Their Jesus leads gay pride parades
Creating our own gods won’t end well
One of the great blessings of working during the daytime hours is not being subjected to the agony that is daytime television. I know it’s not like it used to be, what with the plethora of channels and streaming services that are now available to watch movies and shows on demand. But the number of Americans that still choose to watch old-school live television, particularly during the daytime hours is far too high. Though to be fair, I would consider anything above 10 “far too high.”
Last week proved that point all over again as ABC’s talk show “The View” drew attention to themselves for offering up more impulsive, outlandish comments. I say impulsive, and I truly hope it’s impulsive. I really don’t want to believe that there are people out there who think this kind of thing is well-reasoned or thoughtful.
The women hosts were sitting around discussing the tragic shooting at a Colorado gay bar called Club Q. At the time of the conversation in question, very little information had surfaced from authorities about who the shooter was or what motivated his actions. In fact, those details are still emerging a week later. But ignorance of a topic is never something that stops the View women from talking about a subject.
Unsurprisingly, they all (including the token “conservative” on their panel) placed blame for the carnage entirely at the feet of Republicans and Christians. Blasting pro-gun politicians like Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, the hosts reserved plenty of fire for Bible believers, claiming that hatred and lack of gay/trans acceptance among Christ-followers is leading to such crimes.
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Okay, now back to what I was saying…
Blending people’s identity and their conduct, the hosts declared Christian refusal to “accept” such people was betraying Jesus and leading to this kind of violence. Of course, as it turned out, the shooter was not motivated by some fundamentalist Christian church, or by Lauren Boebert’s pro-gun rhetoric. He was a morally backwards and psychological confused trans person himself, claiming to be non-binary (neither male or female) who attempts to force others to refer to him with they/them pronouns. The media only exacerbates the problem by facilitating the delusional man’s misconceptions when they play along and apply his grammatically incorrect pronouns in their stories.
Meanwhile, back on the View, all these revelations about the shooter didn’t lead to any subsequent apology, retraction, or correction. In fact, they largely just ignored the accusations and denunciations they had uttered against Christians. For the most part, that’s just par for the course these days. Find a story that you think you can exploit to help your agenda, emotionalize it, arouse people’s passions by using inflammatory rhetoric, and then if your narrative falls apart, just ignore it and pretend like it never happened.
But there’s a portion of the View hosts’ diatribe that I don’t think can or should be ignored by Christians:
Whenever someone utters public blasphemy there’s always the fear of overreaction. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to think this is tragically damaging to the reputation of Jesus or that it overly confuses the historic testimony of His church. I feel that way largely because of the source – I don’t know many (if any) people that turn to the View for spiritual wisdom and insight. So whereas I have an undercurrent of Will Smith/Chris Rock that boils up in my blood when I watch something like that – meaning I’d like to pull a Will Smith (sans slap) and shout at her, “Get my Savior’s name out yo mouth” – I don’t want to pretend they are more important r influential on that show than what they are.
At the same time, I think there’s also a fear of underreaction. Taking the Lord’s name in vain is a serious matter. It was serious to God, after all, which is why He made it the third of His Ten Commandments to Israel. And while we typically consider taking His name in vain to mean things like profanity or swear words (which it does), it also means attaching the name of God to our own agendas, pet causes, and self-serving earthly efforts. That’s what Sunny Hostin has done here and it deserves to be denounced.
“Pride parades” as they are known, are festivals of self-indulgence. They are explicit celebrations of a depraved and unhealthy obsession with sensuality, nudity, and abandonment of self-control. While the degree of lewdness varies, there’s no questioning the reality that they are designed to exhibit a “pride” in the very kind of sinful sexual excess that God condemns explicitly throughout both Old and New Testaments as abominable and depraved. To suggest that Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew who kept the Hebrew law perfectly, would participate and condone the sin inherent in such events is certainly blasphemous and will raise the ire of anyone who loves the Truth.
But I’m also aware that my real motivating factor needs to always be setting captives free. Yes, Sunny Hostin is a captive to sin, but “captives” also includes all those who might be influenced and reinforced to persist in their own sin by her words. There is an active movement afoot not just to ignore Scripture, but to rewrite it to affirm our own sinful desires. Consider this tweet from a progressive activist and minister I follow on social media:
It’s hopefully not difficult to see where that kind of philosophy ends. If the Bible is not trustworthy enough to provide us clear answers to great (and grave) moral questions, if there is no trustworthy method by which to interpret and understand its lessons and guidance, then ultimately there can be no absolute, knowable, reliable truth. There can be no objective moral authority because it’s all a matter of subjective interpretation.
Am I free to persist in the sin of denying Christ’s bodily resurrection so long as I tell everyone that I don’t believe denying it is sinful? Am I free to continue persisting in unrepentant sexual sin with pornography so long as I announce that I don’t believe God was that clear about constituted lust and sexual sin? Again, this approach leads us to a place where there can be no objective moral authority because it’s all a matter of subjective interpretation.
Christians must reject that approach if for no other reason because it echoes the deceit of Satan himself, promising us precisely what he whimpered into the ears of Eve: “you can be gods like Him.”
No, we can’t. Humanity’s only hope is in submission to His ways and His will. May we as Christians never lose our voice in promoting that truth, no matter what the View ladies have to say about it.
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I cannot recommend you clicking on this link enough. It provides an interview, an outline, a lesson, and a book on this very topic of Jesus, Christianity, and homosexuality. It’s all biblical and excellent.