Sodom, Late Greece, Late Republican and Imperial Rome, Weimar Germany, 21st century USA – in each place extreme wealth is gathered, sexual perversion is prevalent and prominent. Why? I think the answer to that also answers why the love of money is condemned by the prophets and apostles in ways love of glory and power and family are not.
Money is an abstraction. Like any technology, it creates a degree of separation from the world. Consider two men wishing to mow their fields. The first man is a cash-poor man. He has to get up at dawn, take his scythe, and cut the field by hand. He is in direct contact with the field, the grass, and the tool. He can see the health of the grass. He can tell when the scythe needs sharpening or repair. He can see that he has cut too thin over there, left grass too thick here. He can see that he shouldn’t have struck that sapling with the scythe-blade, since the blade is now nicked. He feels the human cost of the work he is doing in the sweat running down his brow and the fatigue in his legs. He has a clear view of what he is doing, what it truly costs, and what it truly causes. The second man is cash-rich. He hires another man with a tractor to mow his field. He is removed from the field by two degrees of separation, which the money makes possible. He doesn’t know how the grass is doing; he doesn’t know how well the cut has affected the field. He doesn’t really know what went into transforming the field from thick, tall grass to low, neat grass. The first man knows the consequences of his action, because he feels them directly. The second man does not, not like the first man does. If something goes wrong, the first man will be able to respond immediately, and therefore limit the damage done to his field or to himself. The second man cannot respond immediately, and so problems will tend to go further and become more destructive.
You could also think of the Wall Street trader manipulating stock tickers. He has no clue what real world affects those tickers mean. He doesn’t know what families he is depriving of work or what towns he is sentencing to slow death. The money that he works with doesn’t have any straightforward or obvious connection to those things. He does not feel the consequences of his decisions. Someone else bears that burden because the abstraction of money has shifted it off him. A people who are used to manipulating money will become accustomed such burden-shifting. It becomes integral to their social and economic life.
Sex has momentous, natural consequences in the world. Maybe the most momentous and consequential. They are of an emotional, social, biological, economic, domestic, and religious character. Living in extreme wealth, though, forms you sexually in two related ways: first, it trains you to separate yourself from the consequences of your actions generally, and second, it lets you remove yourself from those particular consequences of sexual adventure which you deem inconvenient. Kids? Daycare, or abort them. Disease? Medical treatments. “Unfulfilled marriage”? Divorce. These are all very costly means of consequence-avoidance. Money becomes a shield between a person and the natural consequences of his sexual perversion. Those natural consequences are a gracious feedback mechanism in Creation. When we do something destructive, it hurts. Ordinarily, we’d stop doing that thing. Sodomites, for instance, get diseases and do not reproduce, so their lives ordinarily are short and unattractive. Extreme wealth, though, makes undermining the natural hurts of sodomy possible, so a people is able to pursue sodomy to ever greater degrees, because it never feels the painful consequences. That’s the link between money – excessive accumulation of money – and sexual degeneracy.
A Pilgrim's Missives 