WHEN THE SACRED BECOMES COMMON

Do Not Give Dogs What Is Sacred!
Three movements set out, in print, to erase the line between the holy and the common. The bill has come in.

This passage from Daniel is the opening of this latest 5th version of this article. This is the 2nd published version. I hope you enjoy it.

On the last night of the Babylonian empire, King Belshazzar threw a feast for a thousand of his lords, and he drank wine in front of the thousand.

Somewhere in the wine he remembered the sacred drinking vessels from the holy temple in Jerusalem. Decades earlier Nebuchadnezzar had stripped the temple in Jerusalem and carried its gold and silver vessels to Babylon as booty, and there they had sat, in the treasury, to honor the gods of the conquerors. In the Fertile Crescent, when one place conquered another, they would steal the gods of the conquered place, not only as a way to demonstrate that their gods dominated the conquered place but also as a way to ensure the continued loyalty of the conquered. The ultimate hostage. So when Belshazzar sent for the holy drinking vessels from the treasury, he was demonstrating contempt for the conquered by treating the sacred as common. They were brought into the hall, and the king and his princes, his wives and his concubines filled them with wine and drank from them. A great disrespect to the Hebrew God. Then they proceeded to drink toasts of praise with the temple vessels, to false gods. To the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.

Daniel 5:3 to 31 (Amplified Bible, Classic Edition):

3 Then they brought in the gold and silver vessels which had been taken out of the temple, the house of God which was in Jerusalem; and the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines drank from them.

4 They drank wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone.

5 Immediately and suddenly there appeared the fingers of a man s hand and wrote on the plaster of the wall opposite the candlestick [so exposed especially to the light] in the king s palace, and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.

6 Then the color and the [drunken] hilarious brightness of the king s face was changed, and his [terrifying] thoughts troubled and alarmed him; the joints and muscles of his hips and back gave way and his knees smote together.

7 The king cried aloud [mightily] to bring in the enchanters or soothsayers, the Chaldeans [diviners], and the astrologers. The king said to the wise men of Babylon, Whoever will read this writing and show me the interpretation of it will be clothed with purple and have a chain of gold put about his neck and will be the third ruler in the kingdom.

8 And all the king s wise men came in, but they could not read the writing or make known to the king the interpretation of it.

9 Then King Belshazzar was greatly perplexed and alarmed and the color faded from his face, and his lords were puzzled and astounded.

10 Now the queen [mother], overhearing the exciting words of the king and his lords, came into the banquet house. The queen [mother] said, O king, live forever! Do not be alarmed at your thoughts or let your cheerful expression and the color of your face be changed.

11 There is a man in your kingdom in whom is the Spirit of the holy God [or gods], and in the days of your father light and understanding and wisdom like the wisdom of the gods were found in him; and King Nebuchadnezzar, your father the king, I say, your father appointed him master of the magicians, enchanters or soothsayers, Chaldeans, and astrologers,

12 Because an excellent spirit, knowledge, and understanding to interpret dreams, clarify riddles, and solve knotty problems were found in this same Daniel, whom the king named Belteshazzar. Now let Daniel be called, and he will show the interpretation.

13 Then Daniel was brought in before the king. And the king said to Daniel, Are you that Daniel of the children of the captivity of Judah, whom the king my father brought out of Judah?

14 I have heard of you, that the Spirit of the holy God [or gods] is in you and that light and understanding and superior wisdom are found in you.

15 Now the wise men, the enchanters, have been brought in before me that they might read this writing and make known to me the interpretation of it, but they could not show the interpretation of the matter.

16 But I have heard of you, that you can make interpretations and solve knotty problems. Now if you can read the writing and make known to me its interpretation, you shall be clothed with purple and have a chain of gold put around your neck and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.

17 Then Daniel answered before the king, Let your gifts be for yourself and give your rewards to another. However, I will read the writing to the king and make known to him the interpretation.

18 O king, the Most High God gave Nebuchadnezzar your father a kingdom and greatness and glory and majesty;

19 And because of the greatness that He gave him, all peoples, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him. Whom he would he slew, and whom he would he kept alive; whom he would he set up, and whom he would he put down.

20 But when his heart was lifted up and his mind and spirit were hardened so that he dealt proudly, he was deposed from his kingly throne and his glory was taken from him;

21 He was driven from among men, and his heart or mind was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses. He was fed with grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of the heavens until he learned and knew that the Most High God rules in the kingdom of men and that He appoints and sets over it whomever He will.

22 And you his son, O Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart and mind, though you knew all this [knew it and were defiant].

23 And you have lifted yourself up against the Lord of heaven, and the vessels of His house have been brought before you, and you and your lords, your wives, and your concubines have drunk wine from them; and you have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear or know; but the God in Whose hand your breath is and Whose are all your ways you have not honored and glorified [but have dishonored and disgraced].

24 Then was the part of the hand sent from the presence of [the Most High God], and this writing was inscribed.

25 And this is the inscription that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN numbered, numbered, weighed, divisions.

26 This is the interpretation of the matter:

MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingship and brought them to an end;

27 TEKEL, You are weighed in the balances and are found wanting;

28 UPHARSIN, Your kingdom and your kingship are divided and given to the Medes and Persians. [Foretold in Isa. 21:2, 5, 9.]

29 Then Belshazzar commanded, and Daniel was clothed with purple and a chain of gold put about his neck, and a proclamation was made concerning him that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.

30 During that night Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans was slain,

31 And Darius the Mede took the kingdom; he was about sixty-two years old.

The cups were metal. Any goldsmith in Babylon could have made their equal by the end of the week. What made them different was a line: they had been set apart for the house of God, and a king who knew it had dragged them across that line into a drinking party, to show a thousand men that the line meant nothing. Carrying off a conquered people s gods was standard practice in the ancient Near East. Jerusalem had no idol to carry off. The temple vessels were the nearest thing to the God of Israel that Babylon could lay hands on, and Belshazzar filled them with wine and toasted idols with them. Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. And how great was the fall.

The bill came the same night. The Greek historian Herodotus (Histories 1.191) says Cyrus diverted the Euphrates and his army marched into the city along the riverbed, and Xenophon tells a similar story. The prophecies it matches are Isaiah 44:27 to 45:1, which names Cyrus and has God drying up the rivers and opening the gates, and Jeremiah 50:38 and 51:36. The Babylonian record, the Nabonidus Chronicle, says that Cyrus s army entered Babylon without a battle, and that Cyrus then appointed a man named Gubaru to govern it. Daniel says the kingdom passed to Darius the Mede, who was made king over the Chaldeans, and who set Daniel over the province beneath him. The conservative scholar John Whitcomb identified that Darius with Cyrus s governor Gubaru; others read Daniel 6:28 as naming Darius and Cyrus as one man. On either reading the prophecy and the record agree. Cyrus took the city, and the kingdom of Babylon was given to the Medes and Persians, as the writing on the wall said it would be.

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

Emile Durkheim, who believed in no god at all, concluded in 1912 that the division between the sacred and the profane is the deepest organising principle of human social life, older than law and older than theology, and he found it wherever human beings lived together. Some things are common. You use them, set them down and replace them. Other things are set apart, handled with care, and kept out of the traffic of ordinary use, because dragging them into the common destroys them.

What happens to a society that sends for the cups as a matter of policy is the subject of this piece. Ours has been doing it for sixty years, and the people who started it said so in print.

Sixty years ago the lines around marriage, the body and the family were declared oppressive and taken down, and the people who took them down promised freedom. The people loudest in insisting the price was worth it have seldom been the ones paying it. The bill has landed on ordinary families: on the marriage you are in, or the one you never managed to make; on the children you are raising; on the words you use without thinking. It is the kind of bill a culture discovers too late, when the destruction turns out to have cost more than anyone understood while they were cheering for it.

The marriage bed.
In the societies that built families meant to last, the marriage bed was set apart. People knew perfectly well what happened there. What happened there belonged to an order bounded by promises made before witnesses, and it carried a weight beyond the preferences of the two people in it.

A promise made before witnesses is a different kind of speech from a statement of present feeling. I will binds a future self to a present word and invites a community to hold the speaker to it. That is the structure of a covenant, and covenants are how human beings make themselves trustworthy across time, so that a yes can carry the weight of a life.

A contract expects the parties to stay self-interested and writes in the terms for ending it. The marriage covenant also had an exit, and Jesus gave its reason:

He said to them, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been so [ordained]. (Matthew 19:8, AMPC)

Scripture s exit is a concession to hard hearts, narrowed to grave cause. A contract writes the exit in on the first day and lets either party use it for any reason. No-fault divorce, beginning in California in 1969, moved marriage in law from the first kind of bond to the second. Couples still stand at the same altars and say the same words. The law they marry under assumes that either of them may leave.

The psychologist Philip Tetlock spent years studying what he called taboo trade-offs: proposals to put a price on something held sacred, such as a vote, a child or a body part. People reacted with moral outrage, and the longer they were made to consider the trade, the more contaminated they said they felt, as though pricing the thing had already damaged it. A sacred value works because it is kept off the market. The moment anyone starts calculating its price, it has begun to turn into something else.

The anthropologist Richard Sosis supplied the hardest numbers. Studying two hundred American communes of the nineteenth century, he found that the average religious commune lasted about twenty-five years and the average secular one about six. With Eric Bressler, in 2003, he found that the more a religious commune demanded of its members, in fasting, abstinence, dress and food, the longer it survived. Among the secular communes, demanding more did not help. Communities that asked a great deal in the name of something they held sacred endured. Communities that asked for sacrifice in the name of an idea that could be argued with fell apart.

The sexual revolution ran the secular commune experiment on a whole civilisation. A bond that costs nothing to leave is a bond few people will sacrifice anything to keep.

The body as currency
In the Christian account, the body is the person in material form. A person made in the image of that God loves, suffers and meets other people through a body, and that is why the body belongs to the set-apart order.

Move the body into the common order and it can be sold, and the market sets the price. If you have a twelve-year-old, there is a fair chance the market has already reached him.

A platform built for the sale of sexual content, counts its creators in the millions by its own company accounts. Common Sense Media, surveying American teenagers in a report published in 2023, found that the average age of first exposure to online pornography was twelve, and that a substantial minority had seen it before they turned eleven.

The research on what that does is still disputed, and it should be reported straight. Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant found in 1988 that students who watched pornography over six weeks reported lower satisfaction with their own partners looks, affection and sexual performance. Valerie Voon s group at Cambridge found in 2014 that men with compulsive sexual behaviour showed brain responses to explicit material similar to drug users responses to drug cues, while cautioning against calling it addiction. A 2016 study from the same lab, led by Paula Banca, found the same men habituated faster to repeated images and were pulled harder toward novel ones. A habit that needs constant novelty to hold its effect is a poor school for a lifetime with one person.

Amnesty International argued in 2016 that adult women have the right to sell sex free of criminal penalty, and that is a serious argument about adults. The market it would protect reached twelve-year-olds first.

The girls raised inside that market chose none of it. They were formed by it before they had the means to judge it, and they were told their bodies were theirs to use as they chose. That is true in one sense, and badly incomplete in another. The freedom to use a thing however you like includes the freedom to wreck what it was made to do.

A promise made to everyone is no promise. A body given to everyone has stopped being a gift. The sacred designation protected women from a market that has long wanted them cheap.

The Name.
You shall not use or repeat the name of the Lord your God in vain [that is, lightly or frivolously, in false affirmations or profanely]; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain. (Exodus 20:7, AMPC)

Lightly or frivolously, in false affirmations or profanely: the commandment covers the oath, the curse and the throwaway exclamation alike. In the Hebrew understanding it carries more still. A name is how a person makes himself available to be called, and the name of God is how the God who is beyond the world has made himself available to be addressed.

That God was addressable before there was anyone to address him.

In the beginning [before all time] was the Word (Christ), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God Himself. (John 1:1, AMPC)

Before there was a world to speak to, God was Word, and the Word was with God. Love needs someone to love, and in Christian teaching the love was there before the creation, inside God himself.

C. S. Lewis, in Studies in Words in 1960, named a process he called verbicide, the killing of a word, which happens when a word is used so loosely, or for so much mere emphasis, that it can no longer mean anything precise. The cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen, in What the F in 2016, showed why the old oaths had force: a swear word works only while the thing it names is still felt as forbidden or holy, and it weakens as that feeling drains away. Every casual use of the holy name spends a little of the reverence left in it, and the spending stops only when there is nothing left.

When everything is awesome, nothing is awful. When every experience is sacred, nothing is holy. When the word for the holiest thing a culture knows becomes the word it uses when it stubs a toe, the culture loses more than its manners. It loses the means of naming what it has lost.

The children in the rubble.
The developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind spent decades studying what children need, and her findings, set out most fully in a 1991 study of adolescent competence and substance use, have held up. The children who do best are raised by what she called authoritative parents, who combine high warmth with high expectation. Permissive parents, all warmth and no demand, and authoritarian parents, all demand and no warmth, both produce worse results. Children need love that holds them to something.

The sacred order gave a whole culture that combination: a world that loved its children and also told them some things were not up for negotiation. The children raised after the lines came down were given warmth without edges, a culture that affirmed whatever they felt and seldom said anything mattered more than the feeling. They were handed the conclusions before they could weigh the premises, and when the conclusions did their damage, they were handed a therapeutic vocabulary for the symptoms and told nothing about the cause.

A generation raised with more comfort and more connection than its grandparents could have imagined, and with fewer things held sacred, is the one Jean Twenge found lonelier and more anxious than the one before it. Meaning comes from meeting something that matters more than your current preference: something that makes a claim on you, something you cannot walk away from when it becomes inconvenient. Take those things away and what remains is a self in a vacuum, and a self in a vacuum does not thrive.

The generation paying for all of this was never consulted. Its members are in the psychiatrists waiting rooms, the loneliness surveys, the falling marriage rates and the falling birth rates, raised by institutions that confused the absence of boundaries with the presence of love.

They were given mirrors when they needed walls. They are showing the 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.

The people who sent for the cups.
The line between the holy and the common was attacked in the second half of the twentieth century by three movements, and each of them stated the aim in its own founding texts.

Shulamith Firestone, a founder of radical feminism in New York, published The Dialectic of Sex in 1970. She wrote that the end goal of feminist revolution must be the elimination of the sex distinction itself, along with male privilege, so that the genital difference between men and women would cease to matter culturally. She called for the abolition of the biological family, which she regarded as the root of women s oppression, and looked forward to the day when children would be produced outside the womb. The line between man and woman, and the line around the family, were the targets, named.

Gayle Rubin, an anthropologist, published Thinking Sex in 1984, and it is counted among the founding documents of queer theory. In it she drew what she called the charmed circle. Inside the circle sat sexuality that was marital, monogamous, reproductive, heterosexual and private, which her society, she wrote, labelled good, normal, natural and blessed. Outside sat everything else, labelled bad, abnormal, unnatural and damned. Her argument was that the circle was a system of oppression and that the hierarchy it expressed should be dismantled. She used the vocabulary of blessing and damnation deliberately. The line between the sacred and the profane, in the most intimate part of human life, was named and marked for removal.

David Halperin, a classicist, defined the word queer in Saint Foucault in 1995 as whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate and the dominant, and he added that it refers to nothing in particular. A movement defined that way has no positive content to defend. It exists to stand against the line, wherever the line is drawn.

Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble in 1990, argued that gender is something performed, with no fixed original behind the performance, and proposed subversion, the deliberate confusion of categories, as the method of liberation. The categories themselves were the enemy.

None of this required a conspiracy, and nobody needs to allege one. These writers worked in different decades and different disciplines, and several of them disagreed sharply with each other. They shared a premise: the lines around sex, marriage, the body and the family were drawn by power to serve power, and freedom lay on the far side of erasing them. The premise spread through the universities, then the professions that the universities train, then the law, then the schools. Fifty years later it is much of the default setting of the institutions that raise and educate Western children.

The case those writers made deserves to be heard properly before anyone judges the result, because parts of it were true.

Their case, at full strength.
The old lines were sometimes drawn by people with power around people without it. Under the common law doctrine of coverture, a married woman in England and America had no separate legal identity: her property, her wages and in practice her person belonged to her husband. Every American state exempted rape within marriage from its rape laws in some form until the mid-1970s, and it was 1993 before marital rape was a crime in all fifty states. A husband s access to his wife s body was treated, in law, as part of the sacred bond.

Until 1966 the only ground for divorce in New York was adultery. A couple who wanted to part, however good their reasons, had to produce evidence of it, and an industry grew up to supply it: hired co-respondents, staged hotel-room photographs, testimony everyone in the courtroom knew to be false. A law that claimed to protect the sanctity of marriage charged perjury as the price of leaving one, and the women who paid the most were the ones with no money of their own.

The economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers measured what happened when the exit opened. In a 2006 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, using the staggered dates at which states adopted unilateral divorce, they found that female suicide fell by between eight and sixteen percent where it was adopted, that domestic violence fell, and that the number of women murdered by their partners fell. The exit saved women s lives. That finding comes from careful work, and anyone who wants to defend the old regime without qualification should read it twice.

Paul Amato and Alan Booth, following a national sample of married parents and their grown children over more than a decade, reported in 1997 that children whose parents marriages were full of open conflict did better as adults if their parents divorced. For those children too, the exit was a rescue.

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz showed in 2002 that when young single women gained legal access to the pill, they began entering law, medicine and business school in sharply larger numbers. A woman could commit to a decade of training without the risk that a pregnancy would end it. Goldin later won the Nobel Prize in economics, in part for this work.

The sacred designation was also used to confine people the respectable wanted out of sight. In Ireland, unmarried mothers and girls judged to be in moral danger were sent for decades to Magdalene laundries run by religious orders, where they worked unpaid behind locked doors. The Irish state s own inquiry, published in 2013, found that more than ten thousand women had passed through the laundries it examined after 1922, and the last one closed in 1996. Men were imprisoned for homosexual acts across the English-speaking world within living memory, and sodomy laws stood in some American states until the Supreme Court struck them down in 2003. All of it was done in the language of purity and sin.

Two more objections come from the data. The psychologist Jean Twenge, who documented the collapse in teenage mental health in iGen, dates its sudden start to around 2012, the year smartphone ownership in America crossed half the population, and her explanation is the phone. And married people s reported happiness has a selection problem: Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey, following thousands of Germans over seventeen years, found that people who were happier as singles were more likely to marry in the first place.

All of that is true. Coverture was real. The perjury mills were real. The laundries were real, and so were the prison sentences. The lives saved by the exit are counted. The people who fought those battles in the 1960s and 1970s were in many cases brave, and on those particular injustices they were right before most of the people who now take their victories for granted.

An honest argument starts there and keeps going.

What their own witnesses found next.
Sooner or later a movement has to be held to its own promises. The promise was happiness: love that lasts, work worth doing, a self worth being. Three years after the paper on suicide, Stevenson and Wolfers published another. The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness, in 2009, drew on the General Social Survey and comparable data from other countries. Between the early 1970s and the mid-2000s, as women gained in income, education, legal equality and professional opportunity, their reported happiness fell, against their own earlier levels and relative to men s. The authors are economists with no moral programme, and they called the result a paradox because it ran against everything the gains should have produced.

The same two economists, with the same tools, found that the exit rescued the women who needed rescue, and found that across the whole population of women, through the same decades, contentment went down.

Two other economists had already described why. George Akerlof and Janet Yellen, later a Nobel laureate and the chair of the Federal Reserve respectively, published a paper with Michael Katz in 1996 on the rise in American births outside marriage. Their finding was that reliable contraception and legal abortion ended the old expectation that a man who got a woman pregnant would marry her. Women who used the new technology gained. Women who did not, because they wanted children or refused abortion, lost the bargaining position the old expectation had given them, and many were left raising children alone. The men lost nothing. They got the access and kept their freedom.

The revolution was sold as women s liberation. Its first measurable beneficiary was the man who wanted access without obligation. That is the fruit.

Amato and Booth s study had a second finding, and it is the one usually left out. Most of the divorces in their sample ended marriages with little open conflict, marriages that looked ordinary from outside and to the children inside, and the children of those divorces did worse as adults than children whose parents stayed together. The exit rescued the children of the battlefield. It was used far more often on the children of quiet homes, and it harmed them.

The historian Stephanie Coontz, a widely read defender of the new marriage, argued in Marriage, a History in 2005 that love, once it became the foundation of marriage, made marriage more satisfying and less stable, because a bond held up by feeling ends when the feeling does. That is Rieff s thesis, reached from the other side. A covenant held up by a vow survives a bad year. A partnership held up by mutual satisfaction lasts as long as the satisfaction.

The selection effect is real, and Stutzer and Frey wrote themselves that it was unlikely to explain the whole gap between married and single people. Shawn Grover and John Helliwell, using British panel data in 2014, controlled for how satisfied people were before they married and found the married were still more satisfied afterwards, for years.

Twenge s phone is real, and the question is what it delivers. It delivers a market, in the pocket of every child, where bodies are displayed and rated and sold and attention is the currency. Twenge s own data show that the generation in question is having less sex than its parents did at the same age, and reporting more loneliness. The sociologist Mark Regnerus, in Cheap Sex in 2017, predicted exactly that: when sexual access carries no cost in commitment, its value falls, and so does the motivation to build anything around it. The phone did not open the market. It put the market in every bedroom.

Every objection is true. None of them dissolves the pattern.

What holy means.
The Hebrew root behind the word holy, q-d-sh, carries the sense of being set apart. A holy thing is designated for a different use and belongs to a different order. The cup is ordinary metal and the bread is ordinary bread. The designation makes them different, and profanation, in the vocabulary of the Old Testament, is the act of treating the set-apart thing as common. Belshazzar s crime was a drinking party with the wrong cups.

Scripture also records a line being bent, and how it was bent matters. When David fled from Saul, hungry, with a handful of young men, he asked Ahimelech the priest for bread, and the only bread in the sanctuary was the consecrated showbread, reserved for the priests. Ahimelech gave it to him, after first asking whether the young men had kept themselves from women. David assured him they had. Jesus later cited the episode to the Pharisees, to show that the sabbath was made to serve man.

The line bent for a starving man. Even then the priest checked the boundary before he crossed it, and the bread was handled as holy the whole way through. A line bent with care in an emergency, and a line torn up because somebody resents it, are two different events. The second is the subject here.

The threshold.
The Philistines learned the lesson a few centuries before Belshazzar, and they learned it in their own temple.

They had beaten Israel in the field and captured the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest object the nation possessed, and they carried it home to Ashdod as a trophy. They set it in the house of their god Dagon, beside his statue, where a captured god belonged: at the feet of the god who had beaten him.

In the morning Dagon was face down on the floor in front of the Ark. The priests stood him back up.

But when they arose early the next morning, behold, Dagon had again fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord, and [his] head and both the palms of his hands were lying cut off on the threshold; only the trunk of Dagon was left him. This is the reason neither the priests of Dagon nor any who come into Dagon s house tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod to this day. (1 Samuel 5:4 to 5, AMPC)

What the Philistines did next is the detail that matters most here. They made the doorstep holy. From that day the priests of Dagon, and everyone who came into his house, stepped over it, and the writer of Samuel records that they were still doing it in his own time.

Three holy things meet in that doorway. The Ark, holy because God had set it apart. The temple of Dagon, holy to the people who built it. And a third, made on the spot: a strip of stone that had been an ordinary doorstep the day before and became, overnight, a place no foot could touch.

Centuries later the prophet Zephaniah, in a passage condemning the men of Judah for copying foreign ways, threatened punishment on those who leap on or over the threshold. The Aramaic Targum renders the line as those who walk in the customs of the Philistines, and the eighteenth-century commentator John Gill connected it directly to the doorstep of Dagon. The Amplified Bible reads it another way, as burglars bounding into houses to steal, and the dispute is old. Either way the threshold in Zephaniah is a line that should have been respected and was not.

The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, in The Rites of Passage in 1909, built his account of sacred transitions around the threshold, the place where one order meets another. The word scholars still use for that in-between state, liminal, is the Latin for threshold. A beaten people, humiliated by a holy thing that was not theirs, could not stop drawing the line. When their god s head hit the floor, they set the floor apart.

Philip Rieff saw it coming. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic in 1966 he described a civilisation in the middle of replacing its sacred order, the inherited system of things forbidden and things owed, with a therapeutic order organised around the management of individual feeling. Under the first order the governing question is what must be protected. Under the second it is what feels right and should be permitted. Rieff was describing a shift he could see beginning. The generations raised entirely inside the second order had yet to be born.

What the lines were for.
The old lines were drawn badly in places. Coverture was an injustice. The marital rape exemption was an obscenity. The laundries were a prison run in the name of purity, and the men jailed for what they did in private were jailed by a law that called itself holy. The people who named those failures were right to name them.

The answer to a badly drawn line is to draw it better. The marriage covenant of Scripture has an exit for grave cause, and a law could have made that exit swift and safe for the beaten wife without handing it to anyone, alone, for any reason. A husband s claim on his wife could have been ended without declaring the marriage bed common ground. The cruelty could have been removed from the sacred order without removing the sacred order. Those options were on the table, and the movements that won the argument wanted the line gone, as their founders had said in print.

What the lines protected were the things that cannot survive being priced: the vow, the body given to one person, the name of God, the child who has not yet been asked to be useful. Those things need an order where some matters are kept off the market. Thrown into the common order, they are bought, used and discarded, because that is what the common order does with everything. We stopped treating important things as important, and slowly, at great cost, they stopped being important. When enough of them had stopped, life itself began to feel, for a great many people, pointless.

Jesus put it in a single sentence.

Do not give that which is holy (the sacred thing) to the dogs, and do not throw your pearls before hogs, lest they trample upon them with their feet and turn and tear you in pieces. (Matthew 7:6, AMPC)

The hog has no use for a pearl. It cannot eat it and cannot wear it, and it tramples it, out of nature and without malice. Throwing the pearl into the pen does nothing for the hog. It ruins the pearl, and then the animals turn on the one who threw it.

The cups.
Some seventy years after Nebuchadnezzar carried the temple vessels to Babylon, and soon after Babylon fell to the Medes and Persians, Cyrus king of Persia gave orders for the Jews to go home and rebuild. He had the vessels brought out of the house of his gods and counted out by his treasurer, Mithredath, to Sheshbazzar, the prince of Judah, item by item.

All the vessels of gold and of silver were 5,400. All these Sheshbazzar [the governor] brought with the people of the captivity from Babylon to Jerusalem. (Ezra 1:11, AMPC)

They were set apart again.

A note on causation.
The argument above rests on associations measured over decades, and associations in social data are hard to turn into causes. Women s happiness, marriage rates and adolescent mental health all moved during the same years as the changes described here, and so did wages, housing costs, the structure of work and, after 2012, the smartphone. The studies cited do what they can to separate these, and Stevenson and Wolfers, Stutzer and Frey, and Grover and Helliwell are each explicit about the limits of their methods. Later work has also questioned how large the fall in women s reported happiness was once changes in survey methods are allowed for. The case made here is cumulative: it rests on the convergence of the happiness data, the commune data, the experimental work on sacred values, the history of the law and the movements own stated aims, and it does not depend on any single study establishing cause on its own.

NOTES:

A. C. Rosenthal
Investigating Islam, Christianity, and the West one primary source at a time.
If this was worth your time, the archive is where the rest of it lives.

Books: The Two Muhammads: What History and Manuscripts Reveal About the Islamic Dilemma, The God They Rejected Isn t Real: Exposing the False Gods of Modern Doubt, and The Carpenter s Son and the Imam s Son.
acrosenthal.com thetwomuhammadscurriculum.thinkific.com

A. C. Rosenthal
A. C. Rosenthal writes on comparative religion, Islamic theology, and the relationship between Christianity and modern Western culture. The work is entirely reader-supported, which is the only reason it can say what it says.