Peter Brown Review: Rome: Sex & Freedom

One of Christianity’s most profound transformations of the ancient world was in relation to sex.  As our society follows the drumbeat of the Sexual Revolutionaries in ‘liberating’ sex from marriage, it is salient to remind ourselves that the ‘sexual freedom’ that Christians freed their world from ‘which we like to imagine as forming a timeless human bond between us and the ancients, was based upon the existence of a vast and cruel “zone of free access” provided by the enslaved bodies of boys and girls. Slavery, “an inherently degrading institution,” was “absolutely fundamental to the social and moral order of Roman life.”

The spike in human trafficking and pornography in our day is not incidentally related to our ‘liberation’ from the normativity of Christian marital relations.

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