White women can’t wear hoop earrings because it’s “cultural appropriation.” A university professor complains that teaching math bolsters white privilege. Small children are given transgender hormone treatments after a single 40-minute consultation with a doctor. Government forces businessmen to support gay marriages. Virtually the entire corporate world — including the world of sports — came crashing down on the state of North Carolina for suggesting that people should use the bathroom that matches their sex.

Our world is losing touch with reality. We’re going crazy. But where does this craziness come from? Try this theory: it comes from guilt. Our guilt is driving us mad. Even craziness has a motivation.

How does it work? How does our world deal with its guilt? In two opposite ways. It deals with it by relaxing the rules and by tightening the rules. Weird? Yes. I said it was crazy.

Our Crazy Fervor For All Things LGBT

Take our culture’s wholesale, corporate and frequently crazy fervor for all things LGBT. I think a large part of it has to do with managing sexual guilt. I’m talking about straight guilt, not LGBT guilt.

It goes back to the sixties, when the world bought the line that love is good, sex is love, therefore sex is good, no matter what. “Free love” was the motto, and it meant sex whenever and with whomever.

Students of the 60s are running the country today. Many of them have been sexually active since college. In that time, many wrecked their marriages through sexual indulgence; many left their children devastated; others contracted and passed along STDs; and many had their babies killed in the womb.

Deep down we all know that’s wrong, but the guilty have got to bury that feeling somehow. What better way to make your straight sexual life seem okay than by agreeing that gay and lesbian sex is okay, too?

Do people really think that way? I can’t prove that they do. But I can’t think of a better explanation for why straights have jumped so eagerly on the LGBT bandwagon. It’s about managing guilt.

Taking It Seriously, With No Way To Resolve It

That’s the way we deal with our guilt about our disordered sexual lives. We relax the rules. We’ve got another problem that we deal with by tightening the rules: America’s historic and ongoing sin against Blacks. I know that’s not the most popular thing to say around some conservatives, but men and women who follow Jesus Christ should be the first to acknowledge the wrongdoing.

Still, conservatives have good reason to object to some of the ways the world has tried to manage its guilt. Rules against “cultural appropriation.” The idea that teaching math promotes white privilege. All that’s just crazy.

In fact, they’re so eager to avoid the guilt of discrimination, they won’t discriminate against anything if they can avoid it. They won’t allow immigrant profiling. They deny our nation’s right to protect its own borders. Liberals won’t accept any fact critical of a racial minority, whatever the statistics show.

That’s what happens when people try to assuage their guilt by trying harder and setting more rules. It’s more budget, more guidelines, more restrictions, more social requirements and social no-nos, more ways to try to make sure we’re not racist. It’s about winding the rules around us tighter and tighter until we can hardly breathe.

Why? Guilt. Not imagined guilt, but real guilt. Real guilt managed by people who don’t have any idea what will work. They just keep trying harder and harder with answers that don’t work because they can’t work, until finally they try so hard they end up looking crazy in the attempt.

No Release From Guilt

Our nation is guilty of a lot of things, and it’s acting like it. Sometimes we deal with it by relaxing the rules so we can try to convince ourselves there’s no sin to be guilty of. Sometimes we tighten the rules so we can try to convince ourselves we’re not guilty anymore.

But there’s no release from the guilt either way. Is there a way to take our sins seriously, and yet find release from the guilt and shame? Is there a way to resolve these errors without going insane in the process?

Only one: The gospel of Jesus Christ. There’s much to say on that, so I’ll come back to that in a follow-up article coming soon.

Tom Gilson is a senior editor with The Stream and the author of Critical Conversations: A Christian Parents’ Guide to Discussing Homosexuality with Teens (Kregel Publications, 2016). Follow him on Twitter: @TomGilsonAuthor.