Pedophilia: The Coming Lifestyle Choice?

P is for pedophilia, and some are saying it’s time to add a new letter to LGBT, time to affirm pedophilia as a legitimate lifestyle, time to speak of LGBTP.

German medical student Mirjam Heine recently gave a TED talk in which she asserted that “pedophilia is an unchangeable sexual orientation, just like… heterosexuality.” Pedophilia is a sexual orientation that comes in your gene package.

Yet others in the LGBTP community argue that one’s sexuality is a choice. You choose your gender identity and you can choose to mutilate your body to conform it to your identity. And you can change your identity from day to day depending on your feelings.

So which is it? Is it a lifestyle choice or is it in your genetic makeup. It can’t be both.

This confusion comes from the postmodern rejection of reason, reality (science) and revelation. These have been rejected out of hand, considered the European white man’s power play to enslave the rest of the world. But with the abandontment of the three R’s, anything goes.

I am reminded of the book by the esteemed psychiatrist and co-founder of the famous Menninger Foundation and Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, Dr. Karl Menninger: Whatever Became of Sin? Writing not as a theologian or a pastor, but as a distinguished member of the medical community, Menninger raised a profound theological question that had powerful implications for mental health.

Moral categories have been lost

The word “sin” has been lost in the modern and postmodern vocabulary. Even in the church, people shy away from the word. And yet many still struggle with a sense of guilt and shame. The scars are often deep in our hearts and souls. Maybe the loss of the word sin is a loss of insight as to what might be wrong with the human condition. To overcome the guilt and shame we often turn to drugs, alcohol, sex and amusements.

In the epilogue Menninger explains why he wrote the book. A reviewer writes,

The author tell us how he came to write this book and how he has come from many years of experience to consider moral values an essential aspect of psychiatry. If, as he believes, mental health and moral health are identical, the recognition of the reality of sin offers to the suffering struggling, anxious world a real hope not of belated treatment but of prevention.

Naturalistic philosophy and evolutionary ideology reduce the world to material things. The soul and spirit, sin and moral ecology, all these were subjects of a premodern time and irrelevant to the modern and postmodern worlds. Today’s discussions of LGBT(P) concerns have no moral or spiritual categories.

But Menninger understood that man is more than a glorified animal. There is a transcendent element in the human. We live in a universe of moral and spiritual transcendence. Our struggles often have a moral or spiritual root.

Think of the difference in today’s discussion and social condition if we were free to consider pedophilia a moral issue! Could label it sin! Imagine if we could consider homosexual lifestyles immoral! How might that give a larger space for dealing with some of these issues?

Moral confusion remains

But alas, such questions cannot be raised in a modern or postmodern world. According to some, one is born that way. Others insist the lifestyle is a gender choice. Neither has access to the dimension of morality to bring light to the questions.

So the ambivalence and confusion continue. More and more young children are raised in a world of sexual confusion. More and more lives become unstable and often collapse altogether.

In all this darkness, will Menninger’s question point to a way of hope?

Isn’t there a place to return to sanity? Can’t we speak truth in the public square? Can’t we call people to return to the sanity of a real world with real laws and boundaries, a world in which male or female live in community as complementary sexual beings?

Is it really so crazy to think that we live in a real moral universe where people are volitional human beings who are responsible for the choices they make?

The gospel can restore the dignity of the human being and lift humans from the gutter of pagan sexuality to the glory of human intimacy. Let’s restore some sanity before pedophilia becomes a legitimate lifestyle choice.