Kevin Rudd is bringing back sexual debauchery of ancient paganism
Christian abhorrence of homosexuality was not confined to pederasty, however. Sex between two adult males was also considered abhorrent. For instance, St. Paul condemned men’s “indecent acts with other men” (Romans 1:27). He did not differentiate between pedophilia and adult homosexual acts; both were sinful sexual perversions in God’s eyes.
It seems that wherever pagan values reign, as in the Greco-Roman culture, there one finds widespread homosexuality. For instance, homosexuality was common among numerous American Indian tribes. Walter L. Williams, in a book that focuses on homosexuality among American Indians, sympathetically notes that the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia, the Crows, the Klamaths, the Hopi, the Sioux, the Navajo, the Zuni, the Yokuts, and other tribes in the United States all practiced homosexuality before contact with Westerners. Sometimes homosexual acts were intertwined with the religious ceremonies performed by shamans.
Williams not only conveys a great deal of empathy for the homosexual customs of the American Indians but also throws frequent punches at Christianity for having influenced most American Indians to believe that homosexual behavior is morally bad.
The biblical condemnation and rejection of homosexuality was not a novel idea introduced by St. Paul. Jude, the writer of the New Testament book that bears his name, told his readers that sexual immorality led God to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Jude 7). And it may be that Jesus also had this sin in mind when he referred to God annihilating these two ancient cities (Matthew 11:23).
Had Christ never been born, and had his followers not been transformed by his spirit, the homosexual behavior of the ancient Romans would likely never have been outlawed in the Western world. In addition to laws prohibiting homosexual acts for individuals underage, there also are still laws against adult homosexual sex. For instance, in 1999 more than twenty of the fifty American states still had statutes on their law books outlawing homosexual behavior. This fact is not widely known because the mass media give the impression that homosexuality is a free and legal option (an “alternative lifestyle”) and that there are no longer any laws against homosexual practices. It is also worth noting that these state laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986). In other words, when many in the mass media, as well as others, advocate that homosexual behavior should be tolerated, and even accepted, they often are really abetting criminal behavior.
LESBIANISM
In addition to some women sodomizing young boys, Roman women also engaged in homosexual activities with other women. The Roman poet Juvenal talks about women taking turns in riding each other (Satire 6). As with male homosexual sex, there was no guilt, shame, or inhibition. Homosexual graphics, similar to the heterosexual depictions, were openly portrayed on household items such as frescos, lamps, bowls, and cups. Commenting on this Roman way of life, Clarke says, “Imagine drinking from an elegant sliver cup with scenes of male-to-male intercourse on it … or visiting someone’s house and seeing fresco paintings depicting sexual activity on the walls of the best room.”36
Extrapolating from twentieth-century research studies of homosexuality, which commonly indicate that female homosexuality is significantly less prevalent than among men, we can assume that this difference was also true of the Romans. That, however, did not make this behavior any less depraved in the eyes of the early Christians. To the Christians in Rome, both male and female homosexual acts were a clear violation of the natural/moral law as well as an affront to God’s divine law set forth by Moses some fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. Leviticus 20:13 warned: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death.” And in the New Testament, as noted earlier, St. Paul unequivocally condemned both male and female homosexuality.
THE REJECTION OF BESTIALITY
Many Romans even engaged in sex with animals. Apuleius, the second-century Latin author, tells of wealthy Romans having sex with donkeys and of a woman named Pasiphae sexually consorting with a bull (Metamorphoses 10.19). How widespread bestiality was among the Romans is difficult to ascertain, but that it was a part of their degenerate, depraved sexual life is beyond debate. Barton states that “Roman ‘bestiality’ formed part of the extended repertoire of pleasures.” Pierre Wuilleumier and Amable Audin in their book on Roman medallions depict a scene on a medallion from the Rhone River Valley in France of a woman arched forward with her buttocks extended toward a rearing stallion that is ready to penetrate her sexually.38 As with homosexuality, such behavior was an unmitigated abomination to the Christians, who honored the natural/moral law and God’s divine law as stated in Leviticus 20:15–16. Thus, St. Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome, condemned the sexual behavior of women who “exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones” (Romans 1:26).
CHRISTIANITY’S IMPACT ON SEX AND MARRIAGE
Christian opposition to the opprobrious sex of the Romans has left its salutary mark to this very day. The Christian ethic not only condemned adultery, fornication, and the public portrayal of sexual activity, but in time brought noteworthy, wholesome changes to how people in a civilized society viewed human sexual behavior.
MARRIAGE IS DIGNIFIED
Christians believed that the sex act was not to be enjoyed lustfully at will, that is, by engaging in it whenever it was available or by deriving vicarious satisfaction from its visual portrayals on various artifacts in people’s homes. As already noted, to Christians sexual intercourse belonged exclusively to a married man and woman within the bonds of marriage: “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral” (Hebrews 13:4). Sexual intercourse was a private act between a husband and wife, performed in mutual love, rather than a self-serving act of passion. It was to be governed by the standard that St. Paul delineated: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). Marriage, instituted by God when Adam and Eve were brought together, was a sacred institution. It was this view of marriage and sex among Christians that brought honor and dignity to it.
MARITAL PRIVACY
Another major impact that Christianity had on sex and marriage was its advocacy of privacy in marital sexual relations. As noted above, the shameless, promiscuous practice of sexual acts by Rome’s emperors and by much of its populace, often performed in public, was a reflection not only of the Roman culture having had an extremely low level of sexual morality, but also of its having no institutionalized concept of sexual privacy, not even for married men and women. In contrast to this Roman depravity, the Christians made much of the biblical doctrine that sexual intimacy between a husband and a wife was a hallowed gift of God. It was only to be engaged in in the context of their marital privacy and never outside the domain of a married couple’s private bedchamber. Neither was this gift of God to be visually portrayed on household artifacts (such as bowls, lamps, vases, or pictures, as was common in Roman culture); nor was it to be engaged in in public, similar to the behavior of animals.
The Christian concern for the privacy of the marital sex act essentially led to the institutionalization of privacy. Richard Hixson reminds Westerners that privacy has strong Christian roots. Another scholar has argued that “our [Western] approach to privacy is a function of the ways of thinking that are initially identified with Christianity.” Similarly, still another observer says that there is a marked relationship between the rise of Christianity and the rise of privacy.41
To be sure, the concept of privacy has been and continues to be abused by many, especially by those who ignore or reject Christianity’s biblical morality with regard to promiscuous sexual relations and related shameful behavior. The early Christians did not use privacy to hide illicit or extramarital sex such as fornication, adultery, or homosexuality. They knew that a sin committed in a private setting was still a sin. They had no interest in using the concept of privacy to evade personal accountability before God or man, as is often done today.
CONCLUSION
Edward Gibbon, the famous historian of the Roman Empire, said that the Romans were the masters of the world. Ironically, however, as this chapter has shown, they were incapable of mastering their sexual lusts and passions. Their pagan religious beliefs imposed no constraints on sensual pleasures. In fact, sometimes religious practices were intertwined with sex, as in the pagan institution of temple prostitutes.
When the early Christians spurned the immoral sexual activities of the Romans, they were motivated by the love of Christ their Lord, whose words told them: “If you love me, you will obey what I command” (John 14:15). One of God’s commandments told them, “You shall not commit adultery.” In addition, they knew from St. Paul’s words that “neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers … nor homosexual offenders … [would] inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9–10). And they also believed the words that followed this admonition: “The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body” (1 Corinthians 6:13). They also knew from St. Paul that their body was “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). It was inconceivable for them to pollute their bodies with sexual depravities. So they rejected all sexual immoralities. In time, the Christian moral posture prompted the Western world to condemn and outlaw adultery, pedophilia, adult homosexual behavior, and bestiality. Again, the moral teachings of Jesus Christ made a significant and salutary difference, this time by elevating sexual behavior to a level far above paganism.
Obviously, the Christians were not admired for rejecting the sexual immoralities of the Romans. St. Augustine in the early part of the fifth century said that the Romans despised Christians because they opposed their unrestrained sexual lifestyles (The City of God 1.30). Tertullian said that the Romans so despised the Christians that they hated the name “Christian” (Apology 3). One finds a similar hatred directed toward Christians today.
Given that biblically minded Christians oppose the currently growing sexual immoralities, such as sex outside of marriage and homosexuality, they are negatively referred to as “the religious right” or as “bigots.” Similar to the Romans, these critics do not like it when sensually lustful behavior is morally questioned and called sinful.
The hateful attitudes that once were directed against the early Christians seem to be returning, and for similar reasons, despite the current attention given to toleration. Increasingly, Christians are hated by many who advocate “hate crime” laws. In large measure, they are hated because they seek to honor God and his laws rather than “redefine God as our future selves,” as Richard Rorty, a self-proclaimed leftist, believes ought to be modern man’s concept of God.
When individuals redefine God as their future selves, they no longer fear God, and so they practice whatever behavior pleases them. One is reminded of St. Paul’s words that described the sexual perversions of the ancient Romans:
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.… God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations with unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion (Romans 1:24, 26–27).
Such behavior was contrary to God’s natural/moral law and repugnant to all God-fearing Christians.
By opposing the Greco-Roman sexual decadence, whether it was adultery, fornication, homosexuality, child molestation, or bestiality, and by introducing God-pleasing sexual standards, Christianity greatly elevated the world’s sexual morality. It was one of its many major contributions to civilization, a contribution that too many Christians today (who nominally comprise about 83 percent of the American population) no longer seem to appreciate, much less defend, as feverish efforts are underway to bring back the sexual debauchery of ancient paganism. If the Apostle John were here today, he would undoubtedly say what he said to the Christians in Laodicea: “Because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:16).
Schmidt, A. J. (2004). How Christianity Changed the World (pp. 88–94). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
It seems that wherever pagan values reign, as in the Greco-Roman culture, there one finds widespread homosexuality. For instance, homosexuality was common among numerous American Indian tribes. Walter L. Williams, in a book that focuses on homosexuality among American Indians, sympathetically notes that the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia, the Crows, the Klamaths, the Hopi, the Sioux, the Navajo, the Zuni, the Yokuts, and other tribes in the United States all practiced homosexuality before contact with Westerners. Sometimes homosexual acts were intertwined with the religious ceremonies performed by shamans.
Williams not only conveys a great deal of empathy for the homosexual customs of the American Indians but also throws frequent punches at Christianity for having influenced most American Indians to believe that homosexual behavior is morally bad.
The biblical condemnation and rejection of homosexuality was not a novel idea introduced by St. Paul. Jude, the writer of the New Testament book that bears his name, told his readers that sexual immorality led God to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Jude 7). And it may be that Jesus also had this sin in mind when he referred to God annihilating these two ancient cities (Matthew 11:23).
Had Christ never been born, and had his followers not been transformed by his spirit, the homosexual behavior of the ancient Romans would likely never have been outlawed in the Western world. In addition to laws prohibiting homosexual acts for individuals underage, there also are still laws against adult homosexual sex. For instance, in 1999 more than twenty of the fifty American states still had statutes on their law books outlawing homosexual behavior. This fact is not widely known because the mass media give the impression that homosexuality is a free and legal option (an “alternative lifestyle”) and that there are no longer any laws against homosexual practices. It is also worth noting that these state laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986). In other words, when many in the mass media, as well as others, advocate that homosexual behavior should be tolerated, and even accepted, they often are really abetting criminal behavior.
LESBIANISM
In addition to some women sodomizing young boys, Roman women also engaged in homosexual activities with other women. The Roman poet Juvenal talks about women taking turns in riding each other (Satire 6). As with male homosexual sex, there was no guilt, shame, or inhibition. Homosexual graphics, similar to the heterosexual depictions, were openly portrayed on household items such as frescos, lamps, bowls, and cups. Commenting on this Roman way of life, Clarke says, “Imagine drinking from an elegant sliver cup with scenes of male-to-male intercourse on it … or visiting someone’s house and seeing fresco paintings depicting sexual activity on the walls of the best room.”36
Extrapolating from twentieth-century research studies of homosexuality, which commonly indicate that female homosexuality is significantly less prevalent than among men, we can assume that this difference was also true of the Romans. That, however, did not make this behavior any less depraved in the eyes of the early Christians. To the Christians in Rome, both male and female homosexual acts were a clear violation of the natural/moral law as well as an affront to God’s divine law set forth by Moses some fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. Leviticus 20:13 warned: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death.” And in the New Testament, as noted earlier, St. Paul unequivocally condemned both male and female homosexuality.
THE REJECTION OF BESTIALITY
Many Romans even engaged in sex with animals. Apuleius, the second-century Latin author, tells of wealthy Romans having sex with donkeys and of a woman named Pasiphae sexually consorting with a bull (Metamorphoses 10.19). How widespread bestiality was among the Romans is difficult to ascertain, but that it was a part of their degenerate, depraved sexual life is beyond debate. Barton states that “Roman ‘bestiality’ formed part of the extended repertoire of pleasures.” Pierre Wuilleumier and Amable Audin in their book on Roman medallions depict a scene on a medallion from the Rhone River Valley in France of a woman arched forward with her buttocks extended toward a rearing stallion that is ready to penetrate her sexually.38 As with homosexuality, such behavior was an unmitigated abomination to the Christians, who honored the natural/moral law and God’s divine law as stated in Leviticus 20:15–16. Thus, St. Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome, condemned the sexual behavior of women who “exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones” (Romans 1:26).
CHRISTIANITY’S IMPACT ON SEX AND MARRIAGE
Christian opposition to the opprobrious sex of the Romans has left its salutary mark to this very day. The Christian ethic not only condemned adultery, fornication, and the public portrayal of sexual activity, but in time brought noteworthy, wholesome changes to how people in a civilized society viewed human sexual behavior.
MARRIAGE IS DIGNIFIED
Christians believed that the sex act was not to be enjoyed lustfully at will, that is, by engaging in it whenever it was available or by deriving vicarious satisfaction from its visual portrayals on various artifacts in people’s homes. As already noted, to Christians sexual intercourse belonged exclusively to a married man and woman within the bonds of marriage: “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral” (Hebrews 13:4). Sexual intercourse was a private act between a husband and wife, performed in mutual love, rather than a self-serving act of passion. It was to be governed by the standard that St. Paul delineated: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). Marriage, instituted by God when Adam and Eve were brought together, was a sacred institution. It was this view of marriage and sex among Christians that brought honor and dignity to it.
MARITAL PRIVACY
Another major impact that Christianity had on sex and marriage was its advocacy of privacy in marital sexual relations. As noted above, the shameless, promiscuous practice of sexual acts by Rome’s emperors and by much of its populace, often performed in public, was a reflection not only of the Roman culture having had an extremely low level of sexual morality, but also of its having no institutionalized concept of sexual privacy, not even for married men and women. In contrast to this Roman depravity, the Christians made much of the biblical doctrine that sexual intimacy between a husband and a wife was a hallowed gift of God. It was only to be engaged in in the context of their marital privacy and never outside the domain of a married couple’s private bedchamber. Neither was this gift of God to be visually portrayed on household artifacts (such as bowls, lamps, vases, or pictures, as was common in Roman culture); nor was it to be engaged in in public, similar to the behavior of animals.
The Christian concern for the privacy of the marital sex act essentially led to the institutionalization of privacy. Richard Hixson reminds Westerners that privacy has strong Christian roots. Another scholar has argued that “our [Western] approach to privacy is a function of the ways of thinking that are initially identified with Christianity.” Similarly, still another observer says that there is a marked relationship between the rise of Christianity and the rise of privacy.41
To be sure, the concept of privacy has been and continues to be abused by many, especially by those who ignore or reject Christianity’s biblical morality with regard to promiscuous sexual relations and related shameful behavior. The early Christians did not use privacy to hide illicit or extramarital sex such as fornication, adultery, or homosexuality. They knew that a sin committed in a private setting was still a sin. They had no interest in using the concept of privacy to evade personal accountability before God or man, as is often done today.
CONCLUSION
Edward Gibbon, the famous historian of the Roman Empire, said that the Romans were the masters of the world. Ironically, however, as this chapter has shown, they were incapable of mastering their sexual lusts and passions. Their pagan religious beliefs imposed no constraints on sensual pleasures. In fact, sometimes religious practices were intertwined with sex, as in the pagan institution of temple prostitutes.
When the early Christians spurned the immoral sexual activities of the Romans, they were motivated by the love of Christ their Lord, whose words told them: “If you love me, you will obey what I command” (John 14:15). One of God’s commandments told them, “You shall not commit adultery.” In addition, they knew from St. Paul’s words that “neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers … nor homosexual offenders … [would] inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9–10). And they also believed the words that followed this admonition: “The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body” (1 Corinthians 6:13). They also knew from St. Paul that their body was “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). It was inconceivable for them to pollute their bodies with sexual depravities. So they rejected all sexual immoralities. In time, the Christian moral posture prompted the Western world to condemn and outlaw adultery, pedophilia, adult homosexual behavior, and bestiality. Again, the moral teachings of Jesus Christ made a significant and salutary difference, this time by elevating sexual behavior to a level far above paganism.
Obviously, the Christians were not admired for rejecting the sexual immoralities of the Romans. St. Augustine in the early part of the fifth century said that the Romans despised Christians because they opposed their unrestrained sexual lifestyles (The City of God 1.30). Tertullian said that the Romans so despised the Christians that they hated the name “Christian” (Apology 3). One finds a similar hatred directed toward Christians today.
Given that biblically minded Christians oppose the currently growing sexual immoralities, such as sex outside of marriage and homosexuality, they are negatively referred to as “the religious right” or as “bigots.” Similar to the Romans, these critics do not like it when sensually lustful behavior is morally questioned and called sinful.
The hateful attitudes that once were directed against the early Christians seem to be returning, and for similar reasons, despite the current attention given to toleration. Increasingly, Christians are hated by many who advocate “hate crime” laws. In large measure, they are hated because they seek to honor God and his laws rather than “redefine God as our future selves,” as Richard Rorty, a self-proclaimed leftist, believes ought to be modern man’s concept of God.
When individuals redefine God as their future selves, they no longer fear God, and so they practice whatever behavior pleases them. One is reminded of St. Paul’s words that described the sexual perversions of the ancient Romans:
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.… God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations with unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion (Romans 1:24, 26–27).
Such behavior was contrary to God’s natural/moral law and repugnant to all God-fearing Christians.
By opposing the Greco-Roman sexual decadence, whether it was adultery, fornication, homosexuality, child molestation, or bestiality, and by introducing God-pleasing sexual standards, Christianity greatly elevated the world’s sexual morality. It was one of its many major contributions to civilization, a contribution that too many Christians today (who nominally comprise about 83 percent of the American population) no longer seem to appreciate, much less defend, as feverish efforts are underway to bring back the sexual debauchery of ancient paganism. If the Apostle John were here today, he would undoubtedly say what he said to the Christians in Laodicea: “Because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:16).
Schmidt, A. J. (2004). How Christianity Changed the World (pp. 88–94). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
