Sex in Crisis: How the Religious Right Is Trying to Ruin Sex for Everyone

By Dagmar Herzog, Perseus Books. Posted August 4, 2008.

Editor's note: From the book Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics by Dagmar Herzog. Excerpted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2008

The Religious Right is a capacious tent in which many agendas and approaches have found a home. There are conservative evangelicals who promise worldly prosperity and success (if only you trust enough in God's plans). There are others who gird themselves for Armageddon. There are the vehement defenders of "Merry Christmas" and school prayer and the enemies of evolution and intellectualism and "liberal elitism." There are highly intellectual (and themselves elite) members of the Religious Right. There are those who see the culture clash with neofundamentalist Islam as the current big threat, and those who work to justify the ongoing war in Iraq as a properly Christian cause. There are those who raise money for and organize tourism in Israel in the expectation that at the End of Days a majority of Jews will convert to Christ. But right-wing evangelicalism achieved power in American politics primarily through its sex activism. And in fifteen years of steady effort, it managed to undo the most important achievements of the sexual revolution of the 1960s-1970s.

This was accomplished through a selective appropriation and adaptation of key aspects of that old sexual revolution. Speaking in graphic detail both about sexual discontent and dysfunction and about the possibilities for ecstatically orgasmic and emotionally fulfilling bliss has been a core component. Without the promise of pleasure, the Religious Right would not have found nearly as many adherents as it has; repression alone is not sufficiently appealing.

Evangelical sexual conservatives took up some of the main concerns of the feminist women's movement of the 1970s-1980s. An interest in intensifying women's sexual pleasure has been a central focus of evangelical sex advice from the start. Many women's frustration at male fascination with pornography and emotional non-presence during sex -- another feminist theme -- and the need to help men get comfortable with physical and emotional mutuality, have also been taken up. So too have the classic women's movement themes of concern about domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and sexual exploitation of women. More recently, evangelicals have moved to adapt both feminist and mainstream advice about body image, in addition to generating a vast Christian dieting and addiction recovery industry. There is also an antiauthoritarian evangelical youth counterculture.

In its activism around issues of sexuality, the Religious Right has found ways as well to incorporate the insights of the New Age men's movement in its own program to transform an Internet-ogling insecure bumbler into a virile he-man who is competent at male-male friendship and rivalry as well as hot heterosexual romance. The movement has been wildly successful in part because of its extraordinary ability to present its own program as therapeutic. None of this, however, should distract from the fact that right-wing evangelicals have also been sadistic and punitive, eager to play to the most base human desires to feel superior to others who fail to live up to the expected norms.

While the roots of the Religious Right lie in anti-black racism (a history that has now been largely overcome but still goes woefully underacknowledged), it got its start in American national politics by organizing against abortion and homosexuality. In the wake of the legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973, and in response to the growing public visibility of gays and lesbians in the 1970s and 1980s and their demands for an end to discrimination, evangelical conservatives could count on these two issues, along with more general calls for restrictions on sex education and the restoration of "traditional family values," as their major fundraising and mobilizing tools. All through the 1990s, playing to homophobic reflexes was one of the Christian Right's most popular tactics. But nothing has been more successful in the early twenty-first century than its ability to hijack the national conversation about heterosexuality.

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Dagmar Herzog is professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of two pioneering books, Intimacy and Exclusion and Sex After Fascism, as well as numerous scholarly articles on the history of sexuality.

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