Matt Walsh, Voddie Baucham, The Trans Guy, and the Reality of Stigma

Matt Walsh, Voddie Baucham, The Trans Guy, and the Reality of Stigma

Mar 11, 2023 | Culture

I stumbled on the video below about the drama surrounding Matt Walsh speaking brutal truth to some guy pretending to be a woman. You have to see this guy pretending to believe he is actually a sexy woman to believe it. Appropriate words fail when you encounter something so wrong. It’s like watching something so nauseatingly evil that you’re dumbfounded, literally struck dumb, unable to speak. Like watching old films from the end of WWII and the allies coming upon the death camps with piles of bodies, that kind of nauseating. What can you say about such a thing other than feel anger and disgust and a yearning for justice that feels like vengeance. No, I do not believe a transgender male pretending he’s a woman is in any way comparable to genocide. There are obviously gradations of evil, and while these two examples are significantly different on the scale, transgender sin is deeply evil and elicits in us revulsion, and it should!

The reason I decided to comment on this is because it’s a critical cultural moment for the church and America. I encourage you to watch the 13-minute video to better understand the issues I’m addressing. If you watch through to the end you’ll see a touching video of a girl who now wants to be called Mike reading a letter from her grandmother telling her she cannot do that because of Jesus, but affirming how much she still loves her. Walsh is the one who plays the video, so he’s not the heartless monster his critics say he is. Some of these critics while not saying he’s a “monster” do think his tone and words were unfortunate, not winsome, and basically counterproductive. I couldn’t disagree more because the two examples are apples and oranges: the dude playing the woman needs tough love, and the struggling young lady just needs plain old love, and guidance. This gets to the cultural issue.

 

The word stigma was dropped a long time ago as a remnant of a hostile and intolerant religious (i.e., Christian) past in America. The simplest definition:

An association of disgrace or public disapproval with something, such as an action or condition: synonym: stain.

Oh no, we certainly wouldn’t want to do that! Stigmatizing “the other” was so last century before we entered secular Utopia and became tolerant of others’ lifestyles in the 1960s. Now in American culture we’re tolerant of all lifestyle choices, and accept everyone for who they decide to “identify” as. Only, we’re not. Far from it. Let’s use a simple example of why this “narrative” is a lie.

What are the two most common criticisms of Christians? We hate homosexuals (we’re intolerant), now including trans people, and we’re hypocrites.  Even though the first one is demonstrably untrue, and the second one is true of every human being (nobody lives up to their own standards let alone those of a perfectly holy God), what do these accusation do to Christians? Why, they stigmatize them! We’ve seen a growing phenomenon over the last several decades that has become as obvious as a Mount Everest in our midst. Those who are supposedly the most tolerant among us are the most blatantly intolerant people imaginable. It was not too many years ago when liberals were, well liberal. Here is one definition of the word liberal that makes one laugh out loud thinking we used to call these people liberals:

Favoring reform, open to new ideas, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; not bound by traditional thinking; broad-minded. synonym.

The most narrow-minded bigots in America today used to be called liberals. They are more commonly called progressives now, but any honest person would call them communists. As ex-communist and leftist David Horowitz has accurately said, “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” This is an especially virulent form of communism, though, informed by a cultural form of Marxism, in popular parlance, wokism. This isn’t the old style communism a la Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s hit man who had a penchant for shooting people in the back of the head, but a more subtle form of political murder. In 2023 we call this cancel culture. Another word for this? Stigma.

In the olden days in America, women who got pregnant out of wedlock (what an antiquated word that is!) were stigmatized. Now this is perfectly normal. When I was growing up the phrase, “living in sin” meant two people not married were living together, and people actually used it. If you used that phrase today to anyone under 40, they would have no idea what you’re talking about. Divorce was an embarrassing reality for some families. A man not having a job and living on the government dole was a disgrace. Those who lived on the street were bums, not “homeless people.” People who got drunk often were drunkards, now their alcoholics and supposedly have a disease. And I could go on.

Now, everything in America has become morally inverted. What was once stigmatized and considered immoral, is considered perfectly “normal,” and morally good. What is stigmatized is anyone who questions the morality of such things, those who do are considered intolerant; they must not be tolerated! Free speech, speaking what you think, is now considered by our progressive, woke cultural elites as “dangerous.” If it goes counter to the accepted moral standards of the woke cultural elites, it is hate. How convenient.

Which brings me to the video and Matt Walsh speaking brutal truth to cultural power to the trans guy who claims to be a sexy woman. What Walsh is doing it attempting to re-stigmatize what ought to be stigmatized. In the upside-down, inside-out world of progressive Alice in Wonderland, what should be stigmatized isn’t, and what should not be stigmatized is. There is no moral neutrality in the universe. The idea is a myth of the secular lie. Christians are especially susceptible to the lie because they often buy into the secular cultural stereotype of Christians as Big Meanies who hate “sexual minorities” or some such thing. Those in the video criticizing Walsh as a Big Meanie are blind or naïve, and have no wisdom about the brutality of spiritual warfare in a fallen world.

Which finally brings me to Voddie Baucham, the great Christian culture warrior. At 7:48 and 10:08 in the video, he tells us about the Eleventh Commandment Christian, a phrase I’d never heard before. These well-meaning Christians, he says, believe “that every problem in the world is a result of Christians not being nice enough.” Whenever the “controversial” topics around sex are brought up by Christians or Christian pastors, they die the death of “a thousand qualifications.” As an example, he uses Christian pastors preaching on adultery, and it’s spot on. Pastors would never qualify the evil of adultery so they don’t offend the adulterers in the audience, but on the topic of homosexuality, that’s a different story.

The importance of this cultural moment is that we have two choices as we encounter the cultural hostility to all things Christian the left hates, and that’s pretty much everything. We either call a spade a spade, even if some Christians think that’s “mean,” or the left will continue to try to stigmatize us out of existence. We must culturally re-stigmatize any sex outside of marriage, for example, among many other things. There is no “getting along” with the woke elite. As Ronald Reagan said about the Soviet Union when asked what victory would look like, he answered, “We win, they lose.” The mutually exclusive worldviews of cultural Marxism (wokeness) and Christianity cannot coexist.

The spirit of “the 60s” is at its cultural and political apex; it has no higher to go. But as I argued in my previous post, the fall of the left is inevitable because nothing built on lies can last. It is the examples of Matt Walsh and Voddie Baucham who show us the path to victory and the advance of the kingdom of God.

 

Thoughts on the Global Disinformation Index PSYOP

Thoughts on the Global Disinformation Index PSYOP

Feb 18, 2023 | Culture

It’s a woke world, so nobody who pays attention is surprised there is such a thing as an official “Global Disinformation Index.” Truth be told, I thought it was comical. If we’ve learned anything in the last several years it’s how inept and incompetent the globalist Uniparty elite cabal really is. Not only that, but they are liars who push a “narrative” trying to accomplish their globalist goals of rule by an elite class of overlords who believe in technocracy, or rule by scientific “experts.” Of course, they claim to believe they are doing this for good and noble ends. They also believe the people who are the object of those ends are either too ignorant or stupid to know any better, so they in some way must be made to comply.

Thus some globalist geniuses learned from the Silicon Valley tech giants that only some speech is worthy of being free, and other speech has to be labeled as “disinformation,” whatever that might be. Well, we can be thankful the good folks at the GDI have told us exactly what it is:

GDI defines disinformation as “adversarial narratives, which are intentionally misleading; financially or ideologically motivated; and/or, aimed at fostering long-term social, political or economic conflict; and which create a risk of harm by undermining trust in science or targeting at-risk individuals or institutions.”

Ah, “intentionally misleading.” Of course, these people know beyond a shadow of a doubt what other people’s motives are. Got it. And of course, we couldn’t have anyone “undermining trust in science.” We know now, since the enlightened elites have informed us, that “science” is our savior and must not be blasphemed. The “adversarial narratives” are those which in any way challenge or reject the accepted narrative of the globalist technocratic elite. How convenient! There is an awful lot of fly food coming from our GDI masters made to smell like roses.

One thing in all this pabulum they do get right is that we are in an information war in which the PSYOP is everything. What exactly is that?

Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.

The most successful PSYOP in the history of the world by far was the Covid scam. Whatever Covid was or is, it was not the bubonic plague—the reaction was not commensurate with the actual threat to public health. The reaction was, however, a test run by the globalist elite cabal for what they’ve called the Great Reset, in the very words of Klaus Schwab. No thanks, Klaus! I like the world of sovereign nation states just fine.

These globalist tyrants will be no more successful at stifling free speech and ideas they disagree with, than they were with “flattening the curve.” It will work as well as masks do in keeping people from getting ill from a cold virus, which is not at all, and be as effectives as a vaccine against a cold virus, which is completely ineffective, when not harmful. All told, the GDI tyrants will fail miserably, they just don’t know it yet. The question is why they will fail. It’s simple: The Gutenberg Press of the 21st century, the Internet, our primary weapon in this information war.

Prior to the Internet it was much easier for the elite establishment to wage information warfare. When I was growing up information sources were limited to a handful of TV stations, AM and FM Radio, most of which was controlled by the same corporations as television, and newspapers that were mostly part of the same liberal echo chamber. When I discovered I was a conservative in the early ‘80s, it was terribly frustrating. I found the then reliable conservative publications of National Review and the Wall Street Journal Editorial Pages, but they got bad cases of TDS and are now shills for what I call Con Inc. Then Rush Limbaugh came on the scene on August 1, 1988, and it was positively shocking to hear conservative ideas on the radio. Then Al Gore invented the Internet and everything changed; climate Change Al is a very talented guy. While he was working on the Internet, Fox News was founded in 1996, and left-wing CNN finally had a conservative competitor. But cable is not the Internet, and we’ve seen how Fox has been coopted by Con Inc. and spouts the approved narrative whatever that happens to be, save Tucker who brings in far too much revenue to silence.

One of the best things we ever did was to de-couple from the Matrix by completely stopping any TV watching in our house, and that for me includes no sports. When professional sports leagues started going woke, and accepted all the Covid nonsense, I was done. What a blessing it is to not have to endure television commercials. Whatever advertising we have to endure on the Internet, can easily be skipped or ignored. We can also stream whatever we want to watch and so determine the content. Anyone who still watches cable or television news doesn’t realize how they are being programmed to see things according to “the narrative,” whatever that might be. I’ve learned that whatever “the narrative” is, the very consensus among the media and political elites is likely the exact opposite of the truth. It’s cynical, but necessary.

What’s also necessary is to search out information sources that question “the narrative.” Google, which owns Youtube, completely cooks the books in terms of search results to make sure people see only what they want them to see. It doesn’t mean information contrary to “the narrative” isn’t there, only that it’s really hard to find. The thing is, truth can never be fully, ultimately suppressed, because truth is ultimately incarnational, the very Son of God who is truth itself. Lies are unsustainable and can’t win in the long term. They can cause immense suffering and hardship, but they are ultimately futile. Just as we’re responsible for our own health, we’re responsible for finding truth whatever and wherever it might be, as best as we can discern it.

The reference to the Gutenberg Press and the analogy to the Internet is profound. The elite of the 15th and 16th centuries were the Roman Catholic Church and the nobility. What they wanted people to know, is what they were allowed to know. Then Johannes Gutenberg went and ruined everything with his invention of the first every movable type press in the mid-15th century. Less than a century later printing technology had so improved in quality and pricing that when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Thesis to the church door at Wittenberg in what he thought was a little internecine Catholic squabble, it took the European world by storm. The 21st century Gutenberg Press is doing the same thing only this time worldwide, and the globalist elites will no more be able to contain it than the Catholic Church and nobles contained the Reformation.

 

Psalm 75: God’s Providence and the Aquinas Nature/Grace Divide

Psalm 75: God’s Providence and the Aquinas Nature/Grace Divide

Jan 7, 2023 | Culture

Listen To Post

As I’ve written here numerous times recently, our tendency is to see history and current events happening “by chance,” as if there is no guiding hand directing people and events, and things just happen. Maybe if there is any guiding hand it’s of a very bad pin ball wizard. But in fact, there is an Almighty guiding hand, the God we read about in our Bibles. We find it easy to believe He directed all things in redemptive history, but outside of the Bible we tend to see history and current events as atoms in the form of people just colliding willy-nilly ending up who knows where. But these words in Psalm 75 don’t allow that interpretation of what happens in our world:

6 Not from the east or the west
or from the desert comes exaltation.
7 It is God who judges:
He brings one down, he exalts another.

Think about the implications of this. Not a single individual goes up or down in the world apart from God’s will, and this means anywhere and everywhere in the world. We call this God’s providence.

I don’t believe this is only at the highest reaches of geopolitical power, like presidents or kings or prime ministers, but who gets the corner office, or becomes a store manager, or gets a job in the first place, or gets the gig with the band, or any number of infinite examples of human relationships. The Apostle Paul put it this way in Acts 17 speaking of God, “He gives all life and breath and everything else,” which is as comprehensive as it gets.

This is important for a variety of reasons, not least of which it is true. God is the sovereign ruler of all things. Most importantly, the entire meaning of history is God advancing his kingdom in Christ, and Christ building his church by the power of the Holy Spirit. This means nothing that happens in our lives (Rom. 8:28) or in the lives of anybody on earth, is insignificant. God is ordaining all that happens, literally every single thing every single second of every single day toward the ends of his choosing (i.e., the advance of His kingdom and the building of His church). I’m guilty at times, and I’m sure most Christians are, of seeing some things as “just happening,” as if they are outside of the telos of God’s designs in the ultimate redemption of the universe. Nothing happens by accident. Jesus uses a bird to make the point:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.

Some people rather than taking comfort from this fact of existence, struggle with trying to understand how God’s sovereign control of all things can coexist with man’s free will and accountability. This struggle has long and deep philosophical roots in Western history. I’ve never had a problem with it because I don’t feel the need to understand how both could be true at the same time because in the Bible they clearly are. We get into trouble when we think we either need to understand what is clearly a mystery of God’s being, or are owed such understanding.

But speaking of the deep philosophical roots, I’ve been listening to a podcast series on Thomas Aquinas from the Ezra Institute. It has helped me to further understand why people in Western secular culture struggle with or feel the need to understand God’s sovereignty vis a vis man’s free will. When I was a young Christian, I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There and learned that Schaeffer was not a big fan of Aquinas. For Schaeffer, Aquinas was the turning point in Western intellectual history, and thus culture, because he tried to synthesize the philosophy of Aristotle with Christianity.

For a long time I’ve tried to understand why some Christians think this was a disaster for Western civilization, and others think it was a good thing. The guys at the Ezra Institute are definitely of the former, and I understand better now why. Simply, what happened was Aquinas created a higher order of things in grace, and a lower order in nature. What ends up happening is a kind of dualism where the upper story is for spiritual things, and the lower story “natural” things. Eventually in Western culture as it secularized, the upper story is either unknowable or only accessible via a “leap” of faith, and “real” knowledge is only available in the lower story or material world. The result was a slowly evolving secularism where God became persona non grata and religion a purely personal matter with no relevance to culture.

The challenge for Christians is that we’re programmed in this dualistic view of things just living in a secular Western culture, even if we know intellectually that God is Lord over all creation, every square inch of it. I often use the example I learned from C.S. Lewis who said that Mary’s virgin birth was just as miraculous as every birth. Prior to reading that several years ago I hadn’t realized how programmed I’d been into seeing certain things as “natural” and other things as super-natural. There is nothing “natural” about any birth, or anything in God’s created material reality.

The Bible doesn’t allow us any such distinction, and intellectually I knew that, but I was still influenced to see things that way. I no longer am. To fight against this secularist tendency one practical thing I do now is no longer refer to the created world as “nature.” When Western culture was thoroughly Christian using the word nature wouldn’t have been a problem because everyone agreed that meant God’s created material reality. But as the 19th century progressed, especially with the physics of Newton in full bloom and the idea of evolution percolating among intellectuals, nature soon came to mean “nature,” as in something in the lower story that runs all by itself. Nowadays if you hear or read a secular person use the word nature, it’s amazing what “nature” can do. Just replace that word with God, and there would be no difference.

In our day we should only refer to “nature” as creation because anytime the word nature is used in our secular culture the assumption is “acts on its own.” If we’re to be salt and light to our dark world, we have to be smart about how we use language and affirm our Creator God every chance we get. The fact of the matter is this, “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . .”

If you like philosophy and this topic interests you, you can listen to the podcast here: Aquinas and the Nature/Grace Divide. It looks like there are nine total episodes, but the one I specifically linked to is about the topic of this post.

 

You May Say to Yourself . . .

You May Say to Yourself . . .

Dec 26, 2022 | Culture

What is the first thing that came into your mind when you read the title of this post? Before I answer about mine, one of my sons is reading through the Bible and recently came to me with a quote from Deuteronomy 8:

17 You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” 18 But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.

He said it was profound, which of course gave me the opportunity to expand on the profundity as is my wont; my wife and kids have had to endure these lectures for decades.

The beauty of Christianity, and Judaism for those who take the faith of their fathers seriously, is that when life is properly understood our accomplishments, including the money we make, leads to humility not pride or arrogance. Any clear-thinking secularist would have to admit their wealth and success included depending on many people without whom their accomplishments would be impossible. Yet without knowing a personal God who in Paul’s words gives all people “life and breath and everything else,” a deep humility in gratitude to God for his blessings is not possible. Everything is better, tastier, better sounding, more beautiful, more gratifying, etc., knowing it comes from the gracious hand of our Creator God.

About the verses, the reason wealth was so important to the Hebrews and the Jews as they came to be called during the Babylonian exile was because of these verses, among others. Wealth was a sign to them of God’s covenant faithfulness, a blessing that confirmed God’s love for them. Jesus changed that equation a bit, but there is nothing glorious or virtuous about poverty. God wants us to create wealth, and as we strive and struggle to earn a living (by painful toil and the sweat of our brow always fighting thorns and thistles), we must always understand through the process of learning and growing that it is the Lord our God who gives us the ability to produce wealth. Knowing that we can be grateful and generous, blessing others with what God has so richly provided.

On to the words. As soon as they came out of my son’s mouth I thought of the song by the Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime.” Now I can’t get it out of my head! As we listened to it, I decided to look at the lyrics and discovered it is Nihilistic in a quirky Talking Heads kind of way. David Byrne is an odd fellow and their songs are like that, quirky if not all quite as Nihilistic. This song just happened to be a perfect contrast to the truth of the Deuteronomy verses and why they lead to mutually exclusive places.

The Talking heads version of reality is quintessential secularism where God, if he’s even there, isn’t relevant to everyday life. Our lives are basically a mystery, so he starts with, “And you may find yourself . . .” As you look at the strangeness that is your life you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?” Who knows!

It seems life in Byrne world has something to do with the vagaries and mystery of water, while things are and always will be, “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.” We must remember “Time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us,” and we just let the days go by, same stuff, but “Here a twister comes, here comes the twister.” And we all know twisters just happen for no rhyme or reason.

The song captures so well the hopelessness of secular life without the living God in Christ. It shouldn’t surprise us that in a culture awash in secularism even though it’s the most prosperous civilization in the history of the world, over 40,000 (45,979 in 2020 to be exact) people a year in America kill themselves, and many more try. Life in secular Byrne world will do that to people who try to live without any ultimate hope. I’m reading through the Psalms now, and as I’m writing this I just came across these words of David in Psalm 63. The contrast to secular Byrne world could not be any greater:

You, God, are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.

2 I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
3 Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
4 I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
5 I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.

Our secular neighbors need this God desperately, and I pray God gives us all opportunities to share him with those who know they have needs nothing in this world can ultimately fulfill.

 

 

DJ Stephen ‘tWitch’ Suicide and the Bankruptcy of Secularism

DJ Stephen ‘tWitch’ Suicide and the Bankruptcy of Secularism

Dec 18, 2022 | Culture

The entertainment world was hit with a suicide last week that appeared inconceivable to the secular minds that inhabit “Hollywood” and most of America. I wasn’t planning on writing anything about it because I have written about suicide here before and asked the question, “In What Kind of Culture Do 45,000 People a Year Commit Suicide?” A bankrupt secular culture—that’s what kind!

I recently finished a chapter on secularism in the book I’m currently working on, and I’ll quote myself: “Secularism is dead. It has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” That’s why I’m writing this post, and because of the quote below. I came across it in a book I’d read and it makes a stunning comparison showing us just how bankrupt secularism really is. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the answer for a bankrupt culture, and what every secular person is looking for whether they know it or not. It’s for you and me to share the good news, the great, glorious, wonderful news with them!

This suicide, like every one of them, is of course tragic on so many levels. Not just for his wife, but imagine what this does to his two biological children and stepdaughter. Ugh! It makes me so angry. This guy who had absolutely “everything” the American dream could offer abandoned his family and puts a bullet in his head. As I said in my previous post on this topic, I can’t “judge” the man because there but for the grace of God . . . . However, God calls us to discernment and to be wise about the ways of evil in our midst—to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, and to call spades, spades. The spade I’m calling a dark ace is the modern world’s established religion of secularism, and how it destroys everything in its wake.

I read this in Nicole Mering’s book Awake Not Woke not long after I learned about the suicide, and it’s stunning, but didn’t surprise me at all:

Viktor Frankl contrasts the lack of neurosis and suicidal thoughts among the prisoners in Auschwitz with the growing phenomenon of suicidal thoughts from teens living with ease in modern Austria. “We are living in a society, either in terms of an affluent society or in terms of a welfare state. . . . These types of societies are out to satisfy each and every human need. Except for the one need, the most basic and fundamental need. . . . the need for meaning.” Suffering is intimately tied to meaning. Serial gratification is intimately bound up with despair.

And Frankl said this in 1979. I can’t think of a better description of modern American and Western culture than the pursuit of “serial gratification.” Think of the child who gets everything they want. If your objective is to create a monster, a little Varuca Salt, there is no better way to do it. This is happening on a societal level by a secular culture that believes what it sells, that true meaning and satisfaction can be found in this life if only . . . . fill in the blank. If only I was . . . .

  • smart enough
  • good looking enough
  • thin enough
  • rich enough
  • tough enough
  • sensitive enough
  • sexy enough
  • well-dressed enough
  • well-read enough
  • loved and accepted
  • appreciated
  • Etc.

If only I . . . .

  • had a college degree
  • had a bigger how
  • owned a house
  • had a nicer car
  • had bigger muscles
  • had a smaller behind
  • had bigger breasts
  • had a smaller nose
  • had nicer hair
  • was a great athlete
  • had more money in the bank
  • had a better position in the company
  • had more respect among my peers
  • was more well known in my profession
  • travelled more
  • had a better personality
  • had a girlfriend
  • had a boyfriend
  • had a husband
  • had a wife who really loved me
  • had a husband who really love me
  • had kids who weren’t spoiled rotten brats
  • was rich and famous
  • Etc.

Here’s the deal too many Christians really don’t grasp, and non-Christians can’t: Without Christ, nothing will ultimately deliver on what it promises. No person, no thing, no circumscance, no place, nothing. People get by well enough pretending it does, but they lie to themselves and others. Our lives are defined ultimately by one thing, our relationship to our Creator, and only in Christ, only in the gospel, can we be reconciled to Him and know true meaning and satisfaction, true joy and hope and purpose, true love, true gratitude, Truth itself. Blaise Pascal said it perfectly and succinctly:

There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.

We are the life raft in the dark and turbulent sea of secularism for our neighbors, and if they are willing, we can rescue them by introducing them to Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who told us 2,000 years ago:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

 

Ubiquitous Homosexuality and The Sinner

Ubiquitous Homosexuality and The Sinner

Oct 18, 2022 | Culture

What percentage of Americans self-identify as gay or lesbian? I asked some friends and family several years ago, and the answers ranged from 25 to 40%. They were surprised when I said the actual number (according to a massive CDC study) is under 2%. Just the other day I asked a young Christian friend, and she said 30%. Whatever the actual number, it’s a small fraction of the population. Why the disconnect? The simple answer is popular culture. What we know as “Hollywood” is relentless in its determination to normalize homosexuality, and I’ll make up a word, ubiquitize it.

My latest encounter with this comes from the Netflix series I recently wrote about, The Sinner. God is pretty much persona non grata, especially in any way it would help the hapless scarred and broken people in the stories. If anything, he lends to the scarring. It’s a secular show written by secular people for a secular audience, thus no positive portrayal of God, but you can be sure we’ll see positive portrayals of homosexuality! In the third episode of season 4, we see two men kiss at the end of the episode. I threw the clicker at the TV, metaphorically. The scene was completely gratuitous. There was nothing, no mention of the two guys whatsoever in the next episode. It was  blatant Hollywood homosexual normalizing. Whether intended for this purpose is irrelevant; it is what they are doing nonetheless.

Does my visceral response mean I’m “homophobic” or hate homosexuals? Moral judgment doesn’t necessarily indicate fear or hatred. In fact, there but for the grace of God . . . . I’ve now had 44(!) years of God helping me (forcing, actually) to take the log out of my own eye, so the specs in others’ eyes are less offensive or threatening to me. So, it’s not homosexuality per se that ticks me off, it’s producers and writers imposing it on every story. Entirely too many shows have an agenda, and it’s exhausting.

As a Christian I believe homosexuality is a moral evil, but in the Apostle Paul’s words it is also unnatural, different from heterosexual sin (Rom. 1):

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

The word Paul uses in Greek for unnatural is exactly that, what is not according to nature. Back when the Supreme Court was redefining marriage, I had a friend who was convinced the Bible didn’t condemn homosexuality, and no amount of quoting verses would convince him otherwise, so I used a different tack. I asked him if he’d ever heard of the word telos, a word Aristotle uses for the purpose or end of a thing. He said no. After I explained it, I asked him, isn’t it apparent that the particular body part male homosexuals use was designed for the specific purpose of disposing waste from the human body, and not sexual pleasure? He gave me a puzzled look and said, “I never thought of that.” Of course you haven’t.

The Bible couldn’t convince him, but Aristotle did!

God through Scripture doesn’t identify sin whimsically, or arbitrarily, as if the only reason something is wrong is because God says it is. That is true, but it’s also the way he created the structure of reality to work, the way it’s supposed to work, as is the moral order a reflection of his being. Thus homosexuality is a perversion against God’s creation. But from 21st century entertainment we would think it’s not a perversion at all, but every bit as natural and normal as sex between a man and a woman. It is obvious it’s not, and everyone knows it.

We have to be programmed to think perversion is normal, vice a virtue, and that’s been Hollywood’s plan for a long time, at least since the TV show Friends, which started airing in 1994. A culture’s entertainment is a powerful tool to shape a people’s worldview.

When I was writing my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I used homosexuality (along with smoking) to show how the secular culture transforms our plausibility structures about things, or what we see as real and normal and just the way things are. The plausibility structures we get through the culture determine for us what seems normal to us, just the way things are, and more importantly, how they’re supposed to be. When we watch The Sinner, the message we’re supposed to absorb is that homosexuality is normal, good, and common, and Hollywood has been hugely successful in that endeavor. Just ask your friends the question that began this post.

Illustrative of how effective the propaganda is can be seen in Barack Obama. When he ran for president in 2008, he had to lie, claiming he was against same-sex marriage. His left-wing base knew he didn’t believe that, but he had to say it because the American people weren’t ready for the homosexual is normal, good, and common message. Another indication they weren’t ready happened the same year. Voters in the reliably Democrat state of California passed Proposition 8 which defined marriage in the California constitution as between a man and a woman. Yet, by 2015 the American people had been so successfully indoctrinated by Hollywood, among other cultural messaging, that a Supreme Court case giving same-sex couples the “right” to marry was made the law of the land.

Many conservatives and Christians Chicken Littles at the time wailed that the sky was falling, but marriage had been eviscerated decades before with the passing of no-fault divorce laws and the “sexual revolution.” And because homosexuals are in fact a tiny percentage of the population, and very few want to be married, especially men, it’s completely irrelevant to almost all Americans. Unless, of course, you watch TV. Then it’s everywhere.

 NOTE: Picture is from The Sinner