Purify Your Bride

Goodness is another real strong suit for them. As guys like Mark Shea endlessly point out, they tend to borrow morality from the philosophical infrastructure around them. They don’t have a legitimate source of morality. But it must be said that they are very moral people. Atheists go on and on about immoral acts committed by Christians. Sure there is some anger towards Christianity but it is a righteous anger. They really believe that rejecting Christianity is morally right. They have a point. There is an embarrassing amount of immorality in church history. I know the sins I commit must make people wonder if the gospel could really be true. The church should have many more saints than it does.

But the third desire we have for beauty seems to be somewhat lacking in atheists. They pride themselves on being able to accept hard truths. Why should the human person have dignity? Why should my life have purpose? Why should there be life after death? They see Christianity as being simply too good to be true. That life is ugly and Christians just try and make it beautiful because they are wishful thinkers. Heaven is for dreamers. Of course, they are right. But our dreams are meant to come true.

So why is this? Why do we have so many people losing their desire for beauty while being passionate about truth and goodness? The two things that come to mind for me are sex and liturgy. Romantic love and liturgical worship are two places where we are supposed to get a glimpse of the beauty of heaven. But the last 50 years has seen a huge decline in the level of respect for each of them.

Sex has become distorted to the point where church teaching is almost incomprehensible to most people in society. All they can see in sex is an occasion for inward focused pleasure, in other words sin. They have real trouble seeing it as a place where you can experience beauty deeply and profoundly. This becomes reinforced over and over as people live out the distortions of sex and internalize the ugliness. People get very hurt and very cynical. They see the church with her sexual morals and they know deep down inside she is right. But they react with anger because they feel guilty and they see no way to change.

Atheists live truth and goodness most of the time but when it comes to sex they have no desire for those either. Then suddenly morals become unknowable. I wonder if the sexual revolution has created the atheist movement by destroying people’s capacity for beauty. By treating people as objects for pleasure rather than givers and receivers of self sacrificing love. Sexual abuse is so rampant that most of it is not even called abuse. Someone talks about love, has sex with you and then leaves you? Just an expected part of life. Enough of these intimate betrayals and you can feel God has betrayed you.