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
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