The Hidden Liturgy

Romance Novels, the Enlightenment, and the Religion of Desire

When we talk about pornography in parish settings, we typically assume a male audience. But what if we're missing half the picture?

The data on visual pornography is clear: men consume it at significantly higher rates than women. But expand the definition to include romance novels, literary erotica, fan fiction, and audio platforms specifically marketed to women, and the landscape shifts dramatically.

Romance is the highest-grossing fiction genre in America—over a billion dollars annually, with roughly 80-85% female readership. A substantial portion of that market is explicitly erotic content. Fan fiction platforms host millions of sexually explicit stories with predominantly female writers and readers. Audio erotica apps targeting women have seen explosive growth.

The function is identical to visual pornography: sexual arousal through fantasy that objectifies and commodifies intimacy. Whether delivered through video or prose, the pattern of habituation, escalation, and dissatisfaction with real relationships follows similar trajectories.

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A Genealogy of Desire

This isn't merely an oversight. It reflects a philosophical trajectory centuries in the making.

The Reformation fractured unified Christian authority. When Luther elevated individual conscience over ecclesial teaching, he solved one problem and created another. Scripture alone, interpreted by the individual believer, meant moral questions increasingly became matters of private judgment. The move was understandable—corruption demanded response. But remove the Magisterium, and you remove any authoritative voice that can say "this is disordered" without being dismissed as one opinion among many.

The Enlightenment drove the wedge deeper. If individual conscience could judge Scripture's meaning, why not judge Scripture itself? Reason became the new authority—not reason informed by revelation, but autonomous reason sitting in judgment over it. The philosophes didn't reject Christianity's moral conclusions immediately; they rejected the foundation. Once the foundation crumbled, the conclusions followed.

This is where Mary Wollstonecraft enters. Writing her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, she actually criticized the romance novels of her era as enfeebling women—training them toward emotional dependency and fantasy rather than rational development. She wanted women admitted to the Enlightenment's temple of reason. She would likely be horrified by the modern romance industry.

Yet she couldn't see that the temple had no floor. The Enlightenment's autonomous reason, cut off from tradition and revelation, had no ground to stand on. Why should reason govern desire? By what authority? The Romantics asked this question and found no answer. Authentic feeling rushed in to fill the vacuum reason had created.

The trajectory runs through three centuries: from Scripture interpreted by individual conscience, to autonomous reason over revelation, to authentic feeling over reason, to desire itself as the only sacred category.

Each step followed logically from the last. The Reformation privatized authority. The Enlightenment secularized it. Romanticism emotionalized it. Late modernity sacralized desire itself—and any constraint on desire became oppression.

The Liturgy of Self

The romance novel industry is the liturgy of this religion.

It catechizes women into a vision of fulfillment through emotional intensity. It teaches that romantic desire is self-authenticating—if it feels deeply right, it is right. The explicit content is almost secondary. The deeper formation is in the underlying anthropology: the self as sovereign, desire as compass, constraint as violence.

This is precisely what Benedict XVI called the dictatorship of relativism. When desire is sovereign, any claim that desire can be disordered becomes unintelligible—or worse, oppressive.

The Sacrament That Completes the Liturgy

Every religion has its sacraments—the acts that enact and seal what the faithful believe.

Globally, 61% of pregnancies end in induced abortion. Over one million abortions per year in the United States alone — 1.14 million in 2024, and rising. The majority outcome of human conception is now death by deliberate choice.

This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a culture. And cultures are formed somewhere.

Roe v. Wade belongs in this genealogy—not as cause, but as codification. The 1973 decision didn't create the religion of sovereign desire; it gave it a temple. The Court's privacy framework enshrined the anthropology we've been tracing: the self as sovereign, any claim on the self subject to the self's adjudication. When the justices declared they could not determine when life begins, they made the classic Enlightenment move—when authority cannot settle the question, the individual decides.

But here is what Dobbs proved: overturning Roe did not reverse the trajectory. Abortion rates increased after the 2022 decision. In 2023, over one million abortions were recorded in the United States—the highest number in a decade. By 2024, the number rose to 1.14 million. The monthly average climbed from 80,000 in 2022 to 88,000 in 2023 to 95,000 in 2024. Women in ban states traveled, ordered pills online, found ways. The legal infrastructure changed; the practice accelerated. The desire had already been shaped. The imagination had already been formed.

Roe gave the religion a temple. Dobbs closed one building. But the catechesis continued uninterrupted—the romance novels kept selling, the anthropology kept spreading, the sacrament kept being performed. The law was downstream of the culture, and the culture was downstream of the liturgy.

The child is the one consequence of desire that cannot be managed, edited, or reimagined. The child makes claims. The child interrupts the narrative. When desire is sovereign, the child who threatens that sovereignty becomes an obstacle to be removed. Abortion is the sacrament that completes the liturgy—the final act that protects the self from the claims of another.

The romance novel does not cause abortion. But it forms the anthropology that makes abortion thinkable. It trains women to see fulfillment as emotional intensity, to view their own desires as self-authenticating, to regard any external claim on the self as oppression. The woman catechized in this vision has already been prepared, at the deepest level of moral imagination, for the choice that one in five will eventually make.

This is not a legal problem that legal solutions can fix. It is a formation problem.

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Why This Matters for Formation

Many Protestant responses to the sexual revolution lack the philosophical resources to critique it at the root. They share some of the same premises about authority and individual conscience that set this trajectory in motion.

Catholic social teaching, natural law tradition, and the Theology of the Body offer a more comprehensive framework precisely because they never accepted the initial moves. John Paul II understood that male domination and disordered desire on both sides are distortions to be overcome through redemption, not features of God's design.

The mutual self-gift described in Ephesians 5 represents grace restoring what sin damaged in Genesis 3. Both the man's domination and the woman's desire to control reflect the Fall's corruption of original harmony.

But we cannot form people in this vision if we only address half of the disordered desire in the room.

Women struggling with romance novel or erotica consumption often feel isolated precisely because it's never addressed. The "it's just a book" rationalization has enormous cultural cover. A complete catechesis on chastity must name this for what it is: formation in a false religion, training desire toward unreality, preparation for disappointment with the genuine self-gift that marriage requires.

The romance novel aisle is a chapel. The question is whether we're willing to say so.

For further reading: John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body; Benedict XVI, Homily at Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff (2005); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue.