Only three decades after the legalization of abortion, the broad gains of the feminist movement, and the emergence of the gay rights movement, Americans appear to be doing the time warp again. It’s 1950s redux. Politicians—including many Democrats—insist that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control. Fully fifty percent of American high schools teach a “sex education” curriculum that includes deceptive information about the prevalence of STDs and the failure rates of condoms. Students are taught that homosexuality is curable, and that premarital sex ruins future marital happiness. Afraid of sounding godless, American liberals have failed to challenge these retrograde orthodoxies.
The truth is Americans have not become anti-sex, but they have become increasingly anxious about sex—not least due to the stratagems of the Religious Right. There has been a war on sex in America—a war conservative evangelicals have in large part already won.
How did the Religious Right score so many successes? Historian Dagmar Herzog argues that conservative evangelicals appropriated the lessons of the first sexual revolution far more effectively than liberals. With the support of a multimillion-dollar Christian sex industry, evangelicals crafted an astonishingly graphic and effective pitch for the pleasures of “hot monogamy”—for married, heterosexual couples only. This potent message enabled them to win elections and seduce souls, with disastrous political consequences.
Fierce, witty, and brilliant, Sex in Crisis challenges America’s culture of sexual dysfunction and calls for a more sophisticated national conversation about the facts of life.
