When the West Got Back with Her Ex
Olympias and Alexander the Great as depicted in the film “Alexander.”
I love history. I love hearing a good story and the best kind of story is the sort that is true. Reading history is good, but I especially love an oral telling, the kind of account you get in a classroom or in a documentary. Lately, I’ve enjoyed listening to history in podcast form, as told by Dan Carlin in his Hardcore History podcast. He has an auxiliary podcast feed called Hardcore History – Addendum in which he recently published a feature entitled “Glimpses of Olympias.” This episode tells the story of Alexander the Great’s mother, relating her cunning and malevolent ways. As he tells Olympias’ story, Carlin relates the depraved practices typically embraced during those pagan times – cultic orgies, rampant homosexual trysts, and brutal sexual violence. As I listened to Carlin depict the context in which Alexander lived, I was struck by how alien their standards were to the traditional moral values passed down to us in modern Western society. It becomes all the more striking when one remembers that Greek culture figures large in forming the bedrock of Western civilization. Clearly, Christian moral tradition that was later introduced led the West to dump the social acceptance of these practices.
And yet, what first struck me as alien, became disturbingly familiar as I recently searched for a show to watch one Sunday night. Experience has taught me that I cannot dive into any series blindly without taking on the very real risk of being exposed to pornographic content. Accordingly, as I scrolled across various series featured on Netflix and Amazon Prime, I decided to check out their content on IMDb. Every show I looked up came back with reports of numerous instances of extensive nudity and graphic sex scenes. It was to the point that I was uncomfortable merely reading the descriptions. The scenes described seemed to be taken straight out of Alexander’s day – grotesque in their debauchery. I was forced to give up searching dramas and to settle on a docu-drama.
These were top-rated, highly popular shows. In fact, one of them had been personally recommended to me! My forlorn search has left me feeling disheartened by how far we have morally deteriorated. Alexander’s day no longer seems so alien. As we entertain ourselves according to pagan moral standards, daytime shows now grasp at normalizing polyamarous marriages, giggling over their curiosity, playfully pulling apart thread by thread the rent remains of marriage in this country. This happens until the lawbooks are finally pulled open, as is now occurring in Utah where they are pushing to decriminalize polygamy.
The forces at work producing this moral decay exceed our individual powers. Our consolation is that our King is the one who has spoken this proven word to us: “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world."(John 16:33 ESV) Our first and all-sufficient resort is prayer – praying for our World, but especially for ourselves and our brothers and sisters in Christ who must face down these pressures and temptations. We must pray for discipline when it comes to our entertainment habits - take advantage of resources like IMDb and Plugged-In! This takes on additional importance for those of us who are responsible for our children and the shows/movies they are permitted to watch. We must pray also for the marriages within our church, that they would be grounded in Christ and His sacrificial love, that our brothers and sisters would not be deceived and led astray by the normalization of pornographic entertainment and adulterous relationships.
The West may be getting back with her Ex, but we remain the Bride of Christ. Let us live accordingly.
Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001, 2007, 2011, 2016 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.