Stolen Innocence: The Human Suffering Caused By Moral Relativism, Lust and Pornography
The devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour (1Pt 5:8)
I often present “Stolen Innocence” with Thomas Hampson, a crime investigator who worked undercover exposing both child sex trafficking and child pornography operations. One day he said to me, “Jack this is too big to ever arrest our way out of. The best chance we have to make a dent in the injustices being done to children is to wake up as many people, especially parents and pastors, as possible.”
He is right of course. Today there are 60 million adult survivors of child sex abuse in the United States alone. In fact one in four women and one in six men in our country were sexually abused before they turned eighteen. Tragically the number of walking wounded continues to grow as our society has become wildly sexualized.
Stolen Innocence is a parent and community awareness event that seeks to stem the tide of this human suffering by exposing the dangers to children in schools, public libraries, social media, Hollywood and the culture at large who utilize pornography and gender ideologies to dull their consciences, desensitize and groom them for sexual activity, and rob them of their innocence.
Common questions after a presentation often come from parents who are dealing with children who are either self-identifying as LGBTQIASS+ or viewing pornography. This should not surprise us as a George Barna studyrevealed that 30% of American Millennial’s now identify as LGBTQ, as do 39% of Gen Z. On top of these statistics it has been revealed that the average age that children are exposed to hard-core pornography has dropped to eight-years-old and as a whole 61% of U.S. adults view pornography.
Here I am reminded of a line from the Vatican II document, Gaudium et specs, “When God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible.” The statistics above seem to correlate directly with a recent poll by Barna and Gallup that reveal that 43% of Millennials claimed that they did not believe in God. I would bet that this number is growing.
Hence the culture and seemingly the world is increasingly dominated by what Pope Benedict XVI called the “Dictatorship of Moral Relativism”. This poses a significant and complex problem for Christian parents with younger children who are seeking tools, including the vocabulary, that would empower them to have a discussion with their teens and younger children regarding sexual morality from a Biblical perspective.
John Bursch, author of Loving God’s Children, stated in an interview with me that, “in our modern culture young people in particular have rejected any notion of an objective truth. Among teenagers and college students about 90% of them ascribe to moral relativism where there is no objective truth. What’s truth for you isn’t necessarily what’s true for me. Thus everything is reduced to a matter of opinion because we can never agree on anything thats universally true for everyone” (Become Who You Are podcast #505).
A contemporary problem then arises in our society as the inability to distinguish good from evil. “Many major religions have clear teachings about good and evil in the world. For example, the Abrahamic traditions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – use concepts such as God and the devil or heaven and hell to illustrate this dichotomy. It may be somewhat unsurprising, then, that highly religious Americans are much more likely to see society in those terms, while nonreligious people tend to see more ambiguity, according to a recent survey.” Overall, about half of U.S. adults (48%) say that most things in society can be clearly divided into good and evil, while the other half (50%) say that most things in society are too complicated to be categorized this way (2021 Ausubel, Pew Research).
A troubling statistic in the survey is that about half of Catholics (49%) said that “Most things in society are too complicated to be divided into good or evil.” This is a grave difficulty because it prevents Americans from articulating truth. Without recognizing good, we cannot recognize evil. Without this key revelation, the meaning of our created existence as being declared “very good” by God is diminished. (Gen 1:31) Also diminished is our understanding of the concept of shame, which one cannot do without first an awareness of our innate goodness. (Gen 3:7) It takes only a casual stroll past the local high school and see the way the students are dressing to prove this point.
Perhaps the most destructive aspects of the Dictatorship of Moral Relativism is that love itself has been relativized and reduced to a feeling and then further reduced to sexual activity that has sadly been disconnected from its true meaning and purpose. Love is love…is a popular lawn sign. The result is that self-giving love is inverted and replaced by loves opposite, lust, that uses a person, created in the image of God, as an object to use.
Wojtyla (Pope St. John Paul II) writes,
“Concupiscence, then, refers to a latent inclination of human beings to invert the objective order of values. For the correct way to see and ‘desire’ a person is through the medium of his or her value as a person.” Further, in reference to the value of spousal love, “We should not think of this manner of seeing and desiring as ‘a-sexual’, as blind to the value of ‘the body and sex’; it is simply that this value must be correctly integrated with the love of the person- love in the proper and full sense of the word” (Love and Responsibility, pg. 159).
In his article “The Destructiveness of Lust and Its Cure”[1], Anthony Flood wrote,
“We can discern a long-standing consensus (traditional, focused on Dante and Aquinas) ...on the nature and destructiveness of lust. Lust is the excessive desire for sexual pleasure that harms a person by enslaving him to the all-consuming pursuits of its ends.” Notice here that the traditional account of lust “principally harms the agent himself.” Karol Wojtyla, while not abandoning the core traditional account, offers insights that delve much more deeply into lust’s destructive nature. Approaching from his philosophical personalism and the associated personalistic norm, which demands love of others and prohibits the use of others, lust has a more profound and far-reaching negative effect in the lives of human beings than these (Dante and Aquinas) thinkers recognize. In terms of the Theology of the Body, while lust does, of course, harm the moral agent in its inner nature, it harms others as well.
So is there a remedy? What are we to do to combat our present age of moral relativism and the pornification of culture that is causing so much human suffering, especially among our children? The solution is a timeless one. One must embrace, embody and put into action the Truth, Goodness and Beauty of authentic Love!
People talk about finding “true love,” but what is it? “For love is not merely a feeling; it is an act of the will that consists of preferring, in a constant manner, the good of others to the good of oneself” (John Paul II, World Youth Day Message, February 22, 2004).
If true love is what we seek, we must find a basis for love other than feelings and attractions. We must also move beyond what John Paul II referred to as utilitarianism, a form of using one another. This basis “can only be the personalistic norm. This norm, in its negative aspect, states that the person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end. In its positive form the personalistic norm confirms this: the person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love” (Love and Responsibility, Karol Wojtyla, pg. 41).
So what is a first step, a course of action that each human person can and must take to become a person of love? It is one that Dante, Aquinas, and Wojtyla agree on. The solution: an integrated, virtuous love that subsumes sexual desire into a life directed to the good...Chastity!
Wojtyla affirms that chastity integrates sexual desire into the full authentic love of the other. However, just as he has a greater awareness of the relational harm inherent to lust relative to Aquinas, his account speaks to the relational benefits of chastity.
“The essence of chastity consists in quickness to affirm the value of the person in every situation, and in raising to the personal level all reactions to the value of ‘the body and sex’. This requires a special interior, spiritual effort, for affirmation of the value or the person can only be the product of the spirit, but this effort is above all the positive and creative ‘from within’, not negative and destructive...the value of ‘body and sex’ must be grounded and implanted in the value of the person. We need to acknowledge the essential relational harm that lust produces and, conversely, the essential relational vigor that chastity effects” (Love and Responsibility, 171).
In summary, unless we have a common understanding that objective truth and love exist we can’t even discuss the big questions of human life that everyone is so confused about today:
· What is my identity?
· What is the meaning and purpose of my life?
· What is a man and a woman?
· What is the meaning of the sexual nature of the human body?
· What does it mean to have human dignity?
· How do I find happiness here on earth?
· How do I find love that satisfies, forever?
Yet turning the tide on moral relativism, let alone our thoroughly pornified culture, is an uphill battle. John Bursch summarizes the problem this way, “Modern Americans in general, not only young people, love moral relativism because it's very non-judgmental. If for example I'm at work and there's someone who's spouting a pro-abortion ideology I don't need to confront them because protecting life is a truth for me, but it doesn't have to be for them, and so I don't need to engage in that conversation. It's a polite way to step out and say I'm not going to engage. But we all know that there is an objective truth, that's created by God, Who gave us an intellect so that we can rationalize what that truth is, and the Church has been doing just that for 2000 years starting with the words of Jesus but using everything in the Bible to reveal truths about the human person. So we have to agree that there is a truth that can be discerned before we start the conversation.”
He went on, “Love is a concept that is even more perverted in modern culture. From the movies and TV shows we watch and the novels we read this notion that love is just a feeling is pervasive. If you've ever watched one of those dating shows you will hear, ‘do I have a connection with that person, how do they make me feel? I feel really good when I'm with them so this must be love.’ That's not love at all! The Catholic Church and the Catechism teach us that love is willing the good of the other, so it's not a feeling. It's an action that we freely choose and one not necessarily tied to what the other person wants. It's tied to what's best for them and as parents we intuitively understand this. For example, putting love and the truth together, if my child really wants to touch a hot stone and they say it's going to make me so happy to do, still won't let them because, one, we know the objective truth that a hot stove will burn them. And two, because we want what's best for them, we will deny them the one thing that they desire and ask for the most because that's what keeps them safe and protects them. So as we enter into these conversations with family, school boards and employers about gender ideology we always need to approach it with both of these. Ask yourself, what's the best or good of the other, and also what does objective truth have to say about this subject? If we get those right then everything else will flow from there. If we can get that portion of our identity right, to know that I'm not non-binary, I'm not transgender, I'm not gay, I'm not a smoker and I'm not a pornography consumer, thats not my identity. None of those labels, attractions or habits define who I am but are merely actions that I may have chosen in the past. I'm free to choose something else because my identity is as a beloved son or daughter of God. Once you get that then we can have all kinds of conversations.
“We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures, we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of His Son Jesus.” ― Pope John Paul II
[1] Women as prophet in the home and in the world, Chap 11, “The Destructiveness of Lust and Its Cure”, Anthony T. Flood