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Despite its growing influence, the new morality is far from established. Many leading university ethicists have argued persuasively against it, and the movement has hardly affected Eastern Orthodoxy or Evangelical Protestantism. To the many laymen who are already making up their own minds about sex, the new approach to ethics may seem irrelevant or at best a trendy attempt by the churches to be "with it'' in a society that is adopting increasingly permissive sexual rules. But ultimately it touches a basic theological issue. Against the traditional concept that God wants men to conform to a fixed divine design, the new morality stakes its case on the idea that God would prefer men to make their own responsible decisions.