Hypocrisy and cant

Christians so often have problems with sex these days. Australians saw this when, during the Marriage Law Postal Survey, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney begged them to uphold a ‘biblical definition’ of marriage – as if there were such a thing. Representatives of every denomination fret endlessly over their responsibility for enabling the sex offenders and abusers of children who were hidden in plain sight in their midst. That some do this even as they fulminate against overt sexual expression in the public sphere (the Paris Olympics opening ceremony anyone?) makes them seem even more out of touch.

Such people have come a long way from Mary Whitehouse – that grotesque, ridiculous, self-appointed ‘Archangel of Anti-Smut’ – and yet this is only because the grand old devil-dame’s reactionary Methodism fell flat even then within her ever-decreasing circle of true believers. Whitehouse’s tactics ultimately failed because most people are just not that outraged by what others get up to in consensual situations. Christian anti-sex campaigners now increasingly resort to uglier approaches, spinning ‘victim’ narratives of offence to justify their putative right to protection from blasphemy.