The Old
Immorality
Some time ago a friend and I were walking down Oxford Street in London, when we saw what appeared to be an actress or model getting into a chauffeured limousine while a small crowd gathered to watch. Several photographers begged her to get out of the car so that they could get better pictures. When she complied, they began to yell: "Pull your dress down at the top. The editors won't use the pictures unless you do."
Today every area of our lives is invaded by this immoral flare, which leaves no one untouched. In many of our publications and in most of our entertainment, the emphasis is on sex appeal. Even churchmen, having failed to locate the cause or to produce a remedy for this disease of man, now talk about a "new morality" to fit the times; but their so-called new morality is nothing more than the old immorality brought up to date.
Evidence of the moral disintegration of our society appears everywhere we look. A senator told me recently: "Every time we appoint an investigating committee to investigate anything, it turns up snakes!" It seems that we have gone back to the days of Noah and come full cycle to what Jesus prophesied would take place when He said: "But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be" (Matthew 24:37). He reaffirmed the Old Testament account of a social and moral disintegration so bad that God allowed the world to be destroyed by a flood in the days of Noah. He said also that moral history would repeat itself and that
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this same moral disintegration would be characteristic of the era just preceding the end of history as we know it.
The concern for Western man's moral dissolution is not confined to sociologists, psychologists, preachers, and professors. It is the concern of political leaders, military leaders, business and professional people, and trade union leaders. It is the concern of newspaper editors such as Jenkin Lloyd Jones of the Tulsa Tribune, who declared in an address to a convention of newspaper editors that our people have decided that sin is largely imaginary. We have become enamored of a psychology that holds that man is a product of his heredity and a victim of his environment. Mr. Jones said: "We have sown the dragon's teeth of pseudoscientific sentimentality, and out of the ground has sprung the legion bearing switchblade knives and bicycle chains. Clearly something is missing."
Taking a look at Hollywood, editor Jones said: "Can anyone deny that movies are dirtier than ever? But they don't call it dirt. They call it 'realism.' Why do we let them fool us? Why do we nod owlishly when they tell us that filth is merely a daring art form, that licentiousness is really social comment?"
In the face of this legalized pornography, the conscience of America seems to be paralyzed. More serious than our fakery in art, literature, and pictures is the collapse of our moral standards and the blunting of our capacity as a nation for righteous indignation. We seem to be insensible to the rowdiness of the stage, the glorification of burlesque, the drowning of our youngsters in the violence, cynicism, and sadism that is piped into the living room and even the nursery via television. We are struck dumb in the presence of bawdy-house literature, which fills our best-seller lists with risqué novels that belong in the brothel. One newspaper executive had the courage to ask his book department to quit advertising
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morally objectionable literature in the list of best sellers. We are accused of tampering with the facts. But what facts? There are the facts of immorality, degeneracy, and whore-mongering. These are not only American facts. They are facts that should put a blush on a flags of almost every nation under the sun.
Sex
It has always been a mark of decaying civilizations to become obsessed with sex. When people lose their way, their purpose, their will, and their goals, as well as their faith, like the ancient Israelites, they go "a whoring." It is a form of diversion that requires no thought, no character, and no restraint. One of the world's great historians told me: "The moral deterioration in the West will destroy us by the year 2000 A.D. even if the Communists don't!"
Pornography
Our Western society has become so obsessed with sex that it seeps from all the pores of our national life. Formerly novelists wove the subject subtly into their stories as a part of life. But today from the pens of D. H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, and a hundred lesser lights pours a stream of perverse, vulgar, and even obscene writings like the drippings from a broken sewer. Sex is front page copy everywhere.
The question is, does freedom of speech and the press imply the freedom to corrupt the minds of the people through mass media, thus inciting every form of sexual perversion and immorality? We have laws in our cities forbidding open
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sewers and cesspools. Why shouldn't we have laws forbidding pornography and obscenity? Many heroic leaders have tried, but they have stumbled over even the definition of the word "obscenity." If we cannot agree on the length of a foot, it is because we have lost our yardstick. No one has ever improved upon the moral yardstick given to man in the Ten Commandments. Pornography is anything that depicts lewdness in such a way as to create impure thoughts and lusts. However, the sewers continue to flow, destroying the moral fabric of our society, until they have become the greatest threat to our security.
So-called artistic realism, which is both the goal and guiding star of some parts of the motion picture industry in Europe and America, adds up to filth, rottenness, dirt, and animated pornography that is feeding our youth with poison. No wonder young people are sexually sophisticated at sixteen.
We are corrupting the imagination and taste of a whole generation. Love is perverted to Sodom lust. Sensibilities are so hardened that domestic crimes and international atrocities are accepted as matters of course.
No one can doubt that dirty appetites are becoming the principle satisfaction of life. In this way we are permitting the diabolic to triumph. Jeremiah the prophet warned: "Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore they shall fall among them that fall: at the time that I visit them they shall be cast down, saith the Lord" (Jeremiah 6:15).
Dr. P. A. Sorokin, one of the most astute observers of America's sex scene and former professor of sociology at Harvard University says: "There has been a growing preoccupation of our writers with the social sewers, the broken homes of disloyal parents and unloved children, the bedroom
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of the prostitute, a cannery row brothel, a den of criminals, a ward of the insane, a club of dishonest politicians, a street corner gang of teen-age delinquents, a hate-laden prison, a crime-ridden waterfront, the courtroom of a dishonest judge, the sex adventures of urbanized cavemen and rapists, the loves of adulterers and fornicators, or masochists, sadists, prostitutes, mistresses, playboys. Juicy loves, ids, orgasms, and libidos are seductively prepared and served with all the trimmings."
Ancient historians tell us that one of the symptoms of a declining civilization is a desexualization of the human race, with men becoming more effeminate and women becoming more masculine, not only in physical characteristics but in their basic characters.
Perversion
Hand in hand with this desexualization appears the sinister form of perversion so increasingly evident in our society today, of such a nature that the old-fashioned sins look almost wholesome in contrast. Nothing can alter the fact that God calls perversion sin. "There is therefore no possible defence for their conduct . . . God has given them up to shameful passions. Their women have exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and their men in turn, giving up natural relations with women, burn with lust for one another; males behave indecently with males, and are paid in their own persons the fitting wage of such perversion" (Romans 1:20-27, NEB).
The immutable law of sowing and reaping has held sway. We are now the hapless possessors of moral depravity, and we seek in vain for a cure. The tares of indulgence have overgrown
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the wheat of moral restraint. Our homes have suffered. Divorce has grown to epidemic proportions. When the morals of society are upset, the family is the first to suffer. The home is the basic unit of our society, and a nation is only as strong as her homes. The breaking up of a home does not often make headlines, but it eats like termites at the structure of the nation.
As a result of the mounting divorces, separations, and desertions, about twelve million of the forty-five million children in the United States do not live with both parents. A vicious circle is set in motion. As the Bible says: "The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge" (Jeremiah 31:29).
In every area of our social life we see operating the inevitable law of diminishing returns in our obsession with sex. Many do something for a thrill only to find the next time that they must increase the dose to produce the same thrill. As the kick wears off, they are driven to look for new means, for different experiences to produce a comparable kick. The sex glutton is tormented by feelings of guilt and remorse. His mode of living is saturated with intense strain, unnatural emotions, and inner conflicts. His personality is thwarted in its search for development. His passions are out of control, and the end result is frustration. In his defiance of God's law and society's norm, he puts a death-dealing tension on his soul. His search for new thrills, for new kicks, for exciting experiences keeps him in the grip of fear, insecurity, doubt, and futility. Dr. Sorokin says: "The weakened physical, emotional, and spiritual condition of the sex glutton usually makes him incapable of resisting the accompanying pressures, and he eventually cracks under their weight. He often ends by becoming a psychoneurotic or a suicide."
The warning of the Bible is clear. In Hebrews 13:4 the Scripture says:
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"Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge." Those who scoff at the idea of judgment would do well to study the latest statistics on illegitimate births and venereal diseases. Illegitimate births are at an all-time high; venereal disease rages at epidemic proportions throughout the nation; and all this in the face of the latest in contraceptives and antibiotics. The Scripture says: "Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind . . . shall inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Corinthians 6:9).
One of the most disturbing features of the situation is the attitude of certain Protestant clergymen. Time magazine says: "Protestant churchmen are beginning to change their attitude. They are no longer shaking their finger because boys and girls give in to natural biological urges and experiment. They don't say 'Stop, you are wrong!' but 'Is it meaningful?' " Many pastors and university chaplains now openly condone premarital sex.
Ours is an age of moral relativism. However, there are certain areas in which the Scriptures do not allow us to negotiate. In all of these centuries there has not been the slightest shadow of change in the nature of God or in His attitude toward sin. The Bible teaches from beginning to end that adultery and fornication are sin, and the attitude of certain modern churchmen does not alter its character.
Dishonesty
But we must not leave the impression that sexual immorality is the only sphere of moral danger in our civilization. Dishonesty has increased in our society to alarming proportions. I sat in a federal court to hear the case of a highly respected member of the medical profession who had willfully and deliberately
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falsified his income tax. He was sentenced to ten years in a federal prison.
The disease of dishonesty invades every profession, and its spread into our society is alarming even to the most apathetic among us. The sports scandals shocked the nation as young amateur athletes sold out their ideals and ethics to the hoodlums and gangsters. It has been known for years that professional boxing is deeply infiltrated by the rackets, and the investigations that revealed that the throwing of fights is common practice came as no surprise to many. In a recent survey on a college campus, it was found that seventy-five percent of the students admitted to cheating sometime during their college careers.
Recently as I rode from the airport of a major city in a taxi, I engaged in conversation with the taxi driver. He said: "Payoffs are the practice at every level in the city. If the business house does not pay off, they will just dig up the street in front of the house and keep it that way for a year. When I get my cab inspected, I have to pay twenty-five dollars under the table. The man who collects says he only gets to keep five." He said: "If you took the payoff out of the city, the economy of the city would collapse."
John Steinbeck wrote to letter to Adlai Stevenson in which he said: "There is a creeping all-pervading gas of immorality which starts in the nursery and does not stop until it reaches the highest offices both corporate and governmental." Walter Lippman says: "America is beginning to accept a new code of ethics that allows for chiseling and lying."
Why is there all this dishonesty in every phase of our life? Russell Kirk tells us why: "All this century, this columnist suspects, honesty in great things and small has been diminishing in most of the world. Public and private honesty is produced in part by religious convictions . . . when religious sanctions decay . . . the average sensual man tends to cheat."
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A Dying Culture
That moral and spiritual decadence is upon us today becomes evident at the turn of every page of our daily newspaper. We live in a day when old values are rejected and the sense of significance and purpose has disappeared from many people's lives. The Western world's sole objective seems to be success, status, security, self-indulgence, pleasure, and comfort. If we can judge our times by the paintings produced by some modern artists, we see indiscriminate splashes of color with no recognizable pattern or design. A child throwing paint on the canvas could do as well. As a matter of fact, at one art exhibit a chimpanzee won first prize for his painting. The incomprehensible mixture of pigment merely denotes the confused minds and values of our day. The playwright, the novelist, and the movie scriptwriter all give us unadulterated doses of violence, sex, and murder. This would indeed seem to be a sick generation in need of salvation. The cause of our trouble was revealed recently in a statement by Tennessee Williams, one of the most widely read playwrights of our day, when he said: "We have very little conviction of our own essential dignity, or even of our essential decency."1
With all this evidence of decadence in view it is no wonder that May Craig, Washington correspondent, says: "Unless there is a change deep down in the American people, a genuine crusade against self-indulgence and immorality, public and private, then we are witnesses to the decline and fall of the American Republic."
Yes, we need to cry out to be saved — saved from ourselves, for it is the soul of a nation and a culture that is dying! Hosea the prophet urged the people of his day: "Sow to yourselves
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in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you" (Hosea 10:12).
The crack in the moral dam is widening, but like the people of Noah's day before the flood, life goes on as usual with only a few concerned and scarcely anyone alarmed. However, apathy will not deter catastrophe. The people of Noah's day were not expecting judgment — but it came! We have become soft and comfortable. Watching television, I notice that when almost any crisis arises on the screen, the actor usually says: "Give me a drink." When the headlines get black and foreboding, the sale of alcohol and barbiturates rises in the country, as millions try to escape from the grim realities of our dangers.
In a seminar on a university campus a student asked me: "Is our society in the process of dying, or is it committing the hypocrisy of being dead without knowing it?" I answered: "I am not sure; but I am alarmed, and I feel the burden and compulsion of the prophets of old to warn the people. Whether they listen or not is really not my responsibility." Time after time the prophets warned the people of old, but the Scriptures say that their hearts became hardened and their ears deaf. They were deliberately deaf to the Word of God.
This we do know, our decaying morals do not surprise God. they add to the pile of inflammable tinder that shall someday be ignited by the fires of God's judgment. The words of the Apostle Paul in the first chapter of Romans, addressed to the decadent Roman society, might well apply to us: "Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful" (Romans 1:21). If ever a generation was bequeathed the knowledge of God, we were. Yet we are throwing away this glorious heritage on our lust and passions.
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Again Paul said: "But became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools" (Romans 1: 21, 22). The word "became" suggests deterioration and decay. In a decadent society, the will to believe, to resist, to contend, to fight, to struggle is gone. In place of this will to resist, there is the desire to conform, to drift, to follow, to yield, and to give up. This is what happened to Rome, but it applies to us. The same conditions that prevailed in Rome prevail in our society. Before Rome fell, her standards were abandoned, the family disintegrated, divorce prevailed, immorality was rampant and faith was at a low ebb. As Gibbon said: "There was much talk of religion but few practiced it." Today our churches are filled, but how many are actually practicing Christianity in daily life?
Again Paul said: "They changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man" (Romans 1:28). Humanism has become the god of our time. Aldous Huxley spoke of "human control by human effort in accordance with human ideals." The modern creed of "I believe in man" is a complete reversal of Biblical theology.
The great Apostle again said: "Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lust of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves" (Romans 1:24). It does not say that God gave up, only that God gave man up to unclean and unrighteous practices. When this happens, we are in terrifying danger!
Thus three times in this passage from Romans it tells that God gave man up. In one instance, God gave them up when man turned to immoral lust and practices. In another instance, God gave them up when man turned to vile affections and to immoral deviations. In yet another instance, God gave them over when man turned to a reprobate mind and became
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filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, covetousness, and maliciousness.
When God gives man up, there is only one thing left — judgment! Here it is: "Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them" (Romans 1:32). When Sodom and Gomorrah became guilty of the same sins that we commit, God judged them with fire and brimstone. The Bible says: "God spared them not." When the people of Noah's day became guilty of these same sins, the Bible says: "God spared them not."
We cannot claim to be God's pets. We have no special dispensation from judgment. If we continue on our present course, the moral law that says "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23) will mean ultimate death to our society.
How ironic it is that a civilization that has produced the best automobiles, the best refrigerators, and the best television sets is at the same time producing some of the worst human beings. The total answer to our dilemma in this debacle is that we have forsaken God. God's indictment of man is summed up in four words: "They are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). We as a nation are without excuse, because we have bartered our birthright for a mess of immoral delights. We are finding out that what Tocqueville said is true: "When America ceases to be good, it will cease to be great."
In our knowledge, which has become foolishness, we are setting the stage for personal and national dissolution and ultimate judgment. We are heaping high for conflagration. We are building for destruction. We are begging for judgment. Thomas Jefferson said: "I tremble for my country when I remember God is just." "Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment," said Jesus (Matthew 10:15).
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In the King Tut museum in Cairo there is a grain of wheat five thousand years old taken from the tombs of the Pharaohs. It is said that if the seed were planted, it would grow. The seeds of integrity, reverence, and righteousness are not dead; but we are not allowing them to germinate. There is still time. The day is far spent, it is true; but it is not too late for us to stay the catastrophic fires of God's judgment. The Bible declares: "God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). And again the Bible declares: "Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts" (Hebrews 3:7-8).
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1. Missions, January 1962.
