President Kimball Vs. the World: Part Five: Pitirim Sorokin and Sex in America

 

For Part One, Part Two, Part Three, or Part Four, click the appropriate link. Whew! We’re almost at the end of this one – a doozy from the very beginning! 

 My Hope

I would hope that no one would get the idea that I'm going grammar-Nazi on the prophets and apostles. I would never dream of doing so. The men and women who lead my church are brave and faithful people. They're not perfect, none of them, but I do believe most of them are good people.

President Kimball in particular was a seminal figure in my young life. It’s not an exaggeration to say that his writings and his sermons were a key for me to help me find and grow my own faith. I feel very fond towards him.

He was a tad bit quote-challenged, though. He was human, and not the only one, certainly. They got better with time and practice.

And sex is always fun to talk about, isn’t it? If you wanted straight talk about sex in the 60s and 70s, he didn’t mince words, because of the tough cultural times he lived through.

So the next and final quote he gave was from someone I’d never heard of – someone who, once I did a little research, opened a whole other world to me.

 

The Final Quote from President Kimball's Talk - From the World of Social Science

 ‘“The group that tolerates sexual anarchy is endangering its very survival,” says sociologist Sorokin.’

That was all I had to work with, and from that I found Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian sociologist that emigrated to America when he opposed the Bolsheviks and was imprisoned and sentenced to death for his beliefs. He escaped to America with the help of friends, and became a sociologist at Harvard.

Unfortunately, not a relative, but I digress... 

 

My terrible Post-It Note portrait of a young Pitirim Sorokin

The Context, and Where to Find His Work

When Sorokin came to America, he continued his work and gave some observations on American society and its shifting sands in a work called The American Sex Revolution. The fact that he wrote it in the mid-fifties I find significant, as the changes that preceded that revolutionary time were already evident by that time.

One of my favorite websites is archive.org. A lot of his work is still available for free there, including The American Sex Revolution – the quote itself is found on page 78, where his views were that what was happening in America threatened to undermine individual and societal stability. No doubt this was why his quote ended up in President Kimball’s talk – his voice was one in the world that harmonized with the gospel, at least that much.

Another one that looks interesting, and seems to be one of his seminal works, is entitled Contemporary Sociological Theories.

He also wrote a journal of what happened to him during the Russian Revolution, called Leaves of a Russian Diary. For those who like these sorts of historical first-person accounts, we’ve already discussed Jenkin Lloyd Jones’sAn Artileryman’s Diary, and its accounts of the Civil War from the point of view of a foot soldier. I look forward to comparing the two. The addendum to his diary, called The Thirty Years After, follows up after the diary. This copy combines them both.

There's no homework assignments in this blog. I won't require anything ever. I only give suggestions as to ways we can open ourselves to a whole new world some may have forgotten, or never encountered n the first place.