A recent Gallup poll amazed me. Apparently 92 percent of Americans believe adultery is morally wrong. That’s almost unanimous agreement with the Seventh Commandment, of all things.

It’s a surprise, considering modern society’s loose attitudes about sex and marriage. The same poll found almost two thirds of Americans say divorce is morally acceptable, and nearly as many condone fornication. Over half believe there’s nothing wrong with having a child outside of marriage. Homosexuality is okay to almost half.

Meanwhile, fewer people are marrying. Those who do marry are more prone to split up. Children are likelier to grow up without one of their biological parents. At the same time, same-sex “marriage” is being written into law; transsexuals are receiving special legal protections. Marriage is on the ropes. Family is in retreat.

And yet—here is this stubborn, almost universal moral disapproval of adultery. Amazingly, slightly fewer Americans frown on polygamy than on a married man or woman having an affair.

Is this, as Barack Obama said recently about the belief that homosexuality is sin, simply people clinging to “worn arguments and old attitudes”? What is it about adultery that upsets people so?

The prevailing attitude about a lot of behavior once thought sinful is that if it doesn’t hurt anybody else, it’s fine. Perhaps with adultery, people can easily recognize the hurt. Witness recent revelations of adultery among prominent politicians: The adulterer is always reviled for seeking personal gratification at cost of deep emotional pain to the faithful spouse.

But be honest. Adultery is hardly the only behavior that leaves such wreckage. Mountains of evidence prove, for example, the devastation of divorce: Long-term emotional scars remain in divorcees and their children that in most cases weaken or destroy future family life. Numerous studies also show that unmarried sex is a disaster, causing a mess of physical and mental health problems, particularly in younger people. Abortion—which Gallup tells us just 56 percent of Americans say is wrong—besides killing human beings, also leaves emotional scars on large numbers of women and men. And single-parent homes are proven incubators for scads of social problems, from poverty to criminality to drug abuse.

Without question, these things are common. Fully one quarter of American adults are children of divorce. Ninety-five percent of Americans have premarital sex. A million American babies are aborted every year. Four in 10 American children are born to unwed parents. That is probably why people tend to convince themselves that these actions are “morally acceptable.”

But common doesn’t make right.

These harmful behaviors all share something fundamental in common with adultery: The Bible contains laws directly aimed at preventing them.

God’s law is meant to rigorously safeguard the family. When it is obeyed, the family is preserved, nurtured and strengthened, and every member benefits, as does the whole of society. When that law is broken, the family fragments, every member hurts, and society begins to crumble.

Ninety-two percent of Americans can recognize enough soundness in this logic to agree that adultery is morally wrong. It follows, then, that we all ought to pay closer attention to the Authority that forbids adultery—that, in fact, created marriage and family! Rather than trying to enact new laws that we believe would improve family life and society, we should acknowledge that His other laws might be just as binding and inviolable, and accept and obey those.

It is to our great hurt as a society that we overlook this lesson.

And yet—any individual or family that heeds it, and studies and labors to keep those God-given family laws, is guaranteed to reap blessings for it.

That’s not easy. Though 92 percent of Americans notionally agree with the Seventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” how many truly understand it and live by it? Even by the commonly accepted definition, only 87 percent of wives and 78 percent of husbands have remained faithful.

But Jesus Christ had a stricter definition. He said, “But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery” (Matthew 5:32). Including remarriage after divorce would bump the adultery statistic up considerably.

But Jesus’s definition was even more stringent: “I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (verse 28). That also makes an adulterer out of any consumer of pornography—a scourge that has grown epidemic in the Internet age.

How many of those 92 percent agree with Jesus Christ: that pornography and divorce and remarriage are morally wrong—actually forms of adultery? Again, just look at the devastating results of these practices. Every time someone indulges in them, troubles result—just as surely as when someone violates his marriage covenant through an illicit sex act. God outlawed them for our protection—to stabilize and preserve our families and our society.

“Nothing in this material world is as important as a happy home life with father, mother and well-taught, happy children—a close-knit family.”

Thus wrote Herbert W. Armstrong in the February 1979 issue of the Good News magazine in an article titled, “Where This Breakdown of Family Life Is Taking Us!” For the last several years of his life, which ended in 1986, this great theologian and educator recognized and sought to combat the powerful assault on family hitting the Western world. He wrote article after article exposing the problem and supplying readers with much-needed practical biblical instruction on how to root it out of their own homes.

He also wrote two works that explain a vital dimension to this issue that almost nobody understands. We offer both of these works to you for free, to read online or to receive a print copy by mail at no charge. (See offers at right.)

Without the scriptural understanding in these books, you simply do not comprehendwhy God considers close-knit family so important! Even the 92 percent who condemn adultery mostly lack true understanding of why it is so reprehensible. Society, absent this knowledge, has lost its moral compass—and in its ignorance is ravaging the family, stupidly knocking out the pillars that support its own very foundation.

The true understanding of why family, Mr. Armstrong wrote, “strikes at the very heart and core of humanity’s future and eternity and the gospel that Jesus Christ proclaimed.”

You need to know why!