I'm a child of the '80s. In some ways, it was an idyllic time to grow up, because it was the last decade in which a lot of the old cultural norms still held, but the ground was shifting fast. I found out what divorce was when a 5th grade friend told me that's what his parents were doing. I was shocked. None of the parents of other kids or anybody else I knew up to that point were divorced. He was the first, but definitely not the last, friend from those days to walk through the wreckage of his parents' selfishness. By 8th grade, lots of the kids I knew were drinking and some were into drugs at least casually. Sexual experimentation of various kinds was the expectation of virtually every dating relationship, and after someone had dated a girl for a few weeks guys asked each other, "how far is she letting you go?"
It was an Animal House world, and we all seemed determined to live it up within it, though for my part I felt completely out of step. I can remember trying hard (and mostly failing) to fit in and not seem holier-than-thou even though I was a fairly committed Christian kid. To my lasting regret, I participated in the prevailing culture of innuendo, sex-based humor and hormonally charged interactions with girls. Mustn't seem too weird, after all, even if I made sure that in my own life, I stopped well short of actually engaging in sex with anybody until I was married, didn't drink till I graduated from college, and never tried any illegal drugs. My friends were mostly not so fortunate (if that's the right word). Many went to the wrong kind of parties (those to which I was too nerdy to be invited). Broken hearts abounded and drunken evenings gave way to mornings filled with regrets carefully covered by bravado ("Man, I was soooo wasted last night! Did I do anything?"). Girls that went never seemed to have as much fun as the guys or to celebrate either the parties or their choices at them in quite the same way. Looking back, I suspect all of us were just trying to fit in. Nobody talked about the costs of drinking or sex, and especially not about what happens when the two get mixed together. I'm certain lots of lines were crossed during those darkened, inebriated nights that the sober wouldn't consider in the light of day.
How did we get there? The waves of our parents' Sexual Revolution washed over us and we were its first victims. As a culture, we discarded more than we intended. We wanted freedom to have as much sex as we desired without being bound by the norms of marriage-based sexuality. What we got was sexual freedom that soon turned into complete sexual anarchy. Having abandoned the rules, we got a culture of abuse, treating each other as means rather than persons.
All of which leads us to today. I think the #MeToo movement is a mostly healthy development, pushing back against all this. Women are rising up to tell the world that our culture, which treats so many of them as living sex robots, is doing real damage. Men have behaved abominably, even if not everyone so accused is necessarily guilty. Likewise, many women have been sexually exploitative, even though most men don't see those encounters in quite the same way.
What we need are some new rules, something solid and uncompromising, standards that everyone will agree to and our institutions will universally support. But to whom and to what source shall we turn to find them? Any attempt to create essentially Judeo-Christian norms absent their theological underpinnings will ultimately fail because it has no "Why?" underneath it. "Because God says so" is a pretty compelling reason, it turns out, but "because you might get in trouble later" is a recipe only for staying away from the kind of behavior that might carry legal consequences. Nobody wants to endure that lowest common denominator approach to themselves. The only way forward, at least as I see it, is for an authentic renewal of our historic faith. If that comes, I think we'll see a culture form that values and protects the weaker and more vulnerable among us. If not, then look for the waves of human wreckage to continue washing up on our shores.
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