The history of the death of the west may not be much more complicated than the story of its unending pursuit of sexual gratification. While this is not a uniquely European epitaph, this pursuit has and is being used in our nations to further a variety of political agendas and enslave the masses with the illusion of freedom. In the United States, we might start with Margaret Sanger, founder of the organization that became Planned Parenthood, whose passionate crusade for unrestricted access to contraceptives was matched only by her promiscuity, broken relationships, and life-long guilt for the abandonment of her daughter, who was a child-sacrifice to her insatiable lust. She counted among her friends the leaders in the early eugenics and abortion movement, foreign and domestic. Closely connected to her, organizationally, relationally, and philosophically, were the various population control advocates, usually funded by the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations, disrespectfully. As an interesting though pertinent aside, as these rich barons saw their own social class diminishing in size – due to their use of contraceptives to cover promiscuity – they increasingly sought to limit the populations of other ethnic groups, here and especially in other nations. The thinking was simple and malicious. Other nations cannot be allowed to have more children than we do, for this would threaten our national strength and international hegemony. So committed was this class of men and their children to eugenics and world population control, that John Rockefeller III met with the pope in the 1960’s to try to persuade him to change Rome’s stand on contraceptives. He failed, though most Romanists were swept along in the ensuing years of sexual abandon.
This, however, is only the thin edge of the knife. For the right to be liberated to the bondage of sexual gratification to prevail, public opinion needed to change. Or, according to Freud, Kerouac, of On the Road infamy, and Kinsey with his famous sex institute, our culture needed to be persuaded of its sexually repressed condition and of the normalcy of perversion. Even the Negro and his civil rights movement were surreptitiously recruited to assist. The white plutocracy used the Harlem Renaissance to glorify the “naturalism” of the Negro, his life of sexual freedom unchained from the white man’s social mores, i.e., Christianity. Many culture-shapers during this period, even the theologian Paul Tillich and his wife, spent time in Harlem sampling the delights of Harlem’s notorious libertinism. Of course, cultural change agents could not make their goals so obvious, so they used race as a covering to hide their personal guilt. Prejudice against the black race was really nothing but with prejudice against promiscuity.
By the time of Martin Luther King, Jr., his notorious escapades and those of his associates made the claim of the “virtuous, oppressed Negro” ring hollow. This was no pursuit of the holy grail of social justice. They were worse slaves than their grandfathers had been: enslaved to the white libertines who were using them to further their own agenda. This is one reason the movement eventually settled for government checks; it lacked the moral fortitude to expose its white funders for what they were and to escape from being used even as they were users. In the mid-60’s, Patrick Moynihan issued an important government memorandum on the true cause of the “black problem:” the decline of the black family, especially its father. President Johnson was initially enthusiastic of Moynihan’s findings, as were black leaders when Moynihan gave his report at Howard University. Their white sugar daddies, however, could not tolerate any government initiative that would step upon their seared conscience and true agenda: sexual liberation. Thus, when a black leader, past or present, has the gall to point out the failings of the black family (which might now be just as truly said of the white family) – too much promiscuity, not enough discipline and initiative because of promiscuity, and modeling its lifestyle and relationships after the children of the Harlem Renaissance, i.e., rap and hip-hop gangsters and perverts – Bill Cosby, and Clarence Thomas come to mind – he is immediately shouted down as “not a true black” by the white sexual liberation mob. Not a true black means not sexually liberated and unwilling to further the cause of perversion under the guise of racial justice.
These are only the highlights of a story you need to understand, for it continues today. Why, for example, is there so much government push for contraceptive availability and use among school age children? Even fallen common sense would dictate that children should not be exposed to such an emotional, personal, and responsibility-producing issue, for they lack sufficient years and maturity to digest and wisely use the information. The answer is painful but obvious, and it is not, “Well, they are going to fornicate anyway.” They are going to fornicate because they are being encouraged to do so by the government’s own sex education programs. Sexual liberty makes men political pawns. The sexual liberation conspirators tacitly understand Augustine’s maxim: a man has as many masters as he has vices. Kinsey, whose sexual studies in the 1950-60’s gave us Playboy and now ubiquitous, instant access to pornography, made it a practice to gather the sexual histories of the rich and the famous, thus blackmailing them for unending funding and to prevent exposure of his horrible perversity and utterly skewed research methods and findings. Kinsey, who was funded by the Rockefellers, possessed one of the world’s largest collections of pornography then available, filmed sexual activity of children with adults, gathered his statistics from the prison and homosexual prostitute population, and eventually, driven crazy by his addiction to perversion, hanged himself by trying a rope to his genitalia. And yet, an entire generation has been professionally told by Kinsey and his disciples that “everyone wants to be sexually free,” that “you are repressed by society, family, and religion if you are not sexually liberated,” and that “pornography is harmless, even helpful.” Now, we reach full Kinsey-circle, the push to legalize homosexual “marriage.” Why? Its leaders are all homosexuals, or funded by them, guilt-laden, desperate to change public opinion in order to push our culture’s sexual liberation to its final stopping place – the marginalization and criminalization of sexual purity and sexual self-control. One of unbelief’s most persistent avenues of self-atonement is political action. Changing public opinion to reflect personal vice is also a means of social manipulation. Like lepers, the perverse gather into political colonies; unlike lepers, they seek to colonize the world with their filth. This particular movement serves another useful purpose: to sterilize the population. As James says, “When lust is conceived, it brings forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, brings forth death” (1:15). Homosexuality is the last train stop of bondage, and because by the time the soul reaches this stop it is filled with angry hopelessness and utterly desensitized, all opposition must be silenced, de-normalized, and portrayed as blind bigotry. There must be nothing to remind the slave of his chains. In fact, so committed are its leaders to their agenda that anyone resisting it is characterized as a closet-homosexual, or at least having such tendencies. When everything is viewed through the lenses of sex, especially perverse sex, purity does not register. It is suspected of hiding impurity.
Each of these movements – the initial push for the legalization of contraceptives, abortion, eugenics, unrestricted access to pornography, indoctrinating children into the world of personal gratification as a normal part of a healthy sexual self-identity, homosexual marriage, and all the more publicized, attendant movements – Woodstock’s weekend of sexual abandon, Hollywood’s century-long push to include nudity and graphic sex in its offerings, and now the popular hobby of prurient study of the lives and escapades of celebrities – has one purpose: to offer slavery as liberty, to normalize gratification, and to make political pawns. Men who are fettered by a guilty conscience do not stand upon principle. They do not fight against tyranny. Unless God’s grace intervenes, if given the choice between their God and their libido, men usually opt for the latter. Satan understands this. More importantly, the Almighty understands this, which is the reason the Bible is honest about man’s immoral proclivities and their remedy. It is also the reason we need to be honest about ours.
And this is the reason I share this depressing story with you. For some time now, I have labored under the conviction that the church – and I am not referring to the mainline denominations that have often already thrown their support behind the agenda outlined above, or to Roman Catholics, for their answer is to return to popery and celibacy as the highest form of purity – does not have a clear sense of the strategy, players, and purpose of the horrible events that are transpiring around them. To this, we lack a coherent, motivating, personal sense of identity, a vision for purity that empowers us to stand against the alluring offerings of an apostate culture. We see this deficiency in our young men especially, though they often learned this from their fathers. We home-school and pay for their Christian education, train them in the home, and love them. Yet, the sirens of slavery incessantly cry. Many young, professing Christian young men march to the drumbeat of their testosterone. This is the agenda of many in our culture; they do not want your children to escape the vortex of gratification, the dominion of the libido. The desire is to separate you from your children, or more specifically, for your children, as they grow in years, to view you with increased disdain, even as an impediment to their self-expression and sexual liberty. In short, you, fathers, as a representative of God, stand between them and the wonderful, air-brushed, solipsistic world of sexual gratification. And as for your daughters, they are the objects, not of love, but of lasciviousness, taught to abandon purity and modesty for the elusive hope of male acceptance. As a last ditch effort to preserve the strange bedfellows of feminism and the right to sexual gratification, girls and women are now portrayed as sexually insatiable as men. Women can dominate men and use their feminine mystique to get ahead in the world. Tragically, history shows that lust, like slavery, knows no gender. It also shows that women are always the losers when the soul is abandoned to promiscuity. As women are fed the line of sexual liberation, murder, divorce, lesbianism, and despair rise exponentially. No guilt-driven political action, glamorization of gratification, and government indoctrination programs can change this equation.
So, what is our competing vision, our white city? A conviction must return to Christian men that every foray into pornography, descent into impure thoughts, and use of the marriage bed as a respectable tool for personal gratification is a descent into slavery. Purity is not simply a personal issue of Christian piety, which it is; it is a cultural issue of either liberty or slavery. Here is our vision. I will not join the zombie forces of the diseased and dying. I will not become a political pawn, too paralyzed by guilt to do anything but fight with my own inward lusts, to succumb to the despairing cycle of lust, guilt, frustrated prayers for forgiveness, resolve to do better, only to fall again. No. I will raise the standard of Jesus Christ, of purity, of the blood-stained cross. This is perhaps the single most important act of war you can wage against this culture. I will not be a slave to my passions, to my libido. I will not allow myself to be manipulated. I will be Christ’s pure virgin: body, soul, and mind. And you can. He died and rose for me. He met Satan, the seasoned seducer of our souls, in personal combat and shoved the cross through his skull. He walked out of the tomb. From now on, grace is more powerful than sin – not grace hastily sought or blithely professed but grace sincerely, “with my whole heart have I sought you” turning to the Holy One. He is a consuming fire, and he will consume your dross. You must declare this war, Christian man. You must hold out your hands to Christ and ask him to shackle you with his grace, his love, and the purity that comes from union with him. If you do not, you will be easy prey for a freedom that enslaves.
I start with you, men, because you are the key. A blood-washed conscience sets you free to serve the living God. It enables you to interact honestly with your sons about living in this mess. It gives a reality to your gospel entreaties, especially if you, by God’s grace, are not simply a survivor but also an overcomer. It portrays God-ordained sexuality in the beauty and consecration of marriage. It helps you boldly resist Satan’s first thresholds to the plantation of slavery: the entertainment complex, the indiscriminate, non-chaperoned mixing of the sexes, and the artificial marketing creation of being a “teenager,” with its seductively advertised right to libertinism, experimentation, and sexual gratification without condemnation or consequences. Your daughters need your protection against their own propensities to be immodest in order to gain acceptance. Many daughters of Zion are tempted to jettison a little modesty, just a little, in order to gain the male eye. After all, when the soul is denied, all that is left is my body. It is my only tool. You cannot love your daughters in a way that inoculates them against sexual slavery, however, if your vices are your master. It will come out. They may never know the details, but they will feel the effects.
Satan’s war against purity – for this is a spiritual conflict against principalities and powers – must also be fought theologically. Most of the mainline Protestant denominations, with their advocacy of abortion, vacillation on the sodomy issue, and wholesale capitulation to the reigning zeitgeist of existential spirituality, have already thrown in their lot with the gratification crowd. The evangelical environment is not far behind. At its root, Evangelicalism is concerned with results, not truth. Hence, there is a reigning spirit in its churches that when it comes to the details, doctrines, and morality of the Bible, there is room for disagreement. This is another way of saying, “Do not restrict my liberty.” We see this mindset in the theology, worship, and ethics of American Evangelicalism. It is an indirect feeder of sexual slavery. I can believe as I want. God has saved me so that I can walk by the Spirit, freed from the constraints of the law, able with my experience and reason to ascertain the will of God. Using this hermeneutic, just about anything can be justified, as long as “I think God is pleased, or wants, or allows me to do something.” Do we really need to be reminded of the long line of evangelicalism’s sexual offenders? This is the fruit of their theology. Against it, we must live by every word that comes from God’s mouth. His word is not culturally relative. His law is set. It is beautiful. I will walk at liberty only if I keep his law. All other paths, however seemingly circuitous, eventually dead-end in the cul-de-sac of slavery, especially slavery to sexual gratification. Hence, we must be committed to God’s word – not the ever-changing word of men.
Finally, I really must understand the events going on around me: their deep-seated, Satanic origin. There is no political answer to them. I am not advocating political withdrawal but political realism. Government is not going to pass a law to restrict its own agenda of enslaving the masses and increasing dependency upon its programs. O, it may pass something that looks like such a law. For example, Reagan passed laws that seemed to restrict abortion, but he simultaneously increased funding for population control programs. These are the same thing, born of the same spirit – the desire to put sexual chains upon men so that they can be more easily regulated, controlled, and subsumed into the program of group-think, guilt-manipulated, herd hedonism. What you and I must seek personally, preach publicly, practice familially, and suffer willingly for is liberty through faith in the chain-busting Lord of glory and submission to the liberty-bringing law of God. There are no other weapons. They are the great weapons of this and every age. They are marginalized because they are not dramatic. They are not fundamentally political, hence, irrelevant in an environment, assumed even by many Christians, in which the only real power is directly political. It is not. Dominion over the flesh by the reigning Christ is proclaimed in the pulpit, takes root in the closet, transforms the family, and then trickles down into society, sometimes torrentially. It never begins, however, in the halls of political power. Yet, as long as the church is largely lawless, its surrounding society will continue to be held tightly in the fetters of sexual bondage.
There is, however, one last component of our slavery that we must not ignore. It has a limited life-span. The lives of its leaders – Freud, Sanger, Kerouac, Kinsey, and Rockefeller – are indirectly encouraging. They died. Their philosophy led to horrible deaths for their advocates. The sad thing about the promise of sexual liberation is that it virtually always leads to despairing, diseased, drug-addicted, childless, relationship destroying deaths. It does the same culture-wide. This is Romans 1. Since our enthroned King has apparently given a significant portion of our culture over to a reprobate mind, we can be sure that he is giving these miserable children of the Enlightenment their just due. This is a heady time to live and proclaim the truth. What a contrast the liberating gospel presents to enslaving humanism! Their population is declining; ours should be increasing. We have a great purpose; they have nothing but personal, perverse gratification. They are burning out; we should be kindled with new hope. Our present environment of depravity is not insuperable. Its days are numbered. This is one reason, I think, for the ferocious attempts of the present regime to push radicalism across the board. Guilt and slavery to perversity produce political desperation. Let us possess our souls in patience and in faithfulness. The name of the wicked will rot. And though we may often fall, for the just man is said to do so seven times, he will rise again, for the Lord is able to make him stand. Let us seek the Conqueror, unfurl his freedom banner, and rejoice in his delivering grace. He still proclaims liberty to the captives.