Let the Church Challenge the Idols of Our Day
(Or: Let the Church Fight for True Social Justice)
Rich Lusk
The artricle was originally written in 2017, but I trust it's still relevant.
Let the church recover her role as a promoter of true social justice, especially against the most pernicious idols of our day, same-sex “marriage” and the murder of the unborn.
Homosexuality and abortion are practically sacraments for American liberalism.[1] To speak against them is to commit blasphemy. But this is simply because we live in a culture that hates the true God and therefore loves death. Both homosexuality and abortion are forms of bloody death. They are both sterile. Homosexuality cannot produce new life and abortion kills new life. They are both life-denying rather than life-affirming. They are signs God is judicially blinding us. Lust and bloodlust always go together. When a culture gives legal approval to men sodomizing other men, or women murdering their own offspring, that culture is clearly in deep darkness. Our culture is blind; we cannot even see the big “E” on the ethical eye chart. Our culture is lost; we have no moral compass and no direction.
Christians oppose both homosexuality and abortion because they contradict not only biblical law (this is usually our focus) but also the biblical gospel (this is often overlooked). How does homosexuality contradict the gospel? God designed male/female marriage to image the gospel. A man is to picture Christ to his wife; he cannot duplicate Christ's work, but can and should imitate Christ's way of loving his bride. A woman is to take her cues from the church in terms of how she relates to her husband; Scripture uses words like respect, submit, and obey to describe her posture towards him. Together, husband and wife are to become an icon of the gospel, a living picture of Christ’s one flesh union with his bride. A man/man or woman/woman union preaches a different kind of gospel, which is really no gospel at all. Homosexual “marriage” is actually anti-gospel. We want male/female marriage preserved because (among many other reasons) we want the greatest living symbol of the gospel we have to be upheld and honored. The structure of marriage derives from and symbolizes the gospel. attacks on marriage are attacks on the gospel and vice versa. We cannot preach the gospel without resorting to marital imagery; a people that no longer know how to define marriage (because they have embraced no fault divorce, same-sex unions, etc.) will face more impediments to believing the gospel.
Further, the legalization of same-sex unions opens the door to same-sex couples raising children, usually brought and paid for through the surrogacy/fertility industry or through adoption. While it is true that some children do not get to grow up with the mom and dad who created them, this is always tragic. Every child needs a mom and dad. Mothers and fathers are different and they love their children in different ways. Normalizing same-sex "marriages" and parenting legitimizes intentionally depriving the child of at least one biological parent and the parent of one sex. This a form of child abuse.
What about abortion?[2] At the last Supper, Jesus said to his disciples, “This is my body.” But in the pro-choice movement, a woman says, “This is my body” with a meaning diametrically opposed to Jesus’ meaning. Before Jesus went to the cross, he said, “This is my body given for you.” When a woman has an abortion, she says to her baby, “Your body will be given for me.” Jesus gave his body to cover our sins; he said, “I will die for you.” In abortion, a baby is sacrificed to cover the sins of the parents; they say to their baby, “You will die for us.” Abortion is, in short, an evil inversion of the gospel. It reverses the principle of sacrificial love that stands at the heart of the gospel. It is an evil parody of the Eucharist, the sacramental sign of the gospel. Because of abortion, the sexual revolution is the bloodiest revolution of them all, far more bloody than the American, French, and Russian revolutions put together. In the 1960s, the sexual revolution’s slogan was “make love, not war.” But what they actually gave us was a war on the products of illicit love-making.
Adding to the wickedness is that fact that our culture cloaks these evils in the language of “rights.”[3] It makes sense to talk about freedom to marry, but not a right to marry. Indeed, while getting married is an act of freedom, it is actually the relinquishing of rights! The call to marry is always a call to self-denial and self-sacrifice. Those who think of marriage only in terms of rights – of what’s in it for me – marry for love, but for the love of self, not the love of the other. Those who approach marriage in this way are not likely to be married for long! But that’s only a small part of our confusion. More to the point, it never makes sense to define marriage in terms that include same-sex pairing because marriage is, in the nature of the case, a male/female union. There can be no right to what does not and cannot exist.
Likewise with abortion. Abortion is treated as an aspect of a woman’s right to privacy. The decision to abort is between her and her doctor – not her and the man who fathered her child. Legally, all children in the womb are functional bastards under the terms of Roe. In our culture’s political discourse, we talk about the rights of the mother to her own body and her right to choose what happens to her baby, whether it lives or dies. But in truth there is no right to consequence-less sex. There is no right to unlimited orgasms. There is a God-given fundamental right to life that the baby, once created, has (and even scientists have arrived at consensus that life begins at conception). Abortion violates that right to life, which is why it is both a form of slavery (claiming ownership of another person) and murder (taking the life of an innocent person). Abortion is a tragic injustice against society’s most vulnerable members. If we are concerned about true justice, we will oppose both same sex “marriage” and abortion.
Thus, the church must renew her commitment to true social justice. This means putting just as much energy and effort into overturning Roe and Obergefell as we do into helping the poor, stopping sex trafficking, eradicating racial prejudice, and other “cooler,” more popular causes. The mark of a true concern for social justice (in the sense of a just society) is a desire to support justice for all across the board. Any program of true social justice has to be comprehensive, which means it must include sexual justice, marital justice, and paedo-justice.
[1] I’ve heard this kind of language used by many before. It is not original with me, but it also seems to have multiple sources.
[2] I am quite certain I first heard this line of reasoning developed by Peter Kreeft, so I owe much of this paragraph to his work and influence.
[3] Our culture, legally and officially, calls good evil and evil good. Examples of this kind of transvaluation of biblical values are too numerous to catalog. Those who act on homosexual impulses are considered “courageous” while those who fight against such desires are unhealthy. Those who are concerned with “women’s health” insist on abortion on demand, while those who oppose abortion are fighting a “war against women.” And so on.