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My God and My Neighbor is a “Bible talk show” that looks at religious issues, Christian living and world events in light of the Word of God to give hope. This podcast is a ministry of Tennessee Bible College. TBC offers a bachelor's in Bible studies, a master of theology, and a doctorate of theology in apologetics and Christian evidences. TBC also provides Christian books, audio recordings on the Bible, and free Bible courses in English and Spanish. Tune in to My God and My Neighbor to experience the educational content that TBC has been delivering for nearly five decades!
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Kerry Duke: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Kerry Duke, host of My God and My Neighbor podcast from Tennessee Bible College, where we see the Bible as not just another book, but the Book. Join us in a study of the inspired Word to strengthen your faith and to share what you've learned with others.
As with any other period in American history, the decade of the 1970s was a mixture of good times and bad times, pleasant surprises and bitter disappointments. When you look at the top headline events in the 1970s in America, you'll see scandals and crises, achievements and growth. You'll see things like the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974, which also led to prison terms for some of those who were involved at a time when many people in America had lost confidence in their leaders. This event only lowered the trust that [00:01:00] people had in the government.
Americans became more and more aware of a different kind of evil in this decade. We began to hear it called terrorism. This took place in 1972 at the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. Eleven Israelis were killed when a Palestinian group seized them, held them hostage, and then kill them. A new era of warfare was drawing near.
Then in 1973 and 1974, a national hoax called the oil crisis, especially in 1973, scared millions of Americans. The price of gas jumped overnight to levels we'd never imagined before. And then, in 1973, the Vietnam War finally ended. But it did not end like World War II. Instead of seeing clear lines of right versus wrong, this new generation [00:02:00] wondered why we were there to begin with and what we had accomplished after it was all done.
It was a time of relief and despair together. So how would we describe this period of the 1970s? Well, if the 1960s hit like an earthquake, the 1970s struck like a tsunami across America. The first wave of baby boomers had declared a moral and spiritual and cultural war in the 1960s, and in key ways, they won the battle.
So you might say that they declared this moral and spiritual and cultural war in the 1960s, and in the 1970s, they celebrated because they felt like that they were victorious. You might say that they threw a fit in the 1960s and they got their way in the 1970s. But that wasn't enough. They continued to rebel.
They demanded even more freedom and expected even less responsibility. They pushed the lines of decency that were left [00:03:00] even further than they had before. The decade before had ended with a raucous celebration in New York called Woodstock and for many baby boomers that event defined the mood of the 1970s—sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And if there is one word that describes the 1970s in many ways, it is the word hedonism or the word hedonistic. Now this is from the Greek word hedone which is the word for pleasure. Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure above all else. And the Bible does talk about this mindset. In fact, it uses this word.
In Luke chapter eight, verse 14, Jesus talked about even Christians who sometimes become choked with the “cares and riches and pleasures of this life.” Then in Titus chapter 3 verse 3, Paul talked about the former life of Christians [00:04:00] in which they were once “serving diverse lust and pleasures.” And then in the New Testament, there was still a group called the Epicureans, followers of one Epicurus. Paul debated these people in Acts chapter 17 in the city of Athens. The Epicureans were hedonists. They believed that the highest good and the highest goal in life is the pursuit of pleasure. Now, people in the 1970s may not have called it hedonism, but that's exactly what it was—the mindless pursuit of pleasure.
The rebellion of the 1960s had led to moral chaos in the 1970s because the moral fiber of America was beginning to come unraveled. And to make matters worse, the baby boomers were beginning to marry and have their own children. And so those children grew up with an entirely different set of moral standards.
The nation had changed. And it wasn't going back to those old fashioned [00:05:00] values prior to World War II. So the war against marriage and the family got even worse in the 1970s. Sexual immorality was everywhere. Couples began living together. Divorce rates climbed even higher. Adultery and fornication came to be the talk of the nation in songs, movies, and television.
California became the first state to allow no-fault divorce. The bill was passed in 1969 and went into effect in 1970. In order to get a feel and perhaps a reminder of what was happening in the 1970s, let me take you back to a journal called The Voice of Freedom. This comes from July 1970. It's an editorial called “On the Brink.”
The writer points out that “one university after another is bowing before the violent demands of a small minority of radicals. who intend to overthrow the existing government. These radicals,” the writer says, [00:06:00] “fully intend to overthrow the national government and replace it according to their own fuzzy, undefined lines, which they cannot explain. They have decided to seek as many confrontations with the police and university officials as they possibly can. They are using terror tactics in some parts of the country now.” Does that sound familiar? Does that sound like anything that you have read or heard of recently? And yet this was in July of 1970.
Now included in that editorial was a section from another magazine called Decision Magazine, and it is entitled “How to Destroy a Country.” It reads, “If you want to destroy a country, that is, affirm man's animal origin. nature and functions to the exclusion of everything else and ridicule all reference to his spiritual qualities. Inculcate general disrespect for any kind of authority by urging [00:07:00] people to obey their own impulses in the name of freedom. Hamper the enforcement of the criminal code with decisions that slow down the judicial process and make it difficult to arrest, convict, and sentence a culprit for an offense against society. Import vast supplies of hallucinogenic drugs and make them available to the youth of the land. Then provide the youth with plenty of money with which to buy them. Loosen all restraint on the entertainment media so that sexual license may be presented to the public in its rawest form. Corrupt the youth of the land by permitting pornography, obscenity, and general immorality to be indulged in freely without fear of arrest or prosecution. Soft pedal all discussion of loyalty, responsibility, patriotism, duty, and sacrifice in order that freedom of dissent may be established. Then, [00:08:00] split the older and younger generations by encouraging them to distrust each other and to condemn each other's institutions. Pollute the air, the streams, and lakes, and erode the land until the environment is so poisoned that life can no longer be enjoyed. Indoctrinate the public into believing that God is dead, Jesus Christ is a myth, Christianity a byword for an ancient superstition, and the church an institution that mankind has outgrown.”
Again, that is from The Voice of Freedom, July 1970. And we would add the words from Scripture in Psalm 9 verse 17. “The wicked shall be turned into hell,” that is, Sheol, or the grave, “and all the nations that forget God.” Now as the baby boomers turned away from God, they turned more and more to themselves and to the earth. The farther they went away from God, the closer they got with the world. They lost sight of the supernatural, and [00:09:00] so they turned to the natural.
In other words, they did the same thing that the Gentiles in Romans 1 did 2,000 years ago. Romans 1:25 says that they worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator. Now, this undue adoration of the creation became more pronounced in the 1970s. In 1970, a U. S. senator founded the first Earth Day as an effort to protect the environment. It was observed in colleges and also in primary and secondary schools by thousands across America. And today it's observed in about 200 different countries. And while there's nothing bad or wrong about wanting a clean environment, the real underlying problem is that Americans were beginning to put more emphasis on the creation than they were the Creator.
Later that year in 1970, the EPA was established as a service of the U. S. government. Now again, while concerns about pollution were and are justified, [00:10:00] this government agency has grown into a monster that in some cases has grown out of control and out of bounds with common sense. The environment was beginning to take precedence over human beings.
Remember passages like Psalm 8 and Genesis chapter 1 verse 28? The world was made for man and not the other way around. So it's no surprise that also in the 1970s, there was a disproportionate concern that was beginning to appear for animals, another part of God's creation. Peter Singer came out with the book, Animal Liberation in 1973, and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was established at the end of the decade in 1980.
Now it's helpful to pause at this time and consider a few verses of scripture. In Genesis eight, verse 22, we have the promise of the Creator. The Bible says, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer [00:11:00] and winter, and day and night, shall not cease” [Genesis chapter 8 verse 22].
The Bible also says, “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things even as the green herbs” [Genesis 9 verse 3]. And then of course Romans 1 verse 25 where the Bible says that the Gentiles worshipped and served the creature, the creation, that is, nature itself, rather than the Creator.
Now, in the midst of this cultural revolution, we've said that there was a battle for the home. And in that war, the Equal Rights Amendment, the ERA, became a major focus of controversy in America. There was nothing new about the idea. An ERA bill had been presented to Congress in 1923, but it failed to pass.
But in 1972, an ERA bill passed. However, it was not ratified. Now, that bill purported to give equal pay to working women, equal benefits, equal [00:12:00] employment opportunities, and so forth. It said that a person's rights “shall not be abridged or violated on the basis of sex,” but the objectives of those who were trying to pass that bill were far more sinister and its implications were much more destructive.
In fact, the following year, 1973, the Yale Law Journal included an article entitled “The Legality of Homosexual Marriage.” Now remember, this is the year 1973. That article begins by saying, “Two men recently petitioned the Minnesota Supreme Court to compel the state to grant them a marriage license. The court rejected their application for mandamus, and their appeal was subsequently dismissed by the United States Supreme Court. But the claim was far from frivolous. A [00:13:00] credible case can be made for the contention that the denial of marriage licenses to all homosexual couples violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment” [1973, again].
That article went on to say, “In the final analysis, the court should not avoid granting full relief from discriminatory legislation simply because that legislation is based on deeply held beliefs. A quasi-marital status might satisfy many of the interests of homosexuals in gaining marriage licenses, but it would inevitably fall short of fully normalizing their relationships. A legislative stigma of deviance would remain.” And so, this writer concludes, “The stringent requirements of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment argue strongly for removal of this stigma by granting marriage [00:14:00] licenses to homosexual couples who satisfy reasonable and non-discriminatory qualifications.” The article also mentioned “evolving attitudes toward marriage in our society.”
Now, we go back to Genesis chapter 1, verse 27, a verse that Jesus quoted in Matthew chapter 19. The Bible says, ‘So God created man in His own image, and the image of God created He him, male and female created He them.” The ERA and unisex movements were attempts to erase this line between males and females.
But God instilled that difference into the creation. Feminists and others were fighting a losing battle. Men are men and women are women.
One book in the 70s spoke against the feminist, unisex, and homosexual movements. It was written in 1973 by George Gilder and was [00:15:00] entitled Sexual Suicide. It was revised later and given the title Men and Marriage.
It destroys the myth that male and female roles are just the products of culture. It also warns that a nation that ignores these roles is headed for disaster. The main thesis of the book is that men are by nature aggressive, and that marriage channels that aggression, and by attachment to his wife and duty to his children, that man becomes a stable, productive member of society.
Take away marriage, and you'll have a horde of barbarians as Gilder calls them. Now, it's interesting that Gilder is writing from a secular viewpoint. He's not really arguing from the Bible. But here's something that he says about marriage and its importance in a civilization. He says, “The crucial process of civilization is the subordination of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female [00:16:00] sexuality. The overall sexual behavior of women in the modern world differs relatively little from the sexual life of women in primitive societies. It is male behavior that must be changed to create a civilized order. Men lust, but they know not what for. They wander and lose track of the goal. They fight and compete, but they forget the prize. They spread seed, but spurn the seasons of growth. They chase power and glory, but miss the meaning of life. In creating civilization, women transform male lust into love, channel male wanderlust into jobs, homes and families, link men to specific children, rear children into citizens, change hunters into fathers, divert male will to power into a drive to create. Women conceive the future that men tend to flee. They feed the children that men ignore.”
And of [00:17:00] course, we can't talk about major turning points in right and wrong in America without looking at the Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt once described the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as “a day that will live in infamy.” There's another dark, infamous date in our nation's history. It was January the 22nd, 1973, the day when the United States Supreme Court legalized abortion in the case of Roe vs. Wade. How could the highest court in the land legalize the brutal murder of innocent children? Let's go back to Roe vs. Wade. Let's look at some of the arguments made on both sides of this issue. And let's look at this case in light of the Bible.
The oral arguments in Roe vs. Wade were presented before the United States Supreme Court by these attorneys. The first was held in Washington, D.C. [00:18:00] on December the 13th, 1971. Sarah Weddington was the attorney for Jane Rowe. Her actual name was Norma McCorvey. She was an unmarried pregnant girl in Texas. She had gone to several doctors seeking an abortion, but she was denied because of Texas law that prohibited abortion. So as a result, she filed a lawsuit which went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Now, arguing the case in behalf of the state of Texas was Assistant Attorney General Jay Floyd. He represented Henry Wade, District Attorney of Dallas County, thus the name Roe versus Wade. The second oral argument was presented before the Supreme Court on October the 11th, 1972. Ms. Weddington again represented her client, Roe, and Robert C. Flowers, on that occasion, Assistant Attorney General of Texas, represented Wade and the state.
In the [00:19:00] first hearing, Mr. Floyd seems to have basically given up before he had even begun. He said, “The state, the state court, court of appeal, held that the state had a compelling interest because of the protection of fetal life, of fetal life protection. They recognized the humaneness. of the embryo or the fetus. And they said we have an interest in protecting fetal life. Whether or not that was the original intent of the statute, I have no idea.” What a pathetic attempt to uphold the law. Then he made some improvement in his argument by asserting, “We say there is life from the moment of impregnation.”
But then he immediately recanted and said he really didn't know when life begins. Notice this quote: “When does the [00:20:00] soul come into the unborn? If a person believes in a soul—I don't know.” Now here is an attorney supposedly upholding a law against murdering a child and he leaves the very existence of the soul up in the air.
Well, what if a person doesn't believe in the soul? That would mean that for that person, killing a man is no more morally wrong than killing a dog, since it is the soul, the spirit of a man, that distinguishes a human being from an animal. Now later, in 1972, Mr. Flowers did an even worse job in his oral argument in 1972 because he began by asserting, “But it is the position of the state of Texas that upon conception, we have a human being, a person within the concept of the Constitution [00:21:00] of the United States and that of Texas also.”
Now, that is a great statement, but he was totally unprepared to even begin to substantiate that point. So Justice Potter Stewart immediately asked him, “Now, how should we regard that question? How should it be decided? Is it a legal question? A constitutional question? A medical question? A philosophical question? Or a religious question? Or what is it?” And that is the right way to approach this. How do we decide? But neither Justice Stewart nor Mr. Flowers had the answer.
Now let's step back and look at that question from a slightly different perspective. How is the question of the murder of a two-year-old child decided? How does the Supreme Court, or any human court for that matter, decide, reach the decision that this is morally wrong and a crime? [00:22:00] Now, the answer is not difficult for anyone who recognizes that God is the author of moral law. Unless our human laws against murdering a two-year-old child are grounded in an authority that transcends human decision and human courts, then they have no objective binding power and are therefore subject to change.
If laws against murder derive their authority from human beings, then human beings can change those laws. So the monumental question of taking human life can't be decided without reference to the One who gives life, that is, God. But that was the aspect of the case that was sadly missing. The role of God was not even mentioned in these hearings.
Our culture had become so secular that the attorneys and the justices in this case did not even acknowledge the One who gave us the law against murder and without whom this law would be a mere fleeting [00:23:00] human opinion. They thought in their ignorance and arrogance that they could decide such questions on their own.
Now then, let's look at the arguments on the other side of the Roe vs. Wade case. The first was to convince the court that state or federal lawmakers had not been able to prevent abortion, so why continue a futile statute? Now this is basically the old well, they'll just do it anyway argument. For instance, Mrs.Weddington cited the fact that when abortion was made legal in New York, Texas women just went there to get an abortion. She also argued that when abortion is illegal, many pregnant women will perform an abortion themselves and that will result in further complications and maybe even greater risk of death.
Then Mrs. Weddington made some emotional arguments for abortion. She said. For instance, in Texas law, the woman is the victim. We would ask: How can a woman who has made the choice to have sex with a man [00:24:00] be a victim? She even had the audacity to say that an unwanted pregnancy is an “irreparable injury.” And, she went on to say also that the aborted baby is a “pathological specimen.”
Now, in reaching their decision, the court considered several lines of evidence, one of which was from the American Medical Association. The high court admitted that in 1857, in an American Medical Association committee meeting on criminal abortion, the procedure of abortion was called, “The unwarrantable destruction of human life.”
In fact, in 1871, this committee even called “the attention of the clergy of all denominations to the perverted views of morality [00:25:00] entertained by a large class of females.” But the moral courage of those days had come to an end by 1970. In 1970, when an AMA committee observing that abortion was becoming an increasingly controversial issue among medical professionals, that committee noted “a remarkable shift in testimony in both the medical and the judicial arenas.”
Let those words sink in. A remarkable shift in testimony. Times had changed, and that is their argument. They're arguing a case involving the taking of human life in the womb, and one of the sources that they cite mentions a remarkable shift or change in testimony in the medical and the judicial arenas.
And we ask again, how could this have happened? How could a country undergo such a [00:26:00] remarkable shift in its view of right and wrong? In the late 1800s, the early 1900s, discussion on this subject commonly included such language as “criminal abortion” and the “unwarrantable destruction of human life.” In fact, in 1870, the New York Times referred to abortion as the quote “perpetration of infant murder…that is rank and smells to heaven.” There was a story entitled “The Evil of the Age” in the New York Times in 1871. That lamented “the fact that thousands of human beings are murdered before they have seen the light of this world.”
But let's look at the Scriptures. The Bible says in Luke chapter one, verse 36, “And behold your cousin, Elizabeth, she has also conceived a [00:27:00] son in her old age.” The Bible talks about life in the womb beginning at conception. The Bible says in Genesis chapter 25, verse 22, after Rebecca had conceived, “The children struggled together within her.” In Jeremiah chapter 1, verse 5, God said, “Before I formed you in the belly, I knew you. And before you came forth out of the womb, I sanctified you and I ordained you a prophet unto the nations.”
And then also in that same year of 1973, there was a document that was published that reveals the change in thinking among the so called intellectuals.It was the Humanist Manifesto 2. The Humanist Manifesto 1 had been released in 1933. The Humanist Manifesto 2 was a longer and bolder statement against God-based ethics. And here are some excerpts from that document signed by hundreds of scientists and educators, professors, and [00:28:00] even rabbis and authors.
“As in 1933, humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith. Reasonable minds look to other means for survival. In the wake of the God is dead theologies, we can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species. No deity will save us. We must save ourselves.”
And we're reminded of Psalm 14:1 which says, “The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.” The Manifesto goes on to say, “We affirm that moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics is autonomous and situational, needing no theological or ideological sanction.” It goes on to [00:29:00] point out that “the many varieties of sexual exploration should not in themselves be considered evil. Without countenancing mindless permissiveness or unbridled promiscuity, a civilized society should be a tolerant one.”
And the passage that comes to mind is Judges chapter 21 verse 25 again which says that “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
Thank you for listening to My God and My Neighbor. Stay connected with our podcast on our website and on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Tennessee Bible College, providing Christian education since 1975 in Cookeville, Tennessee, offers undergraduate and graduate programs. Study at your level. Aim higher and get in touch with us [00:30:00] today.