Today, we're excited to share with you an audio essay written and read by Carl Truman,

entitled Ten Things You Should Know About the Sexual Revolution.

Carl's new book is Strange New World,

How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Spark sparked the sexual revolution.

Ten Things You Should Know About the Sexual Revolution by Carl Truman.

Number one, it has been a long time in the making.

One of the mistakes Christians tend to make is assuming that the sexual revolution was something that happened in the 1960s, as part of the general loosening of conventional morality which that decade witnessed.

In fact, it is of much deeper and long-standing origins. We can tend to miss this because we focus on the phenomena associated with the sexual revolution. For example, widespread changes in attitude to premarital sex, homosexuality and

abortion. What we often fail to realise is that these phenomena are actually symptoms of deeper

changes in society, particularly those associated with what it means to be a fulfilled human being.

The sexual revolution rests on the idea that fulfillment is a matter of personal psychological happiness,

and anything which obstructs that, specifically traditional sexual codes,

is by definition oppressive and preventing us from

flourishing. And that psychological construction of human purpose stretches back at least as far as

Rousseau and the Romantics in the 18th and 19th centuries. The sexual revolution is simply one

manifestation of a broader culture of what we might call expressive individualism.

Number two, it has complicated roots.

As implying in point one, the roots of the sexual revolution are complicated.

First we see the psychologization of the self in the

hands of Rousseau and the Romantics. Then we have the sexualization of psychology, the notion that

our sexual desires and their physical satisfaction are the most basic things about us, at the hands

of Sigmund Freud and his followers. Next we have the politicising of sex by the new left, whereby oppression is reconceived,

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