C.S. Lewis once wrote that ‘every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.’
Though written in the mid-twentieth century, Lewis’s words are no less true today. Like all of those before it, our age has its own outlook. We twenty-first century people tend to consider ourselves especially insightful on certain matters, especially able to perceive certain truths. But of course, what we are not able to recognise quite so clearly is that our age is also liable to make certain mistakes, especially prone to not seeing the errors of its own way. That is, after all, the harsh reality of cultural blinders – we normally aren’t even aware that we own any, let alone that we are actually wearing them.
Both our confidence in this age’s idiosyncratic outlook and our failure to recognise its particular cultural blinders is certainly evident in relation to sexuality, marriage and singleness. But it’s not just the secular world that is guilty of what Lewis elsewhere describes as the ‘uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited’. 2 This attitude is one which we Christians also adopt so easily – and again, not least when it comes to matters concerning sexuality, marriage and singleness.
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