By now many of you have probably heard that Atlanta pastor Louie Giglio has removed himself from giving the prayer at President Obama’s inauguration after a firestorm of criticism erupted over his inclusion in the ceremony.  The firestorm was over a sermon Pastor Giglio gave over a decade ago where he discussed the biblical view of homosexual behavior.  In a direct way, he confronted the view that homosexual behavior was simply an “alternative lifestyle.”  Pastor Giglio stated that: “If you look at the counsel of the word of God, Old Testament, New Testament, you come quickly to the conclusion that homosexuality is not an alternative lifestyle.  Homosexuality is not just a sexual preference.  Homosexuality is not gay.  But homosexuality is sin.”  You can hear his comments in this video.

After these comments came to light, groups advocating homosexual behavior demanded that Giglio withdraw from the inauguration, which he did, claiming that he did not want his presence to detract from the work he has been doing recently to end human trafficking.

The blogosphere erupted with commentary on the issue.  Russell Moore posted on his blog:

When it is now impossible for one who holds to the catholic Christian view of marriage and the gospel to pray at a public event, we now have a de facto established state church.  Just as the pre-constitutional Anglican and congregational churches required a license to preach in order to exclude Baptists, the new state church requires a “license” of embracing sexual liberation in all its forms.

Al Mohler posted wrote on his blog:

The Presidential Inaugural Committee and the White House have now declared historic, biblical Christianity to be out of bounds, casting it off the inaugural program as an embarrassment. By its newly articulated standard, any preacher who holds to the faith of the church for the last 2,000 years is persona non grata.

We now see the new Moral McCarthyism in its undisguised and unvarnished reality. If you are a Christian, get ready for the question you will now undoubtedly face: “Do you now or have you ever believed that homosexuality is a sin?” There is nowhere to hide.

Pastor Giglio’s withdrawal from the inauguration ceremony may seem like a small thing.  But small things are often symbols of where we are as a culture.  And this is no small thing.  Mohler and Moore (and otherslike them) are right.  What the Giglio withdrawal shows us is that biblical truth has been blacklisted.  Giglio’s comments in his 1990′s sermon were not hateful, spiteful, or intolerant.  Rather, they were a simple and clear exposition of biblical truth.  But the advocates of homosexual behavior don’t want to hear that truth.  We have now reached a point in our culture where the simple proclamation of Scripture carries public ridicule and censorship.

The Apostle Paul warned about this progression in Romans 1.  He says in Romans 1:18: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.”  They suppress the truth because God has made it evident to them that the behavior they approve of and engage in is sinful and violates His law.  And what better way to suppress the truth than to suppress the truth-tellers.

Pastor Giglio faced public ridicule and scorn for simply proclaiming God’s truth.  His example stands as a warning call to all pastors.  The end-goal of the homosexual legal agenda is the silencing of all dissent; the suppression of the truth-tellers in our culture.  Now is not the time to shrink away from biblical truth.  Rather, when it is under attack, pastors as the men of God must run to the battle lines to proclaim even more strongly and winsomely the power of the Gospel.

Alliance Defending Freedom stands with you as you faithfully stand for biblical truth in today’s culture.  If you find your right to proclaim the truth of Scripture is threatened, please contact us so our attorneys can help.  Together, we are as our name proclaims –  an Alliance Defending Freedom.

All of us at ADF are rejoicing over the recent victory in North Carolina, which became the 31st state to enshrine marriage as between one man and one woman in its state constitution.  I am of the firm belief that the victory would not have taken place had it not been for North Carolina’s churches standing and proclaiming biblical truth about marriage.

One church found itself at the center of the controversy during the voting.  The Devon Park United Methodist Church in Wilmington, North Carolina, served as a polling place and also put a message on its church sign that read, “A true marriage is male and female and God.”  Voters saw the sign on their way in to vote and some complained about the message.  One woman even called the message on the sign “voter intimidation.”

The truth is that the sign and its message broke no law in North Carolina.  The law in that state establishes a buffer zone around polling places and restricts what type of messages can be in the buffer zone.  But the church’s sign was outside the buffer zone and so was completely lawful.  The message on the sign was simply one church proclaiming scriptural truth about marriage.

Sadly, many in society today equate the message of the Bible with “voter intimidation” or “hate” or “bigotry.”  And they try to silence it by any means possible.  The elections board for the county where the church is located plans to address the issue of the church’s sign in the coming days.  If they do, they need to recognize that our country values the rights of freedom of speech and free exercise of religion.  It is impossible to keep people from seeing things or messages that they disagree with.  And if government attempts to equate a biblical message with “voter intimidation,” it will be censoring the constitutional rights of America’s churches to speak and exercise their faith.

I am grateful for churches like Devon Park United Methodist Church who courageously stand for biblical truth.  More churches can (and should) learn from their example.

Under the guise of exploring the current “Crisis in Christianity,” Andrew Sullivan uses a fair portion of his April 2 cover story for Newsweek to denigrate “evangelical Protestants who believe that religion must consume and influence every aspect of public life.” His conclusions, and the arguments that support them, though, do not look anything like orthodox Christianity.

“The issues that Christianity obsesses over today simply do not appear in … the original New Testament,” he writes. “Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion, and his only remarks on marriage were a condemnation of divorce (now commonplace among American Christians) and forgiveness for adultery. The family? He disowned his parents in public as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to follow him. Sex? He was a celibate who … anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was completely irrelevant.”

Normally, a man who paints in strokes that broad would be spreading red on a barn somewhere. But as an argument in debate, it’s hard to follow Sullivan’s double-edged logic. Nothing, he seems to suggest, is explicitly, morally wrong unless it’s literally spelled out in the words of Jesus. And if Jesus should spell it out, well, Sullivan’s got that covered, too: “the canonized Gospels,” he says, “were written decades after Jesus’ ministry, and are copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory.”

In other words, the Bible must be taken literally – and the Bible cannot be taken literally.

Sullivan’s article is part of a broad-scale assault on Christians, and particularly Christian leaders, who would speak out boldly, respectfully on the most pressing social and political issues of our day.  Jesus’ words and example, he points out, were all about serving others with humility. Whereas to flex one’s faith by examining issues in the light of (fallible) biblical truth is to exert power – seek influence – and so fly in the face of everything that Jesus taught.

Christianity, then, by definition, must be apolitical, Sullivan says. There’s no place in the culture for those “who believe that religion must consume and influence every aspect of public life.”

In other words: pastors and other Christian leaders who might see it as their duty to speak out from the pulpit on political issues and candidates should shut up and let non-Christians interpret the government, create the culture, shape our society. When they want our opinion, they’ll give it to us … and as humble, pliant, non-violent servants, we’ll take it.

Sullivan assures us that that doesn’t mean all faith has to be private. “There are times,” he says, “when great injustices – slavery, imperialism, totalitarianism, segregation – require spiritual mobilization and public witness.” (Abortion, apparently, doesn’t qualify as a great injustice. Nor do, say, the increasingly aggressive efforts of activists to compel society not only to acknowledge, but embrace the homosexual agenda.)

“When politics is necessary,” Sullivan writes, “the kind of Christianity I am describing seeks always to translate religious truths into reasoned, secular arguments that can appeal to those of other faiths and none at all.” The reasonableness of an argument for truth, then, is measured by how palatable it is to those who have no taste for it.

Faith, Jesus said, must consume and influence every aspect of one’s private life. And sooner or later, every private life comes into contact – and often conflict – with the political and cultural landscape.  At which point one’s private convictions must necessarily “consume and influence” one’s public statements and actions … or perish, ‘mid the ‘whelming flood of social pressures.

Read Part 1 of Sullivan’s Travels on the SpeakUp Church blog

If, as the Chinese say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, it’s that first misstep by writer Andrew Sullivan that throws him so many miles off course in his cover story assessment of current Christianity in the April 2nd edition of Newsweek.

Sullivan launches his extended diagnosis of the crisis enfeebling the Christian faith in America with an admiring salute to Thomas Jefferson’s Jehoiakim-like approach to the Gospels. Penknife in hand, Jefferson simply cut out those portions of the New Testament he didn’t agree with. “He removed what he felt were the ‘misconceptions’ of Jesus’ followers, ‘expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves,’” Sullivan explains. Jefferson, he says, found the more worthy teachings of Jesus to be sullied by the “embellishments” of His disciples (i.e., the miracles, the Virgin birth, and the Resurrection) like “diamonds” in a “dunghill.”

Sullivan himself, while affirming his personal belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection, lends a strong amen to Jefferson’s criticisms. He chides those who cling to “a rigid biblical literalism, adamantly wishing away a century and a half of scholarship that has clearly shown that the canonized Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ ministry, and are copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory.”

Faced with such unreliable sources, Sullivan, like Jefferson, suggests that we can ultimately set aside the Incarnation and Resurrection, and that even “the cross itself was not the point. The point was how he conducted himself through it all – calm, loving, accepting, radically surrendering even the basic control of his own body and telling us that this was what it means to truly transcend our world and be with God.”

“The message of Jesus was the deepest miracle,” Sullivan says, and that message is explained best “in stories, parables, and metaphors – not theological doctrines of immense complexity.”

Trouble is, of course, that the “stories, parables, and metaphors” were preserved and made known by those same contemporaries of Jesus whom Jefferson and Sullivan regard as too a-swoon with delusions of His divinity to be trusted with the rest of the story.  Matthew and John are to be taken as, well, Gospel, when they report what Sullivan likes to hear, but rejected when they record doctrines or miracles or interpretations he finds far-fetched, or unsettling.

Mr. Sullivan joins the increasingly vocal ranks of those determined to convince Christians that they could more successfully accomplish the aims of the God of the Bible by ignoring the Bible.
Their argument seems to run along these lines: Jesus’ spiritual authority is magnified when it’s distanced from the character of God, as revealed in the Old Testament … when it’s divorced from the miracles that underscored His credibility … when it’s disentangled from His own distasteful assertions of His own deity.

In other words, the sooner we can all agree that Jesus isn’t Who He said He was, the sooner we can all get down to taking Him seriously.

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Read Part 2 of Sullivan’s Travels  on the SpeakUp Church blog