Pastor Zach's Blog

The Price of Shame

March 4, 2013 at 5:15 am 2 comments

I’m not sure the framers of the sexual revolution of the 1960’s ever envisioned this.  What they dreamed of was the freedom to sexually express themselves without having to answer to what they thought were the stifling restraints of a traditional – and, in their view, outdated – sexual ethic.  What they wound up sowing, however, were the seamy seeds of sexual objectification and oppression among subsequent generations.

Cole Moreton, in his article for The Telegraph titled “Children and the Culture of Pornography,”[1] offers a disturbing peek inside a generation who has managed to shake itself free of the moral manacles which once guided the intimate encounters of yesteryear.  I must warn you:  the frank tone of his article is not for the faint of heart.  He opens with the story of a thirteen-year-old girl named Chevonea.  A boy had pressured her into performing a sex act on him, which he recorded with his cell phone’s camera and subsequently showed to all his buddies.  Chevonea threatened to a jump from a window if he did not delete the recording.  But before she could have second thoughts about her desperate threat, she slipped and fell sixty feet to her death.  Chevonea’s story is nauseating.  But her tale is, devastatingly, one among many spawned by a culture gone sexually mad.

The majority of Moreton’s article discusses the ease of access to pornography and how it distorts our children’s view of themselves and others.  Indeed, many of our young people have gone from consuming these illicit materials to creating them with nothing more than the video recorders on their phones, as in Chevonea’s case.  And many of the children who home grow these pornographic videos aren’t even teenagers yet.

So what are the consequences of growing up in such a so-called “sexually liberated” culture?  Moreton explains the effects are especially severe on girls:   “Sexual pressure can cause girls to contemplate suicide, self-harm, develop eating disorders, or try to lose themselves in drugs or alcohol.”  For a movement that began as one of liberation, this hardly sounds like freedom to me.

The Scriptures remind us that sexual freedom can only be truly found within the context of sexual commitment.  God’s created order for intimacy rings as true today as it ever has:  “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).  God sets a clear pattern:  sexual intimacy which results in the joining of two fleshes into one is to take place only after a man is willing to “hold fast to” (i.e., commit to, or marry) his wife.  Such commitment, in turn, results in true freedom:  “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25).

As I read those final words from Genesis 2, I can’t help but think of Chevonea and the overwhelming shame she must have felt after a pushy boy devastated her dignity and betrayed whatever little trust she may have had in him by flaunting a sickly conceived video.  This young man may have used his sexually liberated sensibilities to pressure a young girl to engage in acts completely outside the bounds of common decency, but such sexual freedom turned out to be nothing more than a Trojan horse in which were hidden the stifling shackles of shame.

Ultimately, when it comes to our sexual behavior, we must answer a fundamental question:  To what do we want to be beholden?  Because we will be beholden to something.  We will either be beholden to the slavery of shame that masquerades as sexual liberation or we will be beholden to the constraints of divine law which free us to live without shame because we are within the comforting assurances of God’s will.

I know which one sounds better to me.  Which one sounds better to you?

Entry filed under: Current Trends. Tags: Christianity, Church, Cole Moreton, Dignity, Immorality, Intimacy, Religion, Shame, Spirituality, The Telegraph.