Once self-fulfillment becomes the end towards which individuals are moving, then there is no longer any fixed council or direction to govern any particular individual’s choice—only what a person claims will lead to his personal betterment, as only he is entitled to determine. Individual autonomy and self-indulgence trump all else…. Having enshrined individual autonomy as authoritative, it’s just a question of time and the tide of personal inclination. Justice Kennedy based his opinion on just such an appeal…. The battle wasn’t over marriage. It was over what’s left of the traditional Christian understanding of human design and destiny.

There are any number of reasonable reactions to the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage. Try this one: It was inevitable, and no argument marshaled by the opposition would—or even could—prevent it. Hear me out.

In his 2009 book The Permissive Society, historian Alan Petigny makes the case that the upheavals of the sixties were just manifestations of religious changes from the forties and fifties. It’s not like someone flipped a switch and then—voila!—sex and drugs. “What the nation experienced,” says Petigny, “was a classic instance of norms coming into line with values.”

Something, in other words, happened in the postwar years that set the stage for the events to follow. It’s an observation that helps explain the apparent rapid shift toward gay marriage in our own day.

When the ground really shifted

How rapid is it, really? It sure feels fast. We all have recollections ranging from vague to crystal clear that even progressives such as President Obama and Hillary Clinton opposed gay marriage only a short while ago, or that a person could express contrary opinions without fretting over livelihood or social standing. Not anymore. Something shifted in a hurry. But it was only the norms, not the values.

The values changed all the way back in the forties and fifties. In that sense, the gay marriage battle was already over when Eisenhower was in the White House. How so?

Petigny describes what he calls the Permissive Turn, a liberalization of values that happened following World War II. Some of it came down to a “renunciation of renunciation.” The war had demanded a great deal of austerity and self-sacrifice. But with Germany and Japan subdued, it was time to live it up. Americans plowed their prosperity into material self-gratification. But there was more.

At the same time, the culture witnessed a shift in the way we viewed human nature. We swapped the traditional American view, grounded in a certain pessimism inherited from the Protestant understanding of original sin, for the newly refurbished and Americanized psychotherapy.

When religion found psychotherapy

Freud was no fan of faith, and the rivalry was both hot and clear in Europe. Not so in America, where advocates such as Joshua Liebman, Carl Rogers, Benjamin Spock, and others presented the benefits of psychotherapy without the thorny, antireligious aspects inherent to Freud’s vision. The effect was pronounced. Just two decades after WWII, sociology professor Philip Rieff could look back and talk about the “triumph of the therapeutic” (emphasis added).

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