I’m not sure whether the retreat from Christian sexual ethics led to a loss of belief of whether a loss of belief led to a change in the ethics but both have been in a long and deep retreat in Western societies for 60 plus years now. That’s starting to be long enough for people to assess the alternatives and long enough for what has been forgotten to be rediscovered and found to be not half bad. As usual we need a bunch of studies to back us up (Increase in pornography use & delayed marriage leads to less sex, cohabitation is less stable than marriage, getting married young isn’t risky especially if you don’t live together first, and even that being poor and married is more stable than being rich and cohabiting) but it seems that, as Christians have said all along, the best way of going about things is to avoid pornography like it’s the plague, reserve sex and cohabitation for marriage, that marriage is the best environment for children to grow up in, that faith helps you remain married, and that divorce while sometimes necessary should be rarer than it is.

For further evidence consider the discussion around Louise Perry’s recent book which caused quite a bit of discussion and see how these reviews are headlined: Why should advocating sexual restraint be ridiculed? (Spectator), The Sexual Revolution has failed Generation X women (The Critic). Or consider The Washington Post’s columnist Christine Emba asking herself the question (and then writing a book about it), “what I thought that sex meant, what was shaping my behaviour?”

Vice rediscovered ‘Radical Monogamy’ (apparently what makes it radical is that you might freely choose it) and the BBC wonders if moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse was ahead of her time, a generation putting off motherhood aren’t very happy about it. There is, apparently, something of a sexual counterrevolution starting.

All this should be encouraging to Christians to hold the line on their historic ordering of their sexual and public lives but it is also an opportunity to say to people disillusioned by the ways of the world why consent isn’t enough and that what the Bible says about marriage is far better. And hey there’s even a study showing the positive effects of the love languages!