Dagmar Herzog’s Sex in Crisis:

<p></p>Sex has, over the past two centuries, become much more of a private matter than it ever had been before, and the politics of the 1960s did its part in clearing the legal ground to make this so. But the Evangelical Right recognized that it was also, and always had been, a profoundly public matter. It is, and was, that aspect of our common human existence on which tectonic shifts in Western and perhaps global history are and were represented and fought through. In late antiquity, in the Reformation, and perhaps today, great changes are writ on and through the body.

The problem with the Evangelical agenda that Herzog exposes in all its detail is not primarily, as she suggests, that it will reverse or has already reversed the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Americans are having as much or more premarital and extramarital sex as they ever were; what people do in bed is remarkably resilient in the face of all but the most concerted state efforts. (Pro-natalism, for example, almost never works; an anti-natalist campaign with the full panoply of punitive measures, as in China, perhaps does.) At the core of Sex in Crisis is a debate about what kind of a world Americans want to live in. An Evangelical “babe” on the ticket of a major political party as a candidate to be “a heartbeat away” from the presidency suggests that the debate is going in one direction. The fact that Proposition 8, an effort to amend the California constitution so as to prohibit gay marriage, is failing in the polls – especially now that it has been rephrased on the ballot as a question of taking away a right that people already have – gives hope that it is tilting in the other. Dagmar Herzog’s book really is about what her subtitle claims: “the future of American politics”.

Read the full review here. (Hat tip: The Daily Dish.)