Time & Perspective Quote by Tony Campolo

A single scandal didn’t just embarrass a president; it rewired the American moral imagination. Campolo’s line tracks that pivot with the weary clarity of someone who watched the church’s public voice shrink from social ethics to bedroom surveillance. The key move is his contrast between “moral issues...which were social” and the new morality that became “very personal.” It’s a diagnosis of a culture war tactic: stop arguing about poverty, war, racism, wages - messy systems with shared responsibility - and focus instead on sex and private conduct, where blame can be individualized and endlessly policed.

The Lewinsky reference functions as a shorthand for a whole media ecosystem snapping into place: 24-hour news, talk radio, tabloidized politics, and a religious right newly fluent in scandal as governance. Campolo implies that scripture itself got repurposed. “Using the Bible to address” sounds pastoral and outward-facing; the shift he describes turns the Bible into a tool for prosecution, less prophetic witness than moralized opposition research.

His final sentence - “I have continued that relationship up until the present” - is quietly barbed. The “relationship” isn’t with Lewinsky or Clinton, but with this new regime of moral attention, as if the church has been stuck in a long, unchosen marriage to personal scandal. Subtext: Christians didn’t merely react to the moment; they adapted to it, and in doing so surrendered leverage on the public good. The tragedy he sketches is strategic as much as spiritual: when morality becomes private theater, structural sin gets a free pass.