Killing the Conscience: Aldous Huxley’s War on Meaning and the Secular Professor

I sat in a faculty meeting when a university president recalled the street preachers who would come to his university when he was an undergraduate. They always seem to be named Brother Jed. On one occasion, Brother Jed pointed at this president as a young man and said “fornicator.” As he told the story the president laughed and said “yeah, so?” The faculty laughed. Fornication is funny to the secular university professors. They also happen to hate God and His Son. Is there a connection?

There is, and Aldous Huxley exposed it. Huxley was nothing if not honest. While many intellectuals of his time (and ours) pretend that their rejection of Christianity is purely rational “rooted in science, progress, or enlightenment,” Huxley was self-aware enough to admit the truth. He didn’t want the world to have meaning. He didn’t want there to be a God. Why? Because it would interfere with his desire for sexual freedom.

He confessed as much in Ends and Means:

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning, consequently assumed it had none, and was able without difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially a matter of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously a liberation from a certain kind of political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”

Notice the order. He didn’t follow the evidence where it led and conclude there was no meaning in the world. He wanted there to be no meaning, so he built a philosophy to justify that desire. His motivation wasn’t reason or discovery, it was lust.

The War on Christian Morality

Huxley and his contemporaries weren’t content to sin in secret. They wanted the whole world to join them. If everyone indulged in their rebellion, there would be no one left to remind them of God, no one to convict them, no one to call them to repentance. So they set out to kill the conscience of an entire civilization.

They did this by attacking the very foundations of morality. If they could convince people that there is no meaning, no God, no divine standard, then anything goes. Sexual liberation was the spearhead of this movement, not an accident, not youthful rebellion, not the inevitable march of history, but a deliberate war on God’s created order.

This was not an accident. It was done on purpose. The professors who want to teach you or your children to practice perversion aren’t doing so out of good intentions. They do what is evil and love seeing others do the same. “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).

Paul warned us about this in Romans 1:18-32. When people reject the truth of God, they don’t become neutral seekers of wisdom. They suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They exchange the glory of God for idols. They refuse to acknowledge Him, and as a result, God gives them over to the full consequences of their rebellion. They plunge deeper into sin, celebrating what should bring shame, until they reach a point where not only do they practice wickedness, but they demand that everyone else affirm it as good.

Sound familiar?

The Fourth Generation

We are now in the fourth generation of this rebellion. Huxley’s dream of total sexual liberation has reached its logical conclusion. The vilest acts are applauded. The most debased behaviors are called good. The Bible is canceled. The national conscience is nearly dead. The world is drowning in filth, and people love it so much that they rage against anyone who dares to remind them of God’s law or point out the consequences they are suffering in their own bodies.

But this is not a new story. This is the oldest story. From Cain to Babel to Sodom to Rome, sinners love their sin, hate God, and suppress the truth (keep God’s Word from being taught). And yet, in every generation, God calls His people to stand firm, to expose the darkness, and to proclaim the truth.

So the question is: What will you do?

Will you stay silent while the world sinks deeper into moral chaos? Will you shrink back, hoping that things will somehow correct themselves? Or will you be a voice of truth, calling people to repentance even when they hate you for it? There comes a time for a good man to draw a line to defend all that is good and true in the world and silence evil-doers.

The Huxleys of the world will always try to kill the conscience. But as long as God has His people on this earth, they will never succeed. Huxley couldn’t get it to stop without mind-altering drugs—he left this world on acid, not able to soberly face his Judge.