Sex & The Final Christian Generation – The American Conservative

Harper writes with banked horror at the enormity of prostitution in Rome, and its connection to the slave trade, and to Roman economic life. Sex trafficking, as we would call it today, was a fundamental part of Roman social and economic life. The historian’s tone is even throughout the book, but he is at his most passionate imagining the immense suffering of countless enslaved women and girls, compelled to service Roman men, even to the point where, in the words of one observer of the era, the exhausted women looked like corpses. Is there any wonder why Christian sexual morality was greeted by the poor as liberation?

It is true that a small minority of Roman philosophers opposed the robust eroticism of their culture, but Harper says it’s a serious mistake to think of the early Christians as simply siding with the few Roman conservatives. Christianity’s conception of sex and eros, an essentially Hebraic one, was radically different, and opposed to Rome’s. For St. Paul and the early Christians, sex was bounded by gender. It cannot be overstated how much they despised homosexuality. And like the Romans, sex expressed a concept of the social order that entailed a concept of the human person. In the world of antiquity, people were fatalistic, chalking up their behavior to destiny written in the stars. Not so with Christians, who taught that every soul bears the image of God, and is morally responsible:

via www.theamericanconservative.com

Yikes. Those darn Romans.