Gabriele Kuby on the Global Sexual Revolution

New York City—On February 26, 2018, together with The King’s College, Socrates in the City hosted a conversation with German author and speaker Gabriele Kuby about her most recent book, The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom (Angelico Press, 2015). The event was held at the Yale Club in New York City.

Eric Metaxas, host of Socrates in the City, opened by remarking on how quickly it became the correct response, when Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn, to say nothing and “just keep moving.” Metaxas called this disposition of avoidance “fundamentally unhealthy” and said, “One of the things to call it is the global sexual revolution,” he said—as Gabriele Kuby has done.

She describes her life story as a search for truth. Her father was agnostic and her mother was a Christian but did not regularly attend church, and Kuby was not baptized as a baby as most German Lutherans are. At the age of 8, she went to her mother in tears, asking, “Will I go to heaven if I’m not baptized?” She was baptized shortly thereafter, but it took many years for her desire to be safe with God to come to fruition. She became a member of the leftist student movement as a young woman, and it was not until 1973, watching a sunset while traveling in Spain at the age of 29, that she says “God came back into my life.” But searching for Him took twenty more years. She explored the New Age, esotericism, and all manner of spiritualities. She was married in 1977, receiving “no catechesis on what marriage is,” and separated after 18 years. Of the Catholic church, she only knew what she objected to: its “sexist” policy against ordaining women, the priestly celibacy requirement, and the sex abuse scandal. But one day, a Catholic girl gave her a novena—a nine-day prayer associated with particular needs—and “I prayed that in my meditation space (because when you search for twenty years, you find a lot of things), and at the end [of those nine days], it was very clear I would become Catholic.” She was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1997.

Kuby entered the speaking circuit after publishing her first book, My Path to Mary. But her sociology training led her to pay attention to what was going on around her. She began analyzing cultural messaging about sexuality. J. D. Unwin’s book Sex and Culture was pivotal in her thinking. Unwin said monogamy and virginity are the basis of high culture—the state of affairs in which people have resources and energy to pursue things beyond the sustenance of life—and when monogamy and virginity are devalued in a society, that society disappears from the stage of history within three generations.

Metaxas wondered about the ancient Greeks as a counterexample, because male homosexual relationships were widely accepted right alongside family life. Kuby pointed out that the scope of these relationships was limited; they were not intended to replace relationships with women but to serve a different, hierarchical social purpose among men. They were not conceived as a substitute for the social fabric of marriage and children or a revolution against the natural polarity of the sexes.

In her next book, Kuby applied Unwin’s insights and her own experience to individual life. Breaking Out of Prison: How to Have a Future was addressed to young people, because “if your life is in front of you, there is a way to approach your sexuality that will enable you to do well in life.” After that, she keyed into “an ideology among us which goes to the root of human existence,” and wrote The Gender Revolution: Relativism in Action in 2006.

Metaxas praised Kuby’s courage, but she demurred. Although her books were “not well-received” by the public, she said, “I did not have to overcome fear. What is always most painful is when people who know you, who should know better, begin to exclude you.” The two then talked about the “spiral of silence,” wherein people adapt to perceived norms of political correctness sooner than is actually necessary, thereby creating more pressure toward conformity, and so on. Kuby noted how quickly American society has moved from recognizing same-sex marriage in June of 2015 to affirming the transgender movement. Part of it, she said, has to do with power: many major movers of global society have made the so-called Sexual Revolution part of their agenda: the United Nations, the European Union, Google, Facebook, Apple, the Rockefellers, the Gates Foundation, and more.

Metaxas used this dynamic to suggest a parallel between our own time and Germany in the 1930s. Kuby acknowledged there are troubling trends but said people are still speaking up. She called it troubling that school officials feel that they must affirm gender dysphoria in eight-year-olds and whisk them into treatments that involve puberty-blocking hormones, without reflecting that 25 years of liberalized sexual norms in the Netherlands have failed to lower suicide rates. But Kuby also sees “more and more voices rising against the ideology—look at Jordan Peterson on YouTube! I’m not sure the pendulum will succeed in swinging back because there is so much money and power on the other side. But thank goodness we have models of resistance.” Kuby particularly hopes men will speak up for their families, because she says right now it is mostly women.

She continued: “Some people believe that if you liberate sexuality, you’ll create paradise on earth. People are addicted to pornography by the millions, families are struggling, and paradise is nowhere to be found. Nature, science, rationality, and God Himself are on our side—and the backlash is being driven by people who are true disciples of Christ.”

Metaxas observed in closing that if we care about young people, we have to tell them the truth. Fortunately, the spiral of silence works both ways: when one person speaks up, it emboldens others to do the same.