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July 8, 2008
The Anglicans are splitting as the confessing bliblical conservatives flex their muscles in the culture wars and create a Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (Foca); a global network for millions of Anglicans unhappy with liberal teaching on issues such as homosexuality and women priests. Australians, especially those around Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney, have played a key role in this breakaway.
Steve Bell
This confessing movement is one indication of a rightward shift in Australian culture since the 1970s. Another is the way that the family value conservatives have rallied around a dislike of child nudity and contemporary art. The rightwing mobilizing around sexuality says that a line must be drawn in the sand here as well and supports social engineering to support marriage.
The terrain of cultural politics (especially in popular culture), provides the space for those moral concerns that constitute the meanings that express the moral inflection and the emotional weight necessary to support a trenchant opposition to the social values of Liberalism.
There is a definite sexual ideology around the sexualizaion of children, sex education and traditional heterosexuality that has taken the form of a narrative recognizable in its plotline, its themes, and its moral lessons. The narrative uses a construction of sex as dangerous to present marital sex as the only safe sex; asserts the naturalness of men’s sexual behavior as predatory; uses fear to disempower young people and to enforce a traditional heterosexual code of conduct; and woman being responsible for the consequences of sexuality.
This narrative highlights the dangers of sexual permissiveness, often illustrated by references to 1960s promiscuity, growing popularity of pornography, and concern over the sexualized nature of popular culture. The theme here is that young people are at risk, primarily from cultural forces operating in popular culture and perverts. The narrative crisis centers on the risk to our national culture if young people are not saved from these dangers. Their salvation rests on rejection of the Sexual Revolution and the self-expressive or self-actualizating current in social Liberalism.
This conservative narrative interprets pornography, teenage sexuality and abortion as signs of decadent democracy and liberalism and it places an emphasis on traditional rules and roles, conformity, and unity in thought and deed. Many conservatives hold that the constant questioning of established beliefs and authorities has set us upon a path that has anarchy as its only destination. They therefore suggest that we must repudiate the Enlightenment and reaffirm the thing against which the Enlightenment stood: organized religion.
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My conservative friends say that pornography is everywhere -- at the video shop, in your newspaper, in our inbox. And Australian society grows increasingly accepting of this state of affairs.
Porn is seen as dangerous as it presents a warped image of sex and self-satisfaction that ridicules the values of faith and family, mangling the most sacred ideals of matrimony.
They say that Australians are lost in a maelstrom of moral relativism in a culture obsessed with cheap, degraded, casual sex.
And they see postmodernism - the philosophy that truth and meaning are relative---as the ultimate outcome of liberalism.