Augustine famously prayed, "Our hearts our restless until they rest in You.” True indeed. Being creatures, we inherently sense our ontological poverty””our innate condition of dependence””and are compelled to find a sense of security. And it is also true””as Augustine’s own narrative painfully illustrates””that one of the things we most naturally gravitate toward as a substitute for God is a sexual relationship. The tendency to make an idol of sex isn’t simply a feature of a decadent American culture, or even of the West more broadly. An idolatrous fixation on sexual union has been a staple in human depravity for as far back as our collective memory will take us. In this brief post I offer a few preliminary thoughts on why sexual sin is so often the sin of choice, and why sexual sin is uniquely destructive to our humanity.
