Over the past few years, I have written several blogs on the meteoric rise of depression and unhappiness in our society. Back in March, I wrote a blog titled, “The Adolescent Crisis,” where Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a professor at NYU, reports that young adults today have the worst mental health of any generation. We have data going back to the “greatest generation” which are those born between 1901 to 1925. If you are a parent of an adolescent this is quite a disturbing and frightening assertion.

I believe this discontent is leading people down paths that is only increasing their unhappiness and leading to greater despair. For instance, author John Gray in his book, Straw Dogs, says, “Drug use is a tacit admission of a forbidden truth [in Western culture.]” What is that truth? It is that “for most people happiness is beyond reach.” Human life is unavoidably hard and unhappy for the vast majority of people and always will be. So why not get high?

I recently read words that explain a major reason that people are so depressed and unhappy, a reason that had not occurred to me.

In his book, Live No Lies, John Mark Comer makes a very interesting observation. He says,

“But when we believe lies-ideas that are not congruent with the reality of God’s wise and loving design-and then, tragically, open our bodies to those lies and let them into our muscle memories, we allow an ideological cancer to infect our souls. We live at odds with reality, and as a result we struggle to thrive.”

He then makes reference to the sexual revolution of the 1960’s that set in motion a:

“cascade effect: the reversal of the long-standing moral consensus around promiscuity (which separated sex from marriage) worked in tandem with the advent of birth control and the legalization of abortion (which separated sex from procreation), which moved on to the legalization of no-fault divorce (which turned a covenant into a contract and separated sex from intimacy and fidelity), then to Tinder and hookup culture (which separated sex from romance and turned it into a way to “get your needs met”). From there it’s moved on to the LGBTQI+ revolution (which separated sex from the male-female binary), the current transgender wave (which is an attempt to separate gender from biological sex), and the nascent polyamory movement (an attempt to move beyond two-person relationships). Amid the revolution, the questions nobody seems to even be asking are, Is this making us better people? More loving people? Or even happier people? Are we thriving in a way we weren’t prior to the sexual revolution?

Nobody is really even asking these questions, much less making a serious attempt to research the data.

Furthermore, I was recently reading about the major social problems in America and how they are being caused by the misuse of our sexuality. Think of the consequences of teen pregnancy, addiction to pornography, sexually transmitted diseases, the trauma of abortion, the psychological and physical effects associated with rape, sexual abuse, and all sexual addictions.

If we could eliminate all of these sex-related social ills, imagine how the mental and emotional health in the lives of so many people would benefit. People’s sense of well-being would also greatly rise.

Christianity teaches there is a divinely established moral order, and we as human beings just cannot decide for ourselves what is moral. When we choose to defy God’s moral order, there is a price we must pay.

If a culture or civilization is no more than a composition of thousands or millions of families, it would stand to reason that each family’s teaching and treatment of sex is an important ingredient in not only the family’s foundation, but also in the foundation of our civilization. It would change everything.

Richard E Simmons III is the founder and Executive Director of The Center for Executive Leadership and a best-selling author.