by Dagmar Herzog
Overview
The Religious Right has fractured, the pundits tell us, and its power is waning. Is it true – have evangelical Christians lost their political clout? When the subject is sex, the answer is definitively no.
Only three decades after the legalization of abortion, the broad gains of the feminist movement, and the emergence of the gay rights movement, Americans appear to be doing the time warp again. It’s 1950s redux. Politicians—including many Democrats—insist that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control. Fully fifty percent of American high schools teach a “sex education” curriculum that includes deceptive information about the prevalence of STDs and the failure rates of condoms. Students are taught that homosexuality is curable, and that premarital sex ruins future marital happiness. Afraid of sounding godless, American liberals have failed to challenge these retrograde orthodoxies.
The truth is Americans have not become anti-sex, but they have become increasingly anxious about sex—not least due to the stratagems of the Religious Right. There has been a war on sex in America—a war conservative evangelicals have in large part already won.
How did the Religious Right score so many successes? Historian Dagmar Herzog argues that conservative evangelicals appropriated the lessons of the first sexual revolution far more effectively than liberals. With the support of a multimillion-dollar Christian sex industry, evangelicals crafted an astonishingly graphic and effective pitch for the pleasures of “hot monogamy”—for married, heterosexual couples only. This potent message enabled them to win elections and seduce souls, with disastrous political consequences.
Fierce, witty, and brilliant, Sex in Crisis challenges America’s culture of sexual dysfunction and calls for a more sophisticated national conversation about the facts of life.
Sex in Crisis: New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics
Dagmar Herzog (born 1961) is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.[1] She has published extensively on the histories of sexuality and gender, psychoanalysis, theology and religion, Jewish-Christian relations and Holocaust memory, and she has edited anthologies on sexuality in the Third Reich, sexuality in twentieth-century Austria, and the Holocaust.
Publishers Weekly Herzog (Sex after Fascism) confronts how the religious right has controlled "the national conversation about sex," dictating everything from social attitudes to legislation and HIV prevention funding. "[Their] aim is to infuse with shame all sexual expression and experience outside of heterosexual marriage," she asserts, examining the writings of evangelical sex and marriage experts whose "brand of Christian porn" exalts married, monogamous sex while deploring homosexuality, pre- and extra-marital sex, pornography, masturbation and even idle fantasy.
Herzog examines the global effects of the religious right's influence on domestic sexual policies, detailing the shift from sex education in schools and the proliferation of billion-dollar abstinence-only programs to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, where an insistence on abstinence has been promoted abroad at the cost of billions of dollars in exchange for millions of lives that, she argues, might have been saved by at least an equal emphasis on condom use.
This book is a disturbing, important and eloquent examination of one faith-cum-political movement's powerful-and pernicious-influence over human rights at home and abroad. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Kirkus Reviews
ISBN-13: 9780465002146
Publisher: Basic Books
Publication date: 06/30/2008
Pages: 320
Condition: First Edition Hardcover (MINT)
- American History - Politics & Government
- Religious Aspects - History of Sex
- Gay & Lesbian Communities
- Sex, Marriage & Family - Sexual Behavior