I often present on “Stolen Innocence” with Thomas Hampson, a crime investigator who worked undercover to expose both child sex trafficking and child porn operations. One day he said to me, “Jack, this is way too big to ever arrest ourselves out of. The best chance we have to make a dent in the injustices done to our children is to wake up as many people as possible.”
Stolen Innocence are a series of parent and community awareness events that expose the dangers posed in schools, libraries, social media, Hollywood, and the culture at large that seek to distort the hearts of our children by robbing them of their innocence.
After a presentation, common questions often come from parents who are dealing with their self-identifying LGBTQIASS+ children who do not believe in God or in the Bible’s teachings, especially as it pertains to sexuality and gender. This probably isn’t surprising to us—a George Barna study revealed that 30% of American Millennials and 39% of Gen. Z now identify as LGBTQ. These statistics correlate with a recent poll by Barna and Gallup that reveal that 43% of Millennials stated that they do not believe in God.
This is a significant (and complex) problem, and parents are seeking tools and vocabulary to empower them to discuss sexual morality with their teens and younger children in a world seemingly ruled by what Pope Benedict XVI called the Dictatorship of Moral Relativism.
Perhaps the most destructive aspect of moral relativism is the relativization of love. Love has been reduced to mere feeling and/or sexual activity, disconnected from its true meaning and purpose to promote ambiguity with slogans like “love is love.”
Parents will find that many of the foundational questions that children have about love and human sexuality are answered in Pope Saint John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility. So, as he does, let us start with the question, “What is Love?”
Pope St. John Paul II begins by proposing that there is an “echo” within us of a larger story, a timeless story, an echo of “something more” that burns within human beings. He remarks that this echo, if properly understood, seeks authentic love, a love that is beautiful, a love that is infinite.
People talk about finding “true love,” but what does that mean? Pope St. John Paul II explains that “love is not merely a feeling; it is an act of the will that consists of preferring, in a constant manner, the good of others to the good of oneself” (John Paul II, 2004, World Youth Day Message).
If true love is what we seek, we must find a basis for love other than feelings and attractions. We must move beyond what John Paul II referred to as utilitarianism. He explains:
[This] can only be the personalistic norm. This norm, in its negative aspect, states that the person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end. In its positive form the personalistic norm confirms this: the person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love. (Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, pg. 41)
Properly understanding love is only one step though; we still must fight against the dictatorship of moral relativism to promote this proper understanding. Yet a major social problem we face is the inability to distinguish good from evil. A 2021 Pew Research Report states:
Many major religions have clear teachings about good and evil in the world. For example, the Abrahamic traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—use concepts such as God and the devil or heaven and hell to illustrate this dichotomy. It may be somewhat unsurprising, then, that highly religious Americans are much more likely to see society in those terms, while nonreligious people tend to see more ambiguity, according to a recent survey. Overall, about half of U.S. adults (48%) say that most things in society can be clearly divided into good and evil, while the other half (50%) say that most things in society are too complicated to be categorized this way. (Ausubel, 2021, Pew Research)
A troubling statistic in this survey is that about half of Catholics (49%) said that “most things in society are too complicated to be divided into good or evil” (Ausubel, 2021). This is a grave difficulty because it prevents Americans from articulating truth and reinforces the power of moral relativism’s dictatorship over our present time.
Fighting against this relativism, Wojtyla (Pope St. John Paul II) calls out our own tendency towards sin, our concupiscence, while at the same time affirming our goodness and inherent value:
Concupiscence…refers to a latent inclination of human beings to invert the objective order of values. For the correct way to see and “desire” a person is through the medium of his or her value as a person. (Wojtyla, 1993, p.159)
From the beginning, God declared man and woman “very good” (Gen 1:31). Therefore, we ought to believe in and act according to our own dignity, upholding it in the way we see and treat every person. Without recognizing good, we cannot recognize evil—as the Pew Research Report and sexually immoral social trends show us.
When we are unable to recognize our own goodness, then we also misunderstand our experience of shame (Gen 3:7). The first experience of shame by Adam and Eve was the response to the loss of original innocence; their “eyes were opened,” and their first response was to cover their nakedness. From this moment on, mankind does not live in a state that harmoniously cooperates with the objective order of values, including in the way we view one another. From the moment original sin entered the world, we suffer from concupiscence. But the remedy to concupiscence, especially concerning the tendency towards sexual sins, is not to reject or condemn our sexual natures and inclinations! Instead, we ought to understand the goodness inherent to our design and choose to order our desires properly.
Addressing the proper ordering of sexual love, Pope St. John Paul II teaches:
We should not think of this manner of seeing and desiring as “a-sexual,” as blind to the value of “the body and sex;” it is simply that this value must be correctly integrated with the love of the person—love in the proper and full sense of the word. (Wojtyla, 1993, p.159)
Again, we must first affirm our goodness before we can properly understand the disordered nature of sin. We ought to love because we are made for love. But love can be disordered. Because of this, author Anthony Flood explores the nature of lust and its destructive qualities. He writes:
We can discern a long-standing consensus (traditional, focused on Dante and Aquinas)…on the nature and destructiveness of lust. Lust is the excessive desire for sexual pleasure that harms a person by enslaving him to the all-consuming pursuits of its ends.” Notice here that the traditional account of lust “principally harms the agent himself.” Karol Wojtyla, while not abandoning the core traditional account, offers insights that delve much more deeply into lust’s destructive nature.
Approaching from his philosophical personalism and the associated personalistic norm, which demands love of others and prohibits the use of others, lust has a more profound and far-reaching negative effect in the lives of human beings than these (Dante and Aquinas) thinkers recognize. In terms of the Theology of the Body, while lust does, of course, harm the moral agent in its inner nature, it harms others as well.
(Anthony T. Flood, “The Destructiveness of Lust and Its Cure,” pgs. 163-164, 171-172)
Against the context of Flood’s explanation, we can now understand how lust fails to uphold our own value and that of others. We can see its harmful and destructive qualities. However, in hopeful progression, we can also see the remedy which Dante, Aquinas, and Wojtyla all agree on.
The solution to the problem of lust is an integrated, virtuous love that subsumes sexual desire into a life directed to the good…chastity! It does not reject or condemn sexual love itself. Instead, it shows how chastity accepts, upholds, and integrates sexual desire into the full authentic love of the other.
To better understand the virtue of chastity, let us look to JPII’s Love and Responsibility:
The essence of chastity consists in quickness to affirm the value of the person in every situation, and in raising to the personal level all reactions to the value of “the body and sex.” This requires a special interior, spiritual effort, for affirmation of the value or the person can only be the product of the spirit, but this effort is above all the positive and creative “from within,” not negative and destructive…The value of “body and sex” must be grounded and implanted in the value of the person. (pg. 171)
The practice of chastity is an action requiring spiritual effort to affirm the dignity of the other, to recognize their value, and to uphold their good.
So, love is not mere feeling; this understanding is a reduction of our spiritual efforts and of the virtuous forming that takes place with its practice. Love is also not mere sexual activity; outside the context of spousal, vow-bound unity, this falls into the category of utilitarianism and a failure to recognize the value of the human person. Love is a virtuous recognition of the good of the other. To practice it well, we must recognize and accept our own goodness, acknowledge our sinful tendencies, and work towards the blessed integration towards which chastity leads us.
Let us reclaim this culture and its vocabulary. Let love be love because it is a participation in and an echo of the divine nature. Let love be true, selfless, integrated, and good, and let us be healed by this understanding.
Photo by Limor Zellermayer on Unsplash
