We don’t have great sex in America anymore. Our sex doesn’t work. It doesn’t even make babies. It doesn’t keep us together. We end up alone and pathetic, staring at websites. We’re getting totally fooled and ripped off. We’re acting like losers, instead of winners. It’s time to win again.

If Donald Trump were a sound moral theologian who nevertheless still talked like Donald Trump, that is how he might express what has happened to sex not just in America but all through the West. And indeed, by any objective standard, the Sexual Revolution did for sex what the Russian Revolution did for Russia: wrecked it, and almost killed it.

Birth rates are down. Marriage rates are down. Working class white households are as splintered now as black households were in 1965 when Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that the problem posed a national crisis. Generations are trapped in poverty because they lack a crucial piece of social technology: the family. If current trends continue, family life in the West will become an upper-class privilege, akin to boarding school. Oh yes, and we have aborted 58.5 million Americans since 1973 — so this Revolution has its Gulag, too, and its very own Great Leap Forward.

Step back and look at sex “scientifically,” pretending that you and I are merely the accidental by-products of random mutations and natural selection. No, that isn’t true, but such a thought experiment will help us focus on the hopes, dreams and aspirations that motivate most of our secular culture’s decisions on sexual questions, and view the matter plainly.

We would then see that the strategies we have been trying since roughly 1960 have backfired. Then we might decide that our societies will have to try something else — perhaps something which worked well in the past, such as monogamous, fertile, lifelong marriage as the norm of human life, which our laws could support with incentives aimed first and foremost at protecting the best interests of children. Because, as the Whitney Houston song says, they’re the future.

The Catholic church’s teachings on sexuality say nothing more or less than that. Based on reason and empirical observation, we see that the primary purpose of sex is reproduction — not just the breeding but the rearing of the next generation of our species. Any biologist would say that about an orangutan or a squirrel. And we see that the secondary purpose, which matters more to us than to lower animals, is social — creating bonds of affection and love that will outlast the initial spark of two young, fertile creatures driven by instinct.

The third and least essential purpose of sexuality is the short-lived excitement and pleasure attached to it, so that we would be strongly motivated to go through all the trouble.

Any analysis of other bodily appetites would yield the same results: The primary purpose of eating is nutrition, then second to that the social benefits of sharing meals with others; last would come the gourmet delight we take in a fancy, multi-course meal.

Any species would be in trouble if it got these priorities wrong, and developed a preference for tasty food that wasn’t nourishing. No scientist would dispute that, by, say, championing the “right” of a population of koalas to feed on, say, sugar cane instead of leaves. They would stand back and sadly watch while that mutant group disappeared. They would take copious notes, which would read like a history of twentieth century sex.

As we see from the Catholic church’s efforts over recent decades to explain its perennial teaching on human sexuality, few people are persuaded by such an objective analysis. Why is that?

Why is it that human beings, alone among all the species, do not seem to respond in an uncomplicated way to the deep Darwinian drive to reproduce ourselves, and pass along the “selfish genes” which New Atheists like to pretend are simply using us as tools for self-replication? Instead we write poems, fall hopelessly in love with inappropriate people, elevate our emotional gratification over the well-being of children and pretend that the pleasure of sex — and that pleasure alone — somehow transcends every other biological drive, to the point where we feel almost virtuous in flouting its biological and social purpose. The Sexual Revolution, and the sullen feminist reaction which it provoked, could never have happened if we did not really, deep down, realize that human beings are special, unique, and free.

The Church agrees. Indeed, she has been saying that all along. But part of our uniqueness, the part that Genesis tells us emerged not long after we finished naming the animals, is that we sin. We choose our own immediate gratification, and the delusions of our own imaginings, over the needs and interests of others.

And that’s the whole problem with sex, the reason that it has built into its very nature a far more complex set of ethical obligations than every other bodily instinct. (That’s right — these obligations are part of the package, not arbitrary taboos imposed from outside by envious, celibate clerics.) If every time we ate, or drank, or slept, our activity deeply involved another equal human being with complex emotions and an immortal soul, then eating, drinking and sleeping would also carry profound moral implications, which the Church would have to recognize. And what if any of those ordinary activities could also in fact create a whole new human being, with a body and soul all his own? Just imagine the detailed ethical rules that would have arisen around food, drink and sleep!

We can’t do without such rules. It once seemed as if we could; that’s what Hugh Hefner, Margaret Sanger and the Marquis de Sade each argued, when they called for society to dismantle every obstacle to pleasure — denying the universal, pan-cultural human recognition that sex is somehow special, in favor of a sexual anarchism that’s really only suited to the short-term cravings of a 16-year-old boy. So that’s how we’re training people to act on matters sexual all throughout their lives. No wonder we now grow old without growing up.

We’re low-energy. We’re mating like losers. It’s time to make sex great again.