We should begin by noting that sin doesn’t make sense. If it made sense, it wouldn’t be sin. In a similar way, lust doesn’t make sense because lust doesn’t try to make sense. It doesn’t even try to reason. Lust wants, and it wants what it wants whether or not those desires comport with the outside world, the nature of reality, or one’s previous positions.
And so it is that we have descended into a saturnalia of senselessness, a carnival of balderdash, a great festival of fatuities. As a culture we are spelunking down in the caverns of our chthonic and demented sexual gimmes, and having gotten down this far, the batteries for our head lamps, the batteries of common decency, last charged in the fifties, have gone clean out. There is nothing left to do but grope along in the dark, and with any luck you might grope a female.
Woe unto you, scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites.
You say you don’t need Jesus Christ, and you can fashion a public morality without Him. Well, let’s have a closer look at what you have fashioned, shall we? The Fifty Shades franchise, celebrating an abusive relationship, has thus far raked in over a billion dollars. It is all about a powerful male protagonist in an S&M domination game, and the timid and compliant woman who goes along. Not having seen them, I can’t say for sure, but I am willing to bet you a ham sandwich that somewhere near the end of the tawdry saga there will be some kind of “redemptive turn,” so that the movies might rise to the level of hypocrisy.
And then at the very same time, out in the real world of powerful male protagonists who do that kind of thing, we have this crescendo of #MeToo foolishness. Women are to be respected for their talent, their sass, their street smarts, their contributions to the company, and their “sir, how dast you?” whistleblowing integrity. Women are to be honored for their brains, which they all apparently left at home when they went off to see the Fifty Shades movies. The overwhelming majority of the readers of the books, and the clear majority of the audiences in the theaters, were women. It would appear that #MeToo can carry more than one meaning.
And so it is that we may conclude that we are in utter confusion about our desires. This applies to men and women both. First, we have our desires, our lusts, the kind which are apparent to us. But we are also created in the image of God and so we have a deep creational desire to be considered as righteous. Because of the first set of desires, and our flagrant and thoughtless indulgence of them, we are a guilt-ridden people.
Because we are a guilt-ridden people—because of the fornication, because of all the abortions, because of the perversions, because of the groping harassments, because of the pornography—we go about in constant need of justification. We need to be considered righteous, but we are manifestly unrighteous. What now?
This is what accounts for our periodic and spasmodic moral crusades. And they are not moral crusades so much as they are moralistic warp spasms. As though recycling your garbage is going to make up for all the women you banged in the seventies. As though climate awareness is going to be just recompense for the three abortions you pressured your old girlfriends to have. As though fair trade coffee is going to factor out your porn collection on your computer.
And speaking of prim and moralistic hectoring, comes now the #SeeHer hashtag. For example, Gal Gadot won the second ever #SeeHer award, given for more accurate portrayals of women in film. Allow me to point out what I italicized there. She won this award for an accurate portrayal of women in her role as Wonder Woman. Perhaps they meant buxomy cartoony portrayals of women with superpowers? Easy mistake to make—let us not be too judgey. And if the #SeeHer thing catches on, meaning that lots of starlets start participating in the hot new jubilee of righteousness it involves, you could (if you wanted, which you shouldn’t) google up the name of said starlet along with the word topless, and the odds are pretty good you could, well, #SeeHer.How dare you notice that we are now being lectured on the need for sexual probity by strippers?
“See, that’s the problem with you Christians. How dare you notice that we are now being lectured on the need for sexual probity by strippers? Only judgmental people would notice something like that.”
We have gotten to the point where our crusades against lust and our hot pursuit of lust have gotten all tangled up together. This is not an accidental connection, but rather an organic connection. The worse we get, the more guilt-ridden we are. The more guilt-ridden we are, the more we experience a different kind of compulsive lust—the lust to not be seen for what we actually are. This is why our leading role models and heroes now are no longer admirals, explorers, poets, and astronauts, but rather celebrities and actors.
They tell lies for a living, and they represent us well.