Noble Savages

The roots of pornography are religious, and it must be resisted religiously.

This $57 billion dollar industry is swallowing peoples worldwide as its revenues exceed that of professional football, baseball, and basketball combined. Statistics reveal that upwards of 40 million American adults regularly visit over 372 million published pornographic web pages. How did we get here?

In the "free love" decade of the 1960s, the New Left refashioned pornography into a new image — the symbol of moral freedom. What was once sold "under the counter" as filth was now celebrated as the literary symbol of liberation from God and His law-word. This refashioning was nothing new. It was but an echo of the liberation theology of the Marquis de Sade, the 19th century pervert de France (1740-1814).

In 1974, R. J. Rushdoony, wrote, "[T]his new pornography, first conceived by Sade — will not be eliminated by moral indignation or by legislation." Rushdoony recognized that the roots of pornography in modern culture are essentially religious and must be combated religiously.

In this powerful book Noble Savages (formerly The Politics of Pornography) Rushdoony demonstrates that in order for modern man to justify his perversion he must reject the Biblical doctrine of the fall of man. If there is no fall, the Marquis de Sade argued, then all that man does is normative. Rushdoony concluded, "[T]he world will soon catch up with Sade, unless it abandons its humanistic foundations."

In his conclusion Rushdoony wrote, "Symptoms are important and sometimes very serious, but it is very wrong and dangerous to treat symptoms rather than the underlying disease. Pornography is a symptom; it is not the problem." What is the problem? It's the philosophy behind pornography — the rejection of the fall of man that makes normative all that man does. Learn it all in this timeless classic.