Purity By Proxy

Ok, I’m going to try out an idea here which may be the result of me over thinking, hyper spiritualizing, or otherwise making a mountain from a meerkat mound. Or I may be spot on. But what is the use of having a blog if you don’t put your wacky theories on it, I ask you?

People are complicated. On the one hand, we are all sinners which means we are at enmity with God in our minds and hearts which manifests in myriad sins and perversions. On the other hand, since we are created in God’s image there are certain factory model designs which we cannot extirpate no matter how hard we try. One of these factory settings is the desire to rid our conscience of the weight of sin.

Expiation Through An Innocent

Sinners who know they are sinners love Jesus. When the unliftable burden of sin is shown in light of the unalterable holiness of God and the imminent judgement of that sin, the Gospel lands with joy and is received with gratitude. The Gospels are peppered with all sorts of scenarios of Jesus eating with publicans, prostitutes and the filthy ones of the world. Those who had a functioning righteousness of their own turned up their noses. But for those who knew their true leprosy of heart, Jesus was resplendent. If they could only be around him, nestle up close, perhaps his purity may rub off in some way onto them and cleanse their filthy consciences.  

Something like this was exactly what was revealed to be true. It was through the pure and sacrificial Lamb of God that guilty consciences were finally expunged.

…how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

Hebrews 9:14 (ESV)

Long before Jesus came on the scene, this type of atonement was at work in ancient Israel. Levitical law is shot through with the essentiality of purity. When offending Jews brought a sacrifice to the Yahweh it had to be pure, not only free from disease, but unmarked with any scars, stripes, spots or blemishes. It is only the pure sacrifice that does not need to atone for itself, which can expiate the sin and guilt of the person. Can’t clean your hands with toilet water.

Deep down we all long for catharsis – the unburdening of our consciences. This is an iron law of humanity and is true even when a person has no interest in Christ, and will use whatever the nearest pure sacrifice is within arms reach. This same phenomena is replete in anthropology – you never hear of tribes sacrificing some hussy for the tresspasses of the masses; it’s always the pure virgin. Wiping clean our filthy consciences by befouling the pure is as old as time.

Tunneling Into Teenage Psyches

Recently I was talking to a friend whose daughter has been hounded by a young buck, both of them 16, and he, in the rash lustihead of his young powers, has taken to texting the fair maiden hundreds of times a day. As it came to pass, early on in their texting relationship, this young man had propositioned another of this girl’s friends – and I mean propositioned in the euphemistic sense here. He straight up asked the other girl to have sex. This morsel of information came back to my the young woman and she called him on it in a very noble and virtuous manner. She was lauded, as she should be, and the girl’s father was hoping that would be the end of it, the wolf having been de-wooled, and the pristine maiden saved by her virtue.

Not so. The texting continues, and does so as we speak. He doubled down and has apologized numerous times for his indiscretion, declaring himself a reformed man, saying it was “a phase” – you know, those “phases” of life that last two days and spontaneously terminate when you get caught. Through it all the young woman has maintained her virtue, poise and grace, while he maintains his dogged pursuit of her. 

How are we to understand this peculiar action of the young man? We could say he simply has his eyes on a particular slab of meat and will not rest until he is gnawing on it. Or we could be gracious and say his young love has not yet differentiated into the separate branches of mature eros, phileo and agape.

Call me a cynic, but I cannot help but doubt the young man’s intentions. This is because I once was a young man who propositioned young women and who was rejected by virtue. And I can tell you from experience the draw of sex is nearly as strong as the desire for purity when shamefaced from being caught red handed. Unfortunately, the person in the position to extend purity is also the same person whose pants you are trying to get into, and both require proximity.

Perhaps I am mashing together jungian archetypes into some bitter nougat that have no business being together, and, as mentioned above, I am overthinking it. I have been know to do that from time to time. But here is how I see all of this coming together, and then I will make a conjecture that, with any luck, will really get me into trouble.

As I said above, the desire to purify our consciences is a real thing that all humans have. We are guilty, all of us, for various offenses against fellow man and God. This exists so that we will see Christ, observe his purity and hope that we may also be rid of this nasty conscience, if only we may get close enough to touch the hem of his garment. 

This is precisely the position the young man in question here is acting out. He feels guilty for his proposition of young woman #2, has been called out by virtuous young woman #1, and feels the guilt both of the lust and of being caught with it in his hand. His choices are to run in the direction of his lusts, and the sexual gratification which may result, but also is plagued by the real guilt that accompanies that path. Instead, driven by the desire for expiation, he doubles his efforts to be proximal to what he perceives to be virtuous and pure, and by it, to achieve purity of his own. It is the same process, but with the jungian Virgin, pure and resplendent, instead of Christ.

In itself, this isn’t a bad thing. The woman can refer the young man to the proper place of expiation, at the feet of Christ, and maybe some salvation from his conscience.

But if not immediately redirected to the true solution, the young man will subconsciously hunt for purity in the most obvious and nearest locale – her. And this is where it gets tricky. When we become believers in Christ, we eat and drink of his flesh – we become one with him. How do you suppose this desire for oneness will manifest in the young man’s mind? Exactly. He will nestle into her virtue and feel the cool cloth of expiation mopping his brow, and the thing is, it really will work. He really will feel to some extent purified from his way of life by walking along her higher path. Having escaped the road to perdition, his conscience feels free to relax and, wouldn’t you know it, here is a beautiful young woman here reviving his crippled conscience. She, being a woman both desiring to be desired and to be a help to a man, sees this perhaps as an opportunity to bestow the guiltlessness through association he is requiring.

Deeper and Darker Things

Thus ends the exploration into teenage psyches. But I do want to take this idea nugget of purity by proximity and apply it to a much more nefarious situation afoot, and that is the burgeoning pedophilic sympathies. 

Ten years ago or so I had a conversation with a bunch of ER co workers. It was in the wee hours of the morning where a late dinner and early breakfast pass the baton and there wasn’t much to do. We got talking about cultural trends of the time and I said something to the effect of, “Mark my words, in a decade you will see pedophilia starting to come mainstream.” There was no small amount of incredulous looks, but it was quite clear to see. When the brake mechanism is removed from culture, and every fresh lust on stage left has eventually taken the spotlight – abortion, homosexual marriage, transgenderism – the question is why would pedophilia not come to dance center stage in due course. Eighteen is the “age of consent,” but if we plowed over the inviolability of gender with no problem, the arbitrary age of eighteen stands as no bastion whatever to the lecherous encroachments of pedophilia.

This requires some kind of explanation, and before I offer mine I must acknowledge the obvious, and that is that mankind is perverse; we invent ways of doing evil, and when we get bored with acting out our perversions with other perverse persons, we want to spread our perversions to those yet unsullied. Misery loves company and a single blackened heart would rather make the world black rather than his one heart pure.

Yet there is something curious about this idea we see throughout time of various ways of seeking purity. Because the law of God is written in the heart of man, there is the awareness of a rotting conscience and the desire to be rid of it, as evidenced by the entirety of humanity in all their religious wanderings, occult gatherings, scapegoatings and pagan sacrifices.

Twenty first century America is no exception. Because of this, the same purity by proximity phenomena is at least partially what is going on in pedophilia. It is wicked and heinous and irredeemable, and at its root is the deepest kind of lust. But given anthropological patterns and biblical truths there is some measure of these people seeking expiation through contact with the most innocent among us.

The expiative abilities of the innocent are also extended to those the innocent accepts. Why is this push for LGBTQ agenda being peddled so ardently in young children, as we learned from the national ire against Florida’s bill banning this teaching in young children? Why that particular demographic of pre-k to 3rd grade? Can they vote? Do they have any decision making abilities that matter to the public acceptance? Of course not. All they have to offer is their innocence. Because if this perverse lifestyle can be presented to and accepted by innocent children as normal, then this confers a blessing on the perverse motives and desires – it launders guilty consciences through the innocent acceptance, and they become pure by association.  

Which leads me to my hypothesis:

Queering childhood is the attempted expiation of those who feel guilty of themselves in hope for the purity which comes through acceptance by an innocent. 

Conclusion

We are complex. Rarely are we driven by one desire alone. We can neither remove our sin by ourselves anymore than we can excise the image of God stamped on our souls. Motivations are a mixed bag of conscious and subconscious sinful intentions which themselves are depraved expressions of the image of God.

Just to be clear, I am in no way saying everyone teaching LGBTQ wants to mess around with kids, not at all. Those who do so are exceedingly rare, and there still exists a hefty taboo on pedophilia – for now. But I do think the targeting of children to teach these values are an attempt to launder desires and lifestyle that are wrong and unnatural. External validation is strong armed from others through culture, while internal validation is wooed from the innocent.

Why does this matter? Because it is important to see that underneath all human sin and suffering is the desire for salvation from guilt. To be able to see how this guilty conscience is looking for a scrubbing can help to show how it can never scrub clean and how much more the cleansing power that God offers through Christ.

Speaking of whom, let’s end with a shout out to Jesus Christ who can actually take away sin and purify the conscience. There really does exists the glass of living water we are thirsty for; the burning drouth can be slaked. We swap lives with Christ: he takes our old guilt laden conscience to the cross and buries the sin forever, and gives us his pure life and all the accolades he possesses. He purifies me through oneness. Since this desire for purity through oneness is not dependent on race or creed or country, it burbles in all humans, goaded by our consciousness of conscience. And this desire is meant to lead us ultimately to Christ, the only true mediator of our expiation.