I may have stopped attending Sunday services at the Anglican church, but I still listen to the sermons. Pastor Jeromie is a man I greatly respect and consider a friend. His commentary begins at the 15:20 mark here, and his thoughts were wise, so I want to elaborate on them a bit.
There’s a lot of ground covered, but he talks about how most of us don’t naturally desire the things of God. Our natural inclination, as all Christians believe, is to sin: to choose the things that are not of God, but harmful to ourselves and to others.
In Western culture, desires are very important. In fact, they are for many people tantamount to their very identity. Being told to deny themselves in any capacity is akin to some sort of violence.
I feel a bit silly typing that out, because it honestly sounds like a gross exaggeration of what some people believe. Yet it’s something I come across on social media time and again.
“Desire” can refer to many things, but my brain immediately went to sexual desires (yours probably did too, I bet: don’t lie). “I’m just wired this way,” we often hear, with regard to everything from homosexuality to polyamory.
But Jeromie goes on to say that almost every single advertisement we come across is rooted in one principle: people can be made to want anything if they think about it enough. And that got me thinking about another issue that’s been dominating the news cycle lately: the “Cornell 7” rape case.
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There’s a good deal of debate about whether a rape actually occured that night, and I’m not here to add to it, since I wasn’t there. What I can conclude, based on what I could stomach reading about it, is that consent alone makes a terrible baseline for sexual ethics.
That’s not to say that consent isn’t important; of course it is. But I think our society is long past ready for a discussion about whether some consensual acts are just wrong, period, whether there’s enthusiastic consent or not.
If consent is the end-all, be-all moral determinant for anything we do, does that mean that people can consent to cannibalism? That’s not a hyperbolic question: it actually happened.
Pastor Jeromie continues to say that while our base instincts may desire one thing, we can alter our neural pathways by choosing to focus on good things. For the Christian, good things are holy things that align with God’s desires for us.
Perhaps this is part of what is meant by Philippians 2:12, which says “work out your salvation.” That doesn’t mean salvation is earned, but rather that holiness is a pursuit we work towards in order to experience God’s goodness in our current lives.
This is easier said than done. The messaging in our world conflicts with Christian ideals of self-denial and “picking up our cross.” We’re constantly told that anything we desire is something we deserve to have. Suffering, then, even in the form of self-control, is like oppression.
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No reasonable person would say that rape is anything less than evil. But given the events that lead up to it, well, you can see what kind of environment Cornell promoted before that incident occurred.
That article is behind a paywall, so here’s a relevant passage, written by a current student:
For years, the school has promoted the perception that it is deeply invested in students’ welfare, even as it feeds them a constant stream of guidance on sexual activities that are fundamentally at odds with that goal. Cornell’s health service is shocking in its lewdness, offering students instructions for exploring bondage and supplying a checklist for identifying interest in various forms of group sex. Cornell has also hosted sex-toy raffles complete with demonstrations.
Cornell’s philosophy on sex is so striking because it is much more measured when it comes to other facets of students’ lives. The school regularly instructs my classmates and me to limit our drinking, protect our sleep, and develop healthier habits. Cornell hasn’t adopted a libertarian philosophy on degenerate college behavior in general; it has simply chosen to champion sexual liberation.
This doesn’t mean puritans should police Cornell bedrooms. But if the school insists on advising us on private activities that influence our health, it should do so consistently. On sex, but nothing else, my university has adopted consent-based morality: that just because people agree to do something means they ought to do it; that one should always be in a hedonistic pursuit of what he or she wants. It’s a recipe for disaster. If my school is serious about creating a safer environment for students, administrators should ask themselves whether their embrace of a libertine idea of “sex positivity” has helped, or harmed, Cornell students.
Again, none of that condones rape. At the same time, I can’t disconnect that message from the kind of “morality” that leads a man to write “Free pussy!” in a group chat of fraternity brothers.
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As Jeromie reiterates, none of us is immune to such levels of depravity. The only cure is to deliberately, consciously choose to orient our minds towards God. In therapy-speak, Cognitive Behavior Therapy deals with redirecting harmful thought patterns. In Christian terms, we call this taking “every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ.”
Choose also who you allow to influence you: your friends, your TV shows, your reading material, the Instagram accounts you follow. “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (Philippians 4:7-9).
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