Reversing the Sexual Revolution
Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.
—1 CORINTHIANS 6:18
On October 12 and 13, 2015, the internet lit up with headlines:
• Playboy to stop publishing nude photos (USA Today)
• No more naked women in print Playboy (Business Insider)
• Playboy magazine abandons nudity (Telegraph, United Kingdom)
• Playboy magazine to stop publishing pictures of naked women (The Guardian)
After sixty-two years of featuring nudes, beginning in December 1953 with the famous Marilyn Monroe centerfold, Playboy was no longer going to display pictures of naked women in its magazine. But from the standpoint of moral values, this was actually bad news, not good news. As one supporter of nude photos explained, “We live in a world where all the world’s porn is like three mouse clicks away, and most of it is totally free. In a world like that, Playboy is redundant at best and embarrassing at worst.”1 And remember, it was a supporter of nude pictures who wrote this.
Playboy was not abandoning nude pictorials because society had become more moral. It was abandoning these pictorials because society had become so immoral that Playboy’s relatively mild pornography was no longer a draw. Pornography of the most sordid kind was freely available everywhere, so who needed pictures of nude women in Playboy? Porn was now ubiquitous.
Max Benwell’s article on the Independent’s site in England was titled, “Why You Should Be Worried About Playboy Dropping Naked Women from Its Pages,” with the subtitle “This Isn’t a Clear Moral Victory, but Yet Another Reminder of the Huge Power Wielded by Mainstream Pornography.” Benwell noted that when Playboy dropped nudes from its website in August 2015, that “caused its traffic to quadruple.” People were now drawn to the articles and not distracted by the relatively benign pictures.
Benwell wrote:
The magazine becoming never-nude is heartening for anyone who cares about the media’s constant objectification of women. But no one should pretend that this is a moral victory. Playboy, acting as any business would, dropped the nudes because there’s no demand for them any more. The free market argument that supported their continued existence turned on them. But this isn’t because we’re all reading feminist zines on Tumblr now; there’s no demand for them because too many people are watching free online porn instead. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free,” Playboy’s CEO Scott Flanders has said. “And so it’s just passé at this juncture.” Whether this can be counted as a victory for feminist activists or not, it’s yet another reminder of [how] powerful and pervasive mainstream porn has become. And if you think Playboy is bad, well, it doesn’t even compare.2
When I was a worldly, drug-using, sixteen-year-old rebel, I had no access to pornography unless I knew an older person who subscribed to Playboy—and at that time, I didn’t. I was too young to buy it, it wasn’t available on TV, and if there was a porn theater somewhere, I couldn’t get in even if I wanted to because of my age. As for the images found in Playboy, if 10 represents the worst of what’s available today at the click of a mouse (or the touch of a finger on a cell phone), then Playboy would probably be a 1 or 2 (if that). Today there are chat rooms where women perform sex acts at your command, websites where couples (or other groups) post their sex tapes, and other sites numbering in the countless thousands featuring every imaginable (and unimaginable) perversion.
The Internet is awash with pornography, and most of it is coming from the United States, the porn capital of the world. We are literally experiencing a pornography plague, the likes of which the world has never seen, and it is affecting the most vulnerable members of our society—our daughters and sons. It’s so bad now that even archliberals who steadfastly oppose censorship laws are getting concerned. As Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times, “Left-leaning parents shy away from a cause they identify with right-wing culture warriors, but I challenge any parent to affirm that it’s O.K. for her kids to become digital porn consumers at 11, the average age of a child’s first encounter.”3
Today, there are articles warning about “The Detrimental Effects of Pornography on Small Children”4—yes, small children—and many studies pointing to eleven as the average age that kids are first exposed to pornography. Eleven! (A guest on my radio show said that the average age of first exposure could be as low as eight.) This results in increased instances of sexual abuse within the family (child on child) along with misguided concepts of sex that can last a lifetime.
That early exposure to pornography can lead to sexual brokenness and deviance is confirmed by Michelle Smith, author of the book Prodigal Pursued: Out of the Lifestyle into the Arms of Jesus: An Ex-Lesbian’s Journey.5 She lived as an out and proud lesbian for almost twenty-five years, beginning at the age of eighteen. She traces her sexual struggles and confusion back to the age of seven, when a man first exposed her to pornography. Tragically, she is but one of millions who have been negatively affected.
Cultural commentator Bill Muehlenberg noted that “children accessing porn on the Internet and elsewhere are now acting out what they have seen. For example, child protection experts are warning that Internet porn is creating a new generation of sexual predators as young as six years of age.”
Describing the situation in Australia where he lives, Muehlenberg wrote, “The Children At Risk Assessment Unit in Canberra has warned of a huge increase in kids under ten sexually abusing other kids, mainly because of browsing porn sites on the Internet. A social worker at the Unit said that many of the kids thought that pornography was the Internet’s sole purpose.”
To personalize this daunting information, Muehlenberg pointed to this tragic case from the United Kingdom:
A 13-year-old boy told a UK court that he raped his 8-year-old sister after viewing pornography at his friend’s house. The teenager told police he “decided to try it out” on his sister because she was small and “couldn’t remember stuff,” reported the Lancashire Telegraph. The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, pleaded guilty on Monday in a Magistrates Court to rape, indecent assault, and inciting a minor to perform a sexual act on him. The boy has been released on bail to live with his family while his sister is receiving support from specialist officers.6
Sadly, as Muehlenberg observed, cases like this are becoming more and more common, which is one reason that the Republican Party platform of 2016 labeled pornography “a public health crisis” and a “public menace.”7
But these days, it’s actually hard to avoid Internet porn. A 2003 study claimed that “more than 80 percent of children using e-mail receive inappropriate spam daily,” much of it sexual in content, yet that was well over a decade ago.8 (Moments after typing these words, I checked my e-mail, and this was waiting for me in my Junk folder: “If you could only touch me . . . I’m waiting. I’m horny and have my camera going. Let’s video chat . . . I can’t touch you . . . But you can watch me touch myself. Best I can do until we can hook up. Watch me here!”)
According to a major study conducted by the Barna Group in conjunction with the Josh McDowell Ministry,
• More than one-quarter (27 percent) of adults ages 25–30 first viewed pornography before puberty.
• Nearly half of young people actively seek out porn monthly or more often.
• Teens and young adults consider “not recycling” more immoral than viewing pornography.
• Teenage girls and young women are significantly more likely to actively seek out porn than women over age twenty-five.
• Sixty-six percent of teens and young adults have received a sexually explicit image, and 41 percent have sent one.
• More than half of Christian youth pastors have had at least one teen come to them for help in dealing with porn in the past twelve months.
• Twenty-one percent of youth pastors and 14 percent of pastors admit they currently struggle with using porn. About 12 percent of youth pastors and 5 percent of pastors say they are addicted to porn.9
No wonder a headline reporting on this declared, “Groundbreaking Pornography Study Yields Shocking Results: ‘Our Future Is at Risk.’”10 More disconcertingly, “Most teens (90 percent) and young adults (96 percent) also tend to have a cavalier attitude about porn, speaking about it in either accepting, encouraging or neutral ways, according to the study. This is reinforced with the finding that only one-in-20 young adults and one-in-10 teens say that their friends view looking at smut as a ‘bad thing.’”11
As kids and young people continue to view pornography, the negative effects continue to increase. One pastor told me that he knows men in their twenties who need to use Viagra to have normal sexual relations. Constant exposure to pornography has made them unable to perform otherwise. Another faith leader told me he has counseled young married couples who have a totally sexless relationship. They got burned out on sex in high school and college, and they have now lost interest entirely.
Commenting on a major article in Time magazine posted in April 2016, Christian attorney and author David French wrote, “It turns out that some men report having trouble performing in the bedroom after living pornsaturated lives as teenagers, and some women report feeling pressure to act like porn stars during their most intimate moments. In other words, some men’s minds are so damaged that they have to experience either porn or a porn-like encounter to be sexually satisfied.”
He continued, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s oddly funny that porn is now under fire in some quarters only because the sexual revolution is eating its own.”12 But what else should we expect? For good reason Ben Shapiro, a leading young conservative voice, described his generation as “Porn Generation.”13
Not only are sensitivities removed and standards lowered, but what titillated in the past doesn’t titillate any longer. It must be more extreme in order to excite—more degrading, more revealing, more twisted; more sadistic, more perverted; otherwise, it just gets boring. And as hearts get harder and sensitivities are removed, what used to be forbidden becomes normalized and even romanticized. This helps explain Hollywood’s well-documented promotion of incest on TV and movies.14 Almost nothing is taboo anymore.
And what about the pressure put on women in today’s overly sexualized culture? What about the pressure to look like the latest airbrushed, bikini-clad, perfectly proportioned magazine model? What about the pressure to perform in bed like a porn queen? What about the increasing number of women who themselves are indulging in pornography? What about the extraordinary sales of Fifty Shades of Grey? As of June 2015, this book, commonly described as “mommy porn,” had sold 125 million copies worldwide and had been translated into fifty-two languages.15
The Bible addresses this contemporary and yet age-old problem in three words: “Flee sexual immorality!” (1 Cor. 6:18 NET). “Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body” (1 Cor. 6:18 NLT).16 The Bible has rightly diagnosed the sickness, and the Bible has the cure.
Interestingly, many critics of Christian morality claim that the Word of God places too much emphasis on sexual sin and that too many preachers focus on it in their sermons. The reality is that sexual temptation has been here as long as human beings have been on the planet, and there’s a reason that Paul always put sexual sin first when he listed the various sins of the flesh.17 The Bible also tells us that King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived and a man who penned powerful warnings about sexual sin, himself fell prey to the very sins he warned about. Sexual desires are powerful, and when improperly channeled, they can be destructive.
Let’s unpack one of Solomon’s warnings in the book of Proverbs. His words are all the more urgent because he failed to heed his own warnings. He is addressing men here, but his words have universal application:
My son, pay attention to my wisdom; listen carefully to my wise counsel. Then you will show discernment, and your lips will express what you’ve learned. For the lips of an immoral woman are as sweet as honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil. But in the end she is as bitter as poison, as dangerous as a double-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps lead straight to the grave. (Prov. 5:1–5 NLT)
She looks so good. She has what you want. Look at that body. Look at those eyes. And she’s smiling at you. She wants you! How can you resist? You need it. You deserve it. She’s all yours.
Ah, but when you bite that apple, there’s poison inside. And soon enough, you’re experiencing deep regret, but it’s too late to undo the damage. Your marriage has fallen apart or a sexually transmitted disease has ravaged your body or your reputation lies in tatters. All that for a few moments of carnal pleasure. In a moment of time, sin can destroy what you’ve worked a lifetime to achieve.
The words of Solomon shout to us today:
So now, my sons, listen to me. Never stray from what I am about to say: Stay away from her! Don’t go near the door of her house! If you do, you will lose your honor and will lose to merciless people all you have achieved. Strangers will consume your wealth, and someone else will enjoy the fruit of your labor. In the end you will groan in anguish when disease consumes your body. You will say, “How I hated discipline! If only I had not ignored all the warnings! Oh, why didn’t I listen to my teachers? Why didn’t I pay attention to my instructors? I have come to the brink of utter ruin, and now I must face public disgrace.” (Prov. 5:7–14 NLT)
Bill Clinton may have enjoyed his trysts with Monica Lewinsky, but those trysts (among others) have plagued him throughout his life. That stained dress of his young intern was nothing compared to the stained reputation of this former president of the United States. And so, when I think of the many Christian leaders who have greatly damaged or even destroyed their ministries because of sexual sin, I don’t point a condemning finger at them. Rather, I grieve over the damage they have done—to themselves, to their families, to their congregations, to their larger audiences, to the reputation of the Lord—and I examine my own heart and life. If Solomon could fall, so could I. If a well-known pastor could fall, or if a devoted Christian businessman could fall, or if that sweet homeschooling mother of four could fall, so could you and so could I.
The first lesson, then, to learn from the wisdom of God’s Word is that any of us can fall and none of us are invincible, whether it’s our fleshly lusts that lead us astray or an improper friendship that betrays us. Any of us can fall, which means that all of us must be vigilant. Sexual sin is like fire, and you don’t play with fire. As Solomon warned again, “Can a man scoop a flame into his lap and not have his clothes catch on fire? Can he walk on hot coals and not blister his feet? So it is with the man who sleeps with another man’s wife. He who embraces her will not go unpunished” (Prov. 6:27–29 NLT).
What makes you so sure you can e-mail that girl (or guy) you dated in college without getting pulled back in? Without Facebook, you never would have found each other; but now you’re only seconds away, even though you’ve been happily married for years. Don’t play with this fire! What makes you so sure that watching those R-rated sex scenes won’t lead to watching XXX-rated sex scenes? And wasn’t there a time when you knew the R-rated scenes were wrong too? What makes you so sure that opening that porn e-mail in your Junk folder every so often won’t turn into a full-fledged addiction? And what, exactly, do you expect to see when you click on it? Something wholesome or edifying?
This leads to the second important lesson from the Scriptures: You must deal with sexual sin ruthlessly. Don’t cut it back; cut it out. This is how Jesus told us to deal with sexual sin:
You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matt. 5:27–30)
These teachings are repeated two other times in the Gospels, suggesting that Jesus taught on this theme quite often.18 What does this mean in practical terms? Obviously, Jesus wasn’t telling us to amputate our hands or gouge out our eyes, as if our hands or eyes actually led us into sin. Instead, he was using extreme language to show us the extreme danger of sexual sin, telling us in no uncertain terms that we must deal with it decisively. To repeat: we don’t cut it back, we cut it off.
If you’re involved in an illicit relationship, break it off completely. This means if you’re sleeping with someone you’re not married to, repent before God, confess it to your spouse and your spiritual leaders, and then break off all contact, even if you have to change jobs or change churches. Or if you consistently struggle with online pornography, get accountability software, put it on every device you use, and link the software to your spouse (if you’re not married, link it to someone else you don’t want to betray), and let him or her monitor every single site you go to. Or if you keep messing up with porn on your cell phone, don’t use a cell phone anymore until you have clearly demonstrated that you are free of it.
You may say, “That sounds radical!”
Well, the words of Jesus sound pretty radical too, don’t they? Losing a hand or foot in this world is tragic. But losing your soul in the world to come is a million times more tragic, and that’s the point Jesus was so graphically illustrating.
The third important scriptural lesson is this: realize that sin is never worth it in the end. It promises you everything and leaves you with nothing. It offers you freedom and leaves you with bondage. It guarantees you satisfaction and leaves you with insatiable desires. This is the invariable trajectory: (1) Sin never satisfies, just like that one potato chip doesn’t satisfy. Instead, it creates a desire for more. (2) Because of this, sin leads to more sins, like lying to cover up the sin you just committed, or opening the door to other destructive activities and habits. (3) As a result, sin leads to worse sins. You end up doing shameful things, degrading things, things you never thought you would do (or, in some cases, things you never thought of period; they were completely outside of your world). I can assure you that when I first got high in 1969 as a fourteen-year-old kid, I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I would never shoot heroin. Not a chance! One year later, I was shooting heroin into my veins, and it soon had me in a stranglehold.
Finally, the deadly progression leads here: sin enslaves. That desire or that act or that lust now has you completely bound. You used to be so free, living your life without needing that drug or drink or cigarette or food or sexual fix. Now your hands shake and you break into a cold sweat if you can’t temporarily satisfy that urge, which has become physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be free again? Sin is not worth it!
Have you met a drug addict who is thrilled to be addicted or an alcoholic who is so happy he or she is totally bound? There is nothing like being free, and no sin that exists—including sexual sin—is worth sacrificing your freedom for.
Can I ask you some honest questions? If you are a follower of Jesus and you have watched pornography, were you pleased with yourself afterward? Did you say, “Boy, I’m so glad I did that!”? Or did you say, “I can’t believe I watched that trash!”? If you ever cheated on your spouse, did you say to yourself in the days that followed, “I am so glad we had sex! That was one of the best decisions of my life!”? Or did you weep with regret and shame, pleading for the chance to make things right again in your marriage? The one thing constant about sin is this: it is never worth it in the end.19
And here’s one more lesson from the Bible about sexual sin: If you want to be free, run away from what is wrong and run straight toward what is right, and don’t try to do it alone. This was Paul’s counsel to Timothy: “Flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart” (2 Tim. 2:22). This verse means that you don’t intentionally put yourself in tempting situations and try to tough it out, like a guy going to a strip club but trying to watch his eyes. No, you get out of that strip club (flee!), and you stay out. But that’s not all you do. “Instead, pursue righteous living, faithfulness, love, and peace. Enjoy the companionship of those who call on the Lord with pure hearts” (2 Tim. 2:22 NLT).
To repeat, run from what is wrong and run toward what is right. If you fill your mind with God’s Word on a daily basis, you’ll lose your appetite for those controlling sins, and you’ll understand what the psalmist meant when he said, “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you” (Ps. 119:11). It’s amazing to see how our desires change when we feast on the Scriptures day and night, reading the Word as much as we can, memorizing verses (or, keeping verses in front of us as much as possible), speaking those verses out loud and meditating on them as we fall asleep. Love for God and love for his ways will dominate your thinking, leaving little room for sexual fantasies and sinful acts. This is part of what Paul meant when he wrote, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2).
But don’t try to do all this alone (although renewing your mind is something that only you can do for yourself). Find other believers who share your heart, either in your own congregation or at work or in your neighborhood or even online, and encourage one another and build each other up. Paul said to the Corinthians, “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company ruins good morals’” (1 Cor. 15:33). But it is also true that good company builds and reinforces good morals, which is why the scripture teaches, “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise” (Prov. 13:20). So, whenever possible, spend time with other believers who challenge you to go deeper in God. And these days, with a wealth of online resources at your fingertips (provided that it’s safe for you to use the Internet!), you can be challenged and edified by the hour.
The Bible makes clear that sex is something wonderful that God created for procreation and for enjoyment, but only in the context of marriage. Interestingly, it is within marriage that couples find the most lasting contentment—meaning that, on average, those who engage in one-night stands or go from partner to partner are far less sexually satisfied than those who are happily married.20 They may have more “excitement,” but they will have far less fulfillment and satisfaction than those who enjoy sex with one lifelong, faithful partner. And is that extra excitement worth the STDs that often come along with promiscuity but are unknown to faithfully married couples?
Earlier in this book, I emphasized that God’s ways are ways of life. I should also emphasize that God’s ways work, which means that spurning God’s ways does not work. That’s why, on average, couples who live together before wedlock have less stable marriages than those who don’t live together before wedlock.21 And that’s why a new study has found that “women with between zero and one sexual partner are the least likely to divorce later on, with women who had 10 or more partners emerging as the most likely to see their marriages end, according to the Institute for Family Studies.”
As reported on TheBlaze.com,
“Earlier research found that having multiple sex partners prior to marriage could lead to less happy marriages, and often increased the odds of divorce,” Professor Nicholas Wolfinger wrote in a blog post that announced the analysis. “But sexual attitudes and behaviors continue to change in America, and some of the strongest predictors of divorce in years gone by no longer matter as much as they once did.”
Allow me to quote a few more paragraphs from this article. The statistics are quite alarming:
Wolfinger, professor of family and consumer studies and sociology at the University of Utah, noted that 43 percent of women had only one sexual partner before marriage in the 1970s, but said that this figure later plummeted.
“Even in the 1980s, slightly over half of women had a maximum of one sex partner before walking down the aisle,” he wrote. “Things looked very different at the start of the new millennium. By the 2010s, only 5 percent of new brides were virgins.”
Wolfinger continued, “At the other end of the distribution, the number of future wives who had ten or more sex partners increased from 2 percent in the 1970s to 14 percent in the 2000s, and then to 18 percent in the 2010s.”
In the end, after analyzing the data, the professor concluded that those with fewer partners are less likely to see their marriages end in divorce. Thus, marrying as a virgin left women in a better situation when it came to their chances for future divorce.22
Yes, God’s ways work!
I’d be curious to see what the data says about men who marry as virgins, but presumably the conclusions would be the same. As for young people reading this chapter who are discouraged by this news, saying, “I already slept with a few partners and I’m not yet married,” that is not the end of your story. If you’ll truly ask the Lord for forgiveness and, using some of the principles laid out in this chapter, abstain from having sex until you’re married, God’s blessing can overtake you and your spouse for life. You can be richly blessed!
Right now, the bad news is that sexual sin is destroying our culture. The good news is that there’s nothing stopping tens of millions of us who know the Lord from living godly lives, and by adhering to his life-giving standards, we can have wonderful marriages and experience sexual fulfillment.
So, how about a brand-new sexual revolution—a revolution of purity? Are you in? This is how America can rise again.