None Dare Call It Fornication: How We “Sin” No More

The Overton Window is not just for politics anymore. Coined, not coincidentally by political scientist Joseph Overton, it suggests that there is a range of public policies that a given culture might consider. Anything outside the “window” will be considered too extreme to get any political traction. Sadly, it infects the church as well. There is a range of ideas considered to be acceptable, and those outside the range are not. The Bible is rarely consulted.

We live in a time and culture where speaking an unkind word against the sexual perversity that is homosexuality, or the madness that is transgenderism is verboten, heresy. In certain pockets of the church, we can still speak this way. We realize that sexual ethics are determined by the living God.

Until we don’t. Because the world’s window has lurched to the left, we have given up our right flank. We have virtually come to the place where as long as it is in private, and between grown adults of the opposite sex, then it’s OK. We have erased God’s command against fornication.

To call out fornication in the church is to invite a charge of legalism, to be smeared as unloving. It is not an open secret, for there is nothing secretive about it. Professing Christian couples openly shack up without fear that the church will call them to account.

This is not the first time nor the last this has happened. There was a reason Paul had to enjoin the Ephesians that it not be named once among them- because it likely could have been named more than once among them. It has been said in Victorian England, that era where it was considered scandalously uncouth to call a chicken breast a chicken breast, that there were more brothels in London than churches.

Whole cultures, awash in Christian foundations, turned a blind eye to extra-marital affairs. We live in a culture where professional athletes get into more trouble cheating in their games than cheating on their wives. Inside the church we might look askance at adultery but for those unmarried, fornication is nothing. Getting pregnant might get you a side-eye or two, but practicing that which gets a person pregnant is nothing to worry about.

What should we do? Repent and believe the gospel. We all stand guilty. Either we are engaged in sexual sin, or we are unwilling to call it what it is- sin. All of us have lost our capacity to blush, have fled from the potent power of shame. When we repent the first thing that happens is we acknowledge our wrong. The next thing that happens is it is forgiven.

Sin does not stop being sin when we stop treating it like sin. Instead it festers in us. We don’t get to skip the part where we acknowledge that God is right and we are wrong. Instead we seek His forgiveness. And He blesses us with it. Could it be not that the Overton Window has left the sin of fornication in the past, but that it is simply our failure to believe Him? May the Spirit blow over His church, bringing life and light that exposes the darkness, and gives life to dead men’s bones,