Traditionalists in the United States have seen their influence over sexual norms wane greatly in the postwar decades. If you believe that birth-control pills represent a historic advance to be celebrated, or that neither homosexuality nor premarital sex nor masturbation should be stigmatized, much of this change is salutary. Observers who support modern social norms surrounding sex should nevertheless ask themselves if any wisdom is being lost as mores shift rapidly and more people react against, dismiss, malign, or simply ignore traditionalist perspectives.

For all my disagreements with Christian norms–the most influential and widely held traditionalist perspective in America—I'm convinced that the religion offers some core truths that would improve America's sexual culture if we only applied them. But you'd never know about what I consider Christianity's most valuable insights from the way prominent Christians in the public square talk about sex, or the ways that Christians are portrayed by nonbelievers in media, politics, and popular culture. When talking about sex, even to general audiences, many prominent Christians emphasize arguments and faith-based frameworks that couldn't possibly resonate with nonbelievers. Meanwhile, critics of traditionalist Christians, including some from within the religion, tend to object to their priorities, arguing that unlike Jesus Christ, they focus too much on sex and too little on social justice. That critique treats the substance of their beliefs on sex as immaterial.

There is, I think, a better way.

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Damon Linker recently observed that while Christianity's outlook on sex has changed some over two millennia, "from the fourth century, down to roughly my grandparents' generation, the vast majority of people in the Western world believed without question that masturbation, pre-marital sex, and promiscuity were wrong, that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was shameful, that adultery was a serious sin, that divorce should either be banned or allowed only in the rarest of situations, and that homosexual desires were gravely disordered and worthy of severe punishment."

Today, sex before marriage is the norm; promiscuity is much less stigmatized; masturbation is a matter of moral indifference; birth control is everywhere; out-of-wedlock pregnancy is increasingly common; divorces are frequent and accepted; abortion is legal; homosexuality is mainstream; and porn is ubiquitous. There are websites that facilitate adultery. Moral judgments and expectations "have been almost completely dissolved, replaced by a single moral judgment or consideration: individual consent," Linker says. As he sees it, "all of our so-called cultural conflicts flow from this monumental shift," which terrifies traditionalists. And while Linker usually feels at home in sexual modernity, he sees wisdom in the traditionalists' view and argues that their terror at abandoning old norms may make sense. Here's how he puts it in a passage that understates the gains of sexual modernity and somewhat overstates the likely costs:

We broke from them in the blink of an eye, figuratively speaking. The gains are pretty clear—It's fun! It feels good!—but the losses are murkier and probably won't be tallied for a very long time. Is the ethic of individual consent sufficient to keep people (mostly men) from acting violently on their sexual desires? What will become of childhood if our culture continues down the road of pervasive sexualization? Do children do best with two parents of opposite genders? Or are two parents of the same gender just as good? Or better? How about one parent of either gender? What about three, four, five, or more people in a constantly evolving polyamorous arrangement? Can the institution of marriage survive without the ideals of fidelity and monogamy? What kind of sexual temptations and experiences will technology present us with a year—or a decade, or a century—from now? Will people be able to think of reasons or conjure up the will to resist those temptations? Will they even try? Does it even matter?

I have no idea how to answer these questions.

Various Christian bloggers and commenters nodded along to these temperamentally conservative concerns. But several don't seem particularly concerning to me.

Is the ethic of consent sufficient to stop rape? Well, no, rape is still with us, as it has been under every sexual ethos in human history, but as Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA, has put it, "The rate of forcible rape as reported on victimization surveys peaked in 1979 at about 2.8 per 1000 population. In 2009 the rate fell to 0.5... The theory that pornography causes sex crime would seem to have a hard time surviving comparison with the data." Recent sexual modernity and the rise of ubiquitous porn are correlated with less rape, not more.

What will pervasive sexualization do to childhood? Like rape, this is a subject of legitimate concern, but it's strange to just assume that kids are more sexualized in modern times. The University of Sydney's Stephen Robertson compiled age-of-consent statutes from various American states in 1880. In California, New York, Massachusetts, South Carolina, and most other states, the age of consent was 10. For millennia, the vast majority of children, who lived in close quarters with their parents, were far more exposed to actual sex than today's kids. There is a far stronger stigma against pederasty now than at many times in history. And surveying America and the globe, communities where children lose their sexual innocence at the youngest ages are often bastions of religious traditionalism.

There are, of course, ways in which a kid with an unsupervised Internet connection can see sexual acts that most adults had never seen for most of human history. I don't think concern at the unknown implications of that fact is unreasonable. But the sphere of childhood is arguably better protected and preserved in modern secular America than in all sorts of more traditional settings.

"Do children do best with two parents of opposite genders? Or are two parents of the same gender just as good?" However one reads the available evidence, it seems clear to me that the question is dramatically less important than traditionalists think. If being parented by opposite-gender couples allows the average kid to "do best"—which isn't my read on the evidence at all, but let's say it's true for the sake of argument—so what? Compare kids raised in poor areas of Appalachia or the Deep South with kids raised in Portland, Oregon, or Cambridge, Massachusetts. One could conclude that the latter "do best," on average, by all sorts of metrics. Should those in poor areas stop having kids? Traditionalists certainly don't think so. When a 14-year-old from a family on welfare is raped and decides to keep and raise the baby, traditionalists celebrate this decision, fully aware that the circumstances of the kid's upbringing won't be "the best."

Yet a lovingly married lesbian couple with a house in a safe neighborhood, stable careers, and ample free time for parenting prompt traditionalists to start complaining that hypothetical opposite-sex parents would do better (though they know many particular opposite-sex couples do worse). Alarm at gay parents seems totally irrational. They'll never be more than a tiny minority of all parents in the United States, and there's good reason to think the biggest hurdle they face is anti-gay prejudice.

What if there are far more urgent questions and perspectives for traditionalists to be raising?