November 9, 2009

This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship president Mark Earley.

On the night of October 23rd, a 15-year-old girl in Richmond, California, was brutally assaulted by as many as seven young men between the ages of 15 and 20.

One policeman called the events of that night a “barbaric act” and “one of the most disturbing crimes in my 15 years as a police officer.”

What disturbed him wasn’t only the overt criminal acts but the response—or more precisely, the lack of a response—of those in a position to help.

According to the police, the victim had left a dance at Richmond High School and was in the school’s courtyard when she was gang-raped. As heinous as this crime was, what made it a national story was that approximately 20 kids witnessed the attack and did nothing. Nothing.

Actually, it was worse than that. As word spread about the attack, people came to check it out. There are reports that some of the bystanders took pictures of the assault with their cell phone cameras instead of calling for help. Others laughed and a few even joined in the attack.

No sooner had police found the victim, semi-conscious under a bench, than attention focused on the behavior of the crowd. Comparisons were made to the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York, in which her neighbors supposedly ignored her cries for help because they didn’t want to get involved.

While how many of Genovese’s neighbors actually heard her cries for help is in dispute, there are no such doubts in this case.

So why didn’t anyone do something to help? An obvious factor is fear. Richmond, California, has been described as “one of the nation’s most dangerous cities,” and its murder rate is higher than Oakland’s or Los Angeles’. The school even recently approved the use of surveillance cameras following a series of violent crimes on campus.

In this setting, people have reason to believe that authorities cannot protect them and, thus, getting involved will put them at risk.

Even so, many people live in dangerous neighborhoods where “snitching” is dangerous, but they don’t gather to watch another person being brutalized, much less take photos or laugh. After all, the attack ended when people down the street from the school learned what was happening and called the police.

The response that shocked the nation speaks to an indifference to the well-being of others among some of our children. Instead of empathy, these young people showed apathy—and, as one observer said, “a total indifference to [behavior], customs, mores, and sensibilities,” the things we associate with being civilized.

What happened in Richmond, California, is an unsettling reminder that the standards that make a good society possible cannot be taken for granted. It doesn’t take much to set them aside. That’s why those standards and the beliefs that make them possible must be taught and renewed continuously.

As one Oakland pastor wrote, what happened on October 23rd “is reflective of a societal breakdown that is not limited to the Richmond city limits.”

And that’s what should disturb us the most.

This commentary contains material that may not be suitable for children.

A few years ago a pastor named Dale Kuehne took some college students to work in a farming village in Costa Rica—a poor village that lacked electricity and running water. The locals did have a generator, however; once a week, they fired it up to watch a raunchy American television program—Beverly Hills 90210.

Kuehne was shocked to see village teenagers mimicking the behavior of the characters in the show. And he was floored when village men asked him what was wrong with the women who’d come on the trip. “Why don’t they want to have sex?” they asked. “We thought all American women want to have sex.”

Kuehne relates the story in his new book, Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationships beyond an Age of Individualism. What happened in Costa Rica, he writes, shows how far iWorld messages have spread—and how little the Church has done to engage the iWorld culture.

Kuehne says that we are witnessing in the West the collapse of the Judeo-Christian worldview. Replacing it is a worldview that some call “postmodern individualism,” but Kuehne calls it “iWorld.”

iWorlders are dissolving long-established boundaries because they believe that people are happiest making their own moral and relational choices—outside of the family, community, and faith traditions into which they were born. And the iWorld promotes a desire for immediate gratification—as illustrated in the huge levels of consumer debt and the tendency to become sexually involved at the very outset of a romantic relationship.

Sadly, iWorlders often unwittingly sacrifice what they want, in the long run—contentment and fulfillment—by succumbing to their immediate desires, especially when it comes to sexual relationships.

Perhaps even more sadly, the Church has done precious little to present to iWorlders a vision of true fulfillment. That’s partly because the Church itself has turned a “blind eye” to sexual immorality within the body of Christ. Even worse, writes Kuehne, “is the degree to which the historic orthodox understanding of sexual morality and marriage is being ignored or revised by clergy and laypeople alike.”

This has enormous consequences for the Church’s ability to be salt and light in a culture suffering from the after-effects and social ills of the sexual revolution. The Church needs to be reminded—and needs to make the case—that “the biblical teaching that limits sexual relations to a marriage relationship between a man and a woman is actually beneficial to all.”

And that’s exactly what Kuehne does in his book, in a direct, challenging, but ultimately compassionate way. Every human, he says, is on a “never-ending quest for acceptance, love, and fulfillment.” But these things can never be found in the iWorld—by asking, “What’s in it for me?”

So instead of being subsumed by the iWorld culture, the Church has the “rWorld” to offer. The rWorld understands that God created people for relationships—and that we find our deepest fulfillment in relationship with Him, and in living a life rich in self-giving, not self-satisfying relationships.

And that makes Kuehne’s book, Sex and the iWorld, a worthy read. Visit BreakPoint.org, and we’ll show you how to get a copy.