Prostitution Under the Guise of Freedom
By Jeanne Gowen Dennis
Recently I watched a heartbreaking report on the John Ankerberg Show* about the Devadasi women of southern India. Pondering this Hindu practice, I couldn’t help but compare it to the deceptive sexual “freedom” of Western culture today.
Temple Prostitution in India
The Devadasi women are glorified sex slaves. In the name of the Hindu religion, girls as young as six or seven are being sold into slavery to learn dances and rituals, clean the temple, and serve as temple prostitutes.
When the girls grow too old to be desirable to men (in their twenties or thirties), they own nothing. So to earn money they find other little girls to enslave. The women deceptively claim that a god has chosen each child for marriage. This declaration makes the girl’s calling appear as an honor to her family.
Everyone involved, except the girl, benefits monetarily. If a Devadasi has a daughter, her daughter automatically becomes a Devadasi slave and can never marry.
Like this Hindu practice, the “sexual revolution” in the West also involves deception and slavery. It has left many Western women unwittingly enslaved in prostitution, although most don’t recognize it.
Prostitution Under the Guise of Freedom
I grew up during the moral upheaval of the sixties and early seventies. At that time I watched as, in the name of freedom, women gave up their modesty, their virginity, and their motherhood to the gods of pleasure, convenience, and autonomy.
Looking back, I realize these women also had been deceived. What they called “free love” was just another type of sexual slavery. Men didn’t have to marry or provide for women in order to have sexual relationships with them. Men could, like bees, move from flower to flower without responsibility or regret.
Women also felt free to move from partner to partner. Broken hearts abounded, but sexual freedom was an unforgiving god to be served at all costs. Women strove to appear “liberated” from the “bondage” of morality, marriage, and housewifery.
They became slaves to the lie that marriage led to repression. Marriage to a committed man could have provided lasting love and partnership – a type of true freedom found only when we obey God’s plan.
After abortion was legalized, people who paired up didn’t have to worry about conceiving children. Often the fathers or the girls’ embarrassed parents coerced women into having abortions they didn’t want. But as abortion became more accepted by society, more women chose to put ambition before childrearing, even if it meant terminating multiple pregnancies.
To assuage people’s guilt in the face of this carnage, the culture coined new terms. Those weren’t “babies” they paid doctors to slaughter. They were just “blobs of tissue” or “unviable fetuses.” Abortionists provided “women’s healthcare,” not killing services. Fornicating partners became “significant others.” Sin became “preference.”
Propagating the “Faith”
Like the older Devadasi women in India, these Western women and men of the sixties and seventies became recruiters for this god of “freedom.” They marched in support of “freedom of choice.” They became college professors, media leaders, politicians, and other influencers.
As women offered their unborn daughters and sons for slaughter, they raised their living children – and urged everyone else’s children – to join their cult. Under the feminist agenda, women seemingly became more powerful, bullying and shaming boys and men out of their masculinity and natural leadership roles.
They forced sex education into public schools. No more prudish morality for their children! Or for anyone else’s children, no matter what their parents believed.
The media and Hollywood joined forces with them to propagate this new faith, and the “free love” culture of the late twentieth century grew into the “anything goes” culture of today.
Now instead of learning to read and write, little children are losing their natural modesty and innocence at school and through broadcast and online media. Rather than being guided toward godly character and good citizenship, they are being trained as future customers of abortionists, pornographers, and purveyors of so-called “adult” products.
The deception has progressed so far that many children are confused about – or aren’t even allowed to know – their gender.
To top it off, most people are so bound up and blinded by sin and lies they can’t see the madness in all of this.
Our Only Hope
Our Western culture, once rich in wisdom, goodness, beauty, and heroism, has deteriorated into hedonism. Is there any hope?
As hopeless as it seems, we must remember that nothing is impossible with God (Luke 1:37). Now is the time for God’s people not to rise up in protest, but to fall down in repentance for our own sins and the sins of our people.
God said, “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chron. 7:14 nkjv).
Only fervent prayer and the gospel of Jesus Christ can free those caught in prostitution to false gods in the West, among the Devadasi women, and around the world.
What will you do today, tomorrow, and next week to make a difference?
*John Ankerberg Show, https://www.jashow.org/television-shows/EP 7 | Stories from Cambodia, India, and Ethiopia | God’s Word to the World, section about the Devadasi women of India, Aired on January 10, 2020
© 2020
Related:
Roe v. Wade: Marching is Not Enough
As we in the United States commemorate the terrible anniversary of Roe v. Wade, let us ask God to lift the deception that blinds so many, not just here, but all around the world.
Marches for Life have their place, but they’re no different from worldly protests unless we pave the way with desperate prayer. Also, unless we find ways to share the gospel, marches only demonstrate our disapproval of other people’s choices.
Yes, we must stand up for defenseless babies in the womb, but only the gospel can change their mothers’ hearts and offer hope for the future. Only the gospel can heal the broken hearts of those who have already made the tragic choice to abort their babies.
We must represent our Lord not in condemnation, but in love. We are fellow sinners saved only by God’s grace. It is our duty and privilege to offer the true hope we have received through no merit of our own: The forgiveness and salvation found in Jesus alone.
So as you march or as you talk with others about Roe v. Wade, please remember it is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance (Rom. 2:4).
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