The Seventh Principle: Be sexually pure to create the culture of heart

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LESSON 29: The Value of Sexual Purity

A. Sexual purity is the key to establishing and maintaining the culture of heart.

1. Everyone desires to live in a world of love. It is the primary motivating force of life, and the greatest power for good or evil.

• The greatest threat to civilization is the tendency to turn love into a selfish pleasure. This happens when we reduce love to sexuality, and reduce our desire to give love into the appetite for sex.
• This trend is not just an emotional impulse expressed through personal pleasure-seeking. It is not just the entertainment and advertising which stimulate and profit from it. It is an entire way of looking at life and the world.
• The sexual revolution has an ideological foundation with similarities to communism.
• Communism was the greatest threat to western civilization in the 20th century, but it has fallen. However, its offspring is posing an even greater threat to the future. That offspring is the so-called sexual revolution.

2. Parallels between communism and the ideology of sexual liberation.

• Like communism, the sexual revolution is materialistic. Sex is reduced to a physical act for the purpose of physical pleasure. Whatever seems to limit the physical pleasure (guilt based upon religious values, an "incompatible" partner) should be dispensed with.
• Since religion is the foundation of traditional morality, the ideology of sexual liberation is hostile to traditional religion. Religious commandments are deemed oppressive and "anti-love." Therefore, sexual liberation works against religious traditions, whether in the secular society or within the religious institutions themselves (such as sanctifying homosexual "marriages").
• As the proletariat must overthrow the restraints of the bourgeoisie (Marx) through political revolution, so too the libido must overthrow the restraints of the superego (Freud) through sexual revolution.
• Freedom from private property will liberate the workers to create a perfect society (Lenin), so too freedom from private sexual relations (marriage) will liberate the people to create a perfect society (Herbert Marcuse). In both cases, the establishment, or system, is overthrown in the name of a vague ideal which will come about through liberated people loving each other.
• The sexual revolution is more dangerous than the communist revolution in several ways.
  • It appears in the name of love, which is stronger than the name of justice.
  • It exalts individualism, which is more destructive than collectivism. Communism at least stood for others: the laborers; sexual liberation stands for no one but the self, centered on the physical body.
  • It destroys the family, which is more damaging than destroying economic and political institutions.
  • It has invaded the world through the Christian west, which the world respects, and not Russia, which did not have the moral influence of America.

3. The ideology of sexual liberation has created a culture of immorality.

• Sexual liberation ideology took hold on college campuses in the sixties through the civil rights and then anti-war movements. Soon the "counter-culture" of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll appeared and its morality is still dominating our society.
• Freud took his examples and archetypes from Greek mythology. True Family Values takes ours from the Bible. Through the biblical story of the original human ancestors, we see that sexual liberation is the recurrence of the original problem of humankind in the Garden of Eden.

4. Adam and Eve practiced sexual immorality. Their marriage and family life took place outside the Garden, separated from God.

• The Fall destroyed true love, by planting the seed of false love in Adam and Eve through sexual impurity.
• False love places the body in the subject position fighting against the mind.
• False love separates God and man.
• False love separates husband and wife. Eve deceived her husband as she herself had been deceived. Adam then blamed Eve for causing his fall. Further, Adam called Eve "the mother of all living" (RSV) or "the life-giving one" (TLB), when actually it is God who is the origin of all life. Thus Adam blamed Eve and falsely idolized her at the same time (see Gordon Dalbey, Healing the Masculine Soul [Dallas: Word Publishing, 1988] 35).
• False love separates parents and children. Cain and Abel did not honor their parents, but made their offerings to God separately from them and from each other.
• Adam and Eve established and propagated Satan's dominion, by creating love, life and lineage on the basis of false love.
  • Their love relationship became the pattern for all love relationships, founding a culture of false love. This expanded into a world of selfishness, hatred and war.
  • Fallen world culture celebrates infidelity and the complexity of tangled love/hate relationships. Fallen world culture glorifies promiscuous sex and idolizes the physical body.
  • Those engaging in promiscuous sex have no intention of creating children. Therefore there is no life or lineage; hence they do not have true love.
  • Without God's life elements coursing through our inner minds, we lack a connection to God and to one another. We are a civilization of self-centered opportunists, who have little regard for the suffering of others. We do not naturally know God as our Father, but feel distant from Him. Hence life is cheap, and we think little of hurting others, having abortions and divorcing.

5. Beginning from the Blessing, we are engrafted into God's family line.

• We can enjoy a close relationship to God as our Father.
  • God can dwell with us through true conjugal love, the only possible starting point for our substantial relationship with God.
  • We become God's children, who resemble God. We become husband and wife in whose marital union God is dwelling. We become parents who substantiate God's love for our children.
• We have true love to share with each other. Our values influence the culture around us through our life as families.

6. This is the starting point of the culture of heart.

• It is the culture of the true family. The qualities of love we experience in the family radiate into the society, nation and world.
• Love is the favorite subject matter of poets, composers, artists and authors from the beginning. Naturally cultural creations will reflect and celebrate the stories and beauties of true love.

7. Illicit sex prevents us from participating in the culture of heart.

• Illicit sex repeats the fall.
• It breaks the bond of heart, which is rooted in intact marriage and family life.
• It destroys our relationship with God, because God cannot be present where there is false love.
• It damages true spiritual and intellectual ambition.
• It corrupts our personalities.
  • We become self-centered.
  • We feel the pangs of a guilty conscience.
  • We feel an inner conflict.
  • We lose our ideals and hope.
• It makes us feel distant, alienated, alone.
  • It denies parents, and hence the family and the public purpose.
  • We then cannot participate wholeheartedly in the family or public life.
• It brings shame to our family.
• It dashes the hopes and dreams of our family for our own future.
• It curtails the possibility of our ancestors' resurrection through us.
• Thus, we are cut off from God's heart, which is at the root of the culture of heart.

8. We keep our connection to God's lineage by maintaining our purity.

• No premarital sex: virginity is absolutely required before marriage.
  • First love is the best love. It is like tree-ripened fruit. First love has no precedent. It is unique and incomparable. Therefore it is absolute for each couple.
  • First love is eternal love. Even in the selfish world, everyone longs for eternal love. This is because God is eternal and He created us to be His eternal partners through love.
  • True love waits for the one spouse. If there is more than one partner, love is not absolute and unique.
  • The concept of "dating" should not exist, because this leads to the situation in which partners are chosen based upon individual desires and affinity.
  • God provides our eternal partner.
• Monogamous marriage.
  • Marriage is a covenant with God, spouse, children, and the greater society and spirit world.
  • Absolute, eternal, unique and unchanging love, which all people desire, requires one spouse. To change spouses destroys the absoluteness, eternality, uniqueness and unchanging quality of true love.
  • Infidelity destroys marriage, because it destroys love.
  • There is no divorce within the culture of heart.
  • Faithful spouses set the proper example for children and protect the tradition of true love necessary for the culture of heart.

The culture of heart is a true family culture. We will discuss this in our next lesson.

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