Yet there is another aspect to the essay, and that is Paglia’s barely concealed contempt for the attempts of liberal Christianity and of the gay lobby itself to make homosexuality respectable. For Paglia, sex is powerful and deviant sex reflects that power precisely because it is transgressive, because it breaks the rules. For her, sex is an erotic, Dionysian force that threatens to shatter civilization as we know it. Drawing on the later Freud, with distinct tones of Nietzsche, she understands the destructive power of sex and rejoices in it. To tame it, to domesticate it, to make it respectable, to turn it into merely one more form of pleasurable recreation is to destroy both its substance and significance.

Her basic thesis is that liberal Christianity cannot cope with sex as it really is. Instead it has to make into something anodyne and inoffensive as defined by the aesthetics of the wider world. Cultural tastes trump biblical teaching and historic Christian ethics. This is the problem of liberal Christianity in microcosm. Make Christian doctrine merely an expression of religious psychology and, as sophisticated as that might seem, it leads in only one direction: the assimilation of Christianity to the world. Read more»

Carl Trueman, “The Joy of Paglian Sex.”