What do we do in a sex-crazed society? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
So at the start, Frost immediately begins with this:
For the many Christians who struggle with sexual control, we have hastily presumed that the first line of defense against such carnality is the strict application of increasingly restrictive coverage that treats the creation of God as if it were to blame. Disabused of our cultural narrow-mindedness, we can clearly see that the placebo of clothing only masks the symptoms but drastically intensifies the real root problems. As a result, our culture is well-known for extremes of sex-scandals, rape, molestation, and promiscuity that is far worse than the many unclothed cultures which often maintain marital fidelity and have little concept of immoral lust or pornography as we know it in our supposedly “Christian” culture.
Frost, Aaron. Christian Body: Modesty and the Bible (p. 253). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition.
Okay. The problem is if you’re going to say the problem is clothing, then you need to show the hard data. We can go back a few centuries and find that our country wasn’t like this. If anything changed our world, it was the sexual revolution. The idea of having sex without consequences and the destruction of the family unit caused the most damage.
Now could there be societies with very little clothing where fidelity and the body are honored? Absolutely. That doesn’t mean that those societies are one-to-one parallels with ours. You have to look at what is the same and what is different. Those societies could be highly community-focused and thus there are rules and understanding set in that keep people from stepping out of line.
Consider the world some of us heard our parents and grandparents grew up in if we live in America. If you went out away from your parents house and you were misbehaving, your parents knew it by the time you got home. The neighbors would call and let them know what you had done. Your doom awaited when you got home.
If we live in a culture that doesn’t honor marriage and family and is very individualistic and everyone just minds their own business, then no, nudism will not work here.
Meanwhile, there could be societies where there is no or little clothing and there is chaos of some kind over sexual matters. Perhaps there might be fidelity, but one person who has power will murder another to get a woman for his own. Perhaps these societies have some form of polygamy as well. Would these societies be changed by bringing them clothing? No. In both cases, this is a heart issue.
Frost will say that God’s creation cannot be to blame, but this is a problematic statement. After all, Eve fell in the garden because of the fruit and the serpent both, both of which were God’s creation, but also because of her own free-will. God’s creation is good, but evil uses good things to bring about evil. It has to. There are no things that are purely evil. That’s an impossibility. Temptation takes something good and seeks to use it in an evil way.
Can a woman also knowingly tempt a man with her body for something evil? Yes. Happens regularly. That is the good creation of God being used in a wrong way. Frost has this strange idea that if something is the creation of God, then it’s automatically exempt.It’s not. All we see is a creation of God and yet we live in a world of sin still.
Frost would need to list these cultures and show what makes them different from us and what makes them the same. We need hard data. I have not seen it yet.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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