Freedom, Desire and the Loss of Moral Order

His criticism of the Church reveals not an obsession with sexuality, but a civilisation that no longer understands the human person

Andy Burnham is presenting himself as the would-be saviour of a Labour Party drifting into confusion and public distrust. After seventeen years as a Labour MP and now as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he has carefully positioned himself at a distance from many of the failures and internal tensions consuming Sir Keir Starmer’s government, allowing him to cultivate the image of the man waiting in the wings to rescue the party from itself. Yet Burnham has so far offered remarkably little clarity about how he would resolve the mounting economic, social and cultural fractures now destabilising modern Britain. If he ever does inherit the leadership, he may quickly discover that the “hot seat” is far less comfortable than it appears from Manchester. But as it turns out, that may prove to be the least of his problems.

Burnham’s recent comments about losing his faith because of the Catholic Church’s “obsession” with sexuality are revealing for reasons that go far beyond one politician’s personal spiritual journey. They reveal the profound catechetical collapse that has taken place across large parts of Western Catholicism over the past fifty years. They reveal a civilisation increasingly incapable of distinguishing between love and desire, freedom and autonomy, dignity and affirmation. And they reveal how deeply modern liberal assumptions about sex, identity and selfhood now shape even those who still instinctively admire aspects of Catholic social teaching.

Burnham’s argument ultimately rests on a very familiar contemporary assumption: that traditional Christian sexual ethics are irrational, oppressive and psychologically harmful because they demand that you control sexual appetites, deny the moral equivalence of same-sex sexual relationships and reject the modern ideal of unrestricted sexual autonomy.

But is sexuality really even the issue? I would argue that the deeper issue is actually anthropological: What is the human person? What is the body? What is freedom for? What is love? And does sexual desire itself possess moral authority? (Obviously the answer is “NO!” Desire is real, powerful and part of human nature, but it is not self-justifying. The moral question is never simply “What do I desire?” but “Is this desire ordered toward the good?”). These are the real questions beneath the superficial denunciations.

The extraordinary irony is that Burnham accuses the Church of being “obsessed” with sexuality while living within a civilisation utterly saturated by it. Pornography floods modern life. Sexual identity dominates politics, education, entertainment, advertising and social media. Children are introduced to ideological concepts about sex and gender previous generations would have regarded as profoundly harmful. Relationships increasingly fracture. Marriage weakens. Birth rates collapse. Loneliness rises. Families fragment. The commodification of the human body has become industrialised. And yet Burnham thinks sex is the obsession of the Church? The inversion is utterly staggering! The Catholic Church is not obsessed with sexuality. Modern secular culture is. The Church speaks about sexuality because sexuality touches marriage, family, children, sacrifice, responsibility, fidelity and ultimately the meaning of the human person.

Burnham’s comments reveal another problem. He repeatedly speaks about Catholic teaching on sexuality as though it were an arbitrary institutional fixation introduced or intensified by Pope Benedict XVI. This is historically absurd. Christianity has taught consistently about sexual morality for two millennia. Christ Himself speaks with extraordinary radicalism about marriage and sexual purity. Saint Paul repeatedly addresses sexual ethics. The Church Fathers did the same. Augustine, Chrysostom, Aquinas and countless others understood sexuality not as morally irrelevant private behaviour but as profoundly connected to human flourishing and social order.

This is not, as he frames it a “Ratzinger obsession”. It is historic Christianity. What changed was not the Church. What changed was the culture. The sexual revolution fundamentally altered Western assumptions about morality, identity and freedom. Sexual fulfilment became central to personal authenticity. Autonomy replaced moral teleology. Desire increasingly became self-validating. Once sexuality becomes the untouchable centre of identity, any moral limit begins to feel oppressive. Any refusal to affirm becomes interpreted as hatred. That is precisely the intellectual atmosphere Burnham reflects. But Catholic teaching begins from a radically different understanding of freedom. Freedom is not mere self-expression. Freedom is ordered toward truth.

Christianity has never taught that every desire should be enacted simply because it is sincerely experienced, mind you, neither has secular society! In fact, the idea that desire alone confers moral legitimacy is historically very unusual. Most civilisations, philosophies, and religions assumed precisely the opposite: that human flourishing depends upon disciplining, educating and ordering desire. The Greeks were especially important here. For Plato, the appetites were not evil, but they had to be governed by reason. In the Republic, the just soul is one in which reason rules over spirit and appetite harmoniously. A person enslaved to desire was not considered liberated, but disordered. Similarly, Aristotle saw virtue as the habituation of desire toward the good. Moral education meant learning to desire rightly. Freedom was not “doing whatever one wants” but becoming the kind of person who wants what is truly good. However, Christianity did not simply borrow this understanding from Greek philosophy, but rather recognised in it a profound harmony between reason and revelation. Thinkers such as Aristotle perceived through reason alone that human flourishing requires the right ordering of desire under reason and virtue. The Christian tradition, especially through Thomas Aquinas, saw this not as a pagan rival to the Faith but as evidence of the natural law written into creation by God Himself: truths about human nature that can be discovered by reason and ultimately find their fullest meaning in divine revelation.

The above painting of Greek philosophers is a fresco in the papal apartments called The School of Athens by the Italian Renaissance master Raphael. Commissioned by Pope Julius II between 1509 and 1511, it decorates the Stanza della Segnatura, which was the Pope's private library and study in the Apostolic Palace.

The Romans inherited much of this outlook. Stoicism, especially in figures like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, regarded mastery over passions as essential to civilisation and personal dignity. To be ruled by appetite was considered a form of slavery. Even Hedonism is often misunderstood today. Epicurus was not advocating reckless indulgence. Epicureanism actually prized moderation because uncontrolled desire produces anxiety, instability, and suffering. The highest pleasure was tranquillity, not perpetual stimulation. Christianity entered this world and largely deepened and gave proper meaning to these assumptions rather than overturning them. What Christianity added was the truth that human beings experience many desires that require discipline, sacrifice and moral formation. The entire Christian moral tradition is built around the idea that human freedom reaches fulfilment not in limitless self-expression but in the ordering of desire toward truth, virtue and ultimately holiness. I am sure if Andy Burnham knew this he would not disagree and this is why his comments are so worryingly ignorant here.

Burnham is right to think that Catholic teaching on sexuality cannot be reconciled with the infantile slogan “love is love” because the phrase collapses the crucial distinction between love and desire.