This is the fourth article in a series on modesty in a culture of shamelessness. LifeSiteNews published the first instalment on April 7, the second instalment on April 8, and the third instalment on April 13.
April 14, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — It is sometimes asked, usually whenever sexual morality is being argued: “Are Christians prudes?”
“If only we were!” sighs many an exasperated parent, wishing we could go back to a time when sexual temptations of the most extreme kind did not assault the young at every turn, to a time, moreover, when our present state of affairs would not for an instant have appeared to be normal. Of course, the longing for an age when Christian morality was the norm in society is to some degree a hankering for a golden era that never really existed. It was never perfectly lived by any Christian society.
Yet in those older and wiser periods of Christian civilization, whenever individuals violated moral law they knew that there was a law, and they had some sense that this law was an unshakeable truth based in the divine order, the very structure of reality itself. Even as recently as a generation ago, the extent to which our present culture has become a pornographic one would have been unthinkable. Though sex has always been in the atmosphere, my parents’ generation could not have imagined whole peoples consumed by obsession with sexual pleasure as if it were the most important element in existence.
In my youth, my peers may have been tempted to pore over certain sections of the Sears catalogue, or to rifle through National Geographic magazine in search of articles about hottest Africa, or to pursue their academic interest in Art (at the age of thirteen) by familiarizing themselves with the pictures in well-thumbed volumes on Greek sculpture which our parents thought harmless. But my children are now living in a society where anything—simply anything—can be seen with the tap of a computer key.
From the perspective of middle age, father of six children and husband of a beloved wife, I have come to believe that Western man is still missing the mark, still lost between the poles of two disorders. The libertarian, obsessed with the passions, thinks that our problems are caused by repression and that these will be relieved when we toss out inhibitions. The prude or puritan, hating or fearing the passions, believes that our problems stem from altogether too much of the senses, and wishes to cram them back into the shadows of his being. Neither of these are Christian views of the body.
Michael D. O’Brien is a painter, novelist, and commentator on faith, family, and culture.
