When the Sacred Becomes Common

Judge the tree by its fruit. Not by the sincerity of the planting.

May 02, 2026

Do not give dogs what is sacred. Do not throw your pearls to pigs.

Every civilization that has ever lasted understood one thing our culture is working very hard to forget.

Not every thing is equal. Not every thing deserves the same level of care. Some things are ordinary. You use them, you set them down, you move on. They are replaceable, interchangeable, subject to the logic of convenience and preference. And some things are sacred. You handle them with care. You protect them. You do not drag them into the common because the common is not where they belong, and the act of dragging them there does not liberate them. It destroys them. And when they are destroyed, you discover, too late, that the destruction cost more than you understood when you were cheering for it.

This is not a complicated idea. It is, in fact, one of the oldest ideas in the human record, so old and so widely distributed across cultures and centuries that its recurrence has attracted serious scholarly attention. The anthropologist Émile Durkheim, who was not a religious man, identified the distinction between the sacred and the profane as the most fundamental organizing principle of human social life, prior to theology, prior to law, prior to any specific cultural content. Every society, he observed, draws the line somewhere. Every society designates certain things, certain places, certain relationships, certain acts as set apart, as belonging to a different order than the ordinary flow of use and exchange. And every society that has lost the capacity to draw that line, or has been talked out of drawing it, has paid a specific and predictable price.

We are paying it now. We are in the middle of paying it. And the people most loudly insisting that the price is worth it are, in almost every case, not the ones being asked to pay.

Part One: The Category Nobody Wants to Defend

The Hebrew word for holy is qodesh. It means set apart. Not morally perfect, not ethereally spiritual, not removed from ordinary human concern. Set apart. Designated for a different use. Belonging to a different order.

The logic of holiness in the Old Testament is essentially the logic of the sacred made explicit: there are things that belong to God’s order and things that belong to the common order, and the catastrophe is always the collapse of the boundary between them. Profanation, in the biblical vocabulary, is precisely the act of treating the set-apart thing as though it were merely common. Taking the temple vessels and drinking wine from them at a party. Using the consecrated bread for ordinary purposes. It is not that the bread or the cup is intrinsically different from other bread or other cups. It is that the designation has made them different, and disregarding the designation is not neutrality. It is a specific act with specific consequences.

Roger Scruton, the philosopher, argued that the sacred is not primarily a theological category but an anthropological one. Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. They do not merely exist in the world. They organize the world into zones of significance, they mark certain things as mattering more than other things, and this marking is not an optional add-on to human social life. It is constitutive of it. A world in which nothing is sacred is not a liberated world. It is a world in which the structures that make meaning possible have been dissolved, and what replaces them is not freedom but a particular kind of despair, one that cannot name its own cause because the language required to name it has been discredited along with everything else.

Philip Rieff, writing in The Triumph of the Therapeutic in 1966, identified what he called the therapeutic culture with prophetic precision. He described a civilization in the process of replacing its sacred order, the system of interdictions and obligations that gave social life its shape, with a therapeutic order organized entirely around the management of individual feeling. In the therapeutic order, the question is never what is sacred and must be protected. It is always what feels right and should be enabled. The shift is not merely ethical. It is ontological. It changes what kind of world you are living in.

Rieff was writing in 1966. He was describing what he could already see beginning. What he could not fully describe, because it had not yet fully arrived, was what happens to the second and third generation raised inside the therapeutic order. What happens to people who grew up in a world where nothing was set apart, where every interdiction was treated as a suppression of authentic selfhood, where the concept of a thing belonging to a different order than ordinary use was taught to them as the primary form of oppression.

We know now. The data is available. The faces are in the clinical files.

Part Two: What Happened to the Marriage Bed

Take the most intimate and the most instructive example.

In every civilization that produced enduring family structures, the marriage bed was sacred. Not in the sense that people were naive about what happened there. In the sense that what happened there belonged to a specific covenantal order, was bounded by specific promises made before witnesses, was understood as participation in something that exceeded the preferences of the two people involved and carried weight beyond their personal satisfaction.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was not, at its most fundamental level, a revolution about sex. It was a revolution about the category of the sacred. It was the argument, made explicitly by its architects and absorbed implicitly by its inheritors, that the sacred designation was not real, that the boundaries around sexual intimacy were not structural necessities of human flourishing but arbitrary impositions of a power structure that benefited from their enforcement, and that removing them would produce freedom, authenticity, and the liberation of human desire from its artificial constraints.

The architects were confident. The confidence was not warranted.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies of sexual behavior and wellbeing conducted in the United States, found consistent associations between higher numbers of sexual partners and lower measures of relationship quality, relationship stability, and personal wellbeing, particularly for women. This is not a study produced by religious organizations. It is peer-reviewed social science, drawing on data from over fifteen thousand participants tracked across two decades.

Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University who has spent her career tracking generational shifts in psychological wellbeing, documents in her research a consistent pattern: the generations most thoroughly formed by the sexual revolution’s assumptions, the generations for whom casual sexual encounter is most thoroughly normalized, are also the generations reporting the highest levels of loneliness, the lowest levels of relationship satisfaction, and the most acute difficulty forming the kind of lasting intimate attachment that human beings appear to require for flourishing.

This is not a surprise if you understand what the sacred category was doing. When the marriage bed is merely a bed, when the encounter it frames carries no more weight than any other encounter, it stops doing the work that human beings built the category to do. It stops functioning as the ground for a particular kind of trust, a particular depth of vulnerability, a particular quality of being known that cannot be produced in the absence of the structural commitment that made the category sacred.

The sociologist Mark Regnerus, in Cheap Sex, documents the market logic that replaces the covenant logic when the sacred designation is removed. When sexual access carries no cost in terms of commitment, it becomes cheap in the economic sense, and cheap things are treated accordingly. The commodification of intimacy is not an accidental byproduct of the sexual revolution. It is the predictable result of treating something that was sacred as though it were merely common.

The people who were promised freedom got something else. They got a market. And the market, as markets do, rewards the powerful and underserves the vulnerable. The population that gains the most from the removal of the sacred designation around sexual intimacy is not, historically or empirically, women. It is men whose interests are best served by access without obligation. The revolution that was sold as women’s liberation delivered the conditions that most efficiently serve male incontinence. That is the fruit. Not the intention. The fruit.

Part Three: The Body as Currency

The logic does not stop at the marriage bed. It follows the category of the sacred wherever it goes.

In the Christian understanding, the body is not merely the container of a self. It is the self in its material form. The Incarnation, God taking a body and keeping it through the resurrection rather than discarding it, is the most radical possible statement about the dignity and permanence of embodied existence. Made in the image of a God who became flesh, the human body belongs to the sacred order, not as a piece of religious furniture but as the medium through which persons love and suffer and encounter one another and, in the Christian account, encounter God.

When the body is removed from the sacred order, it becomes available as currency.

The pornography industry now produces an estimated 800 new videos every day in the United States alone. The average age of first exposure to pornographic content in developed Western countries is between eleven and twelve. The content is not what its earliest liberal defenders described when they argued for its legalization, not adult material freely chosen by adults for private adult use, but a ubiquitous environment that shapes the sexual imaginations of children before they have the relational experience to place it in any interpretive context.

The clinical literature on pornography’s effects on intimate relationships is not ambiguous. Valerie Voon’s neurological research at Cambridge found that pornography activates the same neural reward pathways as addictive substances and produces similar tolerance dynamics, requiring escalation to maintain effect. Dolf Zillmann’s research found that sustained exposure to pornography produced measurable decreases in satisfaction with real partners, increases in acceptance of casual sexual encounters, and decreases in the valuation of commitment and fidelity.

The platform known as OnlyFans reported over two million content creators in 2022. The median age of women entering sex work on digital platforms has been declining. The cultural framework that produces this is not complicated. Once the body is common, it is available for sale. Once it is available for sale, the market sets the price. And once the market sets the price, the logic of the sacred, the logic that says some things cannot be bought because some things belong to a different order than exchange, has been decisively defeated.

The girls who grew up inside this logic did not choose it in any meaningful sense. They were formed by it before they had the conceptual resources to evaluate it. They were told that their bodies were theirs to use as they chose, which is true in one sense and catastrophically incomplete in another, because the freedom to use a thing however you choose is not freedom if it is purchased at the cost of the thing’s capacity to function as it was designed to function.

A promise made to everyone is not a promise. A body given to everyone is not, in the covenantal sense, a gift. The sacred category was not protecting women from their own bodies. It was protecting the relational function that their bodies were designed to serve. Remove the protection, and the function does not persist in a liberated form. It degrades.

Part Four: Promises Without Weight

There is a form of the sacred that operates entirely in the domain of language, and its collapse is one of the least discussed and most consequential features of the modern situation.

A promise made before witnesses is a different kind of speech act than a statement of current intention. When two people stand before a community and say I will, not I want to, not I plan to, not I feel this way right now but I will, they are making a claim that belongs to a different order than ordinary expression. They are binding a future self to a present commitment, staking the self on continuity between what is said now and what will be done then, and inviting the community to hold them to that continuity. This is the structure of a covenant.

Covenants are sacred because they are the mechanism by which human beings become trustworthy. Not merely trusted in the sense that their current behavior is reliable, but trustworthy in the deeper sense that their word binds their future, that the self they are now is accountable for the actions of the self they will become. The covenant is the technology by which persons become people whose promises mean something, whose relationships can carry weight, whose yes means yes and whose no means no.

When the covenant is replaced by the contract, something specific is lost that is not recovered by making the contract more detailed.

A contract is an agreement between parties who expect to remain fundamentally self-interested and provides legal mechanisms for managing the conflict between their interests. It is built on the assumption of mutual distrust managed by enforcement. A covenant is built on the assumption of mutual commitment managed by character. They are not the same thing with different vocabularies. They are different anthropological structures expressing different understandings of what a person is.

Marriage in Western civilization was a covenant. It was sacred not merely because it was blessed in church but because it operated on covenant logic: the self bound to the future by the word spoken in the present, before witnesses, before God. When marriage became a contract, which is the operational reality of most modern marriages regardless of whether they are conducted in churches or not, it lost the sacred designation and inherited the contract’s built-in architecture of exit.

Contracts have termination clauses. Covenants do not. The termination clause is not a minor procedural detail. It changes the fundamental logic of the relationship. A marriage entered with a termination clause is not the same relationship as a marriage entered without one, even if both couples stand at the same altar and say the same words. The covenant is made in the body, in the will, in the understood structure of what the relationship is. When the culture communicates that the understood structure includes an exit that requires only the decision to leave, the marriage that results is a different kind of marriage, and it produces different outcomes, and the children raised inside it inherit a different understanding of what promises are and what they cost.

Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, identifies what he calls sacred values as a distinct category of human moral cognition. Sacred values, he argues, are values that resist trade-offs. They cannot be weighed against other values on a common scale. They cannot be purchased or surrendered for compensation. The moment you begin to calculate the price at which a sacred value can be compromised, you have already destroyed it, because the defining feature of the sacred is that it is not on the market.

His research shows that sacred values are not irrational holdovers from a pre-scientific age. They serve specific social functions. Communities organized around sacred values are more cohesive, more trusting, more capable of cooperation, and more resilient under pressure. The dissolution of sacred values does not produce a more rational community. It produces a more fragmented one, in which the only remaining glue is interest, and interest is a thin adhesive that fails when the interests diverge.

Part Five: The Name and What Happens When You Hollow It

There is a commandment that the modern world has found easier to dismiss than almost any other, and the dismissal has produced a consequence that almost nobody connects to it.

You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

The usual interpretation of this commandment treats it as a prohibition on using sacred vocabulary as casual profanity, which it is. But the deeper meaning is something more structurally significant. The name is not merely a sound. In the ancient understanding, and in the theology that grew out of it, the name is the person made available for relationship. God’s name is the mode of God’s presence, the form in which the infinite has made itself accessible to the finite, the technology by which the Creator can be addressed rather than merely contemplated.

To take that name in vain is to treat the sacred mode of presence as though it were common, to drain it of its weight by using it as mere expression, a punctuation mark, a filler, a signal of emphasis with no referent. When God’s name becomes a casual expletive, something specific happens to the culture’s capacity to receive what the name was pointing to.

C.S. Lewis made the observation that when we use words promiscuously, we degrade not only the words but the realities the words were designed to signify. Love becomes the word you say about pizza and about your spouse, and the promiscuity of the word is not neutral. It does not leave the word’s capacity to signify the deeper thing intact. It degrades it, slowly, by accretion, until the word no longer carries the weight it was built to carry.

The same logic applies to the name of God, and to the entire vocabulary of the sacred. When every thing is described as awesome, nothing is awful. When every experience is sacred, nothing is holy. When God is a casual exclamation, the God who speaks before he does anything else in all of Scripture, the God who insisted on the weight of his name precisely because the name was the mode of his presence, becomes unreachable through the vocabulary that was supposed to be the door.

The secularization of language is not merely the loss of religious vocabulary. It is the loss of the cognitive and relational capacity that the vocabulary was maintaining. A culture that cannot speak the sacred has lost more than words. It has lost the equipment for a certain kind of encounter.

Part Six: The Children in the Rubble

Every civilization that has sacrificed the sacred category has eventually been presented with the bill. The bill is always paid by the next generation, the generation that did not choose the ideology but inherited its consequences.

The children of the sexual revolution were not asked whether they wanted a world in which the category of the sacred was dismantled. They arrived into one. They grew up in homes shaped by the contract logic of marriage, in schools that taught them their bodies were instruments of personal expression, in a culture that saturated them with the pornographic logic of the body as commodity before they were old enough to drive. They were handed the conclusions before they had the capacity to evaluate the premises. And then, when the conclusions produced predictable damage, they were handed a therapeutic vocabulary for managing the symptoms and told nothing about the cause.

Jean Twenge’s research on iGen, the generation born after 1995, documents a mental health crisis of unprecedented scale. Depression, anxiety, loneliness, and purposelessness are running at levels that dwarf any previous generation on record. Twenge is careful about causation. She is not a moralist. She is a data analyst. And the data she is analyzing tells a specific story.

The generation with the most material abundance in human history. The generation with the most connectivity technology in human history. The generation with the fewest formal interdictions, the fewest imposed obligations, the fewest designated sacred things. The generation that was given, more thoroughly than any before it, the world the therapeutic culture promised would produce flourishing.

The generation reporting the highest rates of meaninglessness.

This is not a coincidence. It is a result. The sacred category was not a constraint imposed on human flourishing. It was a structural requirement for it. Meaning is not produced by freedom. Meaning is produced by the encounter with something that matters more than your current preference, something that makes a claim on you, something you cannot simply walk away from when it becomes inconvenient. Remove the things that matter more than your current preference and you have not produced freedom. You have produced a self in a vacuum, and the self in a vacuum does not thrive.

The developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind spent decades studying what children actually need, not what ideologies claim they need, but what the evidence shows. Her research produced the concept of authoritative parenting: high warmth combined with high structure. Not permissiveness. Not authoritarianism. The combination of genuine care and genuine expectation, the refusal to choose between being loved and being held to something. This is what the sacred category provides at the level of culture. Not the absence of love, but love that makes demands, love that says this matters enough to be protected.

The children being raised in the ruins of the sacred order are not receiving this. They are receiving the permissive culture’s version of care, which is the validation of whatever they currently feel, administered by institutions that have confused the absence of boundaries with the presence of love. They are receiving mirrors when they need walls, and they are expressing the predictable anxiety of children who cannot find the edges of the world.

The edges were the sacred things. We took them down and called it progress.

Part Seven: The Happiness Audit

At some point an ideology must be held to its own promises.

The promise was happiness. Not happiness narrowly construed as pleasure, but in the deeper sense: flourishing, fulfillment, the satisfaction of living a life that coheres, that contains love that lasts, that produces relationships worth having and work worth doing and a self worth being.

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Michigan, published a paper in 2009 titled The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. Using data from the General Social Survey, tracking women’s self-reported happiness from the early 1970s through the 2000s, they found a consistent pattern: despite substantial gains in income, educational attainment, professional opportunity, and legal equality during this period, women’s reported happiness declined. Absolutely, relative to their own earlier reports. And relative to men, who reported stable or slightly improving happiness over the same period.

Stevenson and Wolfers did not draw ideological conclusions from their data. They are not cultural conservatives. They were genuinely puzzled, and the paper is framed as a paradox precisely because the expected result, that objective gains in equality and opportunity would produce subjective gains in wellbeing, did not materialize.

The data is not puzzling if you understand what the sacred category was doing.

The ideology that promised freedom delivered a specific kind of freedom: freedom from obligation, from designation, from the weight of promises that bind the future to the past, from the roles that the ideologists had decided were impositions rather than callings. The women who received this freedom were not asked whether they wanted to be freed from the weight of the sacred. They were told that the weight was oppression and the freedom would feel like liberation.

Many of them felt something else. Something more like loss. The specific loss of things that carried weight, of relationships that were not provisional, of a life organized around something more demanding than personal preference. The loss, in short, of the sacred category and everything it made possible.

The declining happiness data is not an argument for injustice. The specific legal disabilities that motivated the earliest advocates for women’s equality were real and rightly addressed. No serious person argues that women should be denied property rights or educational access or the vote. Those are not the question.

The question is whether the ideology that addressed those specific injustices was actually organized around women’s flourishing, or whether it was organized around something else that used women’s genuine grievances as cover. The question is what the data actually shows about what women need, as opposed to what the ideology decided they needed on their behalf.

The data shows that women who marry, who form stable families, who raise children in intact households, report higher measures of happiness, meaning, and life satisfaction than women who follow the alternative path the ideology constructed for them. This is not a comfortable finding for the ideology. It is therefore not a widely discussed finding. But it is available, and it is consistent, and it does not go away because it is inconvenient.

Part Eight: What the Sacred Was Protecting

Here is what the modern project of desacralization could not understand, or would not, because understanding it would have required revising the premises.

The sacred category was not a prison. It was a container. Specifically, it was the container for the most important things in human life, the things that are most vulnerable to the logic of the market and most damaged by it. Love. Promise. The body in its relational capacity. The name of God. The life of the child. These things cannot survive in the common order because the common order is organized around use, exchange, and preference, and these things are not use-objects. They are persons, relationships, covenants. They require a different order.

Every civilization that produced enduring structures for human flourishing, structures that served not just the generation that built them but the generation after and the generation after that, understood this. They drew the line. They designated certain things as belonging to a different order than ordinary exchange. They said: here is where the market stops. Here is where convenience stops. Here is where personal preference stops and obligation begins.

The lines were not drawn identically in every civilization, and not every civilization drew them with justice. Some drew them in ways that did real harm, that confined real people, that used the sacred as a tool of control rather than a structure of protection. The critique of those specific failures is legitimate and was necessary. The specific injustices deserved to be named and addressed.

But the response to a badly drawn line is not to eliminate the line. It is to draw it better. The response to the misuse of the sacred category is not to abolish the category. It is to recover its proper function. And the proper function is the one that every lasting civilization understood: to protect the things that are too important to survive in the common order from the logic of the common order.

The marriage bed. The promise made before witnesses. The name of God. The body in its covenantal capacity. The child whose life has not yet been expressed in terms of economic utility. These things require the sacred designation not because they are fragile, though they are, but because they are in their nature unsuited to the market. They cannot be priced without being destroyed. They cannot be exchanged without being diminished. They require an order that says: this is not for sale. This is not subject to preference. This belongs to a different kind of account than the one you run on convenience and cost.

When you take down that designation, you do not liberate the things it was protecting. You expose them to a logic that was never designed to handle them, and they are consumed by it, and the people who depended on them are left in a world where nothing carries enough weight to make a life around.

A Closing Word

There is a sentence in the Sermon on the Mount that does not get enough credit for its precision.

Do not give dogs what is sacred. Do not throw your pearls to pigs.

This is not an injunction to be cruel to people you consider inferior. It is an injunction about the nature of the sacred itself. Some things, given to the wrong order, are not preserved in that order. They are destroyed by it. The pig does not protect the pearl. The pig tramples it. Not out of malice. Out of nature. The pearl does not belong in the pig’s world, and placing it there does not elevate the pig. It destroys the pearl.

The things this civilization has been throwing into the common order since the middle of the last century have not been elevated by the throwing. They have been trampled. Not out of anyone’s malice. Out of the nature of the common order, which cannot do for the sacred what the sacred order was built to do.

The people who made the arguments for desacralization were not all bad people. Some of them were responding to genuine injustice. Some of them were motivated by genuine compassion. Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. The road to the data we now have was paved with confident assertions that the freedom being purchased was worth the price.

The generation paying the price was not consulted.

They are in the psychiatrist’s offices and the loneliness statistics and the declining marriage rates and the falling fertility numbers and the clinical studies on meaninglessness that proliferate faster than the therapeutic culture can manage their results.

They are the fruit. The ideology planted the tree. Judge accordingly.

We stopped treating important things as important. And gradually, predictably, and at great cost, they stopped being important. And when enough important things stopped being important, life itself began to feel, for a great number of people, pointless.

This is not a complicated diagnosis. It is, in fact, the diagnosis that every serious civilization made before us, in the accumulated wisdom encoded in their sacred designations, their covenants, their interdictions, the lines they drew and held at cost because they understood that the cost of not drawing them was higher.

We stopped listening to them. We called their wisdom oppression. We tore down their lines and called it liberation.

The question the data now puts to us is simple.

Does this look like freedom to you?

A Note on Sources: Research referenced in this piece includes the work of Émile Durkheim, particularly The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912); Roger Scruton, The Face of God (2012) and The Soul of the World (2014); Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966); Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012); Jean Twenge, iGen (2017); Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness (2009); Diana Baumrind’s parenting research, particularly The Influence of Parenting Style on Adolescent Competence and Substance Use (1991); Valerie Voon et al., Neural Correlates of Sexual Cue Reactivity in Individuals with and without Compulsive Sexual Behaviours (2014); Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy (2017); and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health.

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