Drag Queen Story Hour as the Objective Room
What happens when parents deliberately expose their children to sexual deviance?
Until very recently it was utterly unthinkable that parents would allow their children to be exposed to perverts dancing in scanty clothes in sexually suggestive ways. This would have been grounds for the authorities to consider removing children from the custody of any parent guilty of such irresponsibility.
Now, however, it is a widespread and growing cultural phenomenon. Parents are taking their own children to Pride parades, drag queen story hours, and bars where perverts gyrate in front of the children.
And these parents are proud of doing it. They congratulate each other for being so enlightened and progressive. Others see it and give their approval. Roman 1:32 comes to life before our very eyes!
I take it as obvious that it is morally evil to desensitize children to promiscuous sexual activity. Children need to be protected from things they are too young to understand and should not be robbed of their innocence. Age-appropriate sex education ought to center on the beauty of human sexuality in the context of family, not on promiscuity and ugliness.
I am not interested here in constructing an argument as to why it is wrong. Rather, I want to ask, “What does it mean?” How should we understand what is really going on here?
After all, it is not just a lunatic fringe. Corporations, businesses, libraries, and schools all push it. It resembles the Salem witch trials, a cultural moment in which sanity temporarily deserted a community and hysteria reigned.
A 1945 science fiction novel by C. S. Lewis might seem like a strange place to look for insight into such questions. But I think it contains important clues to the meaning of what we are living through.
It is not enough to see it merely as de-sensitizing people to moral evil. It is that, but not as an end in itself. Its ultimate purpose is to cut people off from God and prevent them from being saved.
There is a scene in C. S. Lewis’s, That Hideous Strength, where the novel’s protagonist, Mark Studdock, is put into the Objective Room. He is in the process of being initiated into an organization called the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) that is actually a tool of dark, spiritual forces seeking to destroy all life on planet Earth and render it as barren and lifeless as the moon.
At the climax of the rite of initiation, Lewis depicts Studdock as being tempted to consciously reject God by stepping on and insulting a crucifix.
In earlier steps in the process, Studdock has been placed in the Objective Room, in which everything is out of balance, lop sided, and arbitrary. There were paintings, many with religious themes, which had weird features, such as a painting of the Last Supper with the floor covered with beetles. There was one of a young woman with her mouth open and thick hair growing out of the inside of her mouth.
The philosophy of N.I.C.E. was that materialism is true and so the universe has no inherent meaning. Therefore, all human affective responses to art is seen as meaningless and useless. The goal of the initiation process was to deaden the feelings of revulsion to the ugly and obscene in order to adopt an “objective” point of view. The candidate for initiation into the organization was supposed not only to pay lip service to the moral meaningless of the flux of matter that is the universe but was supposed to feel it precisely by feeling nothing whatsoever.
In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis argues that moral education is supposed to do the exact opposite of deadening our feelings of revulsion to the ugly and evil. Moral education is the education of the affections to bring them into line with the reason. By reason we know that certain things are good, beautiful, and true and in order to be a good person it is necessary that we love these things and hate their opposites. Just knowing what is good is not enough; we must love it.
Anyone familiar with Plato’s anthropology and ethics in The Phaedrus knows that he depicts this very thing in his allegory of the chariot. The two horses pulling the chariot are the affections and the appetites. Reason drives and steers the chariot. Success results when the horses allow reason to direct them, but it is also dependent on the horses not pulling in opposite directions from each other. The appetites must be under the control of reason, and this is only possible when the affections are in harmony with the reason. A man who wants to be good must have educated affections, and this is the purpose of moral education.
The objective room is designed to do the exact opposite of moral education. It is designed to deaden the affections and detach them from the reason. Without support from the affections, reason becomes helpless before the appetites. Such a person is easily enslaved because he can be manipulated by granting or withholding the desires of the appetites. Such a life is subhuman and a kind of unfreedom or slavery.
This is why Christian freedom – true freedom - is freedom to do the good, not merely freedom to make choices according to the immediate desires of the lower appetites.
When commanded to step on and desecrate the crucifix, Studdock finds himself unable to do it even though he is not yet a believing Christian. He knows that if he refuses to obey, he may be killed. He is in the hands of the powers that be in the organization, N.I.C.E. Yet he says: “It’s all bloody nonsense and I’m damned if I do any such thing.” He says no to the temptation to give in to being conditioned. Note that his response is not a calm, cool “No” but a forceful ejaculation. It is also a double entendre: “I’ll be damned if I do any such thing.” This is a case of a man speaking more truly than he knew at the time, rather like Caiaphas’s prophecy that “It is better than one man die than that the whole people perish.”
Lewis tells us that Studdock came to understand that the crucified man represented what the Diseased does to the Normal. Even though he was not yet a believer, he still sensed goodness as superior to evil and he decided he would rather die than side with evil. For Lewis, the good, the true, and the beautiful are all one and to reject one is to reject them all. But to love one is to love them all.
As the greatest Christian Platonist of the twentieth century, Lewis takes Plato’s allegory of the chariot and uses it to teach a deeper truth than Plato did. Plato was not wrong to understand human psychology as an ethical struggle between the reason and the passions and he was right about how important it is to train the affections or feelings to align with the reason in order to keep the appetites under control. But Lewis gave the allegory an even deeper interpretation by placing the moral struggle within the context of the spiritual battle for souls that goes on daily in this life. Ultimately, what is required for the spiritual life is faith in Christ as Savior because only faith provides reason with what it lacks and enables victory over sin. What we cannot do ourselves God does in us. For Lewis, moral education is finally inseparable from piety.
So, what is really going on when children are indoctrinated in gender theory in school or taken to Pride Parades, or exposed to Drag Queen Story Hour? What is happening is both a moral and spiritual corruption of children at one and the same time. It is also an aesthetic corruption of their ability to be drawn to the good and the true by beauty.
Most importantly, desensitizing children to the binaries of good/evil, beautiful/ugly, and false/true, while their young minds are still impressionable is an effective method of disarming them in the face of the spiritual evil that tempts them to reject God and embrace despair.
Parents may not understand this but the unseen spiritual forces deceiving them into a false enlightenment and false progressivism understand it very well. We live in dark times.