What about unclothed cultures? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
It’s really sad that this is in the book that Frost decides to cite other sources. When he’s talking about the Bible and archaeology and other such things, he cites no sources. When he gets to talking about anthropology, he does.
What Frost cites are reports from the late 1800’s about places around the world where nudity was supposedly the norm and yet people were quite virtuous.
I’m not an anthropologist nor do I play one on TV. However, that being said, I want to make a few observations.
First off, natural law applies to everyone. Everyone has some standards of right and wrong and there are universal moral truths that we all know and can’t not know. Some of us can suppress them and usually we try to redefine reality to fit our moral beliefs. Hence, when it comes to abortion, you’re not aborting a human person say defenders of the practice, you’re aborting a fetus (Supposedly taking that to mean something non-human) or a parasite.
Second, there was a tendency to try to break away from biblical morality at the time. Consider works later on like Coming of Age in Samoa which was found to be massively wrong later on. The goal of many was to show these people didn’t have biblical morality and yet they lived in a paradise and it was much more closer to the idea of free love.
Third, I get suspicious that all of these sources are dated to the late 1800’s. Is there nothing from more recent research that can further back and expound on this? Have these societies now somehow become totally corrupt?
Fourth, all societies have some kind of modesty standards in what behavior is acceptable for men and women. There is not a society out there that is “Anything goes.” All of them have a morality of some kind that is to be upheld. Someone like Frost can say it is different from ours and to be sure, it could be, but it is still a standard.
Right now, I am also thinking of the second time I went to the National Conference on Christian Apologetics. We had a speaker that spoke of witnessing to a tribe whose name I can’t remember right now, but he talked about bringing the gospel to them. At one point, there was a man among them who converted and after he did, he was given a name that meant “Does not chase after women.”
Bringing a society clothing will not ruin them. If you think clothing leads to a downfall in society, you’re missing the main point. Sin leads to the downfall of a society and the only way to eliminate that problem is not by going nude. It is by turning to the cross and coming to Jesus. If a culture can be Christian somewhere in another country and have different clothing codes than mine and still honor Jesus and honor the marriage bed, good for them. In the same way, we can honor Jesus in our clothing culture and honor the marriage bed just as much.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)