Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Louise Perry Full Interview: The Sexual Revolution Has Failed — Now Try CHURCH || SLP593

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Louise Perry Full Interview: The Sexual Revolution Has Failed — Now Try CHURCH || SLP593 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's always an absolute pleasure to chat to Louise Perry.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_03: Last time we had her on this channel, I teased her about perhaps being a covert Christian.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I wondered, is Louise just a is she a Christian in disguise?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_03: But amidst all her protests, she agrees that Christianity is so much of the air that we breathe.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's all derived from Christianity in the end, isn't it?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is the thing with with with with so much um secular ethics and politics and you know everything everything in the end comes um comes back to Christianity even if it's not explicitly to say.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: And she's come on a long journey since her atheist days.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think that on that though, if it's been a mistake, the real winners make sexual revolution have been a minority of men.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think in general women actually haven't done a lot for sex revolution.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: Christianity produces good outcomes.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: Dechristianisation does the opposite and makes people miserable.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's all true.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: But then of course the next step is: is there anything upstairs?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Does that suggest that it's supernaturally true as well?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: I go to church.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: I worry sometimes that it's not possible for me to supernaturally believe deep, deep down because I didn't as a child.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I guess I guess my my hope for you would be it would be a coming to see that you already live in an enchanted downstairs bit, and that you can find it a natural thing to believe in the supernatural.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: Does that make sense?
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: In this interview, Louise Perry and I talk about everything, including the case against the sexual revolution, the case for having children, why abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia are pagan practices, and why we should all probably get back to church.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: I begin by taking her through her chapter headings for her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and I ask her how her younger self would have reacted to her current views.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: Sex must be taken seriously.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: Men and women are different, not all desires are good, loveless sex is not empowering, consent is not enough, violence is not love, people are not products, marriage is good, and a final word that is uh listen to your mother.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um explain yourself to your 20-year-old self.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um, is this the sort of thing that 20-year-old Louise Perry would have uh naturally believed in?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: 20-year-old Louise Perry would have been on board with some of it, not all of it.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: I think like 16-year-old Louise Perry would have thought it was all nuts.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think when I was 20, I was already something like men and women are different.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: I was already um I was already persuaded of that.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: Because I had a slightly unusually early, I don't actually write it about transgenderism in the book, because I'm I I decided at the time that it was good to be controversial about one thing at a time.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um I've written about it extensively elsewhere and spoken about it.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I was quite early I I was exposed to it quite early as an ideology because I went to a very, very left-wing university and I concluded, therefore earlier than most people did, that this was um this was bananas.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so that I mean the the men and women are different is in some ways the craziest chapter title because it seems it's it's the most fundamental distinction between human beings that absolutely everyone is aware of.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um and yes it does need to be said.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I have a lot of very kind of basic data, I would say, in that chapter about the ways in which men and women di men and women differ, not least in a physical sense.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um yes, I think 20-year-old me would have been okay with that.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think that the um probably the most perplexing bits of the book to my younger self would have been the reconstructing Christian sexual ethics from the ground up bits.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: Because you grew up in a in a quite sort of secular home and as you say, went went to a uh a very left-leaning kind of university.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um your views around faith and that sort of thing, it it just wasn't really a question for you?
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell As it as with almost all of us, I was brought up in a vaguely Christian environment and with assumptions which I now realise are derived from Christian ideas, uh moral assumptions.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: But uh I didn't go to church really at all, um, except I suppose occasionally to like herald services at school.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: I went to a technically C of E school, um, but I wasn't really exposed to church at all.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't read the Bible.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um I didn't really have any Christian friends that I can think of, maybe one or two Christian friends, but I wasn't really uh exposed to Christianity in a direct way.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: And um I was an annoying teenage atheist.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um it was it was the peak time for that when I was a teenager.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: I was I read The God Delusion aged, I don't know, 13 or something and thought it was absolutely fantastic because I was 13.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um so yeah, the idea that um the Bible might have anything meaningful to reveal about sexual politics was an was a new one to me.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I did kind of end up through the process of writing the book largely and and just thinking more deeply about these questions, reaching Christian conclusions almost against my will.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: I think that was the journey, roughly.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and through and almost more through data analysis than through anything else.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: Just think like the marriage chapter, for instance, which in in some ways is the most controversial chapter because there are a lot of feminists who are kind of with me up until then and then they're they're really I I absolutely lose them.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I I really do think that monogamous marriage, a Christian model of monogamous marriage, is good for women and it's good for children.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: And if feminism is about proposing ideas that are good for women, then you know.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's not that's not to say that there aren't trade-offs, it's not to say that there aren't miserable marriages.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, all of that is true.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I I conclude that monogamous marriage is um the best system we have by looking in detail about the altern at the alternatives.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: And the alternatives are actually very dismaying.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: Not least polygamous marriage, which I write about at some length.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell A lot of what you can do at that point when you're pressing into marriage is is think about other cultures.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um monogamy is is has not been the the main way that human societies have have structured male-female relationships in the family, even though it it seems so natural and obvious and and uh and uh it it seems like the default setting against which you must rebel if you're going to rebel, but it seems like marriage the way we've come to accept it in the West is just the the obvious way, um, or or at least the traditional way um of uh of structuring the family.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_03: And yet um and yet actually the first century sexual revolution w was actually quite revolutionary, wasn't it, in in terms of of how marriage came to be understood.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: What we now think of as uh traditional was was revolutionary once.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I I I guess there are two components of the Christian marriage model which are revolutionary.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: One is one is less so, so that's it being monogamous.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um it is still quite rare, though.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's 20% of cultures on the anthropological record are monogamous, something like that.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um which does of course include um uh Roman culture.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: It is the period during which Christianity emerged.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: So um it's not it doesn't seem as strange to us as all that, because the cultures that we're most familiar with are Christian and Roman, so yeah, but it but it is the case that it monogamy is actually in the long history uh pretty rare.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um the other thing which is more revolutionary, I think, is the um expectation of spiritual equality between men and women within the marriage bonds.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think that that's not normal really at all, and certainly wasn't to the Romans.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it's uh I say spiritual equality specifically because i uh it's not the you know, men and women are different.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: So the traditional and traditional gender roles recognise that um with more or less sort of um compassion towards the female half of the the complementary ha halves.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: But um the it's not to say that men and women are treated the same in Christian cultures.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: They're not.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: There are different expectations placed on men and women.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's the it's the spiritual component, it's the idea that um before God husband and wife are are equal to one another.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: That I think is a weird thing to think.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_03: Right, yeah, yeah.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_03: Like like 1 Corinthians chapter 7, the Apostle Paul's one of his earlier letters, and he says that you know the wife's body belongs to the husband, and you can imagine everybody reading that letter thinking, yes, absolutely, you know, this this is what everybody always so far.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we're with you so far.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_03: And then, but uh the husband's body also, in in the same way the husband's body belongs to the wife.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_03: Like, well, that's that's a revolution, isn't it?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean this is I think one of the reasons why early Christian converts were disproportionately female, because Christianity offered things to women that Roman paganism didn't, and also uh the Christian expectation that men ought to restrain themselves sexually is also very attracted to women.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: Because in that same chapter in 1 Corinthians 7, uh the word consent is is used, that they should give themselves to one another by mutual consent and only withhold themselves from one another for the sake of prayer and then and then back to it.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um it seems to be the the implication of the Apostle Paul.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_03: But but putting consent at the heart of the sexual relationship was was radical.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I think I mean one of the other things that's quite um different between the Christian and the Roman understanding is yes, you can have kind of lifelong monogamy within a Roman society, but the idea of forsaking all others, um, the the idea of that exclusive fidelity, the idea of an expectation that both the husband and the wife be virgins um when they come to marriage, and that the husband um yeah has has has no right to go to the concubine and to go to the prostitute, etc.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_03: etc.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_03: I I think that exclusivity and that, as you say, that restraining of male sexuality, um it has been, I I would argue, um, for the great blessing of society.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um because when you have unrestrained male libido, um that that that is not for the greater cultural good, uh is it?
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean certainly not if you're a female slave in Rome society.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I I think that this is something that's quite hard to um quite hard to understand fully if you're raised in a culture so fused with Christian assumptions as we are, that um the idea of um I think it was Tom Holland who first really introduced me to this idea.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um in hi one of the observations he makes in Dominion, which was fresh to me when I first read it.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think I read it when a the book it first came out, was um the You'll know that the um the handmaid's tail outfits have become the symbol of feminist opposition to Trump in particular.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: And uh they are they are of course imitative of kind of Puritan or or the or they look like a nun's habit or something.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: They're obviously imitative of um Chris of Christian symbolism, even though Margaret Outwood said at the time that actually the thing that she was really influenced by was the Iranian revolution.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um but it's it's nevertheless been adopted by opponents of the American Christian right.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_02: And um the point Tom Holland makes, which is very true, is that um in non-Christian societies what Harvey Weinstein did would not be considered wrong.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: It would be considered normal for a man of high social status to demand and expect sexual access to his social inferiors.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: And the fact that we think that Harvey Weinstein is a monster is a consequence of Christian assumptions which are now which are then directly attacked by people who don't realise their origin.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um there's something very Christian, therefore, about Me Too.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um I wonder whether that that was part of the thread that you were pulling at in figuring out just how very Christian we all are.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_03: Uh was was it a case of, you know, reading Tom Holland, reflecting on Me Too?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_03: What were some of the other things that were taking you on this journey?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the things that I I I've has has impressed me in recent years in terms of political cultural events, is um the the ongoing political revolution that we're witnessing in terms of the rise of really radical progressivism.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's not completely like its deep, its deeper origins are in the 1960s, but it's it's really reached a dramatic climax, right, since about 2020.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it might be waning, but anyway, we we can get onto that.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um I've you know, from the get-go, I mean I mentioned my skepticism about transgenderism when I was an undergraduate.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: I from the get-go thought this all sounded pretty nuts.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it was, I think it was because I found transgenderism so unpersuasive that it may be, yeah I started from a more skeptical stance at everything else that was kind of comes with the package.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: And um I've really concluded from it's not an original thought at this point to to point out that progressivism is kind of like a religion or has religion-like characteristics.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: This is actually a point where Tom and I disagree because he would say that it's actually a branch of Christianity in that it retains so many deeply Christian ideas.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: I think that I think it's stretching the definition of, you know, to say that a a political movement that explicitly rejects everything to do with Christianity that has nothing to say about Jesus Christ, rejects the Bible, you know.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: I think we reached the point where actually you can't really describe this as Christianity, although it clearly has Christian I think it's I think it is it has adopted certain heretical ideas from within Christianity, but then what political movement would not adopt?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's unthinkable without Christianity.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's un i i you know, the the intellectual genealogy can be traced back through Christianity, but at some point I think it has morphed from Christian into something quite different.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Yeah, it would be very surprising if, you know, at the end of 2,000 years of Christian influence it didn't have some Christian influence to it.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't think that we should I don't think it is the type of Christianity.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: But um anyway, I think it's highly dysfunctional, is the point.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it makes people miserable.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean you can just see straightforwardly in the data that it makes people miserable.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: People who hold to this ideology are significantly more mentally ill.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: And that's not just that's not just to do with overdiagnosis.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: People are genuinely more unhappy.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's like bad for people.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that it's bad for societies as well in all sorts of ways, um, which maybe we can go into.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: But I one of the conclusions that I've reached from this is that de-christianisation is bad for people and it's bad for societies.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: And if that's the case, isn't that quite strong evidence that Christianity is true?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: Or at least if Christianity were true, isn't that what you would expect to happen?
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: That when people rejected it en masse, it was bad for them.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that doesn't necessarily mean in a direct sort of God is smiting you for doing this.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um I mean, that's one metaphor that you might use.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: More that if Christianity is true, then rejecting it can't go well.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: Doesn't mean smiting, it means human error generating misery.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: But that's that that's been quite important for me, I think, in um seeing Christianity with fresh eyes.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: I guess is seeing de-Christianization with fresh eyes.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_03: If there's a grain to the universe and you go against the grain, you get splinters.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: That that that that's not necessarily the same thing as smiting.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um but it might tell you, if you're getting splinters, that there is a grain, at least.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um might make you curious, yeah, what what that grain kind of is.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um I've heard you say um that many of the origins of what we speak of as feminism today uh are Christian.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um what what what do you mean by that?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_03: And and how how do we draw the links from from this ancient patriarchal document called the Bible to to modern gender equality?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well, show me an ancient society that isn't patriarchal.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it depends on what you mean by patriarchal, right?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that this causes a lot of confusion because there's a kind of tight definition of patriarchy, which anthropologists might use or or used to use, which is only um men are permitted to hold certain positions of power within a society.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's the looser definition, which is to do with men being higher status than women when all else is held equal.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um Christianity clearly has been the first, and the Catholic Church, for instance, remains the first in that only men are allowed to join the priesthood, and f for a very long time only men were allowed to be heads of nation-states and so on, Christian nation-states.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um I guess the the the more complex question is uh whether that means that Christianity is misogynist.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that I don't think that it is, right?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: And not just because uh there are certain objective ways in which Christianity was a better deal for women in the first century than Roman paganism, although I think that is telling, you know.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um I also think that this whole idea of spiritual equality between the sexes and and a complementary role of men and women is confusing to the secular modern mind but I think actually uh really checks out logically.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: Which is of course not to say that there are not examples of Christians being misogynists, but there are also loads of examples of Christians being sinful in every every way you can imagine is kind of built into the to the programme, right?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um more that I think I think that we do I think that we make a very grave error in rejecting Christianity on the basis that it is not um kind of radically egalitarian in the way that modern feminism might like or some branches of it might like, without thinking seriously about what the alternatives are.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean the so the alternative that's proffered is uh I believe this is known as the Nirvana fallacy, the idea that so setting up a perfect alternative and saying, well, why not choose this one?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_02: Why not why not just choose a a like entirely egalitarian society with absolutely no downsized for any whatever no one's sad.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so that I mean that does sound nice, but the problem is that of course this is a s this is a theorised future which can't be realised.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_03: Utopia literally means no place.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_03: That there is no place that is utopia.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, let's let's stop thinking about utopian answers, yeah.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas what we're really dealing with, if we're realistic, is um something like paganism, and that's what I Well that's what I argued in this I say I wrote some years ago for First Things, we are repaganizing.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: That I think it's more likely I think that if you throw off Christianity and you don't adopt, say, Islam or some other serious rival, serious ideological and intellectual, spiritual rival to Christianity.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um I don't think that as the new atheist hoped, as I hoped as a new atheist, that you will basically have Christian morality, but with everyone being much more sensible and rational.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's evident looking around us that that's not what's happening.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think that what you are more likely to revert to is maybe something like paganism in the sense of um a more uh a rejection of the metaphysical god and a belief in more imminent kinds of and a more imminent style of religion in which um some things are still held to be sacred and there are still rituals and there are still, you know, it's like there are many of the same qualities that we're already um aware of, but you don't have that belief in the transcendent being who is omniscient, etc.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think that we already see this to some extent.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean the the uh the embrace of assist suicide across much of the de Christianised West, I think is maybe is is possibly evidence of this.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not that do you remember this ad that was um brought out in Canada um on the it was it was an ad.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, of all things, it was an ad for some department store.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember the name of it because I'm Canadian brand I'm not familiar with.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: Dying in a hospital is not what's natural, that's not what's soft.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: In these kind of moments.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: This department store um took out an a an ad for um its various goods andserted um using this uh also promoting assistant suicide and use and and cut and it cast a woman who would go on to die by assisted suicide on the day or I think the day after she I think she died the day before the ad was released, and when it was released, she was already dead.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: And this was a quite a young woman, she was like in her 40s, and she had um she had Elis Downlos syndrome, which causes joint pain.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: But she had said to friends that she if she'd had more support from the Canadian government in terms of support services, she might have been able to she wouldn't have wanted to die, but she felt like she didn't have that support, so she did die.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: But the thing that I found so telling about this ad and the sort of phenomenon that it represented is that um the this new pagan-esque religion considers choice to be the most to be sacred and personal autonomy to be sacred.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: It considers things to be sacred.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't believe in a deity, but it does consider things to be sacred.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: It just considers different things to be sacred.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: It is religion-like, um, but maybe in a more maybe in a more pagan style, and maybe that's not surprising that we might revert to sort of the other great competitor within Europe to Christianity.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_03: And it goes to show that there is no neutrality really.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_03: We we we probably are these ineradicably religious beings.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um we we've we've had a go at post-Christianity, we've we've had a go at um just being secular in a neutral sense.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_03: But as Tom Holland points out, the the cyculum was was a Christian idea that yes, there's the city of man, and we are to, within this horizon of the next hundred years, kind of pursue life in the here and the now, but that is always to be tied to the city of God.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: And the the tie between you and the city of God is is the the the religious, this is the the the religious.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: And that people have always been religious.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_03: And the the Western conceit is that um we are the the one and only civilization that that hasn't had its gods, that hasn't had its its sacred values.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um and one thing that de-Christianization has done, I guess, is is taught us all that we are religious creatures and if if we won't have the Christian God, we will we will have some other kinds of of of gods.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um tell us more about that repaganizing article because it was it was very popular for first things and it was very sobering um for for people to to read.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um what were some of the data points that you were using to to wake us up to the the the repaganizing idea?
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_03: And what has been some of the um the responses that people have made to that article?
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_03: Because I I think it has been shared very, very widely.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was the most read thing on first things that year.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um I've written two things for First Things and I always because I I really I really like it and I like the editor and and I and I always I've written two things, both of which were like the biggest thoughts that I'd had this decade, the two biggest thoughts that I'd had.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: And um and uh the second one which was on modernity and birth rates, I think was also if not the best read, then the second best read that year.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: So anyway, um the repaganizing article, it was mostly about abortion, really, in the sense that um the Roman world famously had a very um relaxed attitude towards abortion and infanticides, and the secular position um is that the infanticide bit is wrong, but the abortion bit is okay.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I th I find this hard logically, because actually um they really exist on a continuum and and cultures that permit infanticide permit it for the exactly the same reasons that that our culture permits abortion.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think even if it's uncomfortable, I think they do really need to be understood as the same phenomenon and discussed in the same moral terms.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason I think I don't know if you agree with me on this, we'll find out.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: The reason I think that Christians are take such a a strong view against both infanticide and abortion and a very radical view for the time is that um Christianity involves at its core the protection of the weak against the strong and the love of the s the the humble and the suffering.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: And Roman paganism didn't think that.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: I really didn't think that.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the real that's the that's the great inversion that Christianity proposes in the first century, right?
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: That actually it is the the slave and the leper and you know, these are the and the child and these are the people who actually deserve our greatest love and protection, not our um they rather than being despised.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it's c I think it's hard to hold to that idea without eventually reaching the conclusion that unborn babies or indeed newly born babies ought to be protected in the same way.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: And this is a problem for feminism.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's a problem for feminism because it's just it is of course the case that that that pregnancy places much greater burdens on women than on men.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: Of course it is.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: And if you have a moral injunction against abortion, that is going to cause greater suffering to women than it is to men.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I say this is someone who has absolutely appalling pregnancies, right?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like it it female suffering is baked into this, it absolutely is.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um equally, if you abandon the idea that the weak ought to be given special moral protection, you do end up also abandoning the idea that women ought to be given special moral protection because women are weaker than men.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: Women are physically weaker than men, and also women are made physically more vulnerable by uh childbearing.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you want to make a moral claim against you know, the Nietzschean, let's say, that women by virtue of their physical inferiority are also morally inferior to men and ought to be that it is permissible, for instance, to rape a slave woman because you can.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to still hold to that moral idea and then draw a very firm line and say that we shouldn't apply exactly that same line of thought to unborn children or newly born children, I mean the thing is the infanticide thing is not all that theoretical because there are philosophs, contemporary philosophers, like Peter Singer famously, who think that infanticide is permissible.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't think that humans are are special just in virtue of being a member of the species Homo sapiens.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think that if you have humans who are, for example, uh severely damaged at birth, um, that it's not wrong to end their lives.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that in some cases uh human beings don't have a right to life uh because they're they don't have the possibility of having a worthwhile and meaningful life.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so of course I get flack from uh the conservative uh moralists and uh conservative Christians uh from that perspective.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell And there are there there is talk within, say, the Canadian government.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: I write about this in First Things Piece about um permitting infanticides under the assisted suicide laws.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: I it's not fanciful actually to see this as being a very real moral possibility.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um I don't really know how you draw that line.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: I think that you can and you know, I say this almost, I don't actually want to I feel I feel very queasy on the abortion question when it comes to legislation.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: I think that abortion is a bad thing, but I also don't think that just banning it I can see how much suffering that would cause, just banning it.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: So I you know, I'm not I'm I'm a I'm an agnostic on on that question.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm an agnostic specifically on the question of what you do about the moral harm of abortion, not whether it is a bad thing, a bad, sad thing, which by the way is what most people think.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the idea that everyone is really polarized on this question is not really true.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um the people who think that um having an abortion is like getting a tooth pulled are very rare.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um and that women tend to women tend to be more in favor of restrictions on on time limits for for abortion that than men are.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um interestingly, you know, if if we're gonna think about you know male and female issues.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_03: And uh for all your agnosticism, though, Louise, I I think you've been very brave in shining uh shining a light on this on this issue.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um I mean the the poem with which uh your book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, begins, is is an absolute gut punch that that does shine a a spotlight at least on this issue of infanticide.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_03: Uh you you quote from Scottish poet Holly McNish, and it's uh the poem is called Conversation with an Archaeologist.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_03: It goes like this He said they'd found a brothel on the dig he did last night.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_03: I asked him how they know he sighed.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_03: A pit of babies' bones.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_03: A pit of newborn babies' bones was how to spot a brothel.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: And in those six lines of poetry, you you kind of compress so many issues to do with sexual politics there, and so so many issues to do with um with the plight of women, and um what what do we do when we just unleash Eros and you know, have in in many cases in Rome there were state-sponsored brothels and that kind of thing.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_03: Well, sex is related to children, and um children are the ones who suffer when we just let Eros kind of uh have its way, as it were.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_03: And and and I think that was the the real take-home message I got both from the case against the sexual revolution and and then um this this newer version of of that book, that actually uh when we let Eros simply uh run through a society, um, we we might actually be privileging the very people that we don't want to privilege, i.e.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_03: um alpha males, uh uh th those who are already the powerful.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_03: Is is that is that sort of core to your message?
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that the real winners from the sex revolution have been a minority of men.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: I think in general women actually haven't done all that well from the sexual revolution.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um you you you would conclude that they have only if you think that freedom is the preeminent virtue to which all others are secondary.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that actually human beings don't behave as if that's true.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think it is true.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's not to say the sexual evolution has been entirely disastrous.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I do think that I think for instance we tend to take domestic violence more seriously than we used to, which is a good thing.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that probably does have quite a lot to do with women being more involved in politics than they used to be, because they were formally restricted from involving themselves in politics previously, um, at least in kind of elective politics.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: Women have always been involved in you know, the temperance the temperance campaign was a feminist campaign.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: This is one of my more surprising historical historical texts, but it was an anti-domestic violence campaign.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um women have always participated in public life in various ways, it's just uh whether they're formally restricted from certain roles, but anyway.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um The Sexual Revolution has not The Sexual Revolution has given some people some benefits.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think that on net though it's it has been a mistake and it has mostly benefited men who already had it pretty good.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_03: Tell me about some of the losers then.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh you you you begin the book with a comparison between Marilyn Monroe and and Hugh Hefner.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_03: I think these these are sort of two avatars of um I guess in in one sense was Marilyn Monroe a a a winner?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_03: Well, um you've just got to see where the story leads, I guess, to to figure out that question.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_03: Uh tell us that story.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, sex symbols have a very bad um record in terms of having very high suicide rates and and dying young and largely because of drug and alcohol abuse.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: And Marilyn Monroe is of course no exception to that, famously.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_02: In the uh in the Young Adult edition, you know, we had to add stuff about because we got young people to read it to um give their feedback on what they thought.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: We did I did a kind of first run there that just to make it a bit shorter, and then we got young people to read it.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things we had to do was add more explanation for like who is Marilyn Monroe?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: Who is Hugh Hefno?
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right, because uh when you're when you're uh at at at uh our uh um grand old ages, you you know these things, but um I uh for you for for tea adolescents and teenagers it's not so obvious.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: But um yes, and I think that Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe form this kind of neat vignette because um they were born in the same year and they're buried next to each other.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: The reason they're buried next to each other is because Hugh Hefner bought the grave next to Marilyn Monroe, even though he died a very long time after she did, um, because he he he wanted to uh spend after spend the afterlife with Marilyn.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: And this was a woman who he one of the reasons that uh Playboy did so well so early on is because Hugh Hefner acquired naked photos of Marilyn Monroe and printed them in uh I think the first edition of the magazine against without her concern.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean she had sold the photos but for a pittance, she didn't get any extra money um for them being reproduced in Playboy.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: And she I don't think she ever actually met him.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_02: She just if if anything, he was this kind of sinister presence hovering at the edge of her life.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: And uh yeah, I mean Marilyn Monroe, much loved, um, iconically beautiful, but a very sad person who had a very miserable life and had so many abortions that she was made infertile.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if she's the if she's a winner then for the sexual revolution, I I that losers, yeah.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's not Yeah, indeed.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_03: If we are all repaganizing, perhaps we better all get back to church.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_03: Certainly Louise Perry is going back to church and we are noticing a rebirth, a surprising rebirth in belief in God.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_03: Justin Briley and I are putting on a conference by that name, Responding to the Rebirth.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_03: And we want to talk about what is happening with this really quite incredible uptick in interest in faith, interested in going back to church.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_03: We want to discover what is going on, why it's happening, and how we can respond as a church with bold, faithful creativity.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_03: We're holding it on the 22nd of November in central London.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_03: We would love to see you there.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_03: Go to rebirthconference.net and find out more.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_03: And so I I guess in in that context, you can see why something as traditional sounding and and as ancient as kind of Christian marriage can be seen as as something of uh of a remedy for that, something of a at least um yeah, a a remedy for untrammeled male, avaricious sexual appetite.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um, to say to a man, um, you know, I I guess the 1960s sexual revolution is is to say, oh look, women can be as as sexually um expressive as men have always been.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um that's one way of bringing about equality of the sexes.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but I guess the Christian marriage thing is saying, no, men, men need to be as as restricted, as disciplined in their sexual expression as as women had always been expected to be.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but in so doing, you tie men to their women, you tie men to their offspring, and you create this covenant bond, this this bond that is not in nature, but that it is by grace.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_03: And and suddenly you you've got this um this covenant that is as strong as promise.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_03: And and we all know that you know promises can be broken and and um and that we can um bring people into unhealthy bonds, uh, and and that these things can go wrong in all sorts of different ways, but that perhaps Christian marriage is um the worst form of family arrangement uh barring all others, uh to to borrow a phrase from from Winston Churchill.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_03: Is is is that sort of the the way you you see Christian marriage?
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: Because you you you were talking about it earlier in the conversation.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: So if we uh if we there's this trait that psychologists call sociosexuality, which is your interest in sexual variety, essentially.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_02: And if you map men and women on a graph where the x-axis is degree of sociosexuality, you kind of have two overlapping bell curves.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_02: So men are are innately more interested in sexual variety than are women.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_02: And obviously there is variation among men and among women, but the average man is more interested in lots of different partners and being sexually adventurous than is the average woman.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_02: And the very and the the far-right tale is basically exclusively male.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um what the sexual evolution says I'm putting it crudely, what the ideology that emerged from the sexual revolution, which was mostly a consequence of material changes, including the arrival of contraception, but what the what the ideology that emerged from that movement says, is that it is good to try and drag the female bell curve towards the male bell curve.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_02: What they'd say specifically is that women only seem to be less interested in sexual variety because of socialization.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_02: And if you lift that socialization, then women will naturally want to behave more like men and they'll want to have more one-night stands and watch pornography and things like that.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that that's true.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that women's uh greater interest in monogamy and and lack of interest in pornography and so on is a consequence of socialization.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's innate.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think therefore that trying to drag women towards the male norm is going to cause women distress.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, it's very easy to find women who will tell you exactly this that I tried to have sex like a man, I tried to imitate male sexuality and it made me miserable.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: I quote a lot of them in the book.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um whereas I think that what Christian sexual ethics says is that actually you should drag the male norm towards the female one, that men should behave more like women.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_02: So men should choose monogamy and choose um if not celibacy, I mean it was obviously monks and nuns choose celibacy, but they should choose sexual control, sexual mastery of themselves f for the sake of this ideal which is closer towards a female norm than the male norm.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_02: So it's harder for men.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_02: Christian sexual ethics are harder on men actually than on women.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_02: And we we hear a lot more about from anti-Christian feminists about the restrictions that Christianity places on women, which of course are real.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: The masculine laundries are real, um the uh the shaming of women who have premarital sex is real, it's all real.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um unfortunately I think that those historical phenomena, ongoing phenomena in other parts of the world, are a um a side effect of having those kind of sexual norms which is difficult to avoid.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say that for all of the painful trade-offs inherent to having a more conservative sexual culture, the flip side also has terrible trade-offs.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like horrendous trade-offs.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we just think of what pornography does to young people.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that I I've I've obviously written about this at length, but the idea that any of these sexual systems of sexual ethics are victim-free, do not cause suffering and misery, is not true, right?
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_02: But what the Christian norm does do is it um provides the best possible that we've yet found basis for the rearing of children and the protection of mothers during their most vulnerable periods in life when they have young children.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: And we haven't found we haven't found another way of doing that.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: This is a this is a social technology that, for all of its downsides, doesn't really seem to we can't we haven't found a way of besting it.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_03: So far from far from it being silly to go back to a Bronze Age document because it's un unsuitable for life in the 21st century, um perhaps we have this document called the Bible because it has proved successful in um in ordering our lives towards greater flourishing and and and blessing, and and therefore it's the ancient voices that that uh we we probably need to pay attention to um that have some wisdom.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um You've said that you think um Christianity is kind of sociologically true in that it can produce these sorts of societies that reproduce themselves.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I guess the next question is, could it also be supernaturally true?
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: Is it is it not just a bottom-up phenomenon, um, but might it actually be that this works because it's true rather than um because it works, we'll call it true, if you see what I mean.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_03: And and if so, what kind of thoughts have you had along that trajectory testing uh whether this stuff is supernaturally true and not just sociologically?
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, if it were supernaturally true, you would expect it to be sociologically true.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_02: So that's one piece of evidence.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um the Yeah, I mean you can make a strong secular argument for treating taking the Bible very seriously, as Jordan Peterson ha ha has argued, for instance, that in a sense these stories, particularly the most ancient ones in the Old Testament, have uh basically survived a very long period of natural selection that they've they've been preserved and passed down for such a long time because they're true in a metaphorical way at least.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_02: So they say something very important and useful to human beings, that they uh the Bible understands human beings extremely well, and if it hadn't, it wouldn't have been preserved.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that's true of the gospels as well.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um you can you can argue, you can therefore say that one ought to read the Bible um without having to believe in any of the supernatural stuff.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: And you can say, as a lot of other cultural Christians have, civilizational Christians, whatever you want to call them, people like um Tom Holland, Friend of the Pod, Ion Hersyley, uh even Richard Dawkins nowadays is saying this, that um Christianity produces good outcomes in terms of building beautiful civilizations and not just in terms of art but in terms of other and architecture, but um sort of highly functional civilizations and that de-Christianisation does the opposite and makes people miserable.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's all true, but then of course the next step is Is there anything upstairs?
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_02: Does that suggest that it's supernaturally true as well?
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I um I hope it is.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_02: Some weeks I believe and some weeks I don't.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the things that my husband and I have committed to do, he's in the same boat as me, is um we are so convinced that it's sociologically true and we would so like it to be supernaturally true that we want to give our children the best chance possible of believing both uh truths.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_02: And the way to do that, I think, um is to expose them to Christians So not just take them to church, but you know, we we we want to send them to Christian schools.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_02: And um I read Rowan Williams actually saying just this in an in an interview, he was interviewed in the spectator recently, and he said that um the best way to believe is to be around people who are really good at believing, to just expose yourself to faithful people and spend time with them.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_02: And they to they, I mean, they also, by the way, of all the people that I know in the world, the Christians tend to be some of the best people just in terms of being um kind and generous and thoughtful.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's not a hardship to hang out with Christians in my experience.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure there are there are of course exceptions to that.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: There are some.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: I can tell you, I can tell you a little bit.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um I worry sometimes that it's not there are of course adult there are adult conversions every day of the week, but I worry sometimes that it's not possible for me to supernaturally believe deep, deep down because I wasn't I didn't as a child.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: But for me that's that's all the more reason to give my children the chance to deep deep down believe from exposing them to this as children.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_02: So that's my reasoning.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then maybe what will happen.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I do think that that the secular experience that we've had in our lifetimes is very, very likely to be a blip, not least because um one of the best predictors of whether you have children nowadays during period of no birth rates is how religious you are.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_02: And the more religious you are, the more children you have.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: And that means that not only are the the the genes that produce greater religiosity, because it does seem to be a genetic basis to one's openness to the the uh the transcendental, um those genes are being selected for, but also that fa you know religion is also something that you learn at home and you if you don't lose it in adulthood, which most people actually don't, you you pass on to your own children.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_02: So in both by both mechanisms, religiosity is being selected for, which does suggest that uh in the future everyone's gonna be more religious.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_02: And it could be that this period of secularism is uh looked on as a historical curiosity.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so maybe what we can, even though me and my husband and many other people raised in our kind of cultural milieu, even if we are doubtful Christians more doubtful than most, maybe we can uh break that chain.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's it.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's well it's it's a good plan.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's a good plan.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_03: But don't yeah, don't count yourself out of uh yeah, the possibility for faith.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_03: I've I've got a friend from university and I I remember she she once wrote me a letter.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_03: You can you can tell I'm old because uh we it was an epistolary relationship, and and there she is writing me a letter back in the 1900s, and she says in that letter, I I hope you realize Glenn, I could never be a person of faith.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I remember just reading that and thinking, she thinks I've got the faith gene and she doesn't.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_03: And sometimes she looks at me and she thinks she dodged a bullet, and sometimes she looks at me and she thinks I'd hit the jackpot.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um But what's been interesting is is like pressing in with her to the things that she already believes, like things like human rights, and and you sort of and what's what's an interesting conversation with her is saying, okay, you now see, don't you, that the whole human rights discourse and the whole inviolable worth and dignity of all human beings is a particularly Christian idea.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_03: You thought it was secular, you thought it was just obvious and natural and universal.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's actually a Christian thing, and you really already believe in it, don't you?
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_03: And you sort of say to her, like, okay, I'm I'm giving you two options.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um you can believe in human rights or you can believe this is a godless universe, but you know, not both.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_03: And which which are you going to lean into?
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_03: And and she picks the human rights things ever every day of the week.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um most most of my friends do.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_03: They they lean, they actually find themselves they they actually do believe in all sorts of stuff that doesn't make any sense if we are in the godless universe.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_03: Because if I mean and to put that in terms of the sexual disenchantment conversation, um, you know, the bloodhound gang, I really am old.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_03: This is from 1999.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_03: They're saying, you know, you and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel, which actually has the form of a philosophical argument.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's like premise one, if we are nothing but mammals, uh then, you know, conclusion, then sex means absolutely nothing.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_03: But then you run the argument the other way.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_03: No, I oh, but sex really is sacred in that most profound sense.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_03: Therefore, you and me, baby, we we ain't nothing but mammals, actually.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_03: And and I just I just because I always have an allergic reaction when somebody talks about the the double-decker universe and you know, is there something upstairs?
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_03: We can all deal downstairs most of the time, but every now and again the religious have to go upstairs and do their religious bit.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas actually, I think the Christian vision is we're all living downstairs.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's just that downstairs is alive with transcendent value in everything from human rights to sex.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that I guess the process of going to church is putting yourself in the path of of rituals and words and songs and prayers that awaken you to the beliefs you already have.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_03: And yeah, I guess I guess my my hope for you would be it would be a coming to see that you already live in an enchanted um downstairs bit.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um and that you can find it a natural thing to believe in the supernatural.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_03: Does that make sense?
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_02: I do think that some people are more receptive to it than others, but I agree that you can um you can make yourself more receptive through good practice.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um Rod Dre, I had him on my podcast recently, um, he's someone who's just so alive and supernatural all the time.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_02: And we we spoke about uh angels and demons and Satan, you know, he's he is like fully he the the the magic and the mystery of medieval Christianity lives on in his universe and um you know it doesn't he could be right.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'd never seen I've never seen an angel, that doesn't mean that they're not real.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_03: Me neither.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_02: I've but I I've Right, I've I've chosen to um I've chosen to let go of my skepticism about that sort of thing, not least because um every other culture believes in it.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's in some fashion except ours.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so who is to say that our and when I say our culture, I mean our culture for the last five minutes.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um who is to say that we're right?
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: Which is why I love the way Ayan Hosiali and her husband Neil Ferguson, they they got baptized last year and they they describe themselves both as lapsed atheists, which I think is I think that's a really interesting way of unlearning the atheism bit rather than adding on, bolting on this weird supernatural bit.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_03: Just a thought.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_03: Just a thought.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um Louise, you've been so generous with your time.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh thank you so much for for coming on.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_03: Your book is called A New Guide to Sex in the Twenty-First Century.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's the young adult adaptation of the case against the sexual revolution.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_03: How can people keep up with you online?
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_02: So I have a podcast called Made Mother Matriarch, um, which Glenn has kindly been a guest on.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it's mostly about uh sexual politics, but I also have a lot of conversations with guests about religion and um history and psychology and philosophy.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_02: And um, when Rodrea's on, we talk about UFOs as well.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_02: So if any of those themes are of interest to listeners, that's uh Maiden Mother Matriarch.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I also the podcast is hosted on Substack where I also uh write and share my updates and so on.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm supposed to be working on another book about um the case for having kids is the title about pronatalism and birth rates and motherhood and so on.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_02: And yes, when that is eventually when my I just had another baby, so when my children stop getting in the way of me writing my pronatalist book, um that will eventually be available.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_03: When you're done practicing, you can preach some more.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_03: That's good.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but I highly, I highly recommend both the podcast and the Substack.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_03: Louise Perry, thank you for joining us.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.