The title is a reference to a concept espoused decades ago by U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY). The idea was not original to Moynihan, but the phrase meant that as bad behavior becomes more pervasive a limit is crossed and society simply begins to accept it.

The same year that Senator Moynihan gained notice for his comments, columnist Charles Krauthammer expanded Moynihan’s point by suggesting the opposite. Not only were we “normalizing what was once considered deviant,” but we were also “finding deviant what was once considered normal.” As morals decline, the rejection of morality also occurs. We see this more and more today.

It seems that the pervasive nature of pornography, which is available like never before in history, is impacting mindsets. According to Gallup Polling, the percent of Americans who now say that pornography is “morally acceptable” is at an all-time high with 43 percent now expressing this view, up from 36 percent in the previous year’s survey.

The Institute for Family Studies discusses some of the implications of this.  One of the problems they note is that the people who view pornography at younger ages are less likely to marry or more likely to delay marriage.

The theory that porn use is linked to a decline in marriage is one that University of Austin professor Mark Regnerus, the author of Cheap Sex, has noted with the Institute before. “At best, porn will augment—or compete with—sex, and stall marriage,” Regnerus warned. “At worst, sexual technology threatens to undermine coupled sex altogether.”

Beyond marriage, other experts worry about the long-term impact of widespread pornography on the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of young people who are growing up in a porn-saturated world.  A study by BYU professor and family therapist Mark Butler found a link between young people’s increasing use of pornography and their experience of loneliness and isolation. Butler suggested that pornography’s “potential to mislead and misshape young people’s views of women and men, relationships, intimacy, and sexuality during their formative years is very real—making a pornography-loneliness partnership a threat to their overall sexual and relational well-being.”

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

The release of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie is a more important and lamentable event than many Christians may realize. What the movie represents is nothing less than the evolution of pornography in an age increasingly distant from a biblical vision of sexuality and human dignity.

One of the hallmarks of the Christian worldview is an affirmation of the unity of the transcendentals — the good, the beautiful, and the true. Christianity affirms — and demands — that the good, the beautiful, and the true are actually one, unified in their source. The source of what is good, beautiful, and true is none other than God himself, who alone is infinitely good, beautiful, and true. Our very knowledge of beauty, goodness, and truth are due to God’s gifts of revelation and creation. He defines the good, the true, and the beautiful by his being, and they are unified in him.

This means that Christians believe the radical truth that nothing good can be ugly, that nothing untrue can be beautiful, and that everything beautiful and true is also good.

To attempt a separation of the good, the true, and the beautiful is, by Christian understanding, both impossible and self-defeating. Furthermore, the attempt to separate them is sinful — an act of defiance.

For this reason the Christian worldview insists that the face of a child with Down syndrome is infinitely more beautiful than an airbrushed model on the cover of a fashion magazine. The model may be pretty, but every human being is beautiful, simply by virtue of being made in the image of God. That grounding of human dignity points to the fact of our creation by a loving and merciful God, who made us in his image, and revealed this truth in our very existence and in our capacity to know him. He revealed this truth explicitly in Holy Scripture, and this means that every single human being, at every stage of development, possesses full human dignity.

The corruption of the gift of sex is, more than often realized, an assault upon that human dignity that is the Creator’s gift. The attempt to declare beauty at the expense of goodness and truth is at the heart of the problem of pornography. Now, we live in a society fast losing even a sense of shame about its pornographic obsessions.

The explosive sales of the Fifty Shades book series alerted many Christians to the fact of female-oriented pornography. While far more attention had been devoted to the visual nature of most male-oriented pornography, the Fifty Shades phenomenon underlined the public mainstreaming of pornography that would find a primary audience among women — narrative pornography in book form.

While many had noted the attraction of so-called “romance novels” to many women, the arrival of the Fifty Shades series announced that the culture at large was ready to shift to what can only be described as explicitly pornographic. Furthermore, the plot line of the series, now quite well known in the larger society, is devoted to forms of sexuality that had historically been defined as perverse and abusive.

The lost sense of shame is not only documented in the unprecedented sales of the series in book form, but also by the mainstream celebration of the movie.

A culture that is determined to reduce all sexual morality to the issue of adult consent is now ready to eat popcorn while watching the corruption of the gift of sex and, in effect, granting approval to the vision of sexuality that is the film’s very essence.

This next stage in the evolution of pornography combines, in an unprecedented way, male-oriented visual pornography with female-oriented narrative pornography. The movie is being marketed on Valentine’s Day as an adventure for couples — something offered to both men and women.

That something is a lie. The late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan spoke of our tendency to “define deviancy down.” That is one of the marks of our age. The Fifty Shades movie will not be legally defined as obscenity or pornography. In our age, almost nothing is. But biblically speaking, there can be no question about the fact that the Fifty Shades phenomenon is explicitly pornographic — defined in the New Testament by the Greek word porneia — which refers directly to any illicit sexual impulse or act. Pornography, whatever its form, is intended to produce that wrongful sexual impulse.

Going to see Fifty Shades of Grey, or reading the book series, is an exercise in pornographic intent and effect. It is also an act of defiance against the goodness of the gift of sex as granted to humanity by God. Furthermore, the series is an assault upon the dignity of every human being.

The loss of shame in modern society is championed as a sign of cultural progress in many circles and as a step forward in mental health by many therapists. More than anything else, however, it points to the depth of the confusion that inevitably accompanies the corruption of God’s gifts.

Christianity celebrates the unity of the good, the beautiful, and the true in God himself. In obedience, we must seek to unify the true and the beautiful and the good in our hearts and minds — and in our bodies.

Words from the Book of Common Prayer‘s service of Holy Matrimony will serve us well here. Christians know that the good, the true, and the beautiful are always and evermore united. What God has joined together, let no one tear asunder.

This article was originally posted at the AlbertMohler.com website.

De-Pornifying Culture

Looking at culture, it’s tempting to give up in despair. As the dad of little girls, for example, when I see the relentless objectification of women by celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, I’m tempted to think that any attempt in what William Wilberforce called a “reformation of manners” is futile. It seems that instead, in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, we have to “define deviance down.”

But lately, there have been encouraging signs. It’s too soon to call it a “reformation of manners” but a backlash to what one recent author called our cultural vulgarity is already asserting itself—not via the boycotts of angry culture warriors but by some of the unlikeliest cultural allies in politics, the media, and the music industry. For example, several celebrities have spoken out who’ve been repulsed by the shameless pornification of “entertainers” such as Miley Cyrus.

Singer Sinead O’Connor warned her in a direct letter, “Nothing but harm will come in the long run from allowing yourself to be exploited…. It is absolutely NOT … an empowerment of yourself or any other young women, for you to send across the message that you are to be valued … more for your sexual appeal than your obvious talent.”

And Joan Rivers said, “We get it: You’re no longer Hannah Montana … but could you do it with a little more grace?”

Media critics are also experiencing something of a moral gag reflex. Critic Lee Siegel of The Wall Street Journal, no prude himself, wonders how we became so coarse, in the process draining the mystery and pleasure right out of sex.

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf says that pornography is actually killing our desire for sex. Indeed, one study shows that couples may be having 20 percent less sex than they did ten years ago. With all the celebration of sex, I wonder why?

Jonah Goldberg writes, “Today, there’s nothing suggestive about Miley Cyrus. Nobody watching her twerk thinks, ‘I wonder what she’s getting at?’”

And writing for Glamour, a decidedly liberal magazine, television star Rashida Jones calls for a new conversation about the exploitation of Miley Cyrus: “This isn’t showing female sexuality; this is showing what it looks like when women sell sex,” Jones says. “Also, let’s be real. Every woman’s sexuality is different. Can all of us really be into stripper moves?”

And even some politicians are aggressively trying to draw some boundaries, at least overseas. A parliamentarian in Iceland, described as “ultra-liberal” by The Economist, is attempting to outlaw online pornography, believing it contributes to prostitution. British Prime Minister David Cameron hopes to change the default setting on online porn to blocked, unless a household specifically chooses to opt in. Porn in homes is, he says, “corroding childhood.” They’re seeing the consequences of bad ideas about sex in the real world.

Now, many of these new allies have little on which to base their revulsion of the new vulgarity other than their feelings. They know it’s destructive and hurtful to women, children, and families, but they don’t know why. And that’s where Christians can step in with a little gentle teaching about worldview. We might even be surprised at their response.

The culture’s growing acknowledgement of the hurtfulness of porn reveals, in the words of our friend J. Budziszewski, “The task of debate about morality is not so much teaching people what they have no clue about, but bringing to the surface the latent moral knowledge or suppressed moral knowledge that they have already.”

We can explain that our opposition to the pornification of culture is not because we’re afraid of sex, but because we abhor the consequences of its misuse for those created in the image of God. We can confidently tell them that the good gift of sex in marriage brings children, and intimacy, and allows us to learn something of the love of God for his people. The pornification of culture cheapens and obscures this valuable gift.

And that can help explain where all of this gagging has been coming from.

This article was originally posted at the BreakPoint.com website, and the audio broadcast originally aired January 7, 2014.