Wow, what a time of culture and corruption. We started out with Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake showing us far more than we wanted to see during a halftime show, and ended up with a flood of gay and lesbian weddings in San Francisco! Is our culture going to hell in a hand basket? Is there no more sense of decency and morality in America?

Viewing the world from the perspective of ethics the way that I do, pushes me to answer, yes—and no. Yes, surely we see far more nudity on television than we did 30 or 40 years ago. Setting aside Jackson’s exposure, the song itself was filthy and should never have been performed. Yes, obviously, homosexual couples have made huge inroads to reaching a sort of normal status in our society.

These two events were the tip of the iceberg: we have terrorism, political corruption, business corruption—we even have Martha Stewart on trial, for goodness sake!

But really, how much worse is our culture today in comparison with the past? News highlights the fact that the Los Angeles city mayor is seeking to institute the most sweeping ethics reform in the history of the city. The Enron criminals are either in jail or on their way there, and half a million people called CBS to complain about the Jackson/Timberlake stunt.

Now, if no one had called, I would be really worried. By the way, did you call? And if not, why not? In the beginning, it didn’t take us very long to mess things up. It is hard to know how many years it took but, suffice to say, by Genesis chapter six God had decided that the “earth was corrupt and filled with violence.”

Plato recorded Socrates’ views about the corruption of the youth of their time in the Republic. Jesus himself referred to those living in his day as a “faithless and perverse generation” (Matthew 17:17, RSV).

In Philippians 2:15, Paul urged his audience to live morally upright lives even “in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation.”

Are things worse now than before? Maybe I’m just not old enough to know. Maybe I’m just being contrary. I do know, however, that whatever the current moral condition of the world’s culture, our response should be pretty much the same today as it was when Paul offered his counsel to the Philippians. Simply put, we are called to be persons of Christ-like character in a world that is, and has always been, crooked and perverse.