Small-‘c’ (c)hristianity Cowers Before the H Lobby

BOLDNESS: Courage; bravery; intrepidity; without timidity or fear; with confidence … 3. Freedom from timidity; liberty;
SODOMY: a crime against nature;
SODOMITE: … one guilty of sodomy
LIBERTY: … Religious liberty, is the free right of adopting and enjoying opinions on religious subjects, and of worshiping the Supreme Being according to the dictates of conscience, without external control.
— Definitions found in Noah Webster’s 1828 “American Dictionary of the English Language, republished by the Foundation for American Christian Education; Webster is regarded as the “Founding Father of American Scholarship and Education.”

 People like Yvette Schneider who overcame homosexuality through Christ call into question the idea of creating civil rights based on changeable “gayness,” so why are some Christians retreating in the battle against homosexual activism?

By Peter LaBarbera, www.americansfortruth.org

Bruce Thornton’s City Journal essay (excerpted at bottom), “Epistle to the Muslims: Christian Leaders Abase Themselves Before Islam,” is an excellent and highly informative piece on the battle between aggressive Islam and enfeebled, appeasing (small-‘c’) christianity.

In reading it, I cannot help but draw the parallels between that georeligious battle and modern Western Christians’ emasculated, guilt-ridden tone on homosexuality — even as homosexuals and their liberal allies move to indoctrinate young schoolchildren with their destructive ideology. Why are Christians and conservatives constantly apologizing for their past and current “sins” on homosexuality — as if WE are responsible for the transformation of a once-taboo perversion into a civil right? 

Why do we continue to promote the fiction that hordes of Christians “hate” homosexuals when the greater tendency (by far) among believers these days is apathy or, worse, to “tolerate” and even approve of changeable homosexual/gender BEHAVIORS when God doesn’t?

This terrific sentence from Thornton’s essay is directly applicable to America’s internal culture wars (dhimmis are non-Muslims living as second-class citizens in Islamic-conquered lands, allowed to practice their religion if they pay special taxes and acknowledge Muslim supremacy; emphasis added):

This appeasing tone of the traditional dhimmi — an unreciprocated solicitude typical of the inferior when dealing with his superior –– suggests once again that the West is spiritually dead, its Christian faith in the hands of those who will not defend it, even in print.

Granted, the homosexualists have confused us all by doing a number on the language: as Professor Rob Gagnon (www.robgagnon.net) says, when was the last time you heard someone being called an “incest-phobe”? They personalized a sin, called it “gay,” and marketed it to the culture through one-on-one “coming out” encounters. The liberal media became the homosexual activists’ protector and an echo chamber for their propaganda, which includes falsely labeling opponents as irrational homophobes.

Defending Biblical morality is “tough love,” not hate, and opposing this crafty sin movement is hardly fearful bigotry. Do Christian leaders keep bringing up the “hate” fallacy to assuage some misplaced guilt, or is it a symptom of a larger crisis of confidence in Biblical truth and authority?

I would speculate that today’s young, “gay”-tolerant Christians have no inkling of homosexuality’s progression from abomination – see Noah Webster succinct 1828 definition of sodomy above as “a crime against nature” — to studied “condition,” to proud identity and cultural “minority” – and how the latter make a mockery of God’s Word. Nor are they aware of the massive and multi-faceted “gay” activist lobby working against God’s plan for sexuality. (See “Matt Barber Answers Charge that Christians Focus Too Much on Homosexuality.”)

Maybe so many feckless Christians simply need to justify why they — who purport to contend for absolute Truth — do not come close to matching the zeal of the homosexual activists, who defend a lie. Which begs the question: is it somehow un-Christian to go toe-to-toe with the VERY AGGRESSIVE and HUGELY FUNDED “gay” lobby in public policy and culture? Are the USA’s hard-fought democratic spoils destined to go to defenders of immorality?

Was Jesus Christ a wimp? Can Christians lead this Culture War on the side of truth – even if we ultimately fail in a secularized, decadent culture — or should we retreat to safety behind our church walls? (Please note: none of this is to suggest that politics should displace the Christians’ supreme calling of spreading the Gospel of Christ.)

Perhaps we should just throw up the white flag now – one with a nice cross embroidered on it — in the hope that our foes won’t toss us in jail once they gain control of the Attorney General’s office.

Onward, Christian pacifists?
 
Pro-lifers less guilty
Strangely, there is much less hand-wringing among religious pro-lifers who oppose abortion-on-demand and the radical feminist lobby. (Nevertheless, it is troubling that many of the same pro-lifers who, appropriately, regard any compromise on life as anathema somehow have no problem compromising on homosexuality.)
 
Just as toward Islam, Western (c)hristianity is filled with appeasers on the dreaded H issue — e.g., Tony and Peggy Campolo, who contend that it is their compassionate Christian duty to defend “rights” based on homosexuality. (Peggy even crusades for “same-sex marriage.”) Ditto for the oxymoronic but growing “gay (c)hristian” movement, as typified by self-styled “gay Catholic” Andrew Sullivan, with his nauseating scolds against religious Republicans.

Sullivan’s less “judgmental” religion is defiled, not pure: the defining features of “gay (c)hristianity” are redefined sin (see this video and our “Satan’s Talking Points article) and a powerless Christ. Are we to believe that the Son of God, the Risen Savior who came to save mankind, Who raised Lazarus from the dead and transforms drunks, drug addicts – even murderers – cannot help people struggling with homosexual attractions overcome their sin?

Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” (Matthew 16:23)

Loving, graceful outreach to sinners is one thing: that’s truly our Christian duty. We’re all sick with sin and in need of the healing atonement of the sinless one, Jesus Christ. He has changed many lives in this area, as ex-lesbians Yvette Schneider and Charlene Cothran can attest. But helping homosexual activists advance the ahistorical notion of perversion-based personhood (“being gay” … is “who I am”), while discrediting those who are actually fighting the Homosexuality Lobby, is another.

How many times is our boldness misinterpreted by defeatist Christians as “hate,” obsession or — the more refined, nuanced putdown — not being “Christlike”?

What is the “soft” evangelical’s answer to how we should respond to the Professional Gay Industry — that array of public-policy groups spending tens of millions of dollars every year to mainstream homosexuality in education, government, culture, and even the church? (How) should we fight “sexual orientation/gender identity”-based laws that will invariably war against our religious and First Amendment freedoms?

Sadly, the answer some give is “civil unions,” as if that were a great compromise rather than near total capitulation.

America needs a Churchill, not a Chamberlain. No wonder homosexual activists are riding so high these days as they arrogantly move toward their end goal of outlawing Christianity as it applies to their sexual misbehavior. Maybe it will take state prosecution of faithful Christians on charges of “sexual orientation discrimination” or denying “transgender rights” to wake up the Church and expose the religious counterfeits.

By then it may be too late. Regardless, it’s way past time to stop feeling guilty for fighting evil:

“Moral evil is any deviation of a moral agent from the rules of conduct prescribed to him by God, or by legitimate human authority; or it is any violation of the plain principles of justice and rectitude.” – Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828

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Epistle to the Muslims
Christian leaders abase themselves before Islam
Bruce S. Thornton

City Journal, 27 November 2007; read the full essay at http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-11-27bt.html

On November 18, the New York Times ran a full-page ad entitled “A Christian Response to A Common Word Between Us and You.” A Common Word is an October letter from 138 Muslim scholars and clerics “to leaders of Christian churches, everywhere.” It reads like an invitation to ecumenical tolerance and “peace and understanding” based on “the very foundational principles of both faiths”: “The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbour is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity.” Over 300 Christian theologians and church leaders signed the “Christian Response,” including the heads of some of the nation’s most prestigious seminaries and theological schools. But if it accurately represents the thinking of mainstream Christian leadership, then Christianity in America is in deep trouble.

The response opens on a familiar self-loathing note, in the therapeutic style that has convinced jihadists that Christianity in the West is an empty shell, a mere lifestyle choice. Noting that Muslim and Christian “relations have sometimes been tense, even characterized by outright hostility,” the letter professes “that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the ‘war on terror’) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbors,” and so “we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world.”

The groveling self-abasement of this language, particularly its begging forgiveness of Allah, is matched only by its remarkable historical ignorance. “Outright hostility” has indeed existed between Muslims and Christians, for the simple reason that for 13 centuries Islam grew and spread by war, plunder, rapine, and enslavement throughout the Christian Middle East. Allah’s armies destroyed regions that were culturally Christian for centuries, variously slaughtering, enslaving, and converting their inhabitants, or allowing them to live as oppressed dhimmi, their lives and property dependent on a temporary “truce” that Muslim overlords could abrogate at any time. …

… For its part, A Common Word makes no apologies for the violence that Islam has perpetrated against Christian people up to the present day. And the “Christian Response” repeats the “common ground” mantra, along with the usual calls to “interfaith dialogue,” and makes flattering references to the Muslim clerics’ “deep insight and courage” and their “generous letter.” This appeasing tone of the traditional dhimmi—an unreciprocated solicitude typical of the inferior when dealing with his superior––suggests once again that the West is spiritually dead, its Christian faith in the hands of those who will not defend it, even in print.

For the full essay, see http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-11-27bt.html
Bruce Thornton is the author of Greek Ways and Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide (Encounter Books).