Giving New Heart to the Wounded
Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited, closes a body of work that’s occupied a lot of my attention for the past fifteen years. I don’t mean that the last word has been said – far from it. New voices are emerging, including from non-religious circles, that are also newly skeptical of the post-1960s status quo. I mean instead that an idea that started percolating fifteen years ago has now received the systematic treatment first envisioned for it.
For six decades, a secularizing Western society has been telling itself a falsely happy story about the outcomes of the sexual revolution. To counter that story, we’ve needed an account of its fallout closer to the truth. That account falls into two parts: one examining post-revolutionary reality among individuals; and the other examining its effects on the wider world.
In 2008, the then-editor of First Things, Joseph Bottum, invited me to write an essay about Humanae Vitae to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the encyclical. At the time, this seemed like a fine opportunity for an exercise in spirited contrarianism. After all, Humanae Vitae may be the most universally mocked and reviled religious statements of the past century. How, many millions have asked, could the Church possibly defend the teaching against artificial contraception? Didn’t it want to join the modern world? Etc.