Is sexuality without sin possible? The #MeToo movement is reconstituting the idea of sin in secularized sexuality

The Middle Ages are returning - and this is a positive development. Secularism has never rid itself of the religious foundation at its core, and the failure to do so in the sexual realm has cost us much unnecessary suffering

Adam and Eve - Franz von Stuck (Source)

A well-known claim by religious intellectuals against the secularization movement is that secularization is not "real" but a mask for hidden religious ideas, and therefore the secular mask is necessarily shallow, imitative, and even perverse and ridiculous compared to the original. For example, the idea of the sanctity of art in the West was born from its role in the Christian religion, and when art was detached from its source, it initially maintained its aura of holiness in various worship practices, such as treating the artist himself as a "saint" and in the special temples for this religion - namely museums. The religious-conservative cultural critic would argue that beneath the secular guise, the religious structure was copied, but over time it became an empty and disconnected structure, resulting in inauthentic art, lacking depth and seriousness, and more commercialized than any corrupt religious establishment.

The religious genealogy will often identify psychology as a religious ideology that developed at the base of Western secularism and will see it as a pale substitute for true religion. Freud will be perceived as a modern and charlatan version of Paul or Muhammad - a popularizer of religious concepts originating in his family's Hasidic Judaism, marketing an invented myth to the masses. The tzaddik [righteous man] who assists in the union between God and the Shekhinah [divine presence] is replaced by the infant jealous of daddy's sexuality with mommy, where in the secular version he naturally rebels against the father (who is the source of law). But since it's a perverse and arbitrary myth, it doesn't hold up like the ancient myths. The secular idea of the soul - which quickly degraded to the brain - will appear superficial and unsatisfying compared to the depths that religion touches in its treatment of the soul and spirit. And secular psychological treatment will be criticized as degenerating into childish and victimized narcissism - a poor substitute for confession, standing before God, or turning to sacred texts rich in literary and spiritual qualities.

This religious critique of culture will also see in the most important secular movements of our time, such as the movement to preserve the Earth, a false religious-messianic dimension that responds to the need for apocalypse through transparent religious sublimation. Secularism has replaced the fear of hell with the fear of global warming, and the desire to reach heaven with the green aspiration to maintain environmental quality and ecological balance. In this view, the entire environmental trend in culture is a secularized version of the myth of the lost Garden of Eden, responding to a basic religious infrastructure found within every person - even the most secular.

From this perspective of cultural criticism, #MeToo appears as another movement of the failure of secularization. Perhaps the greatest secular cultural project of the twentieth century, following the sexual revolution, the feminist revolution, and the LGBTQ revolution, was to establish sexuality without a dominant concept of sin. The idea of guilt was denounced as suppressing healthy sexuality and sexual pleasure, sexual morality was perceived as a harmful and primitive idea destined to pass from the world, and even infidelity was no longer seen as a sin. As a result, secularized and liberated sexuality was a central source of attraction for the secular Western world and its propaganda against the religious world and conservative cultures around the globe.

In a world where desire is identical to good, it's difficult for us to grasp the almost self-evident identification in the past of sexuality with the evil inclination. What kind of split self-perception was created when sex was a demonic temptation on one hand, and desirable on the other? Perhaps this is the source of the split between body and soul that characterized the medieval perception. Do we still feel ourselves today as composed of two separate entities - soul and body? If the answer is negative, it's possible that following the liberation from guilt over bodily pleasure, our self-perception has changed so much that philosophical problems considered eternal, such as the psychophysical problem, have lost their sting.

The #MeToo movement teaches us that the split between sexual evil and sexual good apparently stands at the foundation of the human psyche, not just in extreme perverse and violent cases or in backward cultures, but also in the regular and normative sexuality experienced by people in the secularized Western world, and in the most everyday relationships between the sexes in our society. It establishes a new and dominant concept of sexual sin, which like previous concepts of sexual sin is present throughout sexuality, and entails ritualistic ceremonies of guilt, denunciation, confession, ostracism, desecration, victimhood, purification through speech, the fall of saints and the seduction of innocents, and other religious and even medieval concepts. Does it surprise us that sexual sin is almost as common as sexuality itself? That sexual education includes dealing with desire? That evil is inherent in sexuality no less than good? After all, this was the basic insight and sense of reality of the pre-modern world. And will we learn to imitate from the religious world other practices related to sin - such as atonement and repentance?