This covers week 4 on Ch.4 “Sexualizing Psychology, Politicizing Sex”.
This series is a reflection on Strange New World by Carl Trueman. Direct quotes will be marked and many of the ideas will be directly sourced from this work. Please support the original work as well.
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“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, few words have taken on greater significance in the transformation of our society than the famous words of Thomas Jefferson outlining basic human rights in the Declaration of Independence. These words have been a rallying cry for the American experiment down through the ages and begs the question today: What will make us happy?

Behind every answer to that burning question is a set of assumptions about human nature. What you claim brings happiness tells you something about what human beings are “for” and what human beings want. This week we encounter two new thinkers who tried to answer this question in a way that turned the pursuit of happiness into the glorification of sex: Freud & Reich.

“The notion that sex is foundational to human happiness is central to Freud’s thinking.”

(Carl Trueman, Strange New World, 72.)

Freud defined happiness very simply as the achievement of pleasure, and the avoidance of pain. This is a far cry from the high minded debates about happiness from previous western philosophers who argued about happiness and human flourishing. For Freud, the question was psychological, and happiness was a question of mental well-being rather than a question of the whole person. Freud observed that sexual pleasure seemed to provide the highest psychological enjoyment and so he placed sexual satisfaction as the highest experience of happiness for humanity. For Freud, sex equaled happiness. He further argued that society only limits complete sexual freedom to keep things stable. After all, even he acknowledged that certain sexual taboos on bad behavior were necessary for a civilized society. But these limitations were nothing more than a trade off, limiting our ultimate happiness in sex, for the overall good of a stable society. This put the social structure at odds with the individual. If sex was the only way to be ultimately happy, and if society required sexual expression to be limited, then the society was always a threat to individual selfhood and identity. Since Freud put sex at the center of individual identity, he also made any rules in a society about sex, simply a pragmatic arrangement and a necessarily oppressive one.

His student Reich, furthered this idea by claiming that any social rules against total sexual autonomy was not only oppressive, but an attack on a person’s identity. Since, in his mind, the goal of expressive individualism was to feel happy, and since sex was the best route to achieve that happiness, then any limits placed on sexual gratification were harmful to self expression and fulfillment. To deny a person full expression of their sexual desires was to erase them, oppress them, deny them their identity. Now sex was not simply an activity that a person could engage in, but an identity. Sexuality changed from something you “do” to something you “are”. Now to prevent certain sexual behaviors was not simply a choice to eliminate certain behaviors, but to “eliminate” certain people.

“It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this move to make sexual desire central to human identity…And the idea that human flourishing is virtually synonymous with sexual fulfillment is a commonplace—in fact, virtually an intuition—of modern western culture.”

(Carl Trueman, Strange New World, 74.)

This is how groups like LGBTQ+ can become an identity group, and beyond that, a political movement. But you don’t have to identify as L,G,B,T,Q, or + to have bought into some of Freud and Reich’s ideas. Many Christians today have bought into the idea that happiness means avoiding pain and finding pleasure, but this does not make good sense of the Christian call to suffering, sacrifice, and service. Or at the very least, it challenges the notion that the happiness God has for humanity is merely psychological or immediate. Or perhaps it calls into question whether happiness is the ultimate goal God has for us. In addition, many believers have bought into the idea that sexual desires can define a person and sexual gratification can fulfill a person. Why else would we have “Gay Christians” as if their desires were a marker of their identity, even if they do not act on them? Why else would every church need a ministry for those addicted to porn or endless series on dating and romance where we look for someone to “complete” us? Hosting such ministries is not bad in itself, and may be entirely necessary given the patterns of sin in our culture. Yet it points to an underlying addiction in our people and a belief that true happiness is found in a sexual experience or relationship. Perhaps that should be called into question by the church.

Our culture’s obsession with sex flies in the face of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 7:36-40, which take sexual satisfaction as optional! Paul says that for Christians on sex, they can take it or leave it. The essential thing is not the fulfillment of a particular desire but the fulfillment of a particular duty: to honor the Lord and honor your neighbor. Perhaps we should stop promising people that Christian sex is better sex, and start promising people that Christianity offers a satisfaction that is better than sex and a happiness that is deeper than sexual desire.