Coldplay, Legitimate Couples, and The Hypocrisy of The Sexular Age

Once bitten, twice shy. Chris Martin asks the next couple if they are “legitimate”. What does that even mean in our day and age?

Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Chris Martin knew things had taken a turn for the worse. That’s why the next question he asked when the Kiss-Cam went onto a couple was to determine whether they were legitimate. Suddenly these things matter again! Yet who even determines “legitimacy” in our culture today? Chris Martin?

This is the story that keeps on giving. Or keeps on taking, depending on which way you look at it. It gives memes and stand-up comedy lines, and plenty of opinion online. It takes families, trust, reputations, and jobs.

But here’s what is most intriguing: the hypocrisy and inconsistency of The Sexular Age over this unfortunate event. I was talking with a friend in church this morning and he made the observation that the shock seems at odds with the general Western ideology of “Love is Love” and “You Do You”.  I mean, what’s a good empty, tautological aphorism worth at times such as this? Where is laissez-faire ethics when you need it?

Exactly. We have been raised on a diet of expressive individualism for so long that we take it for granted that what people do in their private lives is a matter between them, as long as it is consensual. But the exposure of the affair between the CEO bloke and the HR woman at a Coldplay concert shows how thin that view is.  That’s what forced Chris Martin to ask that question of the next couple. And Phew! Thank goodness, they were legitimate!

It’s almost as if God has put into our consciences the difference between wrong behaviour and right behaviour and that no amount of cultural deafening of that voice, no amount of training in the warp and woof of The Sexular Age, will successfully shut that voice off. It’s as if God intended this to be.

Which of course he did. We have an almost visceral reaction to cheating and we respond in a deeply subterranean way, despite our professed progressive ideals. This event has proven Romans 1 in a very real well, that suppression of truth with unrighteousness is the only way to retain our commitment to our idolatries. But once the suppression order is lifted, it’s game on!

Exposure

And indeed that is exactly what has happened. Exposure of sin suddenly jolted us as a whole Western community back to the natural order of things as God has always intended. Cheating on one’s spouse is NEVER ok, and it only feels hip and urban and cool until one is caught out. That’s when the mask falls off and sin is seen for what it is, sin!

It’s almost as if – once again – God has given us all a conscience, irrespective of whether we have saving faith in him or not, that guides the right way to live among those humans he has created. Which of course he has.

This is true of so much else when it comes to ethics. The Sexular Age tells women to “shout their abortion” but then ensures that no person is able to see what actually happens when a baby is aborted. The sheer hostility towards those who might suggest what actually happens, or in more confronting cases, stand outside in the street with actual pictures of what does happen, shows that exposure is our culture’s biggest fear.

It is insane that I can walk down the Pitt Street Mall in Sydney nearly every week and there is a display, very graphic, with recorded mooing and bleating, that is opposing the manner in which animals are sometimes inhumanely killed for our meat industry.

There are pictures and sounds and shouting, all within the earshot and eyesight of children. In other words, the activists want us to see the reality of what is happening in order to change our ethics on the matter.  And for that matter, the Sydney Town Council does too. Or at least it doesn’t mind.

But the inhumane killing of humans? We can’t show that. Lest we, well, lest we what? Stir the consciences of a dulled population? I suspect the same will also be true of the euthanasia debate, especially as it fires up and starts to creep into other sections of our population such the mentally ill, the homeless, the disabled. Rest assured, those things are coming.

The One Exception

Well I did say that cheating on one’s spouse is NEVER okay, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that we are so inoculated by The Sexular Age that there is one scenario on that unfortunate Coldplay concert night in which there may have been a more muted disapproval.

And that is if both the CEO and the HR head had been of the same sex. I say that with caution, but The Sexular Age has stared down any criticism of the “Love is Love” agenda to the point that people would instinctively have looked over their shoulder for accusations of homophobia before going to the same lengths of public derision and punishment of this couple.

Perhaps you will criticise me for this, but when UK TV personality Phillip Schofield came out on his national morning TV show, there was a shower of approval for his outing of himself, even though it was fairly clear in how he responded that he had been unfaithful to his wife in the process.

He was labelled “brave” etc, and any querying of how he may have indulged himself in the process of confirming his same-sex attraction was quickly shut down. Well, for a few years at least, when it finally came out that in a massive power-play he had enticed and seduced young people lower down the TV food-chain all gloves were off..

Our popular culture has something to answer for here. In Hollywood, giving in to one’s homosexual desires is the ultimate demonstration of truthfulness to one’s self. And even Christians can struggle to know how to respond to this. We know how we ought to, but we are cautious.

I think we should just admit that. I think that as Christians in the late modern world we can’t help but lean into these issues in the same direction as the rest of the culture, only pausing at moments such as this to reassess what we actually believe.

Uncovered

It was timely that the first verse in our sermon this morning – a wonderfully pastoral word about how Jesus knows what we are going through, and has been tempted in every way we are yet without sin, was this:

Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. (Hebrews 4:13)

As I stated in my previous blogpost on this matter, the Kiss-Cam revelation of this unfortunate couple is merely a portent to what will occur for each of us. We will each have everything – not just our illicit actual affairs, but the illicit affairs and motives of our hearts – laid bare before God. Truly sobering.

Of course this is not the reason that the CEO subsequently went on leave, offered his resignation and had it accepted. His company is no moral hero, it is simply playing the market.

To have allowed him to stay, while loudly pronouncing its own credibility and trust in the public marketplace would have been the death knell of the company. It was a financial decision. Or as the Godfather, Michael Corleone, might say to those in the mob who are being taken out to be shot by his henchmen, “It’s just business.”

My prayer for the unfortunate couple caught in that “dalliance” (my how that word softens the blow of what was going on!), is that they run to the only one who knows exactly what they are going through now in terms of shame, embarrassment and guilt. For in our sermon this morning we also read this words:

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.  Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. (Hebrews 4:14-16)

This couple need to approach that throne of grace. There is no grace in this world as they are discovering in light of the memes, the opinion pages, the comedian’s field day. The only person who can look fully at them and fully through them, and who himself is without sin, is – in a great moment of cosmic irony – the only one who can forgive them, love them and restore them.