"Victims of the Revolution" by Nathanael Blake. My Review
Just this morning The Atlantic posted an article
that gives signs of hope, “Why Marriage Survives.” It will be printed in their
September 2025 issue. The writer, Brad Wilcox, shows there is evidence that
traditional one-man-one-woman marriage is making a comeback. In fact, rather “quietly,
the post-’60s family revolution appears to have ended. Divorce is down and the
share of children in two-parent families is up. Marriage as a social
institution is showing new strength…”[1] Besides the encouragement of
the article, what caught my attention was “the post-’60s family revolution.”
That’s exactly what Nathanael Blake addresses in his newly published, 272-page
paperback, “Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All.”
Blake is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and contributor to
several publications. Blake’s contention is that the sexual revolution of the
1960s sold us a bill of goods, and now, three generations into it, the walking
wounded are all around us. Why? Well, the “devil may offer the world, but he’d
rather give people hell” (xvii).
The author works over the common mantra that was used
during the ’60s to promote the “revolution” and he traces its lineage all the
way into the present: “My body, my choice.” And now the chickens have come home
to roost with children becoming sterilized and chemically (and physically) castrated
in transgenderism. The whole vision of the sexual revolution rejects “the
restraints of our embodiment” (38). It treats “the body as clay to be remade at
will” which is “the consummation of the sexual revolution’s stripping the body
of all intrinsic significance, leaving only that which is subjectively asserted”
(56). It’s into this ‘liberated’ world that “self-creation is the fullest
expression of our humanity” and to critique such self-created “identity is to
assail” a person’s humanity” (133). Gnosticism is alive and well in the West
and these United States of America!
Blake takes time to guide the reader through the various
manifestations of the sexual revolution that was spawned in my generation. From
life-blocking, sterile sex opened up by birth-control, to pornography, on to abortion,
the shattering of marriage and families, and into the whole polyamorous, homoerotic,
sapphic, transgendered habitat of the present. Oh, unto the third and fourth
generation. And now it is becoming more obvious that sometimes “liberation is
just another form of slavery” (146). For, if “desire, sexual and otherwise, is
not controlled, it will rule over us…” (147).
But the author does not leave us to stew in the juices of
the revolution’s supposed triumphs. Instead, he explicates the Christian view
of real liberation. Here is a right ordering of desire and sex that has a view of
what sexuality was meant to be and what it is meant be a sign of – the new
heavens and new earth where righteousness dwells! And so, on the one hand “Christianity
demands that we regulate sexuality in the best interests of children, rather
than ordering it to adult amusement and advantage.” This then brings together “creation,
procreation, the eschaton, human unions, and the union of the human and divine”
(150). All of this happens inside of a
one-man-and-one-woman-as-long-as-they-both-shall-live marriage. On the other
hand, here is where true social justice is spawned (152-3). Where living well “requires
love, not just consumption. And sexual consumption (and that is how the sexual
revolution has taught us to think of sex: as something to be consumed) is not
the same as love” (170). And living well recognizes that our bodies “are God’s
workmanship, for His glory and our good” (163). And that it is only by “accepting
our limits and foreclosing many other options that we can actually become
something worthwhile” (171).
So then, circling back to the article I started with from
The Atlantic, I think it’s clear that Blake has a wholesome and healthy
view and outlook, because marriage “is an act of defiance against all the difficulties
of life, from the catastrophic to the mundane. In marriage, men and women
promise themselves to each other and tell fate to go to hell” (194). I highly
recommend the book. And I highly recommend this godly act of defiance!
My thanks to the publisher, the author, and the pastor of the author, who hooked me up with a free copy of this work. It is a must-have-must-read volume.
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