The Age of Consent: The Rise of Relativism and the Corruption of Popular Culture

The vise-grip of moral relativism on American popular culture was not suddenly achieved in the 1960s. An incisive new book of unequaled historical scope studies this alluring but poisonous philosophy's hundred-year conquest of the institutions that shape the popular mind: art, music, architecture, film, and, of course, television.

Knight begins with a reminder of the imperfect but healthy society we inhabited before the ideology of self-gratification released the host of social pathologies from which we now suffer. He then guides the reader on a historical tour of the organs of modern popular culture, documenting the nearly unhindered march of relativism-led by a vanguard of decadent lites-through television, Hollywood, art, music, and architecture. This sustained assault on objective truth has brought us to the "Age of Consent," a morally obtuse world in which any act is validated by the mere consent of those immediately involved. Yet the Age of Consent's denial of truth, Knight argues, is unsustainable, and he concludes with a survey of the signs of incipient reaction that give hope for the future.

The Age of Consent opens with a foreword by Gary L. Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, whom the Weekly Standard has called "the most influential social conservative in Washington." As a study of moral relativism, The Age of Consent is unique in its broad historical treatment of the full array of transmitters of popular culture.

ROBERT H. KNIGHT is the director of cultural studies at the Family Research Council, the preeminent think-tank devoted to social issues. He has held fellowships at the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution and was an editor and writer for the Los Angeles Times. A leading expert on the issue of public policy and marriage, he regularly appears on national television news programs and is frequently quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other national journals. Mr. Knight lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and children.