The Joys of Free-Sex

At least it should be joyous, according to many segments of our intelligentsia. However, it seems that another free-sex experiment has bitten the dust.

The Children of God – recently renamed The Family International (TFI) - had emerged in 1968 from the Jesus People Movement:

• Founder David Berg adopted evangelical views on many doctrines, but over time his teachings supplanted the Bible. Cult watchers criticized Berg’s teaching that female disciples should use sexual favors…to convert men to Jesus. More notoriously, the group once had an open attitude about sexual contact between adults and minors. Both practices ceased by 1987… (Christianity Today, April 2012, 14).

Happily, TFI has continued to move back into Biblical conformity. One scholar stated,

• “I don’t know of any comparable group that has changed so quickly or so fundamentally altered such a large number of its beliefs and practices.” (14)

This reversal raises an important question. Why have the many experiments in sexual libertarianism failed?  Why does a practice, which can be so pleasurable, so readily find itself in hospice care? Of the many U.S. communes that had been based on sexual permissiveness, none remain, as far as I know. What was it that these various groups encountered that had closed the door so decisively on this experiment?

Perhaps we humans weren’t endowed with a “blank slate” that can be programmed according to will, as sexual libertarianism assumes. Perhaps we have a human nature that is only amenable to a limited degree of reprogramming – a nature pre-programmed with jealousy, oxytocin, the need for commitment, dignity, honor, and sexual fidelity, and all of those other things that provide for a stable environment for children. And perhaps when this nature is violated, there are painful health, relational and psychological consequences, like when you violate the nature of a car by putting oil in the gas tank.

When we buy a car, we get an owner’s manual telling us how to care for the car. This assume that we cannot treat the car in any manner we’d like. It too has a nature - characteristics that require certain care.

We know enough about cars to know that we can’t experiment by depriving it of an oil change. We also know enough about alternative sexual lifestyles to know that experimentation comes only with a high price tag. Despite the claims of the Man-Boy-Love-Association, we know enough about the consequences of pedophilia to know that it is nothing more than child abuse. I have yet to hear a glowing testimony of someone sexualized as a five-year-old!

We also know of the ills of adultery. One psychologist sung the praises of his adulterous open-marriage to our therapy group. However, he later admitted that when he saw his wife enter their home with her sex-partner, he had to be hospitalized for two weeks. His nature could not handle his chosen lifestyle.

Why is Western society so myopic? Perhaps it wants to be. Perhaps it’s addicted to immediate gratification. Sounds juvenile? In any event, our God mercifully allows us to reap the consequences of the “pleasures” we demand:

• Since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the Lord, since they would not accept my advice and spurned my rebuke, they will eat the fruit of their ways and be filled with the fruit of their schemes. For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them. (Proverbs 1:29-32) 

The consequences are there. We merely have to be willing to open our eyes to them.