World's Gay, God's Gay?

Years ago, a photographer friend took all sorts of pictures of our family members and sold them as stock photos. We see ourselves in Walmart picture frames and on the backs of moving vans. But the one time we really got a kick out of where we found ourselves was when we got an occupant-type letter from a Christian outfit. Our twin girls, about 14 years old, were  pictured on the back of the envelope with the labels, "World's Girl" and "God's Girl." (This was funny because they were actually both very good girls.)

Lately, quite incredibly, some ostensibly religious church people seem to have internalized a similar notion about homosexuality. They think there is a distinct difference between people publicly and quite comfortably claiming homosexuality as an identity who are members of their church and people doing the same thing outside their church. They actually believe their brothers and sisters in the church who are gay are pure and wholesome while the worldly type of homosexual is undoubtedly quite lost and wicked. And yet they use the same cunning but false arguments concocted by the world's best sexual revolutionaries: they were born that way, it's who they are, they can't change.

Those defending homosexuality in the church also add some goofy thought processes of their own. While publicly stating that "God's supposedly celibate gays are not sinful, do not have a disorder, and are not sick in any way, which of course must mean that homosexuality in principle is righteous, orderly, and healthy, in private they believe these people are really messed up, that they've been abused and are miserable. (People with SSA might be interested to know they're being played.) They have also abandoned scripture. When we at SoL have confronted homosexualists within the church with the many scriptures which condemn sexual impurity of all kinds, inside and out, in no uncertain terms, they accuse us of misinterpreting the word of God. Really? How convenient for them.

These people somehow believe that their gays are "moderate," their gays aren't sexually immoral or lustful, their gays are special, their gays are harmless to themselves and everybody else, their gays don't need to repent. (Apparently this attitude creeps into other sexual sins church people commit too, such as the use of pornography.) Seriously? Meanwhile, gays in the church are eating all this nonsense up. They're writing books on how you can be a Christian/Mormon/Jewish homosexual. They know they are making great headway. And they won't stop until their deviant sexual desires and practices are respected and legitimized within their church. Of course they are quite tragically being used as pawns in helping our society along as it slouches towards Gomorrah, as Robert Bork put it.

Is there such a thing as a world's gay versus a God's gay? Is there any significant difference?

God says no.Homosexuality is sexual. Lust is lust. Sin is sin. And God does not look upon sin with the least degree of allowance. There is no such thing as a moderate, nonsexual gay. Celibate or not, however that's defined, it's all bad and harmful, in every degree, no matter how unfortunately it comes about. Remember, sex is a serious thing. If it is misused in the mind, heart, or body somebody gets hurt. Whatever name you call this form of sexual immorality ---and churches are indeed calling it all sorts of nice-ish sounding things---it is a sin in desire, thought, and deed. Homosexuality is destructive to the souls of God's children, and actually only a symptom of something much worse.

There is a greater danger here. The triumph of sin comes with our failure to perceive it, wrote Roger Scruton. A weak sense of sin is tantamount to a weak sense of Christ. If there is no sin, there is no Christ. In other words, we are headed away from the Lord and goodness and toward the devil and evil when we go soft on sin, any sin. God's standards for human behavior do not vary according to what happens to be going on in the world at any given time. Essential principles are absolute, outside and inside the church.

To be a true follower of Christ one must have a strong sense of sin, one's own sins, and sin in general. This takes humility and a consciousness of God and His plan of salvation through Christ. As George Herbert put it so beautifully and succinctly,

Who in heart never kneels
Neither sin nor Savior feels.

There's nothing mysterious or strategic about what's going on in America's churches, how people have fooled themselves into thinking churchy gay is better than worldly gay. What church people are doing in softening toward homosexuality is a direct reflection of what's going on in the culture around us, only with a great deal of doublespeak, smugness, and hypocrisy thrown in.