The Wrath of the Win

I have a mildly ironclad rule for myself of never talking about politics here, if I can possibly help it. Sure, I will obliquely snark around the edges about whatever terrible thing might be happening in the world and on Facebook (are these two things separate one from another? I can’t tell any more) without directly referring to any actual event or issue. Just because I’m obsessed with politics and reading politics doesn’t mean that all of you are and I don’t want to pretend to belong to a class of people (them that blog brilliantly about politics) because I am actually more, how do you say it, living in the world of food and children and chaos and just reading the bible over and over. My life and mind are narrow. I do the same set of tasks over and over and try to say something new or funny about them as often as I can, every day as if were.

That was just a little caveat, a little apology, a little advance ‘for that which I am about to do, may the Lord make me truly sorry’, and that’s say something political.

Two sting videos of planned parenthood have now emerged and are everywhere all over Facebook and everywhere. I suppose I must be the only person in the world to have not been able to click on them. Matt gave me a brief, jarring description of their substance and then I read what lots of what people are saying. The hearing of the ear, for me, and the reading, were sufficient, I think, I hope, to utterly despair over everything.

I should have then carried on with life and put the Internet aside, but I continued to click around and went over to Rachel Held Evans, who I have never read, because my self loathing, though real, has up till now been kept under ample self control. I thought, foolishly, that maybe she would have said something about this, and I was curious. What would Rachel Held Evans say, I asked myself, because she self identifies as a “Christian”, and so maybe she would say something, as so many Christians are.

So far she hasn’t, as of this morning. The latest post is called For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex. It seems to have been published shortly after the SCOTUS ruling, that clarifying moment when the Supreme Court of the United States thought they would do something, and it’s no big deal, because we can all just still get along now, so you Christians, or, as Rachel Held Evans calls them ‘Conservative Christians’ can shut up now, because no one took anything away from you, and it’s bad that you hate gay people. You can go read the post if you want, I guess, or you can go eat a Weiss pizza because you’ll feel the same way, probably, either way you go. Sick. That’s the word I’m looking for. If you do decide to go read it, she has succumbed to the modern internet way of highlighting the bits she believes are most important in each paragraph. This used to bug me, but now I’m grateful because I never have to read anything that carefully any more. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Reading and thinking, especially about the Bible, are hard. So shut up.

Most interesting to me, not to dive too deeply into the particulars of her piece, because they really do boil down to “Conservative Christians are narrow minded bigots and should shut up because they are stupid”, was to read her carefully bolded points with the planned parenthood horror jangling around in the forefront of my sickened and despairing mind. She writes, for example,

So what I’d like to suggest to my fellow Christians is that perhaps taking up the cross means laying down the persecution complex. A spirit of fear and entitlement does more to obscure the gospel than elucidate it.

First off, I wish she would desist calling me, and others who love the Bible and the Jesus revealed in the bible her “fellow Christians”. We are not fellows together. We believe contradictory opposite gospels. She is not curious enough about the gospel I embrace to know what it says, to understand that love is at the center of this issue, that Christians like me are horrified to find that the culture, and self identified “Christians” like her, have created a new definition of love that lets a person sexually tie himself or herself to a person of the same gender, regardless of God’s clear, explicit hatred of such an act. Love demands, love implores, love does everything it can to warn of the peril right ahead. So yes to fear, this is a perilous place we inhabit, now. But from whence cometh the entitlement? Christians have rightly perceived the rejection of their world view and are retreating in sorrow and grief. As for the charge that we are obscuring the gospel, I think the church has already been complicit in that confusion, and I think now Jesus himself is making the gospel more than abundantly clear. One of the ways (only one way, there are so many) gay “marriage” is so hateful to God is because it obscures the central relationship between Christ and the Church. Marriage isn’t about individuals. Each and every marriage paints a picture of Jesus’ sacrificial love for his bride, who is not the same as him. Gay “marriage” paints a lying idolatrous picture of this reality and is one reason why, I think, the winners are so angry. Because living in a horrible lie is actually not that comfortable and pleasant. Look in the defiant, tragic gaze of a child who is lying and who doesn’t know how to get out, and you have an expression of the anger we are seeing everywhere. Why, pray tell, in this moment of great joy, Rachel Held Evans, do you pause to take a wack at bible loving Christians? I’ll tell you why, because the lie is ugly and hurtful, and so there must be lots of shouting and anger to cover up the great wound that leads to death. But moving on.

That’s because in spite of shifting views on same-sex marriage, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people continue to face incredible hostility here in the U.S. and around the world, often at the hands of Christians.

This is utterly specious. I would like to see actual statistics. On the other hand, we have documented, but suppressed knowledge of Islamic regimes around the world killing gay men and brutalizing women everywhere. A careless perusal of the Internet produces much on this subject.

If conservative Christians continue to treat LGBT people as second-class citizens and cry persecution every time they don’t get their way, they will lose far more than the culture wars. They will lose the Christian identity.

We have certainly lost the culture wars. I admit defeat. Hats off to you, Western Secularism. You win. For your winnings you can go gather up the limbs and hearts and lungs and brains and billions of tiny baby fingers chucked into the rubbish bin of your after party. Oh, do you not believe these two horrors to be related, one to the other? They are. God’s judgement is pouring out. His burning anger is already here. If you feel angry, I long for you to look in his face, and not flinch when you see his abiding, perfect wrath. Really, my Christian identity has never been clearer than at this precise moment.