Welcome back to Defender’s Voice. This is Paul Kattupalli. The past few weeks our news headlines are dominated by sex scandals. Roy Moore is the Republican nominee in the 2017 special election for the United States Senate. For the secular media, he has been controversial over the years is an understatement. He consistently took positions antithetical to the secular mainstream. He opposed abortion, he opposed same-sex marriage, he opposed removing Ten Commandments from public places, he opposed removing prayer from public gatherings, he opposed sharia law, he opposed transgender bathrooms. He is the kind of person the secular mainstream does not tolerate anywhere in the Washington. Their worst fear is Christian values becoming public and mainstream.
I was day dreaming Senator Roy Moore giving a passionate speech in the Congress defending Christian faith. Then came the terrible news: At least four women described an unwanted sexual advance or assault by Moore. One of them claimed that she was 14, another was 16, when Roy Moore flirted with them in his 30s. One woman said Moore touched her inappropriately. Moore denied these allegations: ‘I never had any contact with her’, ‘I don’t even know the woman’, ‘I never date a girl without her mom’s permission’, ‘As I recall, she was 19 or older’ etc, etc.
Who is telling the truth? I don’t know. Moore’s campaign issued a statement: ‘If you are a liberal and hate Judge Moore, apparently he groped you…if you are conservative and love Judge Moore, you know these allegations are a political farce’. This statement reflects the toxic atmosphere who have created in our politics. Why can’t you be a conservative and yet believe these allegations? Sadly, our moral anger is dampened by political sewage. It has been said, politics is the downstream of the culture. But we made the politics the source of all things. If he belongs to your political group, it does not matter how many women he abused. As Christians, we should come out of this mindset. Now, I am not implicating Mr.Roy Moore. He, in his own conscience, knew the truth behind these allegations. He should tell the truth to his supporters and others and face the consequences.
Then we got, Senator Al Franken. A woman alleged Senator Al Franken that he aggressively grabbed her and kissed her without her consent. She released the photos: In one of those photos, Senator Al Franken is grabbing her breasts while she is sleeping. What is more troubling is he is smiling to the camera while violating her body. There is no shame! absolutely no shame! Secularism takes away shame. Gone are the days when you kiss your bride only after the pastor says, ‘Now, you can kiss the bride’.
Whatever worldview we espouse in real life, we are all bound by the moral law. Mr.Roy Moore is the founder and president of the Foundation for Moral Law. The curious thing about moral law is it will follow you wherever you go. There is a pay day someday. If you are a lost person, you will stand before Great White Throne to give an account of how you dealt with the moral law all your life. If you are a saved person, you will stand before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account of your life. There is no punishment for the sins of the Christian because God put all our penalties on Christ on the cross. Jesus paid it all. So, God has forgiven us. But, our society is not that forgiving. If Roy Moore did those things which they are alleging him with, he should ask God for forgiveness, tell the truth to the world and face the consequences, even if it means losing a senate race. There is a foundation for moral law as the name of his organization suggests. And that foundation is God himself, the moral law giver.
From Paganism to Christian morality to Post-Christian moral relativism
Now, let us spend some time looking at our current climate from a Christian perspective. Wherever we see these days, we see sexual abuse. Sports: where team coaches and doctors abusing athletes, Congress: Congressmen abusing interns, Hollywood: directors, producers and actors abusing actresses and models; Music industry: Music moguls raping singers; News media: media moguls abusing their female staff, Church: Pastors and bishops abusing female staff and church goers. Schools: teachers sexually abusing children; Universities: professors sexually harassing students; Families: children are sexually abused. Hospitals: Doctors and nursing sexually abusing patients. Sadly, sex abuse is everywhere. God put sex within marriage. We systematically destroyed marriage and its sanctity and now we are witnessing the devastation of moral deterioration all around us.
Film producer Harvey Weinstein: by now over 50 women accused him of sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape. Kevin Spacey: dozens of men alleged that Spacey sexually harassed or assaulted them. You can see the moral depravity of our society: even men have to face sexual harassment from men like Kevin Spacey. His series House of Cards was suspended. You see, for the last few decades, when it comes to sexual norms, we are erecting a house of cards. Anything goes. But, we cannot escape the consequences. Sooner or later, it is destined to collapse.
It’s not sin, It’s just sickness
After the revelations, Harvey Weinstein said, ‘I need treatment, I need treatment’ and joined a rehab. Kevin Spacey also said, ‘I need treatment’. I thought that’s interesting. Both men did not apologize to their victims. They saw themselves as victims. They did not see it as a moral problem: their violations of other persons’ privacy, sanctity of body and sanctity of space. They saw it as a mental health problem, which need counseling, therapy and medication. Nothing is a moral problem any more, everything a mental health problem.
That is Sigmund Freud ruling our world from his grave. Freud told us: there is no God, everything is material, distinction between moral and immoral is just an illusion, difference between good and bad is just arbitrary, right and wrong is just preference. You are dancing to your DNA. This godless, reductionistic, hedonistic, materialistic philosophy of life became rampant in our society.
Once upon a time, Christian view of sex and marriage was the mainstream: God created sex to be confined in a committed, life long relationship between a man and a woman united in a marriage. Sex before marriage is fornication, sex outside marriage is adultery. Marriage is the only route to have sex, procreate and raise a family. But our culture rejected God’s order for marriage, sex and family. It embraced an atheistic, materialistic Freudian worldview: To have sex, all you need is a consent, to procreate all you need is to have sex. The genie of sex was confined to the bottle called marriage. We let the genie out of the bottle and it has been wreaking havoc across our society: from sex abuse in college campuses, the rise of STI, the rise of HIV, the rise of teen pregnancy, the millions of children born out of wedlock, the plight of single women, the decline of marriage, the rise of a plethora of mental disorders and now an epidemic of sex abuse.
Cheap Sex and Transformation of Men:
Why do so many men in our culture treat women nothing more than sex objects?
Mark Regnerus is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. He wrote the book, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy. In this book he describes how the availability of cheap sex transformed men over the last few decades. Once upon a time Christian religion limited to sex to marriage. But secularism and modernity changed our view of sexuality. After abandoning God’s commandments to restrict all sexual activity to marriage, we’ve created a secular, technology driven, hedonistic culture. He wrote, ‘Cheaper sex has been facilitated by three distinctive technological achievements:
- the wide uptake of the Pill as well as a mentality stemming from it that sex is ‘naturally’ infertile
- mass-produced high-quality pornography
- the advent and evolution of online dating/meeting services.
Three things: Birth control pill, pornography and casual sex: the trinity of illegitimacy. Birth control pill separated sex from procreation. Pornography separated sex from intimacy. Casual sex separated sex from real romance. The only condition still on the books is consent. What qualifies as consent? A smile? a nod? a funny joke? a word? an action? an email? a text message? a phone call? an invitation to dinner? The lines have been blurred. So, in all matters related to sex, we have abandoned God’s mandate and embraced human opinion. God warned us clearly. We read in Galatians chapter 6, verses 7 and 8, “Be not deceived, God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting”. We cannot mock God, we only deceive ourselves – we have been sowing a carnal, flesh oriented worldview in our churches, denominations and families and we are reaping the consequences. We are seeing a decline in marriage, decline in moral decency and a rise in sex abuse.
Interestingly, even secular writers warned us of the grave consequences of following a materialistic worldview. Hollywood promoted a worldview that sex is only for our pleasure, it does not have to be confined within marriage, it shamelessly purveyed frontal nudity and graphic sexual violence. Now, when the sexual violence hits it, it is complaining, ‘#Metoo, #Metoo, #Metoo’. These producers and directors have been glorifying graphic sexual violence on big screens for many decades now, why would you think their private lives would be any different?
Solomon asked in Proverbs chapter 6, verse 27, ‘Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not burned?’. Hollywood has been playing with uncontrolled sexual appetites and now it is burning in those flames.
Do you know many of the Hollywood and our secular elites follow Michel Foucault’s philosophy of sex? Michel Foucault was a French philosopher. His life was between 1926 and 1984. By the way, in the early 1950s, Foucault was deeply influenced by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophy remained a strong influence on Foucault’s work throughout his life. Nietzsche declared God is dead, we’ve killed him. Now, human relations are all about power.
In 1976, he wrote his famous book The History of Sexuality. This book has changed the way our culture had been thinking about the sex. Foucault says, sexuality is ‘an especially dense transfer point for relations of power’. Sex is about power, how power relations work out across individuals. When we see the men exerting their power over others sexually harassing or assaulting others, we are seeing Foucault’s worldview being played out.
God established the institution of marriage. A man and a woman love each other, take care of each other for a life time with God as their guide. But our secular thinkers and hollywood portrayed marriage as a bondage. Hollywood constantly mocked marriage and discouraged women from getting married. Once upon a time 90 percent of people were getting married. Now, it dropped to 50 percent. This decline in marriage hurt both men and women. More women are living in harassment, more women are living in poverty, more women are living in depression, more women are living in addiction than ever before.
So, both men and women are facing the tragic consequences of rejecting God and His Word. Our only hope is to repent of our sins and turn to our Savior. We read in Proverbs chapter 14, verse 12, there is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. We all commit this mistake. We think human opinion matters most. They are scholars are right, we should listen. But the Bible warns us, when we abandon God and follow the ways of man, it leads us to the ways of death. Jesus said I am the way , the truth and the life. At the feet of Jesus we find hope. May God help us and our culture to come back to Lord Jesus Christ, our only hope.
Let us pray, Dear Lord Jesus, our hearts are broken as we hear the countless stories of lives destroyed by sexual abuse in our time. You are the physician, great physician who came to save us from our sins and heal our lives. We pray that you touch our lives, our lives deteriorated by sin and its tragic consequences and make us whole again. In your precious name we pray, Amen.