Sex and death – at the heart of religion, or of secularism?

The Pope’s visit is imminent, and on cue, The Guardian has more than its usual quotient of articles bashing religion and waving the flag for secularism. Polly Toynbee has a particularly entertaining specimen, Sex and death lie at the poisoned heart of religion. Here’s the opening paragraph:

A dispute with BBC TV’s religious slot, Sunday Morning Live: would I join a debate on the pope? As president of the British Humanist Association, I was glad to – but there was a problem. Discussion was divided into a first debate on whether Catholicism was over-obsessed with sex, but I was to join a second: is the Catholic church a force for good? How could you answer that without saying that sex lies at the poisoned heart of all that is wrong with just about every major faith?

Now, as far as I’m concerned, the Pope is just some guy in a funny hat. I disagree strongly with the Catholic Church’s teaching on a number of issues, and I have no wish to defend or justify its failings and abuses. However, it seems to me that Toynbee objects to Catholic teaching because it strikes at the idols of secularism.

Having done away with God, secularism has made sex and death its new gods. It is not that religion is over-obsessed with sex – rather, it exposes secularism’s obsession with it. ecularism’s demand for unrestrained sex and death is a sign not of a healthy civilization, but of a decadent and decaying culture of death. This is where the real disease and sickness lies.

Secularism makes sex an absolute good; any restraint on sex or sexual expression is wicked – a dangerous repression of our natural impulses. Christianity teaches that sex is good, but not an absolute good – it exists within a moral framework. It is properly practiced within a framework of love and life-long fidelity, embodied in the practice of marriage. Sex should not be simply the satisfaction of a physical urge, but an act of love that brings together husband and wife into unity not just of body, but as whole persons.

Similiarly, secularism makes individual self-determination an absolute good. Again, Christianity teaches that individual freedom is a good thing; Jesus came to set us free, but again, freedom within moral boundaries and a moral framework. The irony is that the removal of a moral framework around individual freedom actually makes individuals more vulnerable and less protected; a social contract that is based solely around freedom so long as it does not impinge on anyone else’s choices cannot care for the vulnerable as effectively as a social contract that is committed to the common good with moral protections of life and well-being. Christianity seeks to protect life, to care for the hurting and vulnerable until the final breath.

I wouldn’t necessarily draw the moral boundaries in the same place as the Roman Catholic Church, but secularism in its basic logic objects to the very fact of any restraint on individual freedom, except where it impinges on the freedom of others.

Toynbee conflates secularism and atheism, which is a bit of a leap. On the other hand, secularism is basically sociological atheism, so perhaps she has a point, even though secularism has its religious supporters – everyone has their inconsistencies.

The main inconsistency of someone like Toynbee is the sense of moral indignation with which she condemns religion. Like most secularists, Toynbee misses the point about “no morality without God”. It’s not that Christians claim to be more moral than anyone else – Jesus came for the sick, not the healthy, for sinners, not the righteous, and recognise that all humans have an innate moral sense. The problem is not that secularism has no morality; rather, secularism has no justification for its morality that wouldn’t equally apply to any dominant cultural mileu.

For Christians, our innate moral sense is part of the image of God in us; it is rooted in the will and character of a good and benevolent transcendent God. But if it is simply a quirk of evolution – I’ve no argument with evolution as such, by the way, but if it is nothing more than that – why should we obey our innate moral sense over our similarily innate selfish tendencies? If you push it back to the very basic question of “why should we be moral?”, what non-arbitrary answer does secularism have?