https://wng.org/opinions/welcome-to-pride-month-christian-1654083759
Trueman is right to lament Pride Month and the latest shift
in our culture that will (without a doubt) lead to the marginalisation of
Christians. It's inescapable, and like Lot in Sodom – any Christian is bound to
be vexed by the world and the conduct that surrounds us.
All of us are under assault. It's invasive even ranging to
one's computer desktop and many websites. At every opportunity they have to
slip in some kind of homage to the movement. It's like finding a swastika at
every turn. It's that evil and that offensive.
But I must confess I also find the commentary to be a little
puzzling. Is this something new, a recent development? As Christians we're
called to come out from among them and be separate and we're told the world
will think us foolish – in some cases they'll think it strange that we don't
pursue them in riotous living, and in other cases they'll think that we're
evildoers because we refuse to bow to their idols and adopt their ways of
thinking. In fact we're told that all who would live godly in Christ Jesus will
suffer persecution.
This was no less true a year, a decade, or even a century
ago. I fail to see how Pride Month is all that provocative. Those adhering to
New Testament Christianity have felt this vexation and daily grief for a very
long time – indeed even during the decades that many Evangelicals perceive to
be Christian.
We're always in a state of opposition with the culture. If
we're not, then something is wrong. What some like Trueman consider to be an
ideal is a sign that the Church has lost its witness and has become
indistinguishable from the world.
The antithesis and the burdens associated with it have always
been present. While the culture celebrated and confused its worldly values – its
so-called 'progress', successes, mammonism, and war with Christianity, New
Testament Christians have been in a persistent state of lamentation and
opposition.
Does Pride Month make for awkward moments? These have long
been present with the faithful. A myriad of cultural moments that celebrate
sin, a host of little ceremonies and other rot surrounding the flag, war, and
the many holidays – all of these are things that have nothing do with us – or
us with them. And then there are the 'religious' holidays, a problem in the
Church and an even larger problem in the way this kind of faux-Christianity has
been syncretised with the culture. Instead of lamenting the degeneration of New
Testament religion – the worldly Church, the compromised Church, the False
Church has celebrated these defeats as victories and even now glories in its
shame.
Work, school, and all aspects of public life (even sport and
recreation) have been a cause for not just awkwardness but antithesis – a cause
for ridicule and at other times hostility, marginalisation, and persecution.
What is Pride Month but yet another manifestation of the same? I'd rather deal
with Pride Month then some kind of convoluted Fourth or July/Veteran's
Day/Thanksgiving/Christmas conflation that blurs the lines between Church and
world, between the Kingdom and the bestial empires of America, Britain, or
wherever the believer may find himself.
The frustration of the present hour is not due to the sharp
divide between believers and the lost with all their Babylonianism, their mammonism
and sodomitical ethics – the selfish pride and indulgence and the decadence it
produces. Vexing yes, but the real
aggravation and source of bitterness and angst is not from the lost being lost
but from the Christian community thinking and acting as if they too are lost –
even sanctifying the categories of the lost world and embracing its ethics – a
state of affairs in which the covenant community is frequently identified in
Scripture as a harlot.
With effort sodomitical filth can be avoided to some degree
but how is a Christian to interact and be part of Church life and yet avoid the
filth of nationalist and mammonist Right-wing thinking, with its worldliness
and idolatry? It seems unavoidable and not only is it as offensive (and given
its context) worse than cultural sodomy
– it is the values this Christian faction has sanctified which actually lead to
the decadence and degenerate behaviour in the larger culture. The Liberalism of
this culture and its social order, along with the hubris and idolatrous
adoration of mammon are the sources of decadence and degeneracy. The Church which
has adopted the values of middle class thinking and life – security and
respectability has easily fallen prey to this. Pride Month, the cultural
development that so grieves Trueman is simply Western Liberalism gone to seed.
They can try and blame it on socialism or some other deviation from mainstream Classical
Liberalism but it all flows from the same polluted Enlightenment font. And once
again for the record, contemporary identity politics are not the result of
anti-individualistic socialism or some variation of Marxist theory but instead
represent bourgeois culture in a state of self-absorbed and self-indulgent
decadence. Absolutising the individual through the lens of contemporary
psychology and all its internal contradictions, along with cultural and
consumer induced schizophrenia, it's a rights regime gone amok, an exposure of
the deep inconsistencies and dissonance of the Western and particularly
American system which on the one hand maintains connections to historical
thought and categories like Natural Law and the Chain of Being, but on the
other hand repudiates these notions and has sought to create something wholly
new and untethered to historic forms of the socio-political order, ethics, and
epistemology. A new Hellenistic epoch, a new Rome emerged in the eighteenth
century but as children of the Enlightenment, the Western European orders that
emerged were something new – and all things considered, it must be asked if
what emerged remains viable or perhaps its failures and pending collapse have
been on display for a century – as the order imploded during the years
1914-1945. Our lifetimes have been set in the context of a slow death. But like
other old orders which failed, the collapse is usually not an utter one.
Historians will pick a year and maybe we've already passed it, or perhaps it
lies just ahead. But a new order is arising. Some things that were good will be
gone and replaced by evils. But there will be new opportunities. Pining for a
romanticised past is pointless and an exercise in self-deception.
What has emerged in the aftermath, in the century after the
Old West's collapse when the empires turned their maddened guns on one another?
Was it another Actium, the fall of the Republic? Was it another 1453, and the
complete collapse of an order? Such ruminations are worthy of debate but it's
important to note the new order in the West was no longer rooted in the
epistemological soil of its founding. It was a new order based on wealth and
power – like the others before it. But it was also one that no longer trusted
in old institutions, old moralities, and old epistemologies. Of all the people
in the West the Americans have understood this the least as they never truly
felt the weight of the events of 1914-1945 and what it meant to the European
mind and how it would perceive the world.
And now after only a couple of generations, the new order's
failures and social implosion have brought us to the present decadent and
self-destructive moment.
Another way of viewing our period is to think of Rome as it
emerged from the Punic Wars and within a century had conquered the
Mediterranean and pushed further into Western and Northern Europe. Wealth and
power were at its fingertips but the rot of imperial decadence also took hold.
A change in values not brought on by some Frankfurt School based in Corinth,
but by the sweeping social, economic, and political shifts introduced by the
advent of empire. The old conservatism could not survive in such an environment
and the very nature and character of the Roman man began to change. New values
were adopted with regard to not just wealth and status, but character and
purpose. It was an age of self-indulgence and perversion that would later find
expression in the likes of Caligula and Nero. It also produced men of
conscience who became corrupt and destructive like the Gracchi, Sulla, and
others. And of course it produced men that gloried in themselves and their
power – a list too long for this essay. These were men willing to destroy all
to fulfill personal ambition.
And both Old Testament era Jews and New Testament Christians
lived in this context. And society was wicked and yet they persevered with a
clear line of demarcation between their identity and the culture which
surrounded them. Today's dilemma is born of a deep fundamental compromise on
the part of the Church. While the period of imperial decadence was wicked and
perhaps more unstable and dangerous – that doesn't mean that somehow the old
republic was something moral or something to celebrate. It was a different kind
of immorality and idolatry and believers (who would have to be Jews at that
point) had their struggles too. They were in Rome during the Gracchi upheavals,
Marius, Sulla, and the Triumvirates. They were there during the time that Rome
acquired its empire, the period lamented by Cato the Elder, when Rome became
decadent and its wickedness morphed into something obscene even by the pagan
standards and ethics of the republic.
And yet as the Jews would know, cosmopolitanism has its
benefits in that it tends to be more tolerant as indeed there is much today
(such as homeschooling for example) that is tolerated while earlier generations
frowned at such counter-cultural endeavours.
Honesty precludes simply lamenting Pride Month and yet
failing to look at what has brought society to this point. We can in good
romantic fashion look back and pretend that things were so much better
seventy-five or one hundred and fifty years ago, but that would be an exercise
in self-deception. It will be granted the sodomites weren't ascendant but there
were many other evils afoot and sadly many if not most of them were being
associated with Christianity. Sadly even as Saudi Arabia and Russia equate
feminism, sodomy, and the like with Western culture, there are many who still associate
this kind of degeneracy with Christianity. I rejoice at the thought that in the
future Western capitalism, imperialism, and decadence will be disassociated
with Christianity and viewed as hostile to it. That will open up a host of
possibilities in terms of missions. Sadly at the moment a great deal of
missions is a confused cultural-religious project and many converts see the
embrace of Christianity as an embrace of Westernism and the potential for
self-fulfillment and socio-economic opportunity that it holds.
Contrary to all of this, we are called to live as
second-class citizens. As per the New Testament, we don't use the courts or the
police. We don't assert our so-called 'rights'. We live as strangers and
pilgrims. Wealth and power are realms we are excluded from in this age of the
cross.
The sacralist laments Pride Month and views it as a crisis.
This is wrong headed and at one time I think Trueman actually had a better
understanding of this. Instead he has now sold out and joined forces with the
likes of BreakPoint – a true house of theological filth built on the poisoned
foundations of an unrepentant criminal and charlatan who (I think) put on a
veneer of Christianity to pursue power by means of a backdoor. Trueman, the man
who once had the discernment to write Republocrat
and to criticise FOX has now fallen in with those who perpetuate its
narratives and play by its rules.
Pride Month isn't a crisis – at least not for the Church. The
West is not the Church and it is not the Kingdom. In terms of the New
Testament, such opposition is normative. Any student of the Scripture should
know that. But sacralism and the great lie, the great heresy of Christendom
clouds judgment and confounds Biblical thinking and categories.
In conclusion we must ask the likes of Trueman and his allies
– is the real grief over the sin of these lost people or is the grief the
result of being reduced to second class citizenship and the loss of power and
glory associated with the empires of the West?
Pride Month is an occasion to yawn. It simply reveals how
lost the culture is. When the BBC or NPR refer to things like 'people who have
babies', I simply shake my head in pity. Pigs wallow in filth. The blind cannot
see and live in darkness. What's new about that?
But when I hear Christians embrace Right-wing lies and openly
and utterly embrace the manipulative mendacity and evil ethics of FOX – that's
a cause for great concern. Christendom was and is a lie. I do not lament its
fall. There are frustrations involved in living in a rank pagan culture and yet
at least the lines are clearly drawn. We could live a Muslim context and we
wouldn't have endure all the skin, filth, and public sodomy, and the lines of
antithesis are clear – but there are other difficulties to be found in such a
context. Those who think a moral order can be made in this present evil age
need to go back to the Scriptures. They have not understood.
Welcome to Pride Month? Welcome to the machine. It will be
broken and though its great edifices and ivy-covered halls are adorned with
crosses, its fall will cause heaven to rejoice.
Does Pride Month mark a serious moment? We've been in a
serious moment for decades and the conduct of the Evangelical Church over the
past forty years – but especially the last decade is (from my vantage point) a
cause for much greater concern than a world devouring itself. Do you lament the
fall of the West? Read Revelation 18 and join in the chorus of those who lament
the fall of Babylon? Why, because you're one of them.
As Paul said in 1 Corinthians, we cannot escape the
fornicators, murderers, and idolaters, but when Christians behave in a manner
that's little different – people who ought to know better, people who are
bringing shame on Christ's name, giving occasion to blaspheme, and causing the
way of truth to be evil spoken of – that's something to be concerned about. The
apostles certainly were.
Honesty demands that we condemn the culture in its totality,
root and branch and if that puts us at odds with all both in the institutional
sacralised Church and the overtly Christ-rejecting world – then welcome to New
Testament Christianity.