Usually each brazen new effort to “push the envelope” in entertainment (more sex, more obscene language) gets a pretty positive buzz: It’s called edgy or daring or bold. Occasionally it may get panned on the decidedly limited grounds of politics or aesthetics: Critics may deem explicit material sexist or boring, terms meant to advertise their own artistic and cultural sophistication. But moral objections are muted if voiced at all, and actual moral outrage is restricted to the cultural fringe. (Cool people don’t do outrage over sex; that’s the sort of thing you expect from stuffy old biddies on the Religious Right, and who wants to be one of them?)

So this time around, clearly MTV anticipated they’d get great buzz (“Wow! I can’t believe they did that, but ain’t it cool?”). Their press release before the show promised “some shocking moments” and their Web site immediately afterward gleefully boasted “Janet Gets Nasty! You know what we’re talking about, Justin Timberlake and a kinky finale that rocked the Super Bowl to its core.” Yes, folks we’re so — edgy, daring, bold.

But this time was different. The public response to The J & J Show was unmistakably outrage — visceral, emphatic, overwhelming. It wasn’t just the Religious Right folks who were mad, it was just about everybody — and “everybody” didn’t stop to worry that their outrage might make them, in the eyes of the culture’s elite, Religious Right sympathizers. Even MTV rushed to yank its gloating Web coverage and offered apologies, but it was too late. In no time, FCC Chairman Michael Powell — who a few months back joined a ruling that the F-word was OK on TV — was promising “thorough and swift” investigation and making noises about heavy penalties. There was no doubt about the nation’s sentiment: “This time they’ve gone too far.”

So what made this time different? The fact that it was the Super Bowl, with a huge audience including millions of children with their parents alongside them, surely played a big part. So did the fact that it was so completely unexpected. It was thrust literally in our faces, out of nowhere, when we were surrounded by family and friends. It was, in a real sense, a sexual assault — an assault on the sensibilities of an entire country.

Of course, people go through a much lower-intensity version of this every day. In the grocery stores, you can’t go through a checkout line without seeing (often at a child’s-eye level) some “women’s magazine” pushing “sex secrets to satisfy your man.” On TV, you don’t have to watch a filthy sitcom with jokes about masturbation to run across ads for a filthy sitcom with jokes about masturbation. (That happened to me several times a couple weeks back.) The cumulative effect of this is desensitization, or at least resignation. You get used to it, and while you may react against it briefly, you just keep moving, out to the parking lot or on to the next commercial, as the case may be.

But this time was something new, happening in a place you’d never seen it before. Could we get used to this too? Sadly, probably so, if it keeps happening — and that, too, contributed to the outrage. There’s a line here that most people don’t want crossed, precisely because it’s one of the few lines left. People see some events as mainstream national experiences, and if sexual explicitness can intrude on them, then there’s no such thing as a cultural red-light district any more. Hackneyed live-and-let-live appeals like “if you don’t like it, change the channel” don’t cut it here: In this case, the response is “This is our show, and blast it, Janet, you’re the intruder!” If you were to distill people’s thoughts down to a few words, they’d be: “This time they’ve gone too far.”

And that’s true. But it also begs the question: What would’ve been “just far enough?”

I’m not trying to be cute here. I’m making the point that there’s something twisted about using sexually charged material for public entertainment, period — and that’s been accepted for too long already. Janet and Justin really didn’t come out of nowhere, so we should’ve seen this coming.

Most immediately, of course, was what happened just prior to The Big Moment; they gyrated to Justin’s “Rock Your Body,” in which he sang “I’ll Have You Naked by the End of This Song.” Not that anyone expected him to deliver on that promise, but if all that is “just entertainment” fit for national TV, why wouldn’t someone, sometime, cross the line? If we’re going to have a line that’ll hold, it needs to be drawn far short of nudity. (The FCC’s Powell, to his credit, is having the whole show investigated: “The whole show was onstage copulation,” and the finale “wasn’t even the most offensive part.”)

More broadly, though, all this is the natural outcome of a sort of deal with the devil our culture made long ago.

At one time, people recognized sexual “entertainment” as outright sleazy. Though they couldn’t eradicate it, they insisted on confining it to a sort of cultural red-light district. It’d be available to those who sought it, but it — and its customers — remained sleazy. It wasn’t something anyone thought (much less said) had a legitimate claim to exist; it was just that society wasn’t going to invest vast resources on trying to wipe it out altogether.

That kind of situation might have been sustained — a recognition that human sinfulness couldn’t be eliminated but could be limited. But it rested on a clear understanding that this was sinfulness. In the last few decades sexual entertainment has gone from a reluctantly tolerated vice to an aggressively asserted “right.”

Not everyone has understood just how radical this shift has been, because the new “right” was typically invoked in the name of “privacy” (as in “I have a right to do what I want in my private life”). That led a lot of people to imagine that something like the old cultural red-light district was still in effect. It’s not, as those aforementioned trips through the grocery or across the TV dial testify. If anything, the sex industry has gone “mainstream.” It’s no exaggeration to say that a large chunk of the media is based on sexual prostitution. The fact that the sex is largely simulated doesn’t change its nature; it’s still trading sex, in the form of increasingly overt displays, for money.

Could it have been otherwise? Not likely, once sins were called “rights;” to quote (of all people) The X-Files’ Fox Mulder, “Did you think you could call up the devil and expect him to behave?”

This isn’t the counsel of despair. On the contrary, the widespread public disgust over Janet and Justin provides an opportunity for an even Bigger Moment in our culture.

In all the millions of conversations about what happened at the Super Bowl, we have an opening to recover some fundamental understandings about the nature of sex, of men and women, and of our status as creations of God, designed in accordance with His plan for our own good. (For articles on that subject, you can start here, here and here.) We have a chance to show people not only that the line was crossed long before that halftime show, but why there is a line at all — what sex is truly supposed to be, and why so many of its manifestations in our culture are perversions.

Of course, few of us will get a chance to do that on national TV, much less with a Super Bowl-size audience. But each of us can start somewhere, and all those conversations can add up. Especially in God’s economy, where a small investment of effort in a good cause has a way of being multiplied into a fortune.

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