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Influential Evangelical leader: The sexual revolution started with contraception
LifeSite News ^ | 12-18-15 | Ben Johnson

Posted on 12/20/2015 4:51:09 PM PST by ReformationFan

December 18, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – One of the most influential evangelical Christian leaders in the United States says the sexual revolution began with the widespread availability of birth control.

Dr. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, made the remarks Saturday on David Wheaton's "The Christian Worldview" radio show.

“We are clearly at a very important turning point, but you have to go back to the early twentieth century when sexual revolutionaries largely funded an effort to separate sex and procreation, and that was birth control," Dr. Mohler said.

"Most Christians seem to think today that birth control was just something that came along as something of a scientific or medical development," Mohler said. "They fail to see that it was driven by moral revolutionaries who knew that you couldn’t have a moral revolution, you especially couldn’t have a sexual revolution, unless you could separate sex and babies.”

In recent years, evangelical Christians and observers in general have taught the harms inflicted by birth control - from the potential abortifacient properties of some forms of contraception to the way it has unleashed promiscuity and inhibited true intimacy. Author Mary Eberstadt, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told LifeSiteNews that when she wrote her 2012 book on contemporary sexual mores and their consequences, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, "I was just blown away by" the accuracy of Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae. She said the subsequent rise of commitment-free sex destroyed marriages, spread diseases, and led to the nation's skyrocketing rate of illegitimate births.

Dr. Mohler, who released the new book We Cannot be Silent in October, said the second major development that undermined the family was the no-fault divorce "revolution."

In the six year period between 1977 and 1983, 39 states passed laws allowing either party to end a marriage for any reason, or no reason.

"That was massive," he said. "Evangelical Christians just didn't recognize it for what it was."

"You can't have anything like same-sex 'marriage' until you redefine marriage, eliminating it as a lifelong covenant," he said.

Degrading marriage led to a "massive spike in cohabitation among heterosexuals."

“One kind of sexual misbehavior leads to the rationalization of another," he said. "Thus, we couldn’t have the Obergefell decision that came this June, we couldn’t have the legalization of same-sex 'marriage,' if there hadn’t been a lot of sexual revolution before we got there.”

Dr. Mohler went on to answer a question he is frequently asked: Whether faithful Christians should attend the same-sex "wedding" ceremony of a friend or relative.

"Absolutely not, because to participate in a same-sex 'wedding' in any way is uniquely to give an affirmation of it," he said.

While he encouraged faithful Christians to "establish a relationship" with homosexuals in order "to share the Gospel," he said that "going to a [same-sex] 'wedding' is the one thing we can’t do.”


TOPICS: Catholic; Evangelical Christian; Moral Issues; Religion & Culture
KEYWORDS: almohler; baptist; birthcontrol; contraception; eisenstadtvbaird; griswoldvconnecticut; homosexualagenda; lawrencevtexas; mohler; moralabsolutes; pill; plannedbutcherhood; plannedparenthood; prolife; roevwade; romancatholic; thepill
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1 posted on 12/20/2015 4:51:09 PM PST by ReformationFan
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To: ReformationFan

Catholics have said this all along. At least I have.


2 posted on 12/20/2015 4:51:50 PM PST by Salvation ("With God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26)
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To: ReformationFan
Wow, it only took him 85 years to figure out that what the Catholic Church has said all along is absolutely true.
3 posted on 12/20/2015 4:55:55 PM PST by Rashputin (Jesus Christ doesn't evacuate His troops, He leads them to victory.)
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To: ReformationFan

The truth is that once marriage is no longer about children, then how far and how perverse you want to make it is simply a question of degree.


4 posted on 12/20/2015 5:01:42 PM PST by Wyrd bið ful aræd (Don't Tread On Me)
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To: ReformationFan

The pill.....


5 posted on 12/20/2015 5:03:41 PM PST by Intolerant in NJ
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To: Rashputin
Wow, it only took him 85 years to figure out that what the Catholic Church has said all along is absolutely true.

Paul warned us about those introducing false teachings, "For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths." (2 Tim. 4:3-4).

6 posted on 12/20/2015 5:08:58 PM PST by FatherofFive (Islam is evil and must be eradicated)
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To: Intolerant in NJ

IMHO it was abortion on demand.
When mothers can kill babies the role of parent changed and morality died.


7 posted on 12/20/2015 5:13:03 PM PST by jonose
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To: Intolerant in NJ

“The pill.....”

Yes, that was it. The pill, legal abortion as the fail safe for that, and no-fault divorce. But, really it was the pill that changed the world. We don’t call even asprin THE pill, it’s birth control that got that honorific.


8 posted on 12/20/2015 5:14:12 PM PST by jocon307
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To: ReformationFan

Actually, it started with all those GIs returning home from WW2 having been exposed to European morays. The pill and contraception was a reaction.


9 posted on 12/20/2015 5:23:48 PM PST by ameribbean expat
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To: ReformationFan
The sexual revolution started with effective treatments for venereal diseases.

It accelerated with contraception.

Venereal diseases acted as a far more effective brake against promiscuous men than contraception ever had or ever will. It also acts as a brake against women.

I will also point out that DNA testing has decreased the effect of contraception somewhat.

Both contraception and treatment of venereal disease pale as factors next to the big enchilada of spreading promiscuity.

Government welfare as financial supporter of any children engendered. This removed (albeit not completely) the financial burden promiscuity resulting in children. It created a vast underclass of women who pumped out children as if they were breeding stock to keep those government checks coming in.

10 posted on 12/20/2015 5:24:57 PM PST by MrEdd (Heck? Geewhiz Cripes, thats the place where people who don't believe in Gosh think they aint going.)
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To: ReformationFan

That is true -the pill. What of it?

and Griswold v CT said contraception was a “fundamental right” which ushered in Roe v Wade (1973) and on and on.

But so what?


11 posted on 12/20/2015 5:25:22 PM PST by shalom aleichem
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To: ReformationFan

If Christians had rejected the Pill and had retained the birth rates of the 50s, as Catholics are taught (and fail to adhere to), do you think there would be enough secularists and immigrants in this country to elect an Obama in 2008?


12 posted on 12/20/2015 5:31:26 PM PST by ReaganGeneration2
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To: ReformationFan

Happy to hear it.


From Humanae Vitae, 7-25-68:

Consequences of Artificial Methods

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html


13 posted on 12/20/2015 5:32:51 PM PST by mlizzy (America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe/Wade has deformed a great nation. -MT)
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To: Salvation
Catholics have said this all along. At least I have.

A think one of the Popes said it, too.

14 posted on 12/20/2015 5:35:41 PM PST by o_1_2_3__ ( –)
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To: ReformationFan
“We are clearly at a very important turning point, but you have to go back to the early twentieth century when sexual revolutionaries largely funded an effort to separate sex and procreation, and that was birth control," Dr. Mohler said.

Better check history. For as long as people have understood that certain activity causes pregnancy, people have been looking at ways to avoid pregnancy. Contraceptives of one kind or another have been around for thousands of years. IIRC, they were found among King Tut's burial paraphernalia.

15 posted on 12/20/2015 5:39:11 PM PST by exDemMom (Current visual of the hole the US continues to dig itself into: http://www.usdebtclock.org/)
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To: exDemMom

But not until very recently was
has there been effective, mass-produce-able B.C. and the will to use it en masse among the populace. Casanova’s “curiously-wrought whale-skin virginity cap” never really caught on. Modern B.C. has, and not at all for the better.


16 posted on 12/20/2015 5:46:04 PM PST by Wyrd bið ful aræd (Don't Tread On Me)
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To: Rashputin
“Wow, it only took him 85 years to figure out...” Let's give Mohler credit for voicing what is an unpopular opinion among evangelical Protestants. (In the early 70s, the official position of the Southern Baptists was, I believe, pro-choice. They've come a long way, baby.)
17 posted on 12/20/2015 5:48:04 PM PST by utahagen
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To: ameribbean expat

Started well before then, back in the 1920s.


18 posted on 12/20/2015 5:51:15 PM PST by Campion (Halten Sie sich unbedingt an die Lehre!)
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To: exDemMom

Seems to me that argument would hold more weight if there were at least some Christian groups that officially accepted it a few centuries ago. To my understanding they all seemed to get on board after 1930ish or so which makes me think the ease and quantity of manufacture at least played some part.

Freegards


19 posted on 12/20/2015 6:03:27 PM PST by Ransomed
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To: ReformationFan
"We are clearly at a very important turning point, but you have to go back to the early twentieth century when sexual revolutionaries largely funded an effort to separate sex and procreation, and that was birth control," Dr. Mohler said.

Which just destroyed his premise.

Contraception is more the symptom of the sin that was already in the heart. If the sin is there, the actions follow.

The action of sin never proceeds the inception in the heart.

20 posted on 12/20/2015 6:05:31 PM PST by metmom (...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith...)
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