The Fall of the Family

The secular mind may be too witless to notice, but to religious people the New Social Doctrines are fast acquiring the look of a new religion. The twentieth century's great liberationisms often feel like powerful sublimations of the religious drive, as the innate yearning for freedom from worldly ties and the straitjacket of the self becomes strangely transmuted into a great convulsion against restrictions on personal freedom. In this sense, the politically-correct West is an intensely religious society. It has its dogmas and theologians, its saints, martyrs and missionaries, and, with the arrival of speech-codes on American campuses, a well-developed…