The Darwinian Foundation of the Sexual Revolution

John West, Vice President of the Discovery Institute, whose discussion of the impact of the sexual revolution on Christian leadership in America was reviewed in an earlier article, also discussed the impact of Darwinism and its materialistic psychology on sexual mores in the West in a separate lecture at the Southern Evangelical Seminary Apologetics Conference on October 12.

Darwin and a Scientific Explanation of Morality

West said he hoped that people would “gain insight as to why anti-Biblical claims in science can’t just be ignored in culture.” The sexual revolution was originally justified in the name of science. Darwin radically re-defined morality in general by claiming that understandings of right and wrong are based entirely on their survival value over time. Just as “the survival of the fittest” in an “unguided process” accounts for the condition of current life, so it accounts for current morality. It is the “existing circumstances,” and changes in them which develop human morality. Even such behaviors as pedophilia and rape must “have some sort of biological basis.”  If a particular behavior is persistent in the human population, it has just as much the sanction of nature as any other behavior, so that both “the maternal instinct and infanticide” or “pedophilia and rape” are found in nature, and all these things are justified by nature insofar as nature justifies anything. If environmental conditions change, “so too do the dictates of morality.”

Only “a permanent moral standard independent of natural selection” will allow one to criticize any developed morality as a whole, but the objective existence of such a standard is precisely what classical Darwinism denies.  But whether or not people accept Darwin’s ideas or not, they are often shaped by his ideas regarding morality. Fifty-five percent of American adults do not believe (2016) that moral precepts are absolute. Rather West said, they are situational and changing, “over time based on their survival value.” While Darwin favored monogamy, he made clear that this was right only because of current conditions, and past history. The original human condition was not monogamy, as the Bible claims, but “communal marriage,” or “a multiplicity of sex partners.”

Alfred Kinsey and the Materialist Doctrine of Morality

Alfred Kinsey picked up on Darwin’s ideas in the early and mid-twentieth century. He was a “Harvard trained evolutionary zoologist.” West said that Kinsey’s high school classmates identified him as likely to become “a second Darwin.” Along with prevailing opinion, he supported eugenics. In the late 1930s he turned his attention from zoology to human sexuality. His Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) was based on interviews with thousands of Americans. West believes that Kinsey’s research was perhaps the most influential piece of social science research ever in American history, and although it would not begin to pass muster as acceptable work today (and should not have in Kinsey’s day), it was presented to the general public as objective truth from a disinterested scientist.

Kinsey claimed that America’s sex taboos “did not match social and biological reality.” He disparaged the belief that “sex with animals was immoral.” Instead, this belief “originated in superstition.” Male promiscuity and the sexual behavior of pre-adolescent children were held to be “biologically natural.” He downplayed the depravity of pedophilia, “and undercut the reasons for punishing it.” He suggested that the trauma of adult/child sex lay only in the social taboo. Similarly, the trauma of adultery was the result of social convention, not “any inherent wrongfulness.” The sexual behavior of what Kinsey called “the human animal” was held to be fully explicable in terms of biology and conditioning. Any sexual behavior found somewhere in the world was to be regarded as “unobjectionable.”

While Kinsey acknowledged that many Americans would regard this view of sex as “beneath the dignity of a civilized and educated people,” he said that it was “the honest acceptance of reality.” Those who rejected this “were simply ignoring the material origins of all behavior.” Kinsey’s report was “presented to the public as sound, objective scientific research.” The educated classes generally, and specifically “lawyers, judges, social scientists, policy makers, educators” made use of it “to revolutionize how Americans society treated sexuality,” and Kinsey “became a secular saint.”

Kinsey’s Private Life and Public Agenda

Kinsey’s public persona was well crafted. He was presented as a conventional “midwestern professor who wore bow ties and had been married to the same woman for more than a quarter of a century.” Notably, “his children even attended Sunday School.” This public image of a wholesome, objective scientist allowed him to discredit critics “as mean-spirited prudes, who were determined to thwart the march of science.” He was compared to Galileo and Darwin. Probably the greatest deception was his portrayal “as the typical American family man.” One of his biographers, James Jones, who authored Alfred Kinsey: a Public/Private Life changed his opinion of Kinsey while researching the book. Jones found that “Kinsey expected his closest associates to engage in sex with each other and with each other’s wives. Not only that, but they were expected to perform sexual acts on film while Kinsey watched.” This is well documented in Jones’ biography and other credible sources, including 3,000-4,000 reels of film in restricted archives at the Kinsey Institute. Kinsey set up a make-shift photography shop in his attic. He hired a professional “pornographer/photographer to film the various sexual encounters.”

While Kinsey’s defenders insist that such encounters were voluntary, the recollections of Kinsey’s colleagues were different. One wife of an associate “complained of the ‘sickening pressure’ to have sex on film.” She felt that her husband’s career depended on it. Another associate resigned rather than engage in homosexual acts with Kinsey. Kinsey himself engaged “in ever-more destructive sexual practices.” While Kinsey criticized his critics as having sexual hang-ups, “he clearly had a personal stake in trying to justify his own private sexual demons to the world.” West further noted that female students “complained that Kinsey tried to pressure them into giving him their sex histories.” But “the university’s Dean of Women, to her credit, came to their defense, provoking Kinsey’s wrath.” 

Kinsey was clear about who he was fighting. He told an associate “that the whole army of religion is our central enemy.” It was during his years in college that “he saw a basic incongruity” between science and religion. When asked whether he believed in God, he said “don’t be ridiculous, of course not.”

Whatever his religious views or cultural objectives might have been, however, the worst aspect of Kinsey’s research from a scientific viewpoint “was his shoddy scholarship.” Despite cloaking himself in “scientific respectability, his research turned out to be utter junk science.” The worst aspect of this was Kinsey’s “unrepresentative sample.” In Kinsey’s own words, more than half the people he interviewed were “sex offenders, pimps, prostitutes, psychopaths, prisoners, and other social or sexual deviants.” This certainly cannot be used to draw inferences to “the general U.S. male population.”

Kinsey and Sex Education

Nevertheless, Kinsey’s work was foundational to sex education. West said that “the main vehicle of this” was the Sex Information Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), founded in 1964 by Kinsey’s followers. This organization is “still dominant” in sex education in the United States.  It espoused “moral relativism and disparaged Biblical sexual morality as dogmatic and unrealistic.” It “downplayed the seriousness” of pedophilia. The radical nature of SIECUS’s project was evident in its Sex Education in the Eighties: the Challenge of Healthy Sexual Evolution (1981). In it sociologist Floyd Martinson defended incest in a chapter he wrote, saying that “childhood is the best time to learn.” He actually defended the molestation of children, saying “in sex, as in most aspects of life, the older teach the younger.” He lamented that such words as pedophilia, incest, and “child sex abuse” had become “pejorative terms.” Martinson was not a secularist in the sense of being non-religious, but taught at Gustavus Adolphus College, a Lutheran school. Rather than receiving pushback at the college for his work, he received support. He was elected to the committee to draft the statement on marriage of his denomination (the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America). Yet he was “lamenting the hysteria” over child sexual abuse. West said that Martinson is a  good example of a Stockholm Syndrome Christian, one who absorbs and defends ideas hostile to Christianity.

Today those who have followed in the footsteps of Darwin and Kinsey go beyond moral relativism to argue against monogamy. Monogamy is held to be contrary to humanity’s evolutionary heritage and should be rejected by people generally. A prominent evolutionary psychologist, Christopher Ryan, proposes to redefine marriage to be polyamorous. This idea is “no longer at the fringe.”  Sex education for children in kindergarten is now advocated, along with advocacy of transgenderism (really sex destruction) for minors. With transgenderism, the only question is can it be done. Sex has nothing “sacrosanct” about it. It is only a product of “chance and necessity” in nature. The removal of sex organs, however, is not something that can be undone once it happens; sex organs and sexual capacity are gone for good.

Christian Response to Kinsey’s Revolution

West said that the idea that “muting ourselves” about the Biblical sexual morality that Christians believe in “would have no serious consequences” has been proven wrong. When cultural destruction proceeds unopposed, you only “get more of it.” There are “too many Christians and Christian leaders have been complicit in the cultural breakdown.” The early Christians lived in a culture of sexual license similar to our own, but they “became known” for marital fidelity. Today “one of our culture’s biggest lies is that the Biblical view is oppressive and anti-sex.” In fact, studies show it “has tremendous emotional, economic and social benefits. It is associated with, less depression, less loneliness, less risky behaviors, better mental and physical health, better sexual satisfaction, and better economic outcomes.” Some who argue against defending traditional marriage say we should attack poverty instead, but in fact, traditional marriage is “the absolute, hands down, best route out of poverty, and social distress.”

A questioner asked how Christians should deal with aspects of Christian sexual morality which are not explicitly supported in the Bible, citing polygamy as an example. West said that God’s original creation plan was the marriage of one man and one woman, and the polygamous marriages noted in the Bible, such as those of Abraham, David, and Solomon, can all be shown to have caused problems.

Another questioner asked what resources can be used to respond to those who try to debunk the debunking of Alfred Kinsey. This occurs at the popular, if not the academic level. West referred to his own Stockholm Syndrome Christianity and another of his books, Darwin Day in America which gives many primary sources that show his work to have been unscientific. West said that among the things one can find in those resources are citations of two biographies favorable to Kinsey, Alfred C. Kinsey: a Public/Private Life, by James Jones, and Sex, the Measure of All Things, by Jonathan Gathoren-Hardy. Both had access to the Kinsey archives, which are carefully controlled to prevent access by unfavorable commentators. In the first case, the author actually changed his views of Kinsey in researching the book.

West also referred to a British documentary, “suppressed [for broadcast] in the United States” entitled Kinsey’s Pedophiles. It shows that Kinsey’s research was based in part on illegal activity, with research done on children as young as six months and eighteen months. Also provided is information on such activity measured with a stopwatch, which had to be the result of illegal activity. While Kinsey’s defenders maintain that the illegal activity had already been committed, there is also evidence that Kinsey was giving advice on how such activity could be measured. This illegal basis of his research was not noticed until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Judith Reisman pointed this out in an international scientific meeting and questioned the ethics of using child sexual abuse in research. When this happened, West said, “all heck broke loose.”

It was asked what law schools are currently saying about adult/child sexual relations. West responded that law schools “tend to be at the cutting edge” of what is about to happen in society. He said that in the late 1970s and early 1980s America was “enroute to have all” of the sexual revolution which is now being advanced in the twenty-first century. But with the election of Ronald Reagan and the advent of the religious right, the revolution was stopped in its tracks and could not proceed until the twenty-first century. Another questioner asked if pedophilia would ever be socially acceptable. This is indeed connected with LGBTQIA+ liberation, West said, whose leaders support transgenderism. Yet a significant proportion of LGB persons oppose transgenderism. He said he hopes that they would also be opposed to pedophilia. Political and social divides make alliances across the culture war difficult, however.

Another questioner asked why change on sexual morality has been so rapid. West attributed it to the information rich society with a wide variety of sources that now exists. But the “first capitulation” of Christians to the sexual revolution concerned divorce, which was largely accepted in the twentieth century. The common reaction of Christian leadership on sexual issues has been retreat, and often capitulation on one issue after another. The retreat of committed Christians to churches has not been a successful strategy, West said, as most church going Christians are exposed to much opinion from the secular culture.

One can cite evidence and statistics, as West did, to support the belief that opposite sex monogamy is best for the individual and society, but apart from the Biblical framing, it may not seem compelling in one’s own life. Seen within the essentially materialist framework of Darwin and Kinsey, which is the framework that the wider society practically accepts, one can justify any behavior based on self-will and mutual consent. It finally must be commitment to Christ and his Word which controls the lives of Christians, which we then support with argument and evidence.

More from IRD:

The Non-Christian Overculture and the Stockholm Syndrome