Being an archetypalist and a genetic, if not practicing, Catholic, I assume that the nature of the species does not change much, even if the surface behavior is in constant motion. Much of what goes on in our liberal culture feels to me like the behavior of deracinated Christians, and Christianized Jews*, who have kept the drives of their ancestral and discarded religions, but who channel them into superficially secular pursuits. The religious fervor and unquestioning faith that they bring to this non-religious religion has not gone unnoticed. The drive to atone, and to atone by suicide, strikes me as a devolution of the Christian doctrine. The puritanical streak in American culture does not disappear as much as migrate.
In just an offhand way, it appears to me, for example, that the progressive and Gaia-loving rules regarding garbage have a distinctly Mosaic feel about them. Sexual boundaries, cast in culturally-appropriate Americanisms on first, second, third base and scoring, have become mostly antique in the age of the hookup. But plastics, glass, metal, paper, organics, colored boxes...clean and unclean.
Recycling is the secular kosher. As the ludicrous California motto taught us empathetically, "Recycle. It's good for the bottle. It's good for the can." And the whole environmental religion, with its own preachers, jihadis, asceticism, evangelization, and mythic original sin and apocalypse, provoked my witticism about "consumers in the hands of angry Gaia."**
Judaism and Islam, being religions of revealed law, both have divinely ordained food laws, kosher and halal. Muslim pig-phobia is well known and some, not all, regard dogs as unclean. Aside from obsolete issues about eating food sacrificed to idols or ascetical (not purity-related) exclusions of certain foods during times of fasting, Christianity lacks anything remotely similar. Both Jesus and the Church have agreed (something you can't always assume) that there is no such thing as unclean food. But sex was never an item of disinterest.
Mary Douglas' 1966 anthropology classic, Purity and Danger, paid attention to food taboos. Although she later rejected her initial hypothesis about kosher, the persistence of taboos in all cultures as protectors of a worldview and tribal safety from the dirty and dangerously impure other, remains, I think. I have more than once had the bracing experience of listening to some conscious and enlightened Californian launch into a minor rant about the Christian hatred of the body and mistrust of sex and pleasure, who then sat down to some micro-organized meal which they had concocted according to their sectarian variety of culinary ethics: lacto-ovo, vegan, non-farmed, locovor, organic, free-range, fair-trade, humanely raised, humanely killed, even macro-bio, etc. Thank Goddess we've gotten over those tired old doctrinal squabbles among Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, etc.
There's an old tradition here. After all, the primal sin wasn't sex, it was eating forbidden fruit.
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*Christianized Jews: Ashkenazi and some Sephardi Jews whose cultures grew up surrounded by Christianity. I have a semi-theory that this kind of Judaism had to respond to the universalism of Christianity and then to the universalism of the Enlightenment, so that it is mostly European Jews who fall into the progressive world-view. Many who escaped the shtetl gravitated toward socialism and other universalist ethical movements. The Jews of Islam, with few exceptions, eventually followed their Islamic overlords into cultural stagnation and a focus on group law and tribal survival.
**For those of you without the benefit of theological over-education, the famous sermon is given here.
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