Sep 24, 2015

"Evangelicals Won't Cave"

This piece by Russell Moorepresident of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, is an excellent response to the political power and pride of the American sexual revolutionaries. We have been so habituated to thinking of ourselves sociologically as Americans that it is easy to forget how easily American Christians will outlast the current mania for sexual self-degredation. 

The concluding plea for calm is, in other ways, wrong. Certainly, Christians have peace and do not trust in princes. But the Obergefell decision was not simply another wrong decision. Although it was only the most recent in a "long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object," the justices' open contempt for law and declaration of purpose to force all Americans to conform to a new sexual ethos has a greater evidentiary significance. By its reasoning, it "evinces a design" to proclaim an idolatry of man and by its effect to limit the religious liberty of Christians by forcing us to to give "symbolic and material support to homosexuality." 

As such, it wrought a fundamental change in how the United States should be viewed and related to by Christians. We should be agitated politically by this change, the way we are agitated and not calm before any serious injustice that can be righted. Americans, particularly poor Americans, are being destroyed by the destruction of the law of marriage and sexual morals that the U.S. has accomplished. This has been brought about by many actions of the U.S. But Obergefell makes it clear that the destruction of the theological and moral identity of Americans has been the goal all along and is the goal for the future. Poor Americans are the ones who have been most affected by the resulting increase in divorce, out-of-wedlock births and demoralization. It is not a denial of the peace that we have in Christ to be upset about this act of injustice and the harm that it is causing to millions of people.    

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