How Sexual Orientation came to Define Who we Truly Are
Our culture has gone on a journey where we’ve ended up in a strange place that would have been difficult to predict decades ago.
A new religion has arisen and perhaps its most sacred doctrine is the requirement to automatically affirm anyone’s identity if based on the person’s internal sexual feelings. To raise questions on this point or refuse to affirm a person’s identity is even becoming illegal in a growing number of places.
As I’ve tried to wrap my head around how we got here I’ve found it helpful to lay out the steps in this journey and consider alternative paths we could have taken.
One reason for charting this journey is that when you become lost, often the only way to find the path is to retrace your steps.
So here’s one way to chart how we arrived at this surprising place.
Individual freedom (defined as removing every limit on my choices) became the preeminent Western value. When church and state separated this did not remove religion from politics instead a new hidden religion of self-expressive individualism began to emerge. Because it wasn’t a formal religion but instead simply an unspoken article of faith it became impossible to have an equal debate between religious beliefs.
What went wrong: When the faith of millions of intellectuals began to weaken due to theories about the origins of reality that no longer required belief in a transcendent God revealing his will through a book a values vacuum was created that had to be filled. We chose to fill that vacuum with faith in individual freedom. This assumption holds that the deepest ills of our society and every society are rooted in a lack of power that individuals have to fully express themselves. Structures that put limits on uninhibited self-expression had to be dismantled. This cancer took hold in the 1960s but would take a few generations to metastasize into a culture-destroying force.
An Alternative Path: We could have admitted that religion is everywhere and that if we wanted to maintain a pluralistic society it would still be important to reveal and discuss our differing faith commitments on an even plane. There is really no such thing as a secular person. This would have provided a framework for respecting values derived from diverse religious convictions. Instead, we imagined that there were transcendent values apart from faith commitments and this made a secret religion of self-expressive individualism. Because it was a kind of subconscious faith we were unable to debate a hierarchy of values that could restrain its excesses through counteracting values like come from more traditional faiths like loyalty, humility, grace, and truth.
Individualism began to fracture the family. If my deepest problems come from limits placed on my freedom to express myself as an individual it’s difficult to find a bigger obstacle to this kind of freedom than the constraints of the traditional family.
What went wrong: Because the government was infected by the hidden religion of individualism it became obvious to pass laws that favored the individual at the expense of family stability. No-fault divorce laws, greater funding for single-parent households, and state-subsidized promotion of the faith of self-expressive individualism in universities were a few of many factors contributing to a skyrocketing divorce rate never seen before in western civilization.
An Alternative Path: The word “family” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. Our foundational laws and rights are entirely founded on the sovereignty of the individual. We could have articulated the rights of the family and further spelled out responsibilities within the structure of the family. For example, today a man can father children with 10 different women, abandon them all, and put an enormous burden on the criminal justice system without bearing any responsibility for destroying the lives of those children.
Families no longer provided the grounding for identity. For thousands of years, our earliest experience of identity was in multigenerational families. Our most basic words like dad, mom, son, daughter, sister, and brother provided a baseline for knowing who we were. We can build from these identities and add to our self-knowledge but if we ever became confused we could at least start back at these foundational family identities.
What went wrong: Now that more than 50% of the individuals in society came from a family that was abusive, fractured, or weakened by parents putting their individual pursuits above the families they were supposed to be leading. These families were like hollow shells that now lacked the stability and clarity to provide a grounding for the identity of the next generation. We had to find a new way to define who we truly are. Messages like, “you can be anything you want to be” or “who do you to be when you grow up” made parents feel they were doing their kids a favor by not imposing a family identity on their children by providing a kind of blank slate when it came to identity maximizing their child’s individual freedom.
An Alternative Path: We could have lifted up the beauty and importance of the father and the mother as crucial to the psychological health of children. Instead, we told women that they should abandon their children to pursue their core identity outside of the home the same way that men had been doing. Men and women began to be celebrated as great individuals if they experienced success in the workplace even if their success included leaving a trail of suffering children in their wake as they pursued their individual dreams.
Individuals without an identity began searching for a new source for identity. Children still have to discover who they are. For thousands of years, it was understood that identity is something those outside of you see in you. But because the family was too weak to provide these identities, children found their identities in peer groups usually at school. Youth subcultures began to emerge as kids would find their identity by “fitting in” to whichever group where they felt the most belonged.
What went wrong: Children giving identities to other children is a dangerous and destructive trend. Most of these subcultures were entirely detached from any adult providing wisdom and guidance and parents had no way of knowing when they sent their kids to school who they would become based on which subculture of kids provided them with enough belonging to give them the power to bestow upon the child an identity.
An Alternative Path: Here we are beginning to reach a point of no return. The only alternative path is to go back a step and encourage both fathers and mothers to put the family at the center of their identities so that their children can do the same. A son or daughter can only experience their sonship or daughterhood to the extent that a father or mother is embracing their father or motherhood.
We began to look for an entirely internal source for identity. When you allow others to tell you who you are this gives them far too much power and can still get in the way of your freedom as an individual. So many in society began to search for a way to anchor our lack of identity in something entirely internal. Perhaps inside ourselves we can find who we truly are? This is when the religion of individualism gave birth to the cult of authenticity.
What Went Wrong: Once the only place you can search to find out who you are is within then you become identified by anything that mysteriously and spontaneously arises from your emotions or intuitions. Feelings become preeminent.
An Alternative Path: The faith that whatever naturally arises from within is who you really are requires the belief that what naturally arises from within is good. What if there also exists evil within the human heart? The belief in even a small amount of darkness within would then require us to back to relying on others to correct us and help us discover the parts of us that are good and those parts that are not. Community is required but community, like the family, gives power to an unstable group of outsiders and so the faith in our innate internal purity must be total.
Sexual desires feel completely authentic because they arise spontaneously. What feelings are more automatic and authentic than sexual feelings? They act on you when you least expect it. They are almost impossible to control. Therefore, they must be telling us who we really are.
What Went Wrong: It must be said that it’s strange to assume sexual feelings tell me my deepest identity. The fact that I’m a being with automatic sexual desires is one small element of what makes up the human person. Why aren’t my relationships or the good I do in the world or the thoughts I think or the ideas I believe an equal or even better grounding for my identity? But as we pointed out these are not arising automatically from within so now as I search for a way to be maximally free as an individual I become a slave to my sexual feelings.
An Alternative Path: We must admit that identity is complex and relationships, beliefs, and choices are often a deeper description of who we are.
Sexual orientation became the foundation of identity as an article of faith and therefore can never be questioned. Because there’s no proof that sexual feelings are the grounding of our identity and there remains this power that outsiders have to influence my feelings and thus my identity we must find a way to force everyone in society to affirm my sexual identity as my identity. To have even one influential friend or adult deny my identity is to cause me to experience a cascade of existential confusion.
What Went Wrong: Ironically this requires us to consider passing laws to limit an individual's freedom to say what they think because it could destroy another individual’s freedom to have a fully self-referential identity. This is the moment when the serpent eats its own tail. This will likely create an endless stalemate between those who find speech a more foundational individual right vs. a self-created identity as an individual right.
An Alternative Path: Free speech must be defended if we have any hope to begin going back up this chain of consequences. But clearly, individuals can’t exist without some solid ground for identity. So while we champion free speech we also must rebuild strong families. Only through demonstrating the psychological health that the family alone can provide children can we maintain a signpost to a lost and confused culture that points the way back to sanity.