June 2011 – Nations rise and fall. Greatness ebbs and flows. A people at any given time may have their exalted place on the world stage, but are only too soon replaced by another.

For most people these are truisms – statements that are so obviously true and repeated so often that they become trite expressions about history and political reality.

C.S. Lewis pithily noted this persistent pattern in Mere Christianity: “Terrific energy is expended – civilizations are built up – excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin.”

How many people, however, give serious thought to the question of why this process occurs repeatedly. More importantly, is it happening right now – to our own nation?

A theory of corruption
Some secular sociologists and historians have attempted to unlock the keys of this rise-and-fall pattern.

For his 1934 classic work, Sex and Culture, British anthropologist J.D. Unwin studied 80 societies, analyzing their cultural beliefs and practices, especially as related to sex and marriage. This study included the primitive societies of history and his own time, as well as ancient cultures like the Sumerians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, English, and others.

Unwin examined the “cultural condition” of these societies, by which he meant the developmental status and energy they manifested. Was the culture growing – demonstrating what he called “expansive energy” – and then, later in its history, was it improving what it had built – what he called “productive energy.”

Whether or not a society had moved from an uncivilized state to a civilized state, and whether it was manifesting creative energy, was a direct product, Unwin said, of how sexually permissive the culture was. He defined this by identifying various degrees of “sexual opportunity.” The more sexual opportunity a society’s people had – that is, the fewer restraints placed upon sexual habits – the less energetic it would be.

Penalties for breaching the moral code might take the form of cultural disapproval, punishment, banishment, or even death. Together the variations of social reproach limited sexual opportunity.

These restraints were normally tied to marriage, and the historical evidence showed that absolutely monogamous cultures were the strongest.

“In the records of history, indeed, there is no example of a society displaying great energy for any appreciable period unless it has been absolutely monogamous,” Unwin said. “Moreover, I do not know of a case in which an absolutely monogamous society has failed to display great energy.”

On the positive side of this theory, Unwin argued that limiting sexual opportunity in a society allowed energy to be directed toward creative ends. Creativity required “sacrifices in the gratification of innate desires,” he said.

“[T]he placing of a compulsory check upon the sexual impulses, that is, a limitation of sexual opportunity, produces thought, reflection, and energy,” Unwin insisted.

On the negative side, however, was what happened when a people began to transgress its own moral codes – when sexual opportunity began to be extended in both pre-marital and extra-marital sexual freedom. Across the board, Unwin found, such cultures began to decay.

In his 1956 work, The American Sex Revolution, Pitirim A. Sorokin, who founded the sociology department at Harvard University, examined this phenomenon as well. He explained: “Since a disorderly sexual life tends to undermine the physical and mental health, the morality, and the creativity of its devotees, it has a similar effect upon a society that is composed largely of profligates. And the greater the number of profligates, and the more debauched their behavior, the graver are the consequences for the whole society. And if sexual anarchists compose any considerable proportion of its membership, they eventually destroy the society itself.”

Dissipation as a lifestyle
Sexual laxness appears to be a marker of deeper problems within a culture, and it is probably these issues that begin the process of corruption.

From a Christian perspective on human nature it makes sense to suggest that when a people stop focusing on their own sensual gratification – including, of course, sex – they have energy and interest in learning and accomplishing other things.

When energy is expended outwardly, self-discipline is exerted to achieve the envisioned goals. It is easy to gratify every desire immediately, but it takes self-control to corral those desires and channel them in ways that benefit society. That means the society that is restricting its desires and keeping them in their proper place is likely to also possess the self-discipline to work in the lab to develop a better light bulb rather than watch movies every night.

Success and progress require hard work, but so do the creation and maintenance of a civil society. In One Nation, Two Cultures, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb said a society’s common values and virtues have “a stabilizing, socializing, and moralizing effect” on the culture.

In free societies like our own, of course, stabilization and moral consensus come at a cost. Like any purchase there is a trade-off – i.e., as Himmelfarb insisted, a “bargain” is struck: “the purchase of stability and morality at the cost of restrictions on liberty.”

These “restrictions on liberty” do not imply totalitarianism, but instead refer to the voluntary restriction of personal freedom in order to walk according to a corporate sense of propriety. Instead of a person choosing to blurt out profanity in public, for example, he chooses to restrain himself due to being in what we used to call “polite company.” Civil order is maintained at the expense of the person doing whatever he wants – i.e., at the expense of unrestrained liberty.

When success is achieved in a culture, however, the process of outward expansion can begin to wane. The fruits are enjoyed, and now the energy is expended inwardly on self-gratification, and the culture becomes self-centered and weak. The individual considers his own appetites and the unhindered expression of his own liberty, no matter how profane, as the highest goods.

Thus it is not simply sexual dissipation that is causing less energy, but dissipation itself as a lifestyle – i.e. the life of luxury and distraction. This is the core argument made by cultural critic Neil Postman in his fascinating book Amusing Ourselves to Death. His title is self-explanatory.

In 1992, Vaclav Havel, who was at that time president of Czechoslovakia, wrote about what was happening to his countrymen after they had been liberated from the bondage of a totalitarian communist regime. With no outward pressure to conform to enforced societal norms, he said his fellow Czechs “became morally unhinged.”

Havel said this resulted in “an enormous and blindingly visible explosion of every imaginable human vice. A wide range of questionable or at least ambivalent human tendencies … has suddenly been liberated, as it were, from its straitjacket and given free rein at last. … Thus we are witnesses to a bizarre state of affairs: society has freed itself, true, but in some ways it behaves worse than when it was in chains.”

It’s almost as if human nature cannot stand success. When men and women prevail over nature or difficult circumstances, or when they accomplish their goals through energetic endeavor, their baser nature eventually seems to arise. Triumph and success provides luxury, which then breeds avarice, sensuality, complacency, laziness, weakness and then decay.

A virus in the bloodstream
Both Unwin and Sorokin noted that history is filled with the remarkably consistent manifestations of this process of corruption.

Sorokin stated that, in the decline of ancient Egypt, for example, “Sexual anarchy assumed extreme forms and spread through a large part of the population. Side by side with an increase of sexual perversions, a shameless sexual promiscuity also greatly increased.”

He also cited a historian who said about this period of Egyptian decline: “[H]omosexual love entered the mores of the population. The contemporary authors seem to sadistically enjoy the enumeration of a variety of turpitudes and sexual perversions. . . . They describe all the aberrations of morbid eroticism with the impudent serenity of the casuist: rape, unnatural sexual relations, flagellations, and sodomy.’”

In ancient Athens in the fifth century, Unwin said, the old customs “had disappeared, the sexual opportunity of both sexes being extended. There was no compulsory continence; sexual desires could be satisfied in a direct manner. Divorce became easy and common; pederasty [homosexual sex between men and boys] appeared; the men possessed mistresses as well as wives; the women broke bounds, consoling themselves with both wine and clandestine love affairs. The energy of the Athenians declined. Three generations later, the once vigorous city, torn by dissension, was subject to a foreign master.”

In ancient Rome – during the decline of the republic – it was the same story. Sorokin said, “The growth of sexual anarchy, divorces, desertions and orgies; of emancipation and ‘masculinization’ of women and effemination of men, together with radical changes in marriage and family laws, which largely dissolved their sacredness and inviolability, and an attendant decrease of birth rate, proceeded hand in hand with a growth of irreligiosity and of vulgar sensualist ethics and frame of mind.”

In every one of the societies examined by Unwin, the pattern was repeated. “In every case the same situations arose; the same sentiments were expressed; the same changes were made; the same results ensued. The history of these societies consists of a series of monotonous repetitions,” he said.

Is the same process happening in America? There can be no doubt that what hit our nation beginning in the 1950s was not only a sexual revolution but a cultural one. While Americans feared a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union and the insidious power of communist ideology, a different danger was creeping in unnoticed.

Simultaneously there was an attack on the Judeo-Christian foundations of our nation and the propagation of an alternate moral ethic: hyper-individualism, moral relativism, and a sexual revolution that ate away like acid at the twin pillars of traditional marriage and family.

Previous to this revolution, most Americans seemed to understand that the Judeo-Christian worldview was the foundation upon which the American experiment would be built. That implicit agreement provided a “sense of stability and moral consensus,” said Himmelfarb.Now that those virtues have been eroded, however, the corrosive effects of the cultural revolution are hollowing out our society. “It is no accident … that the rapid acceleration of crime, out-of-wedlock births, and welfare dependency started at just the time that the counterculture got underway,” Himmelfarb said.

The signs of corruption studied by Unwin and Sorokin are everywhere evident in America. Divorce. Cohabitation. The sexualization of our children. Abortion. The cesspool of immorality spilling out of Hollywood into our homes. New unknown sexually transmitted diseases. Homosexuality. Pornography.

The most fearful thing about this decay, however, is that it is not a new process unleashed by wild-haired hippies in the 1960s. It is an old, old virus living in the bloodstream, and it has surfaced in America as it has countless times before in human history.

Standing against the tide
Unwin and Sorokin both believed this process of cultural decay could be resisted and reversed, although the latter was more pessimistic. Sorokin stated that a society undergoing this corruption “rarely succeeds in stopping the catastrophic drift, and is usually carried on to gravest catastrophe.”

The key to success, however, seemed to lie with at least a single stratum of the decaying society that stood firmly against the tide until they were able to show their fellow citizens the way back to moral sanity.

“Though by the law of polarization … a minor part of the population tends to become more religious, morally heroic, and sexually continent in the periods of disorders and great calamities,” Sorokin said.

If this smaller faction continues to remain sexually restrained and thus energetic in its creativity, the possibility for the culture’s recovery remains. True, Sorokin insisted, “sex anarchy brings the society to the brink of disaster.” But “if [the society] avoids final destruction, it may ‘discover’ the minority’s creative achievements, which then grow in influence and often become the dominant factors in the recuperation of the society from its madness.”

At this point in Sorokin’s explanation, Christians should be seeing the clear biblical parallels. Believers are called by Jesus to be salt and light in their culture (Matt. 5:13-16). While there is no guarantee that a society can be saved from the corruptive process, Christians may serve to be that “morally heroic” stratum in an otherwise decaying populace.

In fact, Sorokin credited the Christian faith with doing just that within the Roman Empire: “Salvation and regeneration [in Roman culture] came from Christianity with its anti-materialistic, anti-sensualistic, and anti-erotic system of values and moral commandments. … Christianity was able to curb greatly the prevailing sexual anarchy and to restore the sanctity of marriage and the family, and the normal or lawful forms of sex activity.”

For 34 years, this is the role that AFA has played, along with other pro-family and pro-life groups. Standing against the growing plague of immorality, AFA has tried to call the nation back to its Judeo-Christian moorings.

However, this “morally heroic” stand in the midst of a contrary, prevailing worldview is rarely pleasant, Sorokin warned. “Most peoples and leaders of decaying societies were unaware of their cancerous sickness,” he said. “Most of them were sanguine about their present state and future prospects. They continued to live cheerfully in a fool’s paradise, and hopefully looked forward to the realization of their unrealistic dreams. Their leaders attacked all honest appraisals of the situation, and called them false prophecies of doom and gloom.”

Nevertheless, that is the price that must be paid to stand against the cultural rot that threatens to engulf our nation. Should Christians fail to be salt and light, they will surely experience the bitter sorrow of watching their society fall, just as the Athenians and Romans before them.  

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