Pagan Sexuality

Why do we see so much sexual confusion today? The worship of creation rather than the worship of the Creator. It's for that reason, ultimately, that we have sexual perversion.

It's the overturning, you see, of the image of God in man, which is part of the apostasy of paganism, in order to dethrone God from His place in the world. The 1960s brought radical change, a sexual revolution swept the world, and the Christian notion of sexuality was jettisoned. And throughout this seismic shift, we see the influence of Swiss psychologist Karl Jung, who sought to eliminate any idea of right and wrong. Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. Peter Jones takes a critical look at Jung's influence and explains why it has such an intense grip on our culture. This lecture would like to develop a second phase of Jung's prediction. He predicted a liberation of spirituality but also of sexuality. That's what I want to look at now in terms of what happened in the 60s and what is happening now in our own present-day culture as a sort of fulfillment of Jung's ideas. Way before the 60s, one of Jung's contemporaries, a friend of his, Marianne Weber, who well understood her friend Jung, said, Therefore, away with the fetters that prevent a person from fulfilling himself in new experiences, free love will save the world. That was said in the 40s. You heard this later in the 60s battle cry, Make love not war.

If it moves, fondle it. If it feels good, just do it. So this principle of the personal right to sexual freedom comes directly from Jung's theories of psychological wholeness and health. But with the outbreak of the 60s cultural revolution, Jung's conviction that free sexual expression was healthy and good and the more the better became the animating spirit of the times. The satisfying of sexual desire became intrinsic to one's personal identity. Christian notion of sexual restraint to creational boundaries was adjudged psychological repressive and harmful to the mind. If the subconscious with its fantasies is the source and norm of truth, that will have much to say about what we see happening in our culture today. This psychotherapy has become the key that unlocks the chains of moral previous spiritual restrictions. We are addicted to fantasy.

It's sad to say. I told you I'm reading a book on the plane about pornography. And it is absolutely scandalous where we are. There are estimates that 40% of the males throughout the world are in some kind of contact with pornography.

40%. Now, you know, I compare this time at the Roman Empire, but the Roman Empire is nothing compared to the way our citizens are being affected by this anything goes view of sexuality. So I think it may be even worse than the Roman Empire, what we are now producing. And of course, the 60s was pretty bad, but it's far from over. It began then, I told you, with Jung and psychological health. It was facilitated by Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner, who openly celebrated the human right to any kind of sexuality and has now become one of the keys to the way people live.

And it, as a matter of fact, becomes part of the vision of a utopian future. David Galatner, professor of computer science at Yale University, explains how this has worked. Since the Cultural Revolution culminating in the 1970s, the left has run nearly all of the nation's most influential prestigious universities.

That's been proven. Their alumni, in turn, run America's culture, the broadcast networks, newspapers, the legal, and many other professions. Hollywood, book publishing, and most important, the massive US federal bureaucracy. And even more important than that, the education establishment charged with the indoctrination of our children from kindergarten up. That's the kind of social force we are looking at, that it's an elite, but it's taken power. And with that power is driving this ideology through the institutions.

And I don't think we should take that lightly. Indeed, I remember reading about the long march through the institutions where the 60s radicals went underground and away and took jobs in various major companies and have now emerged as the leaders. But if this cultural takeover is true, it explains how this liberating view of sexuality is being systematically promoted in our present-day culture. And such an effort takes Jung's vision to its logical conclusion, which is the elimination of any recognizable sociable structure based on heterosexual normativity and moral restraint.

And, as a matter of fact, pushes Jung beyond even where he imagined things would go into the outer sphere of the queer and the weird. Which makes me think that we need to look at queer theory. What is queer theory? Queer theory insists, quote, that all sexual behavior and identities and all categories of normative and deviant sexualities are social constructs. And rejects the idea that sexuality is an essential category determined by biology or judged by eternal standards of morality and truth. That's queer theory. That there are no standards. There is no sexual morality. Everything is simply one's own fantasy that determines reality. And this is the norm.

Try to oppose it. You'll see what you get in terms of your job or whatever else you do in public. And I believe that Jung is the direct source because he proposed in his writings, you remember, the elimination of the opposites of sexual roles and genders. And this was the royal road to psychological health, the joining of the anima and the animus, as Jung would say, of male and female. And though Jung and his group around him of adept initiates, while they engaged only in various adulterous relationships with mistresses, while remaining married because at that time there was the power of the bourgeois propriety, but sexual experimentation of a more radical nature was also explored on the basis of Jung's theories. And Jung encouraged his followers to have the courage to sin. Indeed, Jung needed to re-evaluate his own notion of sin.

He was brought up in a bourgeois family, right, with a father who was a Lutheran pastor. But he came to believe that doing evil could have a beneficial effect on the personality by freeing the psyche from one-sidedness and putting us back in touch with our instinctual being. That's basically our animal being. The shackles of family, society, and deity must be broken.

The libido is God. With that kind of a theory for realizing psychological health, we see the signs of the victory of this view. In the attitudes of the millennial generation, those born between 1982 and 2003, because these young people around us do not believe that there is any inherently male or female roles, there's no one way a person should be.

And that's been documented now quite significantly. But oddly enough, the Gay Revolution Party Manifesto already said this in 1970, but we just weren't reading it. The Gay Revolution will produce a world in which all social and sensual relationships will be gay, and in which homo and heterosexuality will be incomprehensible terms. That's the future, you see, to get rid of the very notion of gender at all. I was shook when I read in the year 2000 a book by a once-evangelical scholar by the name of Virginia Ramey Mollencott, who was a Bible professor and is now a practicing lesbian and, because of that, became a spiritual pagan.

These two go together, as a matter of fact. And she offered a radical paradigm for the future liberation of sexuality. She called the future an omni-gendered society.

Isn't that interesting? An arrangement of many erotic patterns of no particular hierarchy, where virtually all sexual choices are normalized. Here's the list she gave in her book. The intersexual or hermaphrodite, the transsexual, sex operation changes. The transvestite or cross-dresser. The drag queen or king, cross-dressing performers.

These are all possible sexual choices that we must respect. The transgenderous or bi-genderous, cross-dressing or cross-living, part or full-time. The androgynes, both male and female gender roles at the same time. The heterosexuals, the homosexuals, the bisexuals. Those who enjoy various fetishes, like sadomasochistic sex. The autoerotic, the asexual, the pansexual, the pedophile.

These should be part of this utopian world to which we are going. And she says that the church will be dragged against its will to accept that particular arrangement. She doesn't think pedophilia is all that bad. She's silent on bestiality. Though bestiality is a veritable cottage industry on the internet. Though this sexual liberation sounds very new and historically unprecedented, like paganism itself, it's as old as the hills.

Did you realize that? Jung's colleague Eliade, in his long study of pagan cults, noted that throughout time and space, androgyny, which is the joining of male and female in one person, functioned, quote, as a valid expression of wholeness. And he showed how the leaders of these pagan cults throughout time and space were more than often homosexual shamans. And I mentioned that I'm reading a really thick book on American Indian bardashes, bardashes who are these homosexual leaders of spiritual practice in the North American Indian culture. I wrote a long article on this in my website that you might want to read, truthexchange.com, on the spread and extent of this kind of practice, that androgynous priests were associated with pagan cults throughout time and throughout space, with apparently no way of showing that one group influenced the other. Like from the forests of the Borneo to the forests of Africa, you have the same phenomenon, but you can never show that they had any relationship, which means, you see, that it grows up from a pagan notion.

It is intrinsic to the way pagans view the world that this will happen. And so the priests, androgynous priests of the goddess Ishtar in the Sumerian age, 1800 B.C., were very much in evidence. It is said that the Canaanite goddess Anath had priests dressed up who wore makeup like a woman and expressed their otherness via their androgyny. At the beginning of the 5th century A.D., the cult of Sibelae that Paul opposed in the 1st century continued into the 5th century, and Augustine, in his City of God, vividly describes the public display of homosexual priests.

I quote, They were seen yesterday, their hair moist, their faces covered in makeup, their limbs flaccid, their walk effeminate, wandering through the squares and streets of Carthage, demanding from the public the means to subsidize their shameful life. That's from Augustine in the 5th century. So the idea is not unique to Jung. Jung was well aware of this kind of material. He read the alchemists, who were very much in favor of androgyny. He deeply studied hermeticism and Gnosticism, also with a deep investment in spiritual androgyny. He described his own relationship with his feminine side to achieve a wholeness through psychological hermaphroditism.

Psychological. It starts there. The balance of gender symbolized by the androgyny fits with Jung's view of God.

Remember? As joining both the devil and God together. Joining good and evil together.

Joining male and female together. This is why you see homosexuality in our time is not simply a civil right. It's profoundly religious in its character. And there are leaders in the homosexual movement who will say it. In other words, they actually agree with St. Paul, who said it in Romans 1. Indeed, one of Jung's close friends, whom I've cited earlier, June Singer, in 1977 wrote a book, Androgyny Towards a New Theory of Sexuality, in 1977. Where she maintained that the age of Aquarius would also be the age of androgyny. We didn't know that as we sang, This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. You see, this is the new humanism.

This is the androgynous being. But I think what she says is very indicative of the spiritual character of what's going on. She said this, We have at hand all the ingredients we will need. Oh, this is very interesting. To perform our own new alchemical opus.

Remember the great work. To fuse the opposites within us. See, this is a spiritual activity.

What does it do? It denies the distinction between God and the creation by denying the distinctions between us. They're connected, you see. And how we live, we live either before the face of God or we live denying who God is. And so she states this, and it's so clear. The archetype of androgyny appears to us in the innate sense of and witness to the primordial cosmic unity.

You see that? Primordial cosmic unity. That is to say, everything is one.

There's no such thing as a separate creator. It's all one. That is, the archetype of androgyny is the sacrament of monism.

Wow. Just knock off the M as I did. The sacrament of oneism. It's a sacrament.

Did you notice that? It carries spiritual meaning. This is a disciple and friend of Carl Jung saying this. Functioning to erase distinction. This was nearly totally expunged by the Judeo-Christian tradition and by the image of a patriarchal God. So Christianity almost got rid of this wonderful notion of androgyny as the sacrament of oneism, but now we're seeing it revived.

See, I just don't think we can treat this anymore as a sad occurrence psychologically of some poor gal or guy, or even of civil rights. We are here in the presence of a massive change in the way we view the whole of existence. So the arguments against this cannot be as such moralistic or even biblical inciting script. I think we have to take what I call a cosmological approach to this. What does it say about the cosmos? And what does our view of sexuality have to say about the cosmos?

This is the battle that we fight here that we think is mere civil rights, and it isn't. Paul himself agrees with this. You remember Romans 1.25, the text on which I based much of my ministry, goes on in verse 26.

It doesn't stop there. And the very interesting thing is that it begins with the phrase, for this reason. When Paul says that, take note. Because he's talking about what proceeds to explain what follows, right?

For this reason. For this reason, then, well, he describes homosexuality and lesbianism. Now, for this reason is stated in verse 25. The worship of creation rather than the worship of the creator. It's for that reason, ultimately, that we have sexual perversion. It's the overturning, you see, of the image of God in man, which is part of the apostasy of paganism, in order to dethrone God from his place in the world.

And this is why already in the New Age we saw this coming. Shirley MacLaine imagines her perfect self as a tall androgynous being with long arms and a kind face. An androgynous being. So this is not just about sex.

This is about a spiritual revolution. And so, as we see the destruction, or the deconstruction of gender distinctions, we're in the presence, you see, of a massive recalibration of our society. And so the elimination of M and F on birth certificates and marriage certificates in favor of partner A and partner B and this kind of thing were called upon to embrace our feminine side.

Some evangelicals made lots of money writing books about that. That's also very 90s, actually, since now the feminine side no longer exists because there are no genders. So we've reached a point in our understanding of gender where gender is obliterated.

It's getting eliminated. Little wonder we now see the push for same-sex marriage because if it's true that androgyny is the sacrament of one-ism, then a sacramental ceremony is going to be necessary. You will want to see this celebrated and publicly recognized. And it seems a shame to me that the contemporary belief of some evangelicals that there are no sexual categories because we're all human beings God loves just as we are has the advantage of avoiding the difficult debate about sexuality but fails the test of biblical faithfulness for it runs over Genesis 1.27 where God creates man in his image, male and female. You see, there's a reason why God does that because we carry in that sexual distinction the touristic distinction between us and the world. We're cosmically significant, you see, in our genders. And so we can't just, you know, say God doesn't care about that.

We're carrying our witness to God in that way. And as we move towards this chaos of gender and marriage, I think we should be reminded that Jung's new human will doubtless be a pansexual energine. It's important to note that Dr. Peter Jones recorded that message in 2014, seven years ago, and we can see even more evidence of the cultural decay that he's described there.

It's critical that we understand why these things are happening. If you've joined us for Renewing Your Mind on this Friday, I'm Lee Webb. And over the past several days, we have brought you messages from the series Only Two Religions. Dr. Jones is a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and the executive director of Truth Exchange. In 12 messages, he puts a spotlight on the rise of paganism.

He also looks at where society is headed and the need to counter these ideas with biblical truth. Request it today with a donation of any amount, and we will send you the two-DVD set. You can find us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. We can't stress enough the importance of a series like this, and let me encourage you to share it with your friends and family. When you go to renewingyourmind.org, you'll find a Share button in the middle of the page.

That will allow you to post today's episode on Facebook and Twitter. So thank you for spreading the word. And I hope you'll join us next week for Dr. R.C. Sproul's series Surprised by Suffering. He'll help us see that God is involved in our suffering and does not leave us or forsake us. Join us beginning Monday here on Renewing Your Mind.