Recovering the Christian Virtue of Intolerance

by Pastor Andrew Isker

Recently at the NYC Pride march, the crowd was observed chanting “we’re coming for your children.” Understandably and rightfully this has caused an uproar. Similarly, the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, which included multiple level three sex offenders, made a video of the song “we’re coming for your children.” In the earliest days of the gay rights movement, the leading organization behind it was NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Only in the late 1980s did gay rights activists actively seek to disassociate from the pedophilic image, opting instead for a strategy of mainstream acceptance. They wanted regular Americans to see gay men as “normal” and “decent,” just like everyone else. Central to this strategy was pursuing gay marriage. If the normie could be persuaded that “they are just like us” and that “they want to have marriages and families just like we do,” the association with violent bathhouse orgies and abuse of young boys would disappear.

From this came agitprop like the television show Will & Grace and sympathetic gay characters in soap operas like Grey’s Anatomy. Slowly the average person was socially engineered to believe deviant sexuality was actually “normal.” No longer was the gay man associated with filth and depravity, but wholesomeness and goodness. He was simply a soft, gentle misunderstood man, bullied by evil religious bigots. This campaign was obviously wildly successful.

Many will forget that the effort of the so-called religious right was not a lost cause, doomed to defeat. Until Minnesota in 2012, every state that had put a ballot amendment to ban gay “marriage” was successful, even in ultra-liberal California. It was only because of activist judges that the movement had any political success. But the power of an activist Supreme Court, packed with positively ideological judges by the Obama Administration was enough to overcome the unpopularity of the gay rights movement. Once Obergefell was decided and gay rights were formally enshrined into the Civil Rights Constitution, acceptance and even celebration of homosexuality was now required by force of law. Soon, every corporation began to adopt aggressive protection of homosexuality in their HR departments, and this cudgel began to rapidly shift public views.

Once acceptance of homosexuality became widespread in American culture, peaking at 59% of Republican voters approving of gay “marriage,” the mask that was put on in the 1990s of “normal, wholesome homosexuals” was taken off. Power had been won by the gay rights movement and the time had come to humiliate any remaining opposition. That is what “we’re coming for your children” means. No longer do they have to pretend to not be deviants. Their goals are realized and they can proceed to do the things they have always desired. Homosexuals are not “born that way,” contra Lady Gaga. They are created. And there is one foolproof mechanism for the creation of new homosexuals—the sexualization and sexual abuse of children.

Besides the skillful manipulation of the legal system, how did the gay rights movement succeed culturally? The religious right began the fight with a huge advantage. The majority of the American population was repulsed by the thought of homosexuality. How did they chip away at that advantage and turn the strengths of the religious right into a weakness? They adopted the Alinskyite tactic of using your enemies’ rules against them. They understood the deep Christian roots of this country better than most Christians on the right did. They recognized the ethos of compassion, mercy, and kindness for the victim that pervades the culture of a once-Christian nation. So they used it to serve their purposes. For example, Mathew Shepard was a degenerate, meth-dealing homosexual who was tortured and murdered by his fellow gay, drug abusers Those details did not matter, however. Shepard became a gay martyr. A poor, troubled soul mercilessly murdered by bigoted Christians. Even today, most people believe the entirely fictional tale of Shepard, including Justice Sotomayor who cited Shepard in her dissent in a recent ruling granting first amendment protection to Christians who refuse to offer services to promote homosexuality.

Christian compassion for the victim of brutality was manipulated by the gay rights movement. In neutral world, the time period where Christianity was seen as neither high nor low status, from roughly 1990 to 2015, Christians who were aggressively against the gay rights movement came to be seen as nasty bigots who reveled in the pain of poor, oppressed gay people. If you preached against the acceptance of homosexuality, even in very conservative churches, you were seen as a monster. The shibboleth “hate the sin, not the sinner” gained widespread currency in even the most conservative corners of evangelicalism. The idea that anyone would prohibit gay men from attending our churches or viewing them as dangerous sexual deviants became unthinkable. By the end of neutral world, conservative evangelical churches were far more likely to exercise (at least de facto) church discipline against members who were “bigoted homophobes” before they would ever do the same to open homosexuals. The Christian ethos of compassion for the downtrodden and oppressed was wielded against Christians to the point that they began to sympathize with those who sought to eradicate Christianity from the public life of America.

The gay rights movement won their victory and ushered in negative world, the era when the Christian faith is seen as low status, and in their victory they have now begun to take the spoils of the culture war. Now the outright deviancy of the homosexual movement has begun to be seen for what it is. And a long-delayed reaction has taken root. When a brand that had been a bedrock institution for the Middle American working class, Bud Light, adopted a transsexual man as their spokesman, their customer base revolted. It is clear they did not expect this to occur. Billions of dollars of market cap have been lost, and their trademark blue cans collect dust on every liquor store shelf across the country. When Target began to market “tuck friendly” swimwear for young boys, their customer base of suburban moms, who grew up consuming gay propaganda like Will & Grace and Grey’s Anatomy, likewise revolted. It turns out that fashionable acceptance of quirky gay men can be dumped in a heartbeat when you actively threaten a mother’s children. Target, also, has lost billions of dollars they will likely never recover.

But a deeper change must occur in the church, and not just in reaction to the most egregious outrages of the gay rights movement. The church must begin to learn the play that was run on it and counter it for good. We must never again allow Christian compassion to be used against us to tolerate evil. The entire point of the gay rights movement has always led us to this inexorable point. Their strategy has always been acceptance first, coming for your kids later. Christians, and especially Christian pastors and leaders must begin to see things for what they are and summon the courage to fight against the Christ-hating culture. There has never been an easier moment to start than now. Millions of Americans, many of whom are totally unchurched, have begun to see that “love is love” is a total lie. That the, “how does ‘two people who love each other’ effect you?”, really does affect you and your children. Never has there been an easier time for Christians to reassert the Christian virtue of intolerance. The Christian must never tolerate sin. He must never tolerate sexual deviancy. He must always boldly against sin, and particularly against sin which the Apostle Paul declares that the acceptance of itself is God’s judgment against a society:

26 For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. 27 Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.

28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; 29 being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, 30 backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 31 undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful; 32 who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.

Romans 1:26–32 (NKJV)

The great failure of the Christian Right in the first 30 years of the culture war was twofold. 1. Christian leaders allowed themselves to be manipulated by the politics of guilt and pity, and 2. Christian leaders could not give a coherent and plausible account of why Christians should oppose homosexuality in the first place. We were satisfied with simply saying “the Bible says it is a sin, that’s good enough for me.” While this is true to a certain extent, it became difficult for Christians assaulted by the 24/7 full-spectrum propaganda in every quarter telling them homosexuality is normal, homosexuals were decent wholesome people just like them. Christians were stuck in the unenviable position of defending their fidelity to scripture while it appeared to contradict what the rest of the world presented as reality. Without giving a detailed historical and sociological case of how culturally destructive acceptance of homosexuality is, Christians were left with the idea that God’s Word is simply arbitrary. God forbids things for no reason at all.

But that isn’t the case. God created a world with an intrinsic order. Men are men. Women are women. Marriage between men and women provides the foundation for human civilization and social order. It provides a secure transition of society throughout time. A man knows his children are his and can leave all that he has done in his life to them as his inheritance. A child is brought up with a connection to the past that preceded him. He was raised in security and stability, with the nurture he requires from a mother and the protection and provision, and guidance he needs from a father. Sexual promiscuity disrupts all of this. Divorce disrupts all of this. Deviant sexuality disrupts all of this. The foundations required for a stable and orderly society are totally upended by the destruction of marriage. Children in their most vulnerable and formative stages are left totally unprotected from the most abhorrent traumas and ripe for a lifetime of induced, self-destructive behavior.

We did not make those arguments over the last 30 years. And for the very few who did, their warnings fell on deaf ears. We were forced to learn the truth the hard way. The only result of the left’s victory in the culture war was always going to be the sexualization of children. And now, the reaction has finally come and the church has been catechized into an ethos of “winsomeness” and being warm and friendly and “accepting” of those who would destroy the Christian faith and all we hold dear.

For far too long, Christians have been told we are absolutely forbidden from hatred, because Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said to “love your enemies.” This has been a strategy of our enemies for a very long time. “You can’t hate me for wanting to rape and molest your children, because Jesus said so!” The same Jesus who said that he who would harm one of these little ones it would be better for him to have a millstone tied around his neck and be thrown into the sea (Matthew 18:6). The same Jesus who spoke in the Psalms “I hate them with a perfect hatred” (Psalm 139:22). The same Jesus who inspired Solomon that there is “a time to love and a time to hate” (Ecclesiastes 3:8). Hatred is not the opposite of love. Hatred is love when the object of love is attacked. If you love your children, you will hate those who seek to rape them. Anything less than that is love’s actual opposite, indifference. Whatever the enemy’s love of the Sermon on the Mount means, it must be countenanced by the rest of Scripture. It does not mean to surrender the fatherly or motherly duty to love one’s children, and the necessity of hatred for those who seek to do them harm.

The requirement in the Sermon on the Mount is for the individual Christian when he is personally attacked by enemies. It is not an imperative to surrender your God-given duties to your children or your country. Jesus is not commanding the Christian to simply roll over and hand his country over to pedophiles to abuse children at will. The old, folk-hymn is right. Jesus loves the little children. And because he loves them He hates those who would harm them. A millstone on your neck for a swim in the ocean is preferable to what He has in store for them. This natural reaction to those who seek to harm our children is not something pastors and Christian leaders should seek to temper. It is not un-Christian to be filled with fury at those publicly proclaiming they are “coming for your children.” Far from being un-Christian, you could not be more Christ-like.

Christian leaders must seize this moment and lead the reaction rather than simply following, which is unfortunately all-too-often the case. We must take the lead to teach and train our people to not be manipulated by leftist politics of guilt and pity. We should instead proclaim that it is good and right to feel anger at those who would harm our children. And the only restraint we should put on our people is an absolute prohibition against violence. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay” (Deuteronomy 32:35). God will be the one to sort this out. And His minister which He uses to mete out justice is the civil authority (Romans 13:1ff). The Christian pastor must take the lead in pleading with God’s minister of wrath to do what God has called Him to do.

The culture war is far from over. It has, in fact, just begun. And it is time for Christians to take the lead by proclaiming the virtues of intolerance and total abhorrence of all that God hates.

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