Two of the most pervasive cultural ills of our time, identity politics and the fallout from the sexual revolution, are best understood if we consider them deeply intertwined. Both of these problems flow from the same disordered font, a flawed anthropology that views the human person as infinitely malleable and, ultimately, discardable. These two phenomena have a symbiotic relationship of sorts, brought about by a society that no longer believes in the dignity and value of the human person. We might call the cultural conditions they’ve created the problem of “personal dislocation.”

Because this shared worldview has diminished our belief in the intrinsic value of persons, a recovery of the personalist view—rooted ultimately in a Christian anthropology—is the fullest and most coherent response to this secular, false anthropology. Defending and articulating the personalistic norm, as St. John Paul II called it, will enable us not only to reject the sexual revolution and identity politics but also to take the essential step of replacing their anthropology, offering a positive conception of who we are, what we are made for, and how we ought to live.

In her book Primal Screams, Mary Eberstadt argues that identity politics has become so attractive primarily because of the effects of the sexual revolution. It’s a cry for help from people who have lost their sense of belonging. “Decades into the unintended and potent experiment of the sexual revolution,” she writes, “a great many human beings now live as if we are not the intensely communal creatures that we always have been. To study the timeline is to see that identity politics has grown in tandem with the spread of the Sexual Revolution,” she goes on. “In post-revolutionary societies, the old ways of knowing who I am and what I am for are growing weaker for many people and no longer exist at all for some.”

Eberstadt makes the case, in short, that identity politics appeals to the modern mind because the familial dissolution brought about by the sexual revolution, paired with the simultaneous loosening of religious bonds, has weakened our sense of belonging to something meaningful and larger than ourselves. We can take her insight a bit further if we consider it in conjunction with Carl Trueman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, in which he writes: “The changes we have witnessed in the content and significance of sexual codes since the 1960s are symptomatic of deeper changes in how we think of the purpose of life, the meaning of happiness, and what actually constitutes people’s sense of who they are and what they are for.”

Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor, Trueman argues that modern changes in how we conceptualize what it means to be a “self” have led to, as he puts it, “a prioritization of the individual’s inner psychology—we might even say ‘feelings’ or ‘intuitions’—for our sense of who we are and what the purpose of our lives is.” In the context of gender ideology and transgenderism, he argues, this takes the form of “making [one’s] inner psychological convictions absolutely decisive for who they are.” He argues that it’s not just our desires that are decisive for who we are but explicitly our sexual desires that determine our identity.

Taken together, Eberstadt’s and Trueman’s arguments suggest that the sexual revolution and identity politics share a flawed vision of the human person, developed over several centuries of shifts in how we understand human psychology and how we behave and organize society as a result. We’re witnessing the natural outcome of men and women—dislocated from stable family relationships and from any grounded sense of what it means to be a human person—beginning to believe they can locate their truest self in their sexual identity. We insist upon total sexual autonomy as a marker of human flourishing because this is the primary means by which we now answer the foundational question of who we are.

Our modern over-emphasis on sexual self-expression is really a twisting of the way in which our embodiment and givenness as male or female does help to define who we are in a significant way. Correctly understanding humanity’s sexual dimorphism, our givenness as either male or female, is a crucial part of understanding our nature as human beings. But because we have separated sexuality from any notion of creation in the imago Dei, we’re left on our own to create our own meaning. We now have to define everything about our existence, our nature, and our telos for ourselves.

If we have no creator and are no longer supposed to view ourselves as in any way dependent, we must create ourselves and depend on no one—and we live in fear that our existence is meaningless unless we can craft a meaningful enough identity for ourselves. The supposed escape from nature and givenness turns out to have set us loose in a great and desolate wilderness, where we wander as isolated individuals, tasked with the monumental responsibility of discovering who we are and how we ought to live, with no guidepost apart from our all-powerful self.

Being “free to perform life,” as Trueman describes it, actually forces us to engage in the constant, disorienting work of self-discovery and self-creation. Where am I supposed to look to find the “real me,” now that I am unmoored from historical and cultural lodestars—especially when, thanks to the rise of gender ideology, I can no longer trust even the solidity, givenness, and truth of my own body?

What we’re witnessing is something like a meltdown caused by decision fatigue and deep uncertainty. We now need to provide ourselves with all the structure and meaning once provided by the foundation of nature. When belonging in one political subgroup or expressing one sexual identity doesn’t satisfy us, we might be left wondering: “If I’ve truly found who I am and where I belong, why am I still so miserable?” One possible answer arises: “It must be because I have yet to create myself the right way. I’ve yet to find my true self.” This feedback loop sends the lost soul careening from pleasure to pleasure, identity to identity, hoping to locate whatever is leaving him incomplete or dissatisfied.

This is precisely why identity politics has become so alluring. It proposes answers to the fundamental questions within every human heart: Who am I? How should I live? How should I treat others, and how do I deserve to be treated? Ideologues have created this totalizing theory to explain who we are and, in particular, why we ought to believe that we matter. It is an anthropology and a value system created for unmoored people, exhausted by the task of providing their own meaning.

Take for instance the way in which identity politics sorts its members into a kind of hierarchy based on their level of victimhood or oppression, where the most oppressed are granted the most power in recompense. This notion of restoring value to the victimized is a rather twisted way of trying to affirm that there’s something valuable about the human person. The one who has been harmed asserts that he is valuable, that he has a corresponding identity, and that he therefore belongs. Intersectionality, whereby various oppressed groups band together, might be thought of as something like a makeshift family. This value system makes most sense when you realize it is created for people desperate to believe they matter in a world that tells them their existence is meaningless.

Not only has the sexual revolution’s fallout created fertile ground for identity politics to take root, but it has also created its own set of harms that likewise stem from denying the value of the person. Here we must consider the intriguing reality that it’s no longer just conservatives critiquing the sexual revolution. This growing discontent is well represented by three recent works: The Case against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry, Rethinking Sex by Christine Emba, and Feminism against Progress by Mary Harrington. Each of these writers has her own unique argument, but the commonalities of their books are especially suggestive.

Their big-picture observations won’t be surprising to conservatives: Casual sex is more enjoyable for men than for women, for example, and putting an end to sexual violence will require more than consent workshops. These women all to varying degrees seem to realize that the sexual revolution bolstered a social scenario that can harm women, and perhaps men too. They seem to share a deep sense of discomfort with the possibility that our current sexual norms are causing us to treat one another as objects rather than as persons, though none of them puts it in quite those terms.

For instance, all three authors strongly critique consent as a moderating principle. They realize that we can consent to things that harm ourselves and others and that society should recognize and care about that reality. And yet, in practice, “Did everyone say yes?” or “Did anyone say no?” are the only moral guideposts we’re permitted for discerning whether any given sexual interaction was trifling, unkind, or criminal. Because we don’t have a sense of what persons are or how persons deserve to be treated, “nonconsensual” is the only kind of misconduct we’re able to identify with any certainty. Yet these authors have a sense that something like “good sex” exists and that it requires a heftier intellectual or moral framework than that offered by the sexual revolution.

While each of these thinkers offers true and helpful insights into constructing a better sexual ethic, none offers a coherent, positive moral vision to counter and replace the deficient view of the person posited by the sexual revolution. They focus on its negative outworkings and its ideological problems, but because they don’t offer a solid account of what human persons are, they end up trapped in the realm of problem and solution, identifying harms and constructing ways to mitigate them.

In other words, these authors evidence what it looks like when a culture without a robust moral imagination tries to reinvent a sexual ethic, using only the tools given to it by the sexual revolution. At the root of what went wrong was a detachment of sex from the personalistic norm—or, in Christian terms, from the commandment to love. Here’s how St. John Paul II describes this concept in Love and Responsibility: “The personalistic norm as a principle says: ‘the person is a kind of being such that only love constitutes the proper and fully mature relation to it.’” Elsewhere, he puts it this way: “The value of the person is always higher than the value of pleasure and therefore the person cannot be subordinated to pleasure; he cannot serve as a means to the end which is pleasure.”

We need not only to “rewild sex,” then, as Harrington puts it in reference to rejecting oral contraception, but also to “rehumanize” and indeed “repersonalize” sex. Personalism, grounded ultimately in Christian anthropology, is the fullest and most coherent response to what the sexual revolution has done. It not only rejects the sexual revolution’s anthropology but also replaces it with the truth about human persons and offers an accompanying moral vision to guide our conduct.

The best response to both the sexual revolution and the resultant identity politics is a personalist view that rejects and replaces its foundational assumptions: that human existence is ultimately meaningless; that human beings must invent our own identity and meaning; that anything and everything is acceptable in pursuit of pleasure as long as everyone consents; that we can treat each other, and ourselves, as objects if it brings us temporary satisfaction. A contrary view must assert that human beings are persons and not objects, and it must explain what personhood means for how we ought to treat ourselves and one another.

This framing would revolutionize our diagnosis of the sexual revolution’s failures. We would no longer be forced to invent solutions out of subjective metrics such as consent, power dynamics, and anecdotal experience, or to rely on a gut sense of “ickiness” to determine what’s right and what’s wrong. A coherent account of creation, givenness, human nature, and personalism is directly responsive to each harm generated by the sexual revolution’s ideology. The fact of being human persons created male or female means something substantive about what sex is for, what is problematic about gender ideology, what marriage is, what men and women owe to one another, what parents owe to their children, and what communities owe to families. The fact of being human persons—ends in ourselves and not means to an end—informs our understanding of what is destructive about sex outside of marriage or about contraception, of why prostitution and pornography are antithetical to human dignity, of why abortion is a grave evil.

The idea that we were created on purpose, out of love, as creatures with an objective identity and nature, as human persons with dignity, is the most holistic rejection of and replacement for the sexual revolution’s anthropology. The best case against the sexual revolution is ultimately a positive case, one that affirms the goodness of sex as a means of expressing unity and love between persons, within the context of the exclusive, lifelong, and fruitful commitment between a husband and a wife. This is the fullest response to the frequent complaint that modern sex is all too often an act of objectification or an act of use. Ultimately, we struggle to see ourselves and others as persons rather than objects because we’ve lost sight of the fact that we are created in the image and likeness of God. A philosophy of personalism is certainly accessible to the secular mind, but if we can’t operate from any objective belief about who we are and what we were made for—what it means to be a human person defined by something or someone other than ourselves—we’ll only ever have ourselves as a reference point. Without God, we set ourselves up as the sole creators of our own universe, our meaning, our morality, our purpose, and our identity. Without the notions of creation and givenness, without the knowledge that we were created out of love and for love, all we have is ourselves—and the notion of being a person as an end in oneself rather than an object will remain at least somewhat unintelligible or inaccessible.

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Original Bio:

Alexandra DeSanctis is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing writer at National Review. This essay is adapted from a talk delivered at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture Fall Conference in November 2023.