On Crucifying the Desires of the Flesh

Notes on Christianity, post-Christianity, and desire

Are all desires good?

I’ve been increasingly convinced that there is a fundamental rupture between Christianity and the generic moral common sense of the post-Christian West in how we answer this question. Churches in Europe and North America exist in a broader context that often answers this question with an an enthusiastic “yes”, arguing that so long as minimal norms of consent are achieved, any and every desire can and should be fulfilled. Such a culture is thus increasingly suspicious of attempts to redirect, purify, or reject desire. As a result, churches often find themselves shying away from their duty to proclaim that the Christian life is one of bearing the cross, of renunciation, repentance, and submitting one’s loves and desires to Spirit-led transformation. Yet if we are to be faithful to God’s Word, we must proclaim exactly this — making this a vexing place where Christian discipleship rubs up against post-Christian moral formation.

A very telling progressive-coded example of post-Christian secular endorsement of desires as such just occurred in the graphic expose of allegations of sexual misconduct against fantasy author Neil Gaiman in New York Magazine. At a key moment in the piece, while describing a violent rape, the article author notes that it could have conceivably been a fully consensual (and thus unproblematic) BDSM “rape scene” — but in this case, it wasn’t. Now, this note makes some sense in the context of the piece, since Mr. Gaiman’s defense is that he was in such a BDSM relationship. But it also strikes me as quite remarkable that the author is unwilling to argue that there is something intrinsically wrong in (apologies for the explicitness) a man desiring to beat a woman and have sex with her while she is screaming “no.” The problem, according to the article, is just that he didn’t find a willing partner upon which to act out this desire.

Arguments about polyamory, OnlyFans, prostitution, pornography, and a host of other once-stigmatized sexual practices follow a similar script. The mere fact of a given sexual desire means that it should be fulfilled, so long as you can do it in a way that everyone involved signs off on. What this leaves out is the question of whether or not such a desire is good, whether it is something that should be fostered or instead sublimated, resisted, redirected. But in fact, in this understanding of desire, leaving this question out is the point. To be sure, one is free to engage or not in any of these things – but only as a morally neutral expression of personal taste, rather like preferring strawberries to blueberries. The alternative is that most terrible of words, repression, the subjection to a wicked and old-fashioned moral order from which progressive politics seeks to liberate us.¹

But this ethic is not restricted to sex.² It’s also not restricted to the left. One of the things that I have been most struck by in the last few years, and perhaps above all since Donald Trump’s re-election, is the increasing dominance of a sort of right-libertinism. Matthew Walther coined the term Barstool conservative to describe those who hold this stance: irreligious, overwhelmingly male, opposed to the way that “wokeness” and “DEI” have forced them to more carefully guard their words and actions. These are the sorts of people who are furious about insufficiently buxom video game heroines and who boast to news organizations that after Trump’s victory they can once again say slurs with impunity.

This is the conservatism of men like Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump, of contemporary right-Nietzcheanism, of anonymous ‘dissident Right’ posters thrilled by the frission of expressing ever more racist, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic sentiments while just avoiding being banned. Here, the villain forcing people to repress their desires is not the old bohemian bugbear of Victorian prudery, but rather schoolmarmish DEI commissars. “Straight white men of the world, unite! You have nothing but HR-enforced inhibitions to lose – and you have a life of lib-triggering, carousing, and womanizing to win!”³

Unfortunately, the church has often chosen to give into this attitude rather than hold fast to Christ’s command to take up the cross, to crucify our desires by the Spirit. In the progressive mainline, a conviction (which I largely share) that the church has gotten some things wrong in how it has taught people about gender and sexuality⁴ leads to an unwillingness to talk about sexuality in any moral terms other than the secular-progressive language of consent. More broadly this loss of nerve in the church’s moral teaching sometimes leads to the idea that the church cannot tell people (especially members of historically oppressed groups) what to do at all but must simply lovingly accompany them in their decisions. This is what the Anglican Church of Canada has said in response to MAiD, for example. And, as I have argued, it also is implicit in the rejection of excommunication from the communion table. It’s “who I am to judge?” as the apotheosis of pastoral practice.

Once upon a time conservative churches were seen as staunch enemies of this sort of libertinism, which made them (depending on who you asked) either a key source of that repressiveness which was the font of all ills or the last bulwark of moral standards in a world gone mad. But one of the things that I have been shocked by is just how willing many of such churches have been to explicitly embrace a thinly Christianized version of the right-libertinism I discussed above. This didn’t start with Trump, of course. Take sexuality: the approach of someone like Mark Driscoll, who sought to compete with the promises of secular raunch culture by offering Christian men uninhibited sexual fulfillment in the bedroom, is not uncharacteristic of a lot of evangelical sex advice of the last few decades.⁵ But the last decade or so of Trumpism has intensified it, especially among those churches and Christian leaders most closely allied to Trump’s agenda. We hear a lot about the virtues of lib-triggering and pursuing a pugilistic masculine Christianity, about the goodness of red-blooded American male desire. And the idea that Christianity might impose some strictures on how American greatness is pursued – that, for example, it might tell us about what we owe to the stranger and sojourner living among us – is rejected as capitulation to the “post-war consensus.”

So, on the left and on the right, in various ways, we see a culture moving towards the idea that the regulation of desire is a problem to be avoided, that freedom requires throwing off the chains of repression to do whatever it is that one desires to do.⁶ And despite what Scripture tells us about crucifying the desires of the flesh, about setting our minds on heavenly not earthly things, about taking up the cross, the church has all too often gone along with it, providing a light Jesusy-gloss on libertinism of the right (conservative evangelicals) or the left (the progressive mainline).

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I find it quite interesting, however, that on both the secular left and right there are already dissidents from this approach, people who have become convinced that the endless treadmill of desire-fulfillment is not the path to the good life, that libertinism and liberation are not the same. For example, in left-wing circles, left-libertinism co-exists uneasily with a quite different approach, which one might call the progressivism of Doing The Work. It’s a call for certain people to carefully, even obsessively scrutinize their behavior and motivations for unconscious biases and other moral failures, to root out the effects of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and so on upon one’s desires so as to be an ethical subject. Now, whatever problems this approach has (and I think it has some⁷), it does strike me as morally serious about desire in a way that libertinism isn’t: desire needs to be transformed, purged, purified rather than just automatically taken as good. On the right, too, I think that figures like Jordan Peterson and various purveyors of pop-Stoicism are, at their best, an attempt to similarly rebel against a culture of desire-fulfillment in favor of something more substantive. I do not recommend Twelve Rules for Life, but it is certainly an assertion that life should be about more than one of fast cars and fast women a la Tate.⁸

It therefore seems to me that the current gap between church and culture, for all that it is a challenge, is also an opportunity, a chance to offer a distinctly Christian approach to desire amidst the exhausting maelstrom of competing libertinisms. For the Christian life is all about desire – not desire indulged or simply repressed but rather transformed by the Holy Spirit.

Against the libertines, Christianity does not say that our ‘natural’ desires under conditions of human sinfulness are good or worthy of being expressed, even if no one is apparently hurt by their expression. No! About those who preach such a vision of the good life, the church says with the Apostle Paul, “their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.” For in fact all our desires are inflected by sin; by ourselves we are turned fatally in on ourselves, unable to love God and neighbor as we ought. As the confession at morning and evening prayer puts it, there is no health in us.

However, the Christian response to this diagnosis is not the sort of grim, white-knuckled self-fashioning that characterizes the progressive struggle session or conservative pop-Stoicism. Even less is it a stern opposition to all pleasure, caricatures of dour church ladies notwithstanding. No: it is about God acting for us in Jesus Christ, turning our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, reorienting our desires towards him. Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII and a formidable theologian, writes in The Lamentation of a Sinner that it was precisely the recognition of God’s saving work for her in Jesus Christ that led to true love being born in her heart. As long as she believed that salvation was in part her own work, true charity was not present. But when she came to realize that it was entirely God’s agency, God’s power at work, then her heart was set afire with the life of God. Or, as she put it:

Yet I never had this unspeakable and most high charity, and abundant love of God, duly printed and fixed in my heart, until it pleased God of his mere grace, mercy and pity, to open my eyes, making me to see, and behold with the eye of lively faith, Christ crucified to be my only savior and redeemer… when God in his mere goodness had thus opened my eyes and made me see and behold Christ, the wisdom of God, the light of the world, with a supernatural sight of faith, [then] all pleasures, vanities, honor, riches, wealth, and aids of the world began to wax bitter unto me…Then I began to dwell in godly charity, knowing by the loving charity of God in the remission of our sins: that God is charity as St. John says. So that of my faith (whereby I came to know God, and whereby it pleased God even because I trusted in him to justify me) sprang this excellent charity in my heart…

This Christian life of grateful love in response to God’s free gift of salvation is then, as Sarah Coakley helpfully describes it, one of asceticism beyond the binary of libertinism and repression, “a lifelong commitment to personal, erotic transformation, and thereby of reflection on the final significance of all our desires before God.” Now, there is real struggle in this. Paul is bracingly realistic in describing the conflict between the desires of the flesh and that of the spirit. Jesus calls this bearing our cross. But it isn’t a condemnation of desire so much as a right ordering of it (painful though it may be), orienting our loves not towards ourselves but towards the eternal – and this not by our own power, but by the Spirit working within us. It can’t be such a condemnation, for the Christian tradition has always held that desire as such is a good gift of God; the problem is desire’s disordering. Indeed, this right ordering of desire is not in the end about moderating or eliminating it but intensifying it! There is a reason that medieval monks loved above all to write commentaries on the Song of Songs. For them the language of eroticism was the most appropriate language to discuss the soul in relationship to God, and this was because the Christian life is one about the soul set on fire with burning desire for God!

And so this is the good news we have to share, good news for those still running the pleasure-maximization treadmill and for those hurt and exhausted by it: the goal of stable, lasting joy at which such behavior confusedly aims really is attainable – but not by the means of libertinism. No, it turns out that the way to save your life is to lose it; the way to gain unimaginable pleasure is to renounce it; desire is best fulfilled not by letting it run amok wherever it will but by redirecting it towards the only place it can be filled to overflowing. As Augustine famously put it, our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

1. It is perhaps worth adding that this is not only the view of the bohemian avant-garde! Consider the 2024 Democratic election ad in which a young man was about to view pornography but then was thwarted by a Republican-imposed blocker, and remember that opposition to pornography was once a feminist crusade. The ad very much had the air of a desperate and not entirely convincing attempt to appeal to young men trending towards Trump. But “vote Democrat so you can keep your porn” is, I think, a rather sad sign of the times all the same.

2. The discourse around drug use is a great example of this: there is fascinating slippage between “decriminalization will help drug users seek treatment” and “people should be able to inject whatever they want” in progressive drug policy circles. This is perhaps a sillier example, but I’m also reminded of the commonly reiterated position that any critical judgment about movies or television or literature is at best in bad taste, that is somehow politically problematic to suggest that the exclusive reading of YA fiction or watching of trash television are a poor use of an adult’s time. This from a political tendency which once condemned this sort of thing as mass culture, the product of a politically deadening culture industry!

3. It’s worth noting, of course, that while this latest iteration of conservative-coded male raunch culture has some distinctive features, it itself is not particularly new. One thinks of opposition to political correctness in the 1990s, or magazines like Hustler or Maxim, or the responses to feminist anti-pornography campaigns in the 1970s.

4. For example, the historic exclusion of women and LGBTQ people from ordained ministry, hierarchical accounts of gender difference within marriage or in general, etc.

5. It is worth saying here that for this genre, male sexual liberation (in marriage) had as its counterpart strictly regulated female sexual desire. To be a good Christian woman was to be pliant, available, enthusiastic about fulfilling her husband’s wishes, and undemanding as far as her own went.

6. I doubt it is entirely coincidental that this coincides rather neatly with an economy increasingly dependent upon consumer spending, but I’ll save my slightly crankish rant about billboards as idols leading us into false worship for another time.

7. I’d point to its unequal deployment (some people need to constantly scrutinize their desires, while to question others’ desires is itself something to be repented of), the vexed question of who gets to judge whether or not one is sufficiently transformed, and most fundamentally a gracelessness: the transformation of desire is not here a grateful response to the gift of grace, but rather an anxious, never-ending attempt at self-justification or avoiding condemnation. I also think that it isn’t terribly political productive, for what it’s worth.

8. Again I think there’s a sort of graceless Promethianism here, a call to sternly pull yourself up by your bootstraps, as well as some deeply strange and unhelpful ideas about gender and religion. To be honest, I think Peterson is a charlatan – but charlatan or no, his popularity is clearly tapping into something, and I think that something is in tension with Tate-Trump right-libertinism in some ways.