'Prime-time debauchery' makes mockery of fidelity

Thursday, February 1, 2001

Fox's Temptation Island.

By GREGORY J. RUMMO
Special to The Record

Fox TV has achieved a new nadir in entertainment. The network that brought us "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?" has tapped into the viewing public's thirst for reality shows. By combining voyeurism and steamy sex, Fox executives hope to create the ultimate in prime-time titillation -- "Temptation Island."

"Temptation Island" is prime-time debauchery -- Sodom and Gomorrah with no angels sent to save the righteous.

In the first episode, four unmarried but "seriously committed" couples are brought to an exotic island off the coast of Belize. There, they are introduced to 26 singles. The sole purpose is to test the couples' relationships in the face of sexual temptation.

The location is a tropical paradise, and the music is sensual. The guys are hunks and the women are lookers. Andy, one of the "committed" guys, equated the lineup of women with "the Pepsi challenge where the ladies were the actual soft drinks."

But Billy, another one of the "committed" guys, opens the show with a bleak soliloquy: "I feel like I sold my soul to do something fantastic. . . . Now that the fun is over, and I am paying for it, I hate to say, it's a mistake, but now I am in hell."

Another one of the men in a committed relationship remarks: "This seriously scares the hell out of me."

It ought to.

"Fox has set out to do for courtship what it did for the institution of marriage with 'Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?' " says Charles Colson, Prison Fellowship Ministry's president and former Nixon-administration aide. " 'Temptation Island' trivializes courtship for the same purpose. It makes light of one of the most important promises we can make. The promise to be faithful and honor our commitments is turned into fodder for soap-opera dramatics."

"From a Christian perspective," explains the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, the chairman of the Washington, D.C.-based Traditional Values Coalition, "Fox TV has turned the Lord's Prayer upside down. In it, the Lord Jesus tells his followers that they should pray that God would lead them away from temptation and deliver them from evil."

And it's not as though this trash can be avoided by simply using the on-off switch. Trailers for the show were aired repeatedly during the Christmas and New Year's weekends. "Temptation" promos even appeared during the network's Christmas Eve broadcast of "Miracle on 34th Street," a movie that undoubtedly attracted a large number of families with children.

Leave it to the network that brings us the NFL on Sunday afternoons to debase sex to the level of a "sport."

Dr. Archibald Hart, author of "The Sexual Man" (Word Publications), writes: "Sex has become dehumanized. In many circles, it is no longer regarded as an act between loving, responsible couples. Sex has become a sport. And in sports, there is a strong desire to improve one's performance."

When sexual relations between a man and a woman are turned into sport, the twin pillars of family and fidelity are weakened. Former President Bill Clinton reinforced this dangerous trend when he tried to convince the public that his extramarital affair during office hours with a young intern wasn't really sex at all.

His behavior is already bearing poisonous fruit. According to a story about teen sexual activity published in The New York Times on Dec. 19, many young people are now echoing the former president's hair-splitting logic. Experts "have found that many young people perceive oral and anal sex as something other from sex -- and often, even, as abstinence."

Are we blind to the consequences of this trend?

"The public health risks of oral and anal sex are real," the Times continues. The story notes that "a health screening project among middle school students" in Georgia intended to find cases of meningitis had stumbled on several cases of gonorrhea of the throat among adolescent girls.

Fox tried to minimize the criticism they most certainly anticipated would come their way by choosing "committed" instead of married couples. But to believe that a couple can be truly committed without being married is nonsense. This is evidenced by the remarks of one of the women who describes her committed relationship as being "in a unit," as opposed to being "out there."

In a unit? Whatever happened to "shacking up," "fornicating," or "living in sin"?

"I object to the term that these people are committed," said TV Guide writer Mark Schwed, in an appearance on "Hannity and Colmes" on Fox News last month. "If they were committed, they would be married. There's not one ring on any of these people's fingers," he noted.

The institution of marriage establishes the true definition of a committed couple, which in turn is the fundamental building block of society. This concept was so important to God that he wasted no time establishing marriage as something sacred.

"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). God made it clear that his rule was one wife for one life.

Throughout the Old Testament, we see great biblical heroes fall prey to a weakness for women -- David, Solomon, and Samson, to name a few. But interlaced with the anecdotes of lust and promiscuity is the condemnation of a righteous God -- a commentary missing from "Temptation Island" and from our 21st century discourse on sexual mores.

In "Every Man's Battle" (Water Brook Press), Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker write: "Because our standards on sexual purity have been so mixed with God's, many men have no clue about God's standard for sexual purity. We're commanded to avoid sexual impurity in almost every book of the New Testament."

Such warnings are lost on the pundits of modernity. Pleasure is their god and ambivalence the attitude toward the repercussions caused by their active disparagement of America's long-standing Judeo-Christian values.

"Modern culture has abandoned more than 20 centuries of Western tradition that adheres to a transcendent standard of right and wrong," writes Colson in "A Dance With Deception" (Word Publishing).

In "The Things That Matter Most" (Harper Collins/Zondervan), syndicated columnist Cal Thomas cautions, "When marriage vows are trivialized, when adultery is winked at (usually by men, who remain in control of much of the media), this, too, sends an important signal to the culture about what does and does not matter."

"Temptation Island" signals that traditional sexual morality does not matter to a large segment of the American public.

To those who scoff at God's standard for sexual purity, the writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews warns: "Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral" (Hebrews 13:4).

And that should be enough to scare the hell out of us all -- literally.

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Gregory Rummo is a business executive who belongs to Madison Avenue Baptist Church in Paterson, where he also serves as choir director. You may e-mail him at GregoryJRummo@aol.com

You can e-mail his editor, Lisa Haddock at Haddock@northjersey.com
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