Excerpt from Chapter Eleven, SOCIETY: Indulging ME ...

We celebrate cultural depravity embodied in movies and pop culture by living them out in our minds or in our deeds.  Desperate to personally achieve the toxic high depicted by the adulterous characters we find in our novels, we imitate their torrid affairs.  We actually root for the “bad marriages” of our favorite TV or movie characters to dissolve, making way for their heroic unification with the soul mate they befriended at work or by chance.  And it doesn’t take long for that mentality to begin overtaking our own minds, dreams and desires.  We begin searching for the “movie moment” where we can steal a forbidden touch or taste a forbidden fruit.

But then, in a sort of ghastly moral schizophrenia, we have the temerity to condemn and censure the exact same moral failings we applaud on TV or in our own lives when they surface in the character of our children’s teachers, our church ministers or our elected political leaders.  I’ve caught myself doing that often on my radio program.  Back in 2012, I found myself standing and cheering for many of things I heard former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich say as he campaigned for the Republican nomination for the presidency.  But I couldn’t bring myself to endorse him as a candidate because of his multiple marriages and struggles with adultery.  Ditto that with fellow Republican candidate Herman Cain.  I was firmly behind Herman until charges emerged of sexual harassment and of a 13 year extra-marital affair.  At that moment, my support, like his campaign, tanked. 

And when it’s a candidate from the political party I don’t align with because of its outward and flagrant hostility to Christian morality, I’m even worse.  How many times did I chastise those who would support adulterers like Bill Clinton or John Edwards by posing the fine-sounding argument, “If he can’t keep his vows and promises to his wife and family – people that he knows and cares about deeply – how can we expect him to keep his vows and promises to the citizens of his country that he doesn’t know or care about personally?”  It sounds great, doesn’t it?  But it’s also wrong.  In fact, even though I’ve used it often, it’s what in the logic world is called a “non-sequitur,” meaning the conclusion does not automatically follow the premise.  Just because a man lies to his wife to carry on an emotional or physical affair, it does not automatically follow that he will be an ineffective or corrupt leader.

Just open up the pages of Scripture and see God using King David as a just ruler (through whom extends the lineage of Jesus) despite his obvious adultery and ‘execution’ of the jilted husband Uriah.  Jewish radio host Dennis Prager takes it further:

“Jimmy Carter, to the best of our knowledge, has been faithful to his wife throughout their long marriage.  That is certainly commendable.  Did it make him in any way a better president?  Has it given moral acuity to the man who wrote a book equating democratic Israel with apartheid South Africa?

And the American who, perhaps singlehandedly, may have prevented inter-racial war in America, Martin Luther King Jr., committed adultery on a number of occasions.”

Personally, I have often stated publicly how much I appreciate President Barack Obama’s example as a committed husband and father in a nation with increasing fatherlessness and family breakdown.  But that certainly has not made him an effective or moral leader.  As Prager correctly surmises,

“Just knowing that a man or woman had extramarital sex may tell us nothing about the person.  I have always wanted to know: Why is sexual sin in general and adultery in particular the one sin that many…people regard as defining a person as well as almost unforgiveable?”

The truth is that it’s not.  At its core, it’s like everything else: the result of selfishness.  The more selfish our society becomes, the more adultery we’ll see.  Why?  Because the self-obsession of a flawed character is the very nature, the very essence of a marital affair.  That’s true for physical affairs where the desire to satisfy personal sexual urges overpowers our willingness to control our minds and bodies and causes us to act without regard for those we care about most.  And it’s also true for the far more common emotional affairs.

I say emotional affairs are far more common because many times we are so caught up in indulging ME that we don’t even realize what we’re doing.  We find in someone else what seems to be something as innocent as a good friend, not realizing (at first) that we are developing an overly strong emotional bond with them that rivals or even trumps the one we have with our spouse.  But why does that happen?  Because they fill an inward longing we have for companionship, compliments, and happiness.  Are you noticing where the focus is in those circumstances?  ME and my feelings, rather than on serving our spouse.  If there is a concurrent physical attraction with our emotional affair, it usually isn’t long before gratifying our psychological needs through them transitions into gratifying our sexual needs as well.

That’s why it is so silly when we defend our affairs by pretending it isn’t the result of selfishness.  Perhaps it’s because we are so shamed by our physical actions that we don’t want to admit our character deficiencies as well, but when we justify our adultery by claiming things like, “The heart wants what the heart wants,” or “I didn’t want to, but when it’s right, it’s right,” or “I can’t help that I found my soul mate,” or “I didn’t even realize I was falling in love,” it’s beyond ridiculous.

Marriage expert Mark Gungor, who I quoted in an earlier chapter, has much to say about these pathetic and insulting attempts to justify our selfishness.  “People fall in toilets, off of bikes, in holes, off of chairs…but they don’t ‘fall’ in love,” he writes, explaining that the huge flood of emotion, passion and desire manipulate our selfish minds into incorrectly thinking we’re in love.   But Gungor lays this self-serving ignorance to rest in a big way by putting the “love” of affairs up against the real definition and descriptions of true love:

“Love endures long...NOPE – most affairs are short lived, when the heat gets too much or the feelings wear off, it’s over.

Love is patient...NOPE – an affair is all about impatience.

Love is kind...NOPE – what is kind about stringing someone on, not being devoted to them, and two-timing them?

Love is never envious or jealous...NOPE – an affair is filled with lots of envy and jealousy.

Love is not proud...NOPE – an affair is nothing but a pit of pride that both people are swimming in.

Love does not rejoice over evil but rejoices over truth...NOPE – adultery is sin, sin is evil. It’s built on layers and layers of lies and deceit, not truth.

Love does not seek its own way...NOPE – an affair is extremely selfish.”

When I first read those points, I made the mistake of putting the jilted wife in place of the mistress.  In other words, I countered Mark’s argument in my mind by saying, “Well the cheating husband isn’t saying he loves his wife while he is two-timing her.  He’s saying he’s in love with his mistress, Mark.”  But then it dawned on me, he’s two-timing BOTH of them.  I was reading these points thinking about how the cheating man is obviously not loving his wife, but Mark’s point is that the cheater is clearly not loving his mistress either.  He’s using her.  Particularly if, like him, the mistress has a marriage and family herself.  Risking the destruction and jeopardizing the stability of someone else’s very existence is not an act of love.  It’s an act of supreme selfishness.

But it doesn’t end there because, of course, there are physical and moral consequences to our selfish choices of pre-marital, extra-marital or adulterous sex beyond just the dissolution of marriages, destruction of families and dissolving of relationships. 

Demonstrating just how mired in a pit of ME-centered hedonism we’ve become, look at how we handle those consequences.