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If all you have ever known is the flood, would you recognise when you’re drowning? This thought keeps on recurring in my mind whenever I encounter those words that speak of an age of depravity in the latter days. I used to pray that I would not live to see those days, but no more. It begins to occur to me that this age has already come, and we simply do not recognise it because we have been raised in its company and everything we witness is simply the norm.

A growing intimacy with the dark side of our culture has thrown a new light on that normality. It must be two years since we began our quest to give something back to society, first contemplating fostering those children who find themselves in the care of the state, then giving thought to adoption. The training sessions and assessments that have followed have opened our eyes.

The levels of abuse perpetuated against children and their neglect is criminal, but it is nothing extra-ordinary, for it is happening all the time. Following a recent appointment, our social worker asked us to start looking through the lists of children seeking families. It was a heart-breaking venture, for there are hundreds of children in need, of all sorts of cultural backgrounds.

Earlier this year, my department at work was tasked with working on a website for the sexual health team. The purpose of such websites is to warn young people about sexually transmitted infections and to tell them to get tested regularly. It is inappropriate – indeed judgemental – to advise them anything old fashioned like abstaining. Indeed one NHS website we encountered while researching possible designs had the slogan, “Not for virgins” – bizarrely in connection with the chance to win a Nintendo Wii by having a Chlamydia test. The lesson is that the consequences of our actions can easily be treated with a course of anti-biotics or avoided altogether by using a condom.

The dark side of our culture is thus veiled from most. Most of us – unless we volunteer to adopt or become social workers – do not see the thousands of children in care or the thousands of children who have no idea as to the identity of their fathers. Instead the talk is of freedom and modernity, a new way of living, of progress, and many rejoice that young Muslims – male and female – are embracing this liberation too. It is a sign of a death of the old, of an acceptance of modern values. The many babies of “Muslim heritage” that we find in the lists of children seeking families are of no consequence. There is always abortion. These are the answers of modernity. We dare not speak of abstention, of doing without; the choice comes not before, but afterwards.

The absence of revulsion for what has become of us provides the answer to the question that keeps recurring in my mind. The extremes of yesterday are today’s norms and those who resist are extremists. Those who abstain are today’s queers, to be mocked and outed. We cannot see that we are drowning because this flood is all we’ve ever known.