Christian defenders of biblical sexual morality stand at the tipping point. Will our faith be consigned to the same medical waste dumpster as eugenics and racism? Both of those ideologies once held sway over elites and the masses alike, but public campaigns by highly motivated groups dismantled their arguments and shamed their defenders into silence and obscurity. And rightly so.

Should Christianity follow them into the trash bin? Even should the faith deserve to prevail, will it be crushed in America anyway? We can’t count on the sheer numbers of self-professed Christians in America to save biblical morality from being pathologized and punished. People change their minds, especially when they’re being kicked in the head, or slyly seduced. As Soviet interrogators learned, most effective of all is to alternate threats and bribes. Resist, and you’ll be locked out with the bigots and psychopaths. Collaborate, and all the really cool people will praise you. Exorcists report that they get the same treatment from the hostile spirits they try to expel: a constant switcheroo between buttering up and bullying.

It’s gruelingly hard to keep the faith when the most prestigious voices in the culture are all chanting the same slogans, backed up by the coercive power of the government, the financial weight of billion-dollar companies, and the new shaming mechanisms of social media. Muslims ground down the once-mighty churches of North Africa not so much by massacre as by degrading social restrictions and heavy taxes on “dhimmis.”

If we do intend to stand firm, we need to counter the opposing argument at its heart, which is simply this: Gay people have the right to form erotic relationships and receive the exact same public recognition and endorsement in same-sex relationships that people do through opposite-sex marriage. If you oppose that, you’re being as irrational and evil as Americans who opposed interracial marriage and imposed Jim Crow laws to prevent “race-mixing.”

In an April 3 column, Jonah Goldberg did a fine job of explaining how religious freedom laws are not remotely comparable to legal segregation. But he didn’t touch the central question, which is the “problem” those segregation laws were intended to solve. And that was “miscegenation,” or race-mixing. It was that, much more than black political power or economic advancement, which racists considered the ultimate threat to the “white community.” (The irony that most mixing of the races occurred when white masters raped black female slaves was almost entirely repressed.)

I finished a Ph.D. in English that focused on Southern literature, and saw in detail how much of it is shot through with the profound anxieties of Southern whites about the sexual power and reproductive activities of non-whites, especially black men — and the fear that white women might find their vigor irresistible. From D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, and Allen Tate’s The Fathers, you feel the ripples from this deep-seated cultural superstition.

Laws prohibiting interracial marriage were among the first that whites imposed after Reconstruction ended, and they were often the last repealed. If you read the demagogic rhetoric of white racist leaders from decades past, you’ll see incessant references to the “honor of Southern womanhood,” and “female chastity.”

Racist theory posited that black men had primordial sexual power, insatiable desires, and an animal allure which must be controlled through violence — through laws that rendered it criminal for black men even to speak to white women, and through lynch mobs that often hanged black men without trial. An imaginary epidemic of black men raping white women provoked a genuine plague of lynching across the country — and “respectable” Southern Democratic senators fought anti-lynching laws tooth and nail. A key reason for segregating public schools and swimming pools was to keep white girls and women “safe.”

This is the background of Jim Crow laws, and the basis for the comparison between conservative Christians today and yesterday’s segregationists. Because this much is true: There are couples who want marriage licenses, which we don’t think should be granted. Thus far the parallel holds.

Now before hyperventilating here because this appears to prove gay activists’ case, remember that almost everyone still agrees that the state must pick and choose which kinds of relationship contracts it will ratify and enforce. Here is a short list of sexual relationships which states refuse to grant official status:

1. Covenant marriages. In most states, there is no provision for people (for instance, Christians) who wish to make their marriage indissoluble, or less dissoluble than no-fault divorce laws make every marriage nowadays. You might write such a contract, but the state will refuse to enforce it.

2. Polygamous unions. Saudi princes who bring their harems here will have to pick just a single wife to enjoy that legal status. Mormons who wish to revive their ancestors’ practice can face arrest for trying it.

3. Incestuous unions. Brothers still can’t marry their sisters, or fathers their grown-up daughters.

4. Sadomasochist contracts. You might decide that you’re somebody’s “slave,” and sign a contract to that effect, but the 13th Amendment prevents the state from enforcing it.

I could go on into even more lurid territory, but you get the idea. The state protects the common good, and the interests of children, and sometimes decides that these outweigh the wishes of consenting adults. This is a point that Rick Santorum made ten years ago, and was brutally cyberstalked and vilified for daring to mention — a sure sign that he had grasped the nub of the issue.

Christians don’t oppose same sex “marriages” because we think that they are less ideal than heterosexual unions, or tacky or icky or gross. We think that they are impossible. By the very nature of what it means to be human, people of the same sex simply cannot marry, any more than they can sprout wings and fly. To say so is not to commit hate speech against either birds or human beings. It is simply and starkly a fact.

The state already is, and needs to be, in the business of deciding which marriage contracts to enforce or prohibit — just as it decides which employment contracts are legal, forbidding wages below the legal minimum, for instance. The only deciding question here is this: Are the grounds for not equating same-sex relationship with natural marriage rational and grounded in solid arguments about the nature of man and society? Or are they based on pseudo-science that’s covering up for irrational hatred or contempt?

In Part Two, I will do a side-by-side contrast between the spurious arguments used to oppose marriages that dared to mix the races, and those that insist that a real marriage must mix the sexes. (See “On Same-Sex Marriage, Are Christians No Better Than Racists?”, originally posted HERE)

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Almost 20 years ago, the journal First Things published an article by a famous German theologian named Wolfhart Pannenberg titled “How to Think About Secularism.” In the article, Pannenberg outlined the nature of secularism and how it threatened the church, also explaining how the church should not respond to the challenge.

Looking back, it’s clear that many of our pastors and leaders have done the opposite of what he counseled, and we are paying the price for it today.

Pannenberg himself was orthodox in some of his beliefs and unorthodox in others, but I’m focusing here on his observations about secularism rather than his overall theology.

Tracing today’s Western secularism back to the 17th century, he wrote, “A public climate of secularism undermines the confidence of Christians in the truth of what they believe.” So it’s not just a matter of Christians becoming worldly and materialistic. Instead, the secular climate undermines our confidence in the truthfulness of the gospel.

At the same time, Pannenberg writes, “In a secular milieu, even an elementary knowledge of Christianity, ‘its history, teachings, sacred texts, and formative figures’ dwindles. It is no longer a matter of rejecting Christian teachings; large numbers of people have not the vaguest knowledge of what those teachings are.” (He is quoting the sociologist Peter L. Berger.)

This is exactly what we see today in America and Europe, where a large percentage of the population is completely ignorant of the fundamentals of the faith. Is it any wonder, then, that we find ourselves in such a moral and spiritual tailspin?

Only the Beginning

But this is only the beginning. As Pannenberg notes, “The more widespread the ignorance of Christianity, the greater the prejudice against Christianity,” and when people do search for spiritual truth, they seek out alternative religions instead.

Is this not an accurate description of our nation today, with widespread ignorance of the gospel leading to an increasing hostility to the gospel, and with the assumption that true spirituality must be found in another faith or outside of any particular faith?

Truth itself is under attack, as Pannenberg wrote with almost prophetic accuracy: “In the view of many, including many Christians, Christian doctrines are merely opinions that may or may not be affirmed according to individual preference, or depending on whether they speak to personally felt needs. . . . Missionary proclamation was once understood as bringing the truth to others, and was therefore both legitimate and extremely important. For many today, the missionary enterprise is a matter of imposing our personal preferences and culturally conditioned prejudices upon others, and is therefore not only illegitimate but morally offensive.”

“How dare you impose your religion on us!” shouts the world to us incessantly. That’s why, as Pannenberg explains, the “destruction of [the very idea of truth] is key to legitimating a secularist culture, since the idea of truth touches on secularism’s greatest vulnerability.”

How then should we respond to the crisis of secularism? What did Pannenberg counsel? Read these words carefully, and then ask yourself if we have followed his counsel or if we have done the exact opposite:

The absolutely worst way to respond to the challenge of secularism is to adapt to secular standards in language, thought, and way of life. If members of a secularist society turn to religion at all, they do so because they are looking for something other than what that culture already provides. It is counterproductive to offer them religion in a secular mode that is carefully trimmed in order not to offend their secular sensibilities.

He has hit the bull’s eye with his analysis. But there’s more: “What people look for in religion is a plausible alternative, or at least a complement, to life in a secularist society. Religion that is ‘more of the same’ is not likely to be very interesting.”

To be clear, Pannenberg stressed that he was not arguing for “dead traditionalism,” noting that “[t]he old-fashioned ways of doing things in the churches may include elements that are insufferably boring and empty of meaning.” Rather, “Christianity proposed as an alternative or complement to life in a secularist society must be both vibrant and plausible. Above all, it must be substantively different and propose a difference in how people live.”

Something Radically Different

In other words, we must show the world something radically different. We must call the lost into something radically different. We must live lives that are truly different, characterized by the radical, wonderful nature of the gospel and the radical, wonderful new life we experience in Jesus.

Unfortunately, when we try to accommodate our message and method to the secular society, and “when the offending edges are removed, people are invited to suspect that the clergy do not really believe anything so very distinctive.”

Why should people listen to us if our message and lives are just like theirs? If we are just like the world, what are we calling the world to? We hurt and bleed like everyone else, and we deal with the same problems everyone deals with, but our message really does bring transformation.

That means that “[t]he plausible and persuasive presentation of Christian distinctives is not a matter of marketing. It is a matter of what the churches owe to people in our secularist societies: the proclamation of the risen Christ, the joyful evidence of new life in Christ, of life that overcomes death.” And while stating that “Authentic Christian teaching appropriates all that is valid in the secularist culture,” Pannenberg emphasizes that it does so while taking hold of and proclaiming the very truths that the secularist society neglects or even disdains.

Sadly, many of our American pastors have gone in the opposite direction, and as things have declined in our churches, they have reaffirmed their error rather than corrected it. In short, they followed a worldly philosophy of accommodation (which is very different than wise, Spirit-led cultural sensitivity), but rather than this bringing a wave of renewal, salvation and discipleship, it brought more spiritual decline in the form of superficiality and compromise.

Then, as these leaders continued to survey the spiritual landscape, looking at the defection of so many young people from the church and the increasing hostility towards Christianity in our society, rather than recognizing that the real problem was lack of deep commitment to the radical claims of Jesus, they watered down the message even more, removing the offensive edges, lowering the requirements and emphasizing what is trending more than what is truthful.

The Floodgates of Apostasy

Now, the floodgates of apostasy have opened wide, and yet so many leaders still do not recognize what has happened, continuing to put the blame in the wrong place.

Yes, by all means, let us be sensitive and compassionate in our outreach to the lost, and let us with humility give ourselves to bless this dying world, living as servants rather than as those who are “holier than thou.” But let us not accommodate the gospel to secularism. Instead, let us show how totally different and other the gospel is, how dramatically transformative new life in Jesus is, and how it is absolutely worth it to know him and follow him to the point that we joyfully swim against the tide of a very worldly world, having exactly what this society so desperately needs.

Then, empowered by the Spirit as we proclaim the truth and live the truth, we will change the world rather than the world changing us. (See “The Terrible Failure of the Secular Gospel”, originally posted HERE)

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