Editor’s note: This article is adapted from Stockholm Syndrome Christianity: Why Christian Leaders Are Failing — And What We Can Do About It, by John West, just released by Discovery Institute Press.

Charles Darwin helped overturn the traditional Western understanding of morality as something based on timeless truths from God or nature. In his book The Descent of Man, Darwin contended that specific moral precepts develop because under certain environmental conditions they promote survival. Once those conditions for survival change, however, so too do the dictates of morality. 

Nowhere did this new Darwinian view of ethics have a severer impact than in family life and human sexuality. Darwin himself supported monogamy as the preferred form of mating in 19th-century Victorian England. But he also made clear that there was nothing sacrosanct about monogamous marriage as the preferred form of human mating. It might be the preferred choice at the time he was living, but with a different environment in a different time, it might be the wrong choice. It certainly wasn’t the original model for human sexuality across time and culture. As Darwin wrote: “all those who have most closely studied the subject, and whose judgment is worth much more than mine, believe that communal marriage was the original and universal form throughout the world, including the intermarriage of brothers and sisters.”

Darwin’s evolutionary account of human mating practices in The Descent of Man encouraged a relativistic understanding of sexual morality. Other thinkers soon pushed the envelope well beyond Darwin. Perhaps the figure most responsible for the breakdown of traditional sexual ethics in Western culture was a Harvard-trained evolutionary zoologist.

His Name? Alfred Kinsey

In 1948, Alfred Kinsey (pictured at the top of this article) released Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a mammoth volume containing more than 800 pages of graphs, charts, and descriptions of nearly every conceivable sexual practice among white American males. Unveiled with a publicity offensive that would have dazzled Madison Avenue, the book soon became the talk of the nation. Based on interviews with thousands of Americans, Kinsey claimed that America’s sex taboos did not match social and biological reality.

Kinsey disparaged as childish those who believed bestiality was immoral, and he suggested that taboos against bestiality originated in “superstition.” He claimed that male promiscuity and sex behavior among pre-adolescent children were biologically natural. Kinsey did not officially try to claim that adult-child sex was normal or acceptable. Nevertheless, he did downplay its seriousness and undercut the reasons for punishing it. Kinsey implied that the trauma of child-adult sexual contacts did not lie in the molestation itself but in the social disapproval that surrounded it.

Kinsey treated the “human animal” as merely another type of mammal whose mating behavior could be fully explicated in terms of biology and conditioning. Adopting a thoroughly Darwinian approach to sexual morality, Kinsey argued that any sexual practice that could be found somewhere among mammals could be regarded as normal mammalian behavior and be regarded as unobjectionable.

Kinsey acknowledged that many Americans considered this view of sex as “primitive, materialistic or animalistic, and beneath the dignity of a civilized and educated people,” but he maintained that the materialistic view was simply the honest “acceptance of reality,” whereas those who opposed it were simply “ignor[ing] the material origins of all behavior.” 

Mostly Junk Science

In reality, Kinsey’s research was mostly junk science. At a minimum, nearly half of those interviewed by his team prior to publication of Kinsey’s book on male sexuality were sex offenders, pimps, prostitutes, psychopaths, prisoners, and other social or sexual deviants.

There is no way such a sample could be validly used to describe the sexual patterns of the general U.S. male population. Even the rest of Kinsey’s sample was far from representative of the overall American population. That’s because Kinsey did not randomly select the people he interviewed. Instead, many of his subjects volunteered to tell their sexual histories after having attended a lecture by him. Such self-selection bias is likely to produce data that is unrepresentative of the general population. 

Unfortunately, Kinsey’s studies of sex behavior in America were presented to the public as sound, objective scientific research conducted by a scholar motivated by nothing more than the impartial pursuit of scientific truth. Lawyers, judges, social scientists, policymakers, educators soon used the findings to revolutionize how American society treated sexuality. Kinsey became a secular saint and a celebrated cultural icon.

American sociologist Floyd Martinson was one of the many academics influenced by the Darwin-Kinsey approach to sex. In the 1980s, Martinson argued that incest could be a positive experience, quoting one scholar who affirmed the practice by observing that “childhood is the best time to learn.” Martinson defended child molestation by arguing that “In sex, as in most aspects of life, the older teach the younger.” He even lamented that words like “‘Incest,’ ‘pedophilia,’… and ‘child sex abuse’ have become pejorative terms.” 

Martinson wasn’t a big bad atheist, and he didn’t work at a secular university. Instead, he spent his career teaching at Gustavus Adolphus College, a church-related college whose trustees to this day are elected by congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. According to a fellow sociologist, Martinson “chose to be at a church-related school because he wanted to do research ‘in the context of the church.’” He was even active in various Lutheran groups.

In an autobiographical essay published in the late 1990s, Martinson indicated that far from receiving pushback from his college or his church, he received support. “I don’t recall ever having any difficulty with the faculty,” he wrote. “I also had no difficulty with the national church leadership.” In fact, he was elected to a committee to draft a denominational statement on marriage. Some local pastors did occasionally complain about him to his college president, but the president backed him up. Martinson ended his essay by lamenting “the hysteria over child sexual abuse.”

Recognizing the Truth

As I document in my new book, Martinson was an example of a “Stockholm Syndrome Christian” — someone who personally identifies as a Christian but who embraces the worldview and ideas of secularists who are hostile to the historic teachings of the Bible. 

Christians often like to blame secularists as the primary agents of cultural collapse, but the sad reality is that many self-identified Christians like Martinson have been just as key to cultural disintegration as the secularists. 

Until we recognize that truth, we won’t be in a position to change things for the better.