Unbelief Betrays Its LIcentiousness

The Immorality Implicit in "Robing Up"

You knew from the get-go that Hindu and Moslem women are profoundly chaste and faithful, right?  You knew that because they robe up.  Of course we knew that.

OK, so now we can dispense with the jokes and the kidding.  Below is a telling excerpt from Dr Vishal Mangalwadi, in, The Book That Made Your World,  in answer to the question, "What did the biblical idea of marriage and family do for the status of women and for civilization?"  He chose to answer the question by telling a story from his personal experience.

As I mentioned . . . we began our service to the poor in village Gatheora in 1976 by training Village Health Workers (VHS's).  Dr. Mategaonker and his staff would come to our farm twice a week to teach village folk how to stay healthy, prevent diseases, and cure simple ailments.  The village families wouldn't allow women to attend these classes, so we had to begin by training young men.  After a few months, after we had bonded and become free with each others, the VHW's conveyed to us their considered opinion: "You Christians are very immoral."

"What do you mean?" I was taken aback, since the jury had reached this verdict after due deliberation.  "How are we immoral?"

"You walk with your wives holding their hands," they explained.  "Our wives walk at least ten feet behind us.  You take your sister-in-law to market on your scooter.  Our wives are too modest to sit behind our bicycles, and they cover their faces in front of our fathers, uncles, and older brothers."

I had no clue how to answer my accusers.  But Vinay, my older brother, had lived there longer than I.  He responded with brutal frankness: "Come on, you guys!  You know perfectly well that the truth is the exact opposite.  You do not allow your wives to uncover their faces in front of your fathers and brothers because you trust neither your father nor your brothers nor your wives.  I allow my wife to go to the market with my brother because I trust her and I trust my brother.  Our wives can walk in the fields with us and visit you in your homes because of higher moral standards.  You chain your wives to your kitchens and imprison them behind their veils because you are immoral."

To my utter amazement, every one of the VHWs agreed with Vinay without a whisper of protest.  They may have remained sceptical about our morality, but they knew first hand their own moral standards.  [Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011),  p. 276]

He adds:

I was grateful for Vinay's insight, for I had never seen the connections of morality to liberty, liberty to the status of women, and the status of women to the strength of a society.  I should have known better because our village was less than twenty miles from Khajuraho, where every imaginable sexual act had been carved in stone to adorn Hindu temples.  My ancestors' religion of "sacred sex" had enslaved our women just as it did in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman civilization.  [Ibid., p. 277.]

This rampant immorality of heart (and, not infrequently, action) crosses just about all races and cultural lines in the East.  In most Eastern nations and cultures the females walk behind the males and they are always accompanied.  It is therefore reasonable to expect their menfolk are enslaved to sexual impurity, in heart if not in deed.  On the other hand, the secular West's enslavement to pornography represents the same licentiousness.  It is the same cultural sin, albeit with a different mode of expression.