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Writing about a fast-breaking news event for a magazine with six weeks lead time is risky business. By the time you read this, the salacious charges involving the President and Monica Lewinsky may have faded like a bad dream, or possibly taken even more bizarre turns.

But whatever the facts turn out to be, there will remain disturbing questions about one aspect of the scandal: the astonishing public response. At this writing, the President's approval ratings continue to soar with each new accusation. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, a whopping 66 percent said the President should not be impeached even if the accusations prove true. Man-in-the-street interviews reveal a general indifference. Even the usually indignant feminists opine that since the alleged sexual relationship was consensual, it is no big deal.

How could so many shrug off such charges?

I put the question to Robert George, professor of political philosophy at Princeton.

"It's because they've lost a sense of the sacredness of human life," he replied.

"I'm not talking about abortion," I said, puzzled. "I'm talking about adultery."

"Both derive from the same world-view," George explained. Modern secular orthodoxy splits the human being, dividing the person from the body. The body is treated as an instrument for getting what the self wants—pleasure, emotional satisfaction, whatever.

This may sound abstract, but the consequences of a person/body dualism are painfully concrete. It follows that the body is not really "me" but something other than my real self—something like a possession to be deployed or disposed of. Thus abortion: Secularists insist that a human embryo is merely a body, not a full person, and can be readily discarded. Thus assisted suicide: Secularists who decide the body is giving them too much pain or bother may opt for suicide—and even demand that a physician help out. Thus sex outside marriage: The sexual union of two bodies does not necessarily mean the union of two persons on all levels of their being (marriage), but only that two selves are using their bodies for mutual pleasure or affection.

We will not understand the secular position on these contentious moral issues unless we grasp the underlying person/body dualism. The idea that sex outside marriage is morally okay implies that the body is merely a vehicle for getting what you want—just as you use a car to get where you want to go.

This runs totally against the grain of the Christian world-view. Since the apostles, the church has opposed dualist heresies. We believe that God created each individual as a unity—body, soul, and spirit. At the end of time, our bodies will be raised to life eternal. We affirm this whenever we recite the Apostles' Creed: "I believe … in the resurrection of the body." Christianity grants the body extraordinary dignity. What we do with our bodies expresses who we are as full persons. We utterly reject any dualism that breaks up the individual and relegates the body to a merely instrumental role.

This explains why God speaks so strongly against sex outside marriage. The sexual unity is a unity of two whole persons. That's how we were made. If we engage in sex outside marriage—if we form a bodily union apart from a union of whole persons—we violate our wholeness.

That is to say, we violate our integrity (which literally means wholeness). We dis-integrate ourselves. That's why sex outside marriage is so devastating: It shatters the integrity of our being.

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April 27 1998, Vol. 42, No. 5