A Time for Moral Indignation

Americans are having sex thrust upon them every waking hour of their day. This is not done by “the girl next door.” Whoever she may be, her power to project sex was never equal to the massive bombardment that hits Americans today before, after, and between meals. In the judgment of Malcolm Muggeridge, America is the most sex-ridden country in the history of the world (Esquire, February, 1965).

Our modern media of communications—newspapers, magazines, books, movies, advertising, radio, and television—have made possible this unparalleled degree of mass saturation. Sex precipitates from the national atmosphere and drips into every nook and cranny of the land. Modern technology has made sex omnipresent; there is today no escape from it. Even if a person takes wings and flies to the other side of the land, he will behold the movie offerings on the seat ahead, or at the end of the cabin.

Without this massive projection of sex by our impersonal media of modern communications, we would not have our national, impersonal sex symbols. When the projection of sex depended on the girl next door, sex was not divorced from the human person. Under these circumstances sex could never be a mere symbol. But thanks to modern communications, we now have national, impersonal sexual images that are mere sex symbols; the nameless nude, the fictional Lady Chatterley or Candy, the television and movie actress whom 95 per cent of the viewers have never really seen, let alone spoken to. This or that segment of a woman’s body, divorced from her person and known only impersonally on paper or screen, becomes the mental image of what sex is or can be. Although such people are often not in their private lives what their public image suggests, this does not prevent millions of Americans from pursuing these faceless, fleshless symbols. Our expansive technological amplification of communication has done what the girl next door could never do: project an omnipresently haunting, but always elusive and retreating, sexual attraction.

Nor was the girl next door ever able to impart to sex a symbolic religious significance. The very presence and limits of her personality prevented her from becoming a sex symbol with religious dimensions and aura. Only an impersonal projection of sex can turn it into such a religious symbol, into a goddess. Muggeridge suggests that the ultimate experience of sex “has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.”

This separation of sex from the human personality and its impersonal projection through modern modes of communication has produced what has become an object of pagan veneration. “Instead of the cult of the Virgin Mary, we have,” says Muggeridge, “the cult of the sex symbol … a Marilyn Monroe or a Jean Harlow, displayed in glossy photographs, on cinema and television screens.” That these women are dead does not destroy the symbol; the symbol was always ephemeral. The person dies but the symbol lives on, for the symbol was always impersonal. This provides the motive for the current attempt to return Jean Harlow to the screen in a new movie. Had she not been an impersonal symbol, the public would find it repulsive to find entertainment in the charms of a dead woman.

Dangle the impersonal, emptied sex symbol before the modern sex-ridden mentality and it is pursued like a tin rabbit on a dog track. One result is that no society pursues sex more than our own and yet none enjoys it so little. No normal sexual experience manages to catch the elusive pleasure the symbol promises. The accumulated disillusionments consequently send the unsatisfied devotee into more frantic pursuit, passing from one sexual conquest unfulfilled to another, from one husband or wife to the next, ever goaded on by a sense of having missed that religious fulfillment the impersonal sex symbol always promises but never gives. When the disillusionment is complete, the heterosexual is often abandoned for the homosexual experience in the sordid, forlorn hope that perhaps the never-never exquisite experience has been sought in the wrong place.

A second result of this exaltation of depersonalized sex into what can only be regarded as an idolatrous religious symbol is that while the allurement of sex is enhanced, the arrestive restrictions are removed. When sex is confronted in the girl next door, its very embodiment in her person acts as a restraining influence upon sexual abandon; no matter how uninhibitedly she projects her sexuality she, by the very fact that she is a person, arrests what she induces.

In short, all the next-door girls in America could not achieve that mass sex saturation of our national mind which has now been brought about by the application of technology to sex.

Americans have become victims of their own media of communications. Victims, because sex is not a symbol; sex is what we are: “Male and female created He them.” We have raised sex to the status of an idol; by impersonalizing sex we have depersonalized ourselves. As the Psalmist said long ago about idol makers: “They that make them shall be like unto them.”

This process of self-victimization with all its untallied human misery, frustration, divorce, crime, and dirtying of the human spirit will not stop of itself. There will always be more than enough people willing to commercialize sex and exploit it to whatever degree serves their financial purposes.

If we are to free ourselves, we must recognize first of all that the freedom to project sex upon the public mind, whether by author, publisher, advertiser, or movie or television producer, is a limited freedom. Both sex and freedom of expression are good, but when stripped of all limitations, they become fetishes that are destructive of society. Unless we recognize that there are limits, we render ourselves helpless. When “anything goes” in sex and freedom of expression, it is society that finally goes.

It is doubtful that additional legislation would be helpful. Nevertheless we must rid ourselves of the ridiculous notion that because no one can define obscenity with absolute legal precision, no legal regulation of obscenity is possible or enforceable. No one can precisely define a cow either; yet we have laws regulating the buying, selling, and keeping of cows. Indeed, there are few things that can be so precisely defined by law that frequent recourse need not be taken to the courts for precise application and judicial decision. Is indeed obscenity so hard to recognize that even in its baldest forms we cannot detect it? Literally large piles of Candy are currently on sale in many newsstands. Have we become so sophisticated about the legal niceties of freedom and about the academic precision of moral definitions that we are unable to protect the youth of America from a book that, while ostensibly satirizing the sex novel, contains an extended and minute description of the process of seduction? It is often pointed out that in the last analysis the laws of our society embody the standards that the people accept. Yet there are many publications on the market that the great majority of Americans would reject as utterly vulgar; common decency can often make better moral judgments than we are able to codify in our laws and enforce in our courts. Admittedly, the line between law and freedom is a delicate one. Yet delicate though it is, there are many areas of life in which we recognize limitations upon freedom of expression, and there is no principial reason either in law or in freedom why a delicate balance of these two cannot be achieved in the area of freedom of sexual expression.

What America’s present moral situation requires even more than laws and their enforcement is the arousal of a tidal wave of righteous moral indignation against a wanton exploitation of sex. There are signs that such an indignation is smoldering beneath the surface. Every American dedicated to common decency must become morally indignant and let this indignation burn righteously in an articulate protest against an exploitation of sex that is unparalleled in the history of the world. Never before in human civilization has sex been so pervasively prostituted to financial gain, for the technological possibilities were not present until our time. Public opinion is still a powerful force for public righteousness. It can outshout all the sounds of modern communication if it finds its voice and in moral indignation lifts it high.

The millions of Christians in America have a special duty. They know that when anything becomes a national idol, it is because God has first been displaced and his moral law set aside. The final resolution lies with God, who alone can give purity of heart. But until such a time, Christians are summoned to reflect his holy wrath against every unclean thing. It will be a shameful thing if the secular moral conscience voices its indignation against a glaring evil first and is belatedly joined by the millions of Christians in America, who will then sound only like an echo.

The Church And Moral Decadence

When Bishop Robinson of Woolwich employed the term “new morality” in his writings, he stimulated voluminous discussion in the area of social ethics. Last month some 500 ministers and educators gathered at Harvard Divinity School for a conference on the sexual and marital aspects of the new morality. The three major strands of thought that ran through the conference were introduced by substantive presentations that provided the starting point for double sessions of four seminars.

The historical phase of the discussion was presented by Dr. Robert W. White, professor of clinical psychology at Harvard University, whose thesis was that the present situation in sexual morality is a reaction to the excesses of Victorianism, the end-product of three generations of uncertainty about moral values. The emergence of the “sub-culture of adolescence” marks the reductio ad absurdum of a permissiveness born of indecision and default. The confusion came, White pointed out, as a response to Freudian oversimplification of human motivation and to literary debunking and muckraking. The result is a generation of half-adults, those who demand adult privileges but who little comprehend the depth of adult responsibilities.

The second strand was furnished by Professor Paul Ramsey of Princeton University, who presented a convincing case for the idea that the Christian ethic entails a view of marital intimacy so deeply rooted in the need of human beings for the unitive that it can be justified only within the context of the married state, undertaken with a deep sense of lifelong responsibility. This was a carefully reasoned statement of the respective roles of the unitive and the reproductive aspects of sexual union, and of the case for the relative independence of the two within marriage.

It was refreshing to hear the claims of Ephesians 5 and John 1 pressed in this light. And it was not surprising that this position was subjected to heavy two-pronged attack—first, from those to whom the appeal to Scripture seemed irrelevant; and second, from those who were prepared in advance to defend a libertarian view of sexual morality.

The third strand of thought was presented by the cultural relativists, who held that every ethical situation is “situational” and that no principles can be laid down for behavior apart from the highly individualized Sitz im Leben. This theme was announced from differing vantage points. Some approached it sentimentally, urging the right of all persons to some form of sexual enjoyment as soon as they are “mature” enough to accept its consequences. Others overlaid the libertarian claim with an unstructured view of agape, suggesting that where love for the neighbor is safeguarded, any type of behavior agreed upon by two adult persons is acceptable. Still others said that due regard must be taken of “what exists,” so that, when a morality for our “new” day is to be formulated, full weight should be given to some statistical determinations of morality, such as those of Kinsey. This superficial view was evident at several points in the discussion.

Underlying the sessions was a dialectic that seldom emerged to the surface: Should the Christian Church seek to be conformed to the sexual decadence that seems evident in our culture? or should she be prophetic and undertake to transform individuals through the renewing of their minds, so that they walk as children of light and shine as lights in a dark world?

What emerged clearly was that the so-called new morality is as old as human evil and its advocacy at least as old as the classical pagan writers. Every hour on the hour, the claim of the homosexual to be regarded not as a deviant but as “normal” was heard (although it needs to be said that little encouragement was given this claim).

Some solid values emerged from the conference. The most creative expression came from those who recognized two things: first, the spiritual nature of our sexual crisis; and second, the profound relevance of the Christian Scriptures for the understanding of the sickness of our culture.

R. Kenneth Strachan

At the height of a memorable missionary career of almost thirty years the General Director of the Latin America Mission, Dr. R. Kenneth Strachan, died on February 24 in Pasadena, California. He was 54 years old and was buried in San Jose, Costa Rica.

A well-known faith missionary leader who had earned a high reputation as a missionary statesman, Dr. Strachan made his peak contribution in his Evangelism-in-Depth concept for missions in Latin America. Less than a month before his death almost 4,000 evangelical Christians carrying biblical banners marched four abreast through the streets of Caracas to mark the close of the public phase of a thirteen-month nation-wide Evangelism-in-Depth effort in Venezuela.

Dr. Strachan was born in Buenos Aires in 1910. He was educated at Wheaton College and at Dallas and Princeton seminaries. After the death of his father, who had organized the Latin America Mission in 1921, Dr. Strachan succeeded to the mission leadership. He substantially enlarged its ministry and personnel. In 1958 he set up Evangelist Billy Graham’s successful tour of the Caribbean. He was a contributing editor to CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

A year ago he was taken ill, and the diagnosis was Hodgkin’s disease. He spent the final months of his life in Pasadena, California, combining teaching and writing, and seeking medical care during a much needed furlough.

Peace On Earth

The stark fact of a divided world in our atomic age, its hostility dramatized in Viet Nam, provided an urgent setting for the international Pacem in Terris convocation February 18–20 in New York City. Since the conference was based on Pope John XXIII’s encyclical (addressed to all men of good will), a note of unwelcome irony was bequeathed to the conference by the ugly conflict between Catholics and Buddhists in South Viet Nam which weakened effective resistance to the Communist thrust from the north.

The blurred sense of justice in international affairs, the deteriorating efficiency of the United Nations, the widening differences between France and the United States, may well remind us that the prophet Isaiah’s great vision of universal peace, long since secularized, was essentially messianic.

Meditation On The Moon

The lunar mission fulfilled by Ranger 8 marked another magnificent technological victory by American scientists. It stirs admiration for the bold ingenuity of contemporary science and surrounds the prospect of Americans on the moon with eager expectation. If the theologians ought ever to be dispatching monthly telegrams of congratulation to the scientists, they should be doing so in these times.

Yet our age of scientific breakthrough generates as many anxieties as expectations. If ours is a time of great adventure, it is likewise a time of great doubts and of even greater confusion.

The two World Wars exploded such modern myths as “the inevitability of progress” and “the essential goodness of man.” Yet we have an uneasy feeling that these tenets, particularly the former, are creeping back through the laboratory door. The fetish of technology so makes its claim upon the whole of life that modern man is tempted to acknowledge King Science as the new god.

For this development the theologians can hardly blame the scientists. It scarcely impresses the modern generation when the theologians say in effect only that the scientists are merely “reshuffling nuts and bolts.” For while the theologians write of one world of ideals, the scientific breakthrough has already changed the world into a single community of overnight travel. Paying tribute to the key role of American scientists, President Johnson recently peered into the future and asserted that the nation can now look to scientific technology to provide new jobs to meet unemployment, health programs that will “eventually conquer” disease and disability, and guidance furthering peace and justice in a free world, besides purposeful and useful exploration of the seas around us and the space above us. The order is a big one, especially since it nowhere admits suffering as a fundamental fact of man’s fallen condition and looks for guidance, purpose, and wisdom to King Science rather than to the King of kings. It is noteworthy that political concern is mounting over the atomic installations that the United States, under its Atoms for Peace program, has placed in forty nations around the world. This proliferation of nuclear technology (200 kilograms of natural uranium and 150,000 kilograms of enriched uranium) has also spread the ingredients of potential destruction, since the alternatives of peace or war often hinge on the greed of rulers or the flush of anger.

The failures of the theologians, not the successes of the scientists, are the saddest side of the current situation, whose moral vacuum is ideally filled by the Gospel of Christ. One seldom learns from the official addresses of the spokesmen for Deity that valid communicable knowledge is available about God and his will. Newspapermen go to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and are fascinated as specialists give progress reports, and the entire nation listens eagerly by radio or watches even more eagerly by television. But journalists who call on leading theologians like Paul Tillich are told that God is no person at all; religion writers who cover Faith and Order meetings come away unsure who God is and what he does and says; and reporters covering the NCC General Board meetings sometimes find little to distinguish them from political discussions. One readily understands the rapt applause of observers when scientists announce that their object in space is “functioning on full power,” and why observers respond with polite reserve when theologians announce that the God of space will be the subject of debate at the next ecumenical display of ecclesiastical power. The scientists who launch a rocket 239,000 miles into space and land it within fifteen miles of target are not likely to be greatly impressed by theologians who quite properly assert that the methodology of science cannot tell what is true and good, but only what works efficiently. For many of these theologians themselves revolt against fixed religious and moral truths, and proclaim their only absolutes in the highly debatable area of politico-economic and social theory.

The tragedy is that theologians are losing God in obscurity here while scientists are confidently exploring the moon out there. And the loss of God means the surrender of much more than the modern man dreams. It leads to the orphaning of science from her Mother and to moral delinquency whose final cost might be the erasure of a civilization. It is not the world and man only that owe their existence to the Divine Creator; science and the scientist too have their unacknowledged lease on life from the rational God whose broken image man bears in his quest for the meaning of reality. Amid the enormous curiosity of the scientific mind, which reaches into remote outer space for some clue to the origin of life and to man’s place in the universe, it is sheer tragedy that so many theologians have thrown a picket line around the biblical account of origin and destiny and today join Bultmann, Tillich, and the Bishop of Woolwich in a ready assault on the self-revealed God of miraculous grace.

When the Son of Man who died on Calvary Hill is no longer lifted up as the redemptive hope of the world, Christians need not be surprised that rockets launched from Cape Kennedy will soon pre-empt his centrality. When the evidential value of the Empty Tomb is forfeited by the theologians as a decisive link to man’s destiny, the early caves with their man-like remains will become the scientist’s clue to the secret of life. Doubtless there is considerable confusion among scientists too. Even now a debate is under way over whether the soft surface of the moon would support a party of explorers; until there is a man on the moon nobody can be sure, experts say. But some theologians remain uncertain about the Gospel’s ability to carry man to a new life even after the crucified Lord of Life has returned from the caverns of death. Never more urgently than now have men needed the great truths and the great reality of the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. At the conclusion of his long journey to the moon, modern man will still be overheard saying to himself: “Why am I here?” Since he has squandered his spiritual inheritance on earth, how can there be any greater problem for man in the far country than his need to repent and to return to his Father’s house?

Salute To West Virginia

The West Virginia House of Delegates defeated by an overwhelming vote of 81 to 15 a proposed constitutional amendment that would have legalized state-operated sweepstakes. Advocates of the amendment pressed it on the ground that it would help finance public schools and other worthwhile projects.

It is to the credit of the members of the House of Delegates that, despite the adverse economy from which their state suffers, they had the moral stamina to resist so stoutly the temptation to put West Virginia in the gambling business. The function of government is to promote order and preserve justice, not to exploit human weakness and indirectly foster crime through the operation of lotteries.

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