Counterfeit Gods: When the Empty Promises of Love, Money and Power Let You Down

by Timothy J. Keller

The Power of Love Some say that Becker’s cultural analysis is dated. We now live in “the hookup culture,” in which young people have turned sex into something ordinary, casual, and free from commitment. Fewer men and women actually date or have boyfriends and girlfriends. In the interest of gender equality, women have begun to say, “We deserve to have as much fun with our sexuality as guys do.” There is growing peer pressure to engage in sex and not get too emotionally involved.28 Surely, then, our culture is moving away from any hope in “apocalyptic romance.” Once we get over our lingering Puritanism, the argument goes, sex will be no big deal. Don’t bet on it. Laura Sessions Stepp, in her book Unhooked, found that hookups left most young women unsatisfied, though they are unwilling to admit this to their peers. And the enormous stress our culture puts on physical and sexual beauty belies any notion that sex is no big deal. In the 1940s, C. S. Lewis heard from many of his peers in the British academy that sex was nothing but an appetite, like that for food. Once we recognized this, they said, and began to simply have sex whenever we wanted it, people would cease to be “driven mad” by desire for love and sex. Lewis doubted this, and proposed a thought experiment. Suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that i...