Tuesday, August 2, 2022 – AlbertMohler.com – Albert Mohler
Dr. Dimie Ogoina, who’s director of medicine and infectious diseases at Niger Delta University in Nigeria, began several years ago to trace outbreaks of a virus that became known as monkeypox. Most recently, he detected it in an 11-year-old boy who is believed to have been playing with monkeys. It is now believed that that child was the source of the current outbreak of the monkeypox virus.
Now, this particular virus is known as zoonotic, which just to say it originated in animals and then spread across species to humans. But the reason we’re talking about it right now is because the outbreak has reached the United States. Counties like Broward County, Florida, have noted marked outbreaks of the disease. But it is not evenly distributed throughout the population. We are indeed looking at a medical crisis, but it’s also buried in medical confusion. That’s really not caused by medicine, but by moral insanity, thus, the paradox of monkeypox.
Returning to Nigeria and Dr. Ogoina, he noticed something interesting. Eventually, the cases that were presenting themselves in Nigeria were not children who might well have been playing with monkeys, thus the source of the monkeypox, but rather in young men described by the doctor as healthy young men in their 20s and 30s, and the painful and unmistakable blisters characteristic of the disease were, well, let’s put it delicately, in their most private regions. Very quickly, the doctor came to the conclusion that a sexual history revealed that the virus had been spread by what’s described as intimate contact.
Now, the New England Journal of Medicine recently estimated that 95% of all the cases in the current outbreak can be traced to sexual contact, and not just sexual contact, but the sexual contact among men. As a matter of fact, the epidemiologists and the medical community continue to warn that those who are at highest risk and where the spread has been most widespread is among those described as, “Men who have sex with men.” The risk of transmission was highest among those men who were having such sexual activity and even higher among men who were reported to have had several homosexual partners.
Now, anyone of a certain age or of certain historical knowledge will see the parallels between monkeypox and the original outbreak of what became known as AIDS eventually tracked to a virus known as HIV. Then, as now, this was not so much described as a sexually transmitted disease as a virus that was clearly transmitted through sexual behavior, and not just any sexual behavior and not just in any sexual population, but rather particular forms of sexual activity. Now, the euphemism here is intimate contact. That again comes down to the description of men having sex with men.
Now, most of us would do quite well without thinking about such issues or talking about such issues, but the parable of our day comes down to this. If we who understand the moral reality will not speak to it clearly, then we’re simply abdicating the field. We are unfaithful as Christians because the Scripture does speak to these issues. First and most fundamentally, it speaks to the reality of a moral universe, of a moral universe in which the creator embedded certain moral commands, moral rules, and a very sufficient moral knowledge to understand how we are to handle and to be stewards of the sexual gift. The Bible’s abundantly clear about the nature of homosexuality. More on that in just a moment.
The big issue here is to understand that the controversy right now, and what we see in our society, our public health officials, government officials, sources in the mainstream media and others constantly warning that the big issue here is not so much monkeypox, but moral stigma. That the one thing society must give full attention to is avoiding any kind of stigmatization or adding or pointing in any way to the moral stigma that might be attached to men who have sex with men because of the outbreak of monkeypox.
This is where Christians simply have to understand what’s going on here. This is a massive exercise in cultural self-deception. It’s a massive exercise in dishonesty. But it tells us a great deal about our society, a society that prides itself on supposedly being clear about such matters as science and viruses and epidemiology, but, on the other hand, a society in which medicine itself has become deeply infected with all kinds of ideology. The use of the word stigma here over and over again, it’s in almost every headline, it seems, about this issue, it just tells us that the issues here are far more about a medical establishment and the elites trying to protect the issue of homosexuality rather than, in a candid way, dealing directly with the virus and with, what the New England Journal of Medicine reports, is 95% of the viruses in this outbreak, wherever it has been found.
An example of this approach is demonstrated by Juliana Kim of National Public Radio, and NPR, by the way, is demonstrating this pattern over and over again. A representative report here points to the tragic moral confusion of our times. The entire purpose of this article is to describe how to talk about monkeypox citing experts, of course, putting that in quotation marks, who offer ways to reduce stigma. She cites one professor of public health and public health promotion who has warned that focusing the image on how the virus impacts different populations can be unproductive and unhelpful. Seriously? We’re talking about 95% in one population defined by sexual behavior. To ignore that fact is simply to exercise another form of moral insanity, moral evasion. This really isn’t about public health, at least what would mean the health of the public. It’s about the moral revolution and protecting the moral revolution against any kind of stigma.
Now, one of the things Christians need to understand, by the way, is that the more you say you need to remove stigma, the more in a Catch-22 you underline the fact that the stigma is there. That’s true about abortion. It’s true about illicit sex. It’s true about homosexuality. And there’s a good reason for that. God created a moral universe, and in that moral universe men, to use their phrase again, who have sex with men will experience moral stigma. The more a society insists that there is none and should be none, the more it points to the fact there is.
Another public health official warned against what was described as over-stressing sex and advised avoiding any mention of homosexuality. The NPR report also turned to efforts to communicate this message at a recent “leather and fetish street fair in San Francisco, complete with questions about bondage performances.” Now, I can tell you right up front, this is an awkward issue to talk about, but talk about it we must. If no one else in this society can talk about it honestly, we must. For one thing, we care about the people who are involved, and we understand the moral and the medical issues simply can’t be divided the way our increasingly insane society insists that they must.
Joseph Goldstein reporting for the New York Times tells us, “Some public health experts say that many gay men are likely to push back against any advice that could be seen as discouraging or stigmatizing gay sex.” The New York Times continues, “They say that such advice shifts blame onto them for the outbreak and could lead the intended audience to view public health authorities with distrust.” In other words, if you do not join the mass delusion, then you’re part of the problem. We’re told right up front, too, that the price exacted by the LGBTQ community, in this case those identified as gay men, were told that their population, which is experiencing 95% of the cases of this truly horrifying disease especially in terms of the pain, we’re told that they simply won’t accept any argument that gets to, well, how the virus is actually being transmitted.
Now again, if you’re of a certain age or a certain historical knowledge, you know that this is exactly what happened in the ’80s and in the ’90s in the AIDS crisis. You had public health officials including, now wait for it, Dr. Anthony Fauci who came against all medical knowledge and all the evidence to say you really can’t focus on gay sex being wrong or even particularly dangerous in medical terms. You just have to redefine it with a very happy message of safe sex. Of course, here again, Christians understand that you cannot make illicit sex safe sex. By the way, this is not just something that as in one of the reports was cited as a Bible thumping preacher would say. This is something that an epidemiologist, if honest, would have to say.
Consider this additional statement found in the Goldstein report in the New York Times, quote, “‘Telling people not to have sex or not to have multiple sex partners and not to have anonymous sex is just a no-go, and it’s not going to work,’ said longtime AIDS activist, Charles King,” who is described as the head of an organization known as Housing Works, “which provides housing in social services to the homeless and those affected by HIV.” “People are still going to have sex, and they’re going to have it even if it comes with great risk.”
In other words, public health is out the window in the midst of the very public that is experiencing the outbreak. Now, just keep that in mind. It’s, again, a demonstration of moral insanity, but the public health community’s turning around and saying, well, now you just have to factor that in and figure out some other way to try to deal with this outbreak. You can’t tell people that they can’t have sex regardless of how they want to have sex, and you can’t say that there are moral much less medical consequences, particularly as these reports make clear because they use the phrase over and over again when you’re dealing with men who have sex with men.
Here, we need to turn to Scripture. The Bible explicitly and repeatedly defines the very sexual practices that are now identified as leading to viral transmission as sodomy. It’s a very strong word. There is no moral evasion in Scripture. Furthermore, as awkward as it might be even to Christians, the medical reality is that the sex acts at stake here involve parts of human bodies that were never meant to come together. The tissues involved are easily damaged, medical authorities concede, leading to the transmission of disease. Christians understand that the natural law and the Scripture underline the difference between natural and unnatural sexual relations. The natural law points also to the necessity, medical and moral necessity, of understanding the difference between the reproductive and digestive systems. Let’s just leave it at that.
But this really is a fundamental moment, a teaching moment in terms of our society because it reminds us that when we’re talking about moral stigma, it’s possible that could be wrongly directed. It could be wrongly attached to something. So we, as Christians, have to turn to Scripture and say, “Should there be stigma attached to this? Is this sin?” Well, this is where the Scripture comes back. It’s, of course, explicitly dealt with in Leviticus but also in Romans. In Romans, you also have the phrase that the apostle Paul, uses in Romans 1, “Against nature.”
Now, that takes us back to Genesis and the very origin and order of creation. That’s what we’re talking about when we say that even by natural revelation, general revelation, even by just understanding how a cow and a bull come together in order to have a calf. As that kind of reproduction is fundamental to biology, we understand that there is also a structure to the universe that is nature that reveals something supernatural. That is God’s glory most fundamentally, but also the way that God intended the cosmos and, in particulars, human creatures to relate to one another. We need supernatural revelation. We need Scripture in order to tell us all that we need to know, including not only the way of salvation and the revelation of Jesus Christ, but we also need Scripture in order to tell us what, due to human sin, we would never be able to discern in the created order.
For instance, God in Scripture makes very clear that adultery is wrong, sex outside of marriage is wrong, and there’s an entire category, an entire catalog of sexual sin in Scripture. But when it comes to men having sex with men, or for that matter women with women, then Romans 1 is just abundantly clear. God’s inherent and infallible word describes those relationships among people of the same gender. Again, the physical aspects are clear as not just being sin and not only a violation or breaking of the commandment of God, but against nature, which is to say, this attempts to undo God’s act in creation.
Now, here’s where we understand, this is going to come with consequences. The most important consequence is the wrath of God poured out upon sin. But there’s also a set of temporal consequences that come with breaking God’s law and divine creation. What we have here in this one virus is just another demonstration of what that looks like.
But in our contemporary culture, this demonstrates the fact that we are increasingly in the midst of a society that will not only deny Scripture and deny God, it will deny the entire moral order that is revealed even in creation. That’s the point at which we understand the depth of our society’s rebellion, not only against God, but against creation, against biology. Christians understand that the more rebellion of our day comes with deadly consequences. HIV and AIDS made that very clear as does now monkeypox. Thankfully, monkeypox, dreadful as it is, is not so deadly, at least at this point, as HIV and AIDS. For that, we can be thankful. By the way, we hope for every sick person to be made well. We also want those who are not sick not to become sick, and there is a moral context in which that is more and less likely to happen.