How Should Christians Respond To Gay Rights Advancements

Hands On Originals, a Christian t-shirt printing company in Kentucky, has been found guilty of discriminating against homosexuals. Charisma News reports the company refused to make gay pride shirts, resulting in The Gay and Lesbian Services Organization filing a complaint in 2012.

Over in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts, will no longer allow student teachers from Gordon College to teach or mentor inner city students.

Why? Because Gordon’s president wrote and signed a letter to the President requesting that religious institutions be exempt from federal gay rights laws. 

The city’s outrageous and shortsighted action is bringing more harm to its inner city students, who are now without mentors, than it does Gordon College.

But there is more. In late September, the higher education committee of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, the body that accredits Gordon, met to consider whether Gordon’s inclusion of homosexual acts as a “forbidden practice” ran afoul of the Association’s standards for accreditation. Note that the Gordon statement requires all students to adhere to sexual behavior standards. There’s no singling out of same-sex attracted folks, nor are there any prohibitions against admitting students with same-sex attraction. The stance has to do with sexual behavior, which falls in line with two millennia of Christian teaching.

The Association gave Gordon one year to submit a report about its policies that would satisfy the Association that the school was not discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. But if Gordon loses accreditation over this issue, the implications for the school and its students and other religiously-affiliated colleges will be profound.

So how should we respond?  Two Concerns we must be mindful of. 

There is a lie that is floating around that we ought to be mindful of. The lie is what Rod Dreher calls “The Law of Merited Impossibility.” Essentially, the “Law of Merited Impossibility” means: “It’s a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of gay rights.”

It’s Dreher’s way of summing the way elites and other opinion-makers “frame the discourse about the clash between religious liberty and gay civil rights.”  The whole idea is that we Christians just need to “chill.” You Christians are getting so upset over nothing.  You Christians are fearful that the expansion of gay rights will pose a threat to religious liberty.  Such concerns are only fear-mongering.

Yet, when gay rights supersede Christian rights, the same elites and opinion makers defend the infringement as striking a blow against “Christian bigotry.” In other words, “take that you, Christians.  Good for you!”

Another concern we need to be mindful of is the maxim of the late Richard John Neuhaus, who said:  “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.” In other words, Neuhaus understood that discrediting Christian ideas, especially in the area of sexual morality, wasn’t a prelude to genuine “tolerance” and “pluralism,” but the imposition of a new “orthodoxy.”

As Neuhaus warned, the “new liberal orthodoxy” is “hard and nasty.” It “claims to speak for the future and is therefore the bearer of imperatives that brook no opposition.”   It won’t matter who opposes this new liberal orthodoxy, because it is the voice of the future.

Jesus foretold of a time when people will seek to silence the voice of Christians thinking that they are doing a service unto God (cf. John 16:2).  In the Middle East, the god is Allah.  In North Korea it is Communism.  Here in the United States, it is the god of Tolerance.  Daily, we are witnessing how Tolerance is a very determined and jealous god!

  

So, what do we do?  I suggest three things:

First, we need to be in prayer and reading God’s Word.

Here’s what we must understand. This war is not something God expects us on our own to win. We read in the Bible how God often encourages His people by saying, “the battle belongs to Me” (1 Sam. 17:47; 2 Chron. 20:15).   God has His ways to solving problems and His ways are not always our ways.  So let God fight the battle.  This way when there is a battle that’s won, God will get the credit and not us.

Second, put on the Whole Armor of God (Eph. 6). 

You cannot be out and about in the heat of a battle and not be protected.  Listen carefully, it is going to take all the troops we got to fight this war. But if we become wounded carelessly, then our wounds will take away from the battle at least two others to tend to our needs. You see my point?  Any advancement in the arena of ideas will be hampered if we are too busy caring for our own that’s been wounded.  So put on the Armor of God for protection so you will not become a statistic.

Third, speak the truth in everyday affairs – at BBQs, at work, on the beach with friends, sitting and waiting for the bus, wherever the need and opportunity arises. Just plant the seed and let God give the increase.  

“Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it. The greatest heroes stand because it is right to do so, not because they believe they will walk away with their lives. Such selfless courage is a victory in itself.” – N.D. Wilson