In his 1967 poem Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin, one of Britain’s best-loved poets, famously declared that: “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three… Between the end of the Chatterley1 ban and the Beatles’ first LP.” He was referring, of course, to the huge change in sexual attitudes taking place in the country during the early 1960s. A jury had recently cleared publication of D. H. Lawrence’s scandalous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and The Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me, had appeared. A new tide of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” was sweeping away the last vestiges of Victorian morality, which had continued to exert some, if declining, influence until that time. Many British Christians deplored this trend, but they were wrong if they thought, as many did, that this was entirely new. It had happened before, from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. And as bad as things have gotten since the 1960s, today’s decadence meets its match in that bygone era.

It started as a backlash against the Puritan view that unchaste behavior was universally immoral. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, most of England rejoiced to be rid of the constraints of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, including its Puritan sexual ethic. Charles himself set the tone with his licentious court and many mistresses, who gave him at least 12 illegitimate children. Theatres, closed by the Puritans, were allowed to flourish once more. They played a key part in London cultural life but were notorious for their bawdiness and sexual explicitness.2 Adultery became fashionable, particularly for upper-class men, who were expected to keep mistresses. Indeed, if they did not, or like King William (1689-1702) kept only one, it prompted rumors of homosexuality3—not that homosexuality seems to have been particularly frowned upon in upper-class circles (even though it was illegal).4

By the first decade of the eighteenth century, and probably earlier, there was a definite homosexual sub-culture in London with a number of “molly” houses—clubs where groups of men would meet together, using female nicknames, dancing together and using a special slang.5 By the same period female prostitution was widespread, particularly in the Drury Lane district of London, with such terms as “Drury Lane Vestal,” “Covent Garden Virgin,” and “Newgate Saint,” all ironic names for different classes of prostitutes.6

Masquerades and receptions were blatantly sensuous with “Champagne, dice, music or your neighbour’s spouse” advertised as competing attractions.7 Nor was it only the upper classes that cast off sexual restraint. With the rise of the printing press, there was an explosion of pornography, primarily designed to be read in public in coffee houses and ale houses with a price making it accessible to virtually everyone. Thus the sexual attitudes of the upper classes percolated down the social strata.8

Were it not for the evangelical awakening of the eighteenth century, England would have collapsed, having rotted from the inside. And were it not for accounts of that awakening and others like it, contemporary Christians would despair of their culture’s escape from its current “Babylonian captivity.” But just as God was powerfully gracious in the day of Whitefield and the Wesleys, He may well reverse the terrible state of today’s society gone mad with sexual license. It would be miraculous, but He is the God of miracles, particularly when His people cry out for deliverance.
 
Footnotes:
 
1  This refers to the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written by D. H. Lawrence in 1928. Although it was printed privately that year in Florence, Italy, its inclusion of explicit sex scenes and certain four-letter words meant that it could not be published in Britain because it would have fallen foul of then-existing obscenity laws. It was eventually published in Britain in 1960 after the introduction in 1959 of a new Obscene Publications Act, meaning that publishers of works judged to be obscene could escape conviction if they could show that the work was of literary merit. Even so, the publishers, Penguin, were subject to a high-profile trial in 1960. Penguin’s winning of the case was seen as a major blow, giving freedom from forms of literary censorship.
 
2  Particularly scandalous was the fact that women played female parts for the first time and thus enacted explicit scenes of seduction.
 
3  Historians differ as to whether William was actually a homosexual or not, but some maintain that he had a significant gay court circle. See Dennis Rubine “Sexuality and Augustan England: Sodomy, Politics, Elite Circles and Society,” in The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, ed. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (New York: Haworth, 1989), 349-381.
 
4  Under Henry VIII’s Buggery Act of 1533, sodomy was punishable by hanging. This penalty was not lifted until 1861.
 
5  According to one ballad, “Such cursed Lewdness does infect the Town (London), ’Tis a mere Sodom, or Gommorrah grown.” Quoted in Richard Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700-1830 (London: GMP, 1992), 117.
 
6  See J. Wesley Bready, England: Before and after Wesley (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), 158.

Another ballad of the early eighteenth century, John Dunton’s The He-Strumpets: A Satyr on the Sodomite Club (published in 1707), claims that sodomy was becoming popular in London because many female prostitutes were “so full of Ails,” or infected with venereal disease. See Norton, 51.
 
7  Walter Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century, 410. Quoted in Bready, 158-159.
 
8  See “Sex and the 1700s,” an article summarizing the Ph.D. study by Jenny Skipp of the University of Leeds. University of Leeds Website, http://reporter.leeds.ac.uk/press_releases/current/sex_research.htm (accessed April 13, 2009).

For example, in the borough of Garret, a settlement of “straggling cottages near Wandsworth,” now South London, they held a mock election for Parliament, and “‘the qualification of a voter was that he had enjoyed a woman in the open air in that district.’ The occasion… drew swarming crowds of debauchees from London.” See also reference to disturbing baptism records in G. R. Balleine, History of Evangelical Party, 14. Quoted in Bready, 159.
 

article from Kairos Journal
 
 First Baptist Church of  Perryville is located at 4800 West Pulaski Highway, Perryville, MD.