You can think whatever you want, as long as we agree…
I sense, among younger, conservative Christians, a kind of “libertarian silence” when it comes to issues surrounding the undeniable ascendancy of LGB-whatever grievance politics. There was a time when some poor lumberjack who longed to sport fishnet stockings and a frilly bustier kept those desires to himself, but his old TMI is now another line item in the humanist manifesto, and we all mock that under threat of becoming an untouchable.
The speed of this change caught me by surprise. I grew up with Alan Alda making fun of Klinger on MASH. I remember Dean Martin singing, “in my Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it, I’m sure I’ll get rejected at the draft board today.” I can remember vast electoral majorities utterly rejecting gay marriage even in California. Perhaps the Party of the People will forgive me if I remind you, children, that even Barack Obama was once completely unenlightened on this front.
Things move fast once the costume party actually starts.
Back during the Proposition 8 days, I got the sense that quite a few people of faith just didn’t have the belly to defend that old Judeo-Christian standard any more. The faith had become very personal. It was a private spiritual place to battle substances, porn, divorce, and addictions of various sorts. How could these hospital patients heal anyone on the outside anyway? A few Christian libertarians even got a little uppity about the whole thing: why were we allowing the state any role in sanctioning marriage?
And even though this would inspire shrieks of protest over a Huffpo water cooler, Christianity breeds tolerance and mercy. We believers have the libertarian, open-minded thing down, folks. We civilized the Druids and we eventually got the Comanches to stop cutting off their captives’ noses.
So, if you want to trivialize your life, and coarsen your soul, by pushing the sexual dimension to weird extremes, have at it. As near as I can express the perspective of young conservative Christians, it runs something like this: “I know. It’s sad. We’re all wretched sinners. Not a battle worth fighting, Dad.”
But there’s a problem. From their perspective—because their god is obviously so fickle that new identities and new grievances are being manufactured on a near daily basis—it’s not “live and let live.” As of this writing, old white guys, young white guys, heterosexual “breeders” and toxic masculinity can be ridiculed without mercy, but when I characterized males-turned-females competing against biological females as “insanity,” I was accused of hate speech.
As I wrote yesterday, pondering a muscle bound lad in girl’s clothing, a head taller than his competitors, as a question we can think about in terms of “fairness” seems supremely daft. It’s like seeing a colleague defecate on his desk at work and calling it “impolite.” It’s like watching someone unload a pistol in someone’s head and calling it “uncivil.” It’s insane, folks. Crazy. Bonkers. Unglued. Unzipped. Twelve Tacos short of a dozen discount.
The freedom to make judgments, the freedom to call out insanity, and evil, are clearly under assault. The freedom to ridicule bad behavior—so that your children might learn something from that ridicule—is getting throttled back to a whisper. “You can say anything you like, old white man, as long as it’s not in public, as long as it’s not on the job, so long as it’s not at school, so long as its not on a publicly-traded social media platform, and stop complaining if you get beat up at your campus outreach. You were inciting that behavior, after all.”
Christians, you thought you could give the Levite and his concubine a little shelter in your own house, behind your gate, didn’t you? You thought you would be safe inside your own homes and churches, right?
Well, those worthless fellows outside? They want you to throw your conscience out as well, so that they can gang rape it.
Jim! God bless you for your strength and the profoundly articulate courage of your response. I am with brother!
The Church of Jesus Christ does not exist to worship, ordain nor proclaim human proclivities. It is instituted as the “Bride of Christ” to proclaim His light and truth to a world in darkness.
In our society today an overwhelming majority are blind to the darkness that is closing in upon us. Those in darkness insist that we cast away the Light and dwell in darkness with them.
I can answer only for myself… I cannot exist apart from the Light of the World who is Christ Jesus.
Though I dearly love those souls in darkness and sin and pray for their salvation, they have conditioned any relationship with themselves upon our silence concerning their darkness and sin.
They feel free to revel in their sin and rub our noses in it. We are individually and corporately shamed when we proclaim the Gospel message in the face of their sin.
They proclaim a “new revelation” that God didn’t mean what two millennia of believers understood him to say. They claim a license to sin they assert is endorsed by their god.
Our Creator God is the author of our freedom to choose; even to choose that which He has said would separate us from Him.
My brothers and sisters may insist it is their right to dwell in sin and darkness if they so choose. So be it. I readily concede that freedom.
But I will not relinquish my own God given freedom to choose to follow God’s Light in Christ, as I am called, and reject dwelling in darkness and sin.
Further, pastors are not called by the members they serve in order to endorse their carnal desires. Rather, they are called by God to uphold and proclaim His Holy Word.
We must confront sin even and especially when society says it is no longer sin. Either we serve God or society. I choose God.
Thanks, Randy. I freely admit I’m tempted by what I think is the “libertarian deception” on this front, a deception that most of the church silently endorses. We know our congregations, and our own lives, are full of failure and sin, so we toy with accepting a mutual failure standard: you ignore my sin and I’ll ignore yours. But I’m not sure we can do that without effectively telling Christ, “sorry, we didn’t need you. We’ve got this covered.” Husbands and wives have to do the hard work of forgiving and loving each other; thieves need to look upon the King and change their ways. Those tempted by sexual idolatry are no different. We don’t love them if we don’t ridicule their error.