Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Writing in 2019, the National Catholic Reporter pointed out: “… what we see with President Donald Trump and his cast of sycophants and co-conspirators — some of them beginning to flee the sinking ship on advice of counsel — is a rare thing: All seven deadly sins on display at once.”
It details how Trump and his sycophants committed the seven deadly sins – greed, lust, gluttony, sloth, deceit, envy and pride. Trump’s second term looks like his and his sycophants’ sins will only get worse.
The notion of sin, the forbidden, has been an aspect of American social and moral life since the nation’s founding four centuries ago. The Puritan minister, Samuel Willard (1640-1707), once observed, “… in nothing doth the raging power of original sin more discover itself … than in the ungoverned exorbitancy of fleshly lust.” The New World was besieged by numerous sex scandals during the first 75 years of Puritan settlement. These scandals revealed sin’s ever-present threat.
For New Englanders and other British colonists up and down the Atlantic Coast, these scandals set the boundaries of acceptable moral life. They mostly involved premarital sex (fornication), extramarital sex (adultery), sodomy (homosexuality) and interracial sex. Two offenses were most upsetting: bestiality involving young men and sexual witchcraft among older women.
Among Puritans, as the historian John Murrin points out, “Bestiality discredited men in the way that witchcraft discredited women.” However, in New England, sex with the devil was the gravest of all sins! Puritan sexual scandals were a terrain of struggle that illuminates, if only in its exaggeration, America’s most formative era of cultural identity. It is an identity that, like a threatening shadow, continues to hover over America today.
Mary Johnson, of Wethersfield, Connecticut, was one of ten Puritan women accused of having sex with Satan. In 1648, Johnson allegedly admitted to minister Samuel Stone (and reported by Cotton Mather): “She said her first Familiarity with the Devils came by Discontent” with her role as a servant and that “she was guilty of the Murder of a Child and that she had been guilty of Uncleanness with Men and Devils.” Two years earlier, she had been accused of thievery and was publicly whipped. However, for her truly unholy deed of consorting with the devil, she was convicted of witchcraft and executed.
Now, nearly four centuries later, we’ve come a long way since the British settlers first colonized the New World. For one thing, people are no longer executed for consorting with the devil. A host of sexual prohibitions — including masturbation, premarital sex, adultery, homosexuality and interracial sex — are no longer considered sins by civil authorities, most moralists and a significant proportion of the public. Prostitution has become a discreet business activity, regulated in a few rural counties in Nevada, increasingly decriminalized in states across the country and – compared to times of old — relatively free from moralistic and police harassment.
Today, the boundaries to acceptable sex are based on consent among adults or among similarly aged adolescents between 16 and 18 years of age. Strong prohibitions, both legal and ethical, attempt to halt nonconsensual sexual acts like rape, pedophilia, incest and bestiality.
The modern concept of the sin is best expressed as perversion. It is a concept that emerged during the late-19thcentury in an attempt to classify and control a mounting wave of unacceptable sexual behavior. It bore much social weight, combining a medical diagnosis with a moral judgment and a legal determination. It became a cornerstone assumption of modern Western – and particularly American — notions of social values and individual normality. For more than a century, the notion of perversion served as a powerful force in the regulation of desire.
Over the last several decades, however, perversion has disappeared from professional and popular discourse. Revolutions in psychiatry, jurisprudence and popular culture removed nearly all sense of the immoral and illegal from the notion of perversion, rendering it a lifestyle, sometimes referred to as “kink” or “spicy sex.” Like communism of yesteryear, perversion has become an endangered species.
Like sin, the concept of perversion has effectively disappeared from scientific discourse for today’s professionals attempting to assess unacceptable aspects of American life. It has been replaced by three concepts that have come to redefine the illicit, abnormal or unconventional — sin: (i) disorder, i.e., a persistent discomfort with sexual identify or practice; (ii) paraphelia, i.e., a pathological sexuality expressed in a disturbance of psychic life; and (iii) offense, i.e., criminal violation that takes a sexual form. For the general public and popular media, perversion has become an intriguing exhibitionist indulgence, an episode in a late-night TV reality show or, increasingly, a banality. In 21st century America, perversion is no longer perverse – and sin no longer sin.
What was once considered a sin or perversion is, today, part of the mainstream of American culture. Nevertheless, examples of unacceptable sexual practices abound, as evident in all-too-often reports about pedophiles, child pornographers, rapists, sex traffickers and lust murders. Concomitantly, images of sexual exaggeration have been integrated into the popular media. Erotically provocative depictions of women and teenage girls, sometimes including sexualized children, appear regularly in fashion magazines, especially advertisements. Still other once-perverse sexual expressions have become coy wink-and-a-nod scandals, perfectly represented by the obscenity controversy involving Janet Jackson’s now-infamous nipple exposure during CBS’s broadcast of the 2004 SuperBowl.
An unprecedented number of consenting adults are engaging in sexual practices that were once identified as perversions. Masturbation is now accepted as a normal function if done in a non-obsessive manner; however, strong opposition does persist. Similarly, consenting adult homosexuality is no longer a psychiatric disorder, an illegal practice, or a moral failing. Pornography is now a hip, high-tech $13 billion business, easily accessed through cable and satellite television, DVDs, magazines and the web. An estimated 5,365 “adult stores” operate successfully at local malls as well as innumerable online sites, offering women and couples a selection of sexual playwear, jells and toys to fulfill every conceivable fantasy. The sex toy, apparel and paraphernalia industries are flourishing, even among evangelical Christians.
Today, sinful “sex scandals” don’t seem to shock most Americans. The sordid stories of Donald Trump’s misadventures, Bill Clinton’s dalliance or Jeffrey Epstein’s pathologies are hyped in the media but have little resonance. Americans are swamped with endless eroticized advertising and media, let alone ceaseless sexualized fashion and public display.
Sin has morphed into the multi-billion-dollar sex industry, redefining popular vales and fostered a new secular sensibility. More troubling, the sins of yesteryear — greed, lust, gluttony, sloth, deceit, envy and pride – are now practices openly, celebrated in the exploits of Trump, Elon Must and their sycophants.
