There’s a lot of cultural prestige to be had and available platforms to stand on if you’re willing to be the sort of Christian who assures non-Christians and their liberal Christian friends that conservative Christians are cruel and misogynist and that their views on sexuality and the sanctity of life can be dismissed.

(LifeSiteNews)—Earlier this month, conservative evangelical Denny Burk, pastor and professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, faced off on Twitter with progressive Kristin Kobes du Mez, whose book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation has been the toast of the mainstream press for the past year. There is obviously much the two disagree on, and their back-and-forth on LGBT issues was an interesting exchange, with both penning blog posts to articulate their disagreements more clearly.
What struck me about this debate, however, is not that Denny Burk, a conservative Baptist and staunch pro-lifer, and Kristin Kobes du Mez, a progressive scholar who displayed thinly veiled contempt for pro-lifers through her recent book, have much to disagree on. It was du Mez’s implication that it was Burk’s theological views which were primarily shaped by culture rather than her own.
Now, to be fair, du Mez did not state that she has definitively concluded that she supports LGBT rights as such—although Jesus and John Wayne made it crystal clear where her sympathies lie. But she did state that she was re-evaluating her stance on sexuality, as is her denomination. Many churches, she pointed out, have been doing so over the past several decades. And she’s right—many major mainline Protestant denominations have abandoned the traditional biblical view of sexuality just before imploding.
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Trans activists have achieved cultural hegemony and are going after everyone who disagrees — even with doxing, death threats, rape threats, and violence. They are coming after public education, what’s left of the entertainment industry, and will inevitably demand that churches, religious institutions, and all remaining dissenters submit to their demands and play along with their delusions as well. The culture wars are, unfortunately, real conflicts involving real people and the futures of our countries. 

There is a certain faction on the Right, especially in the libertarian wing, that poo-poos the culture wars as unimportant. Issues like gender ideology, for example, are dismissed as crass attempts to gin up anger among people uncomfortable with the pace of social change and a mere distraction from more important issues like inflation, house prices, and jobs. These are boutique issues, the thinking goes, and thus the Right would be better off ignoring these issues and focusing on the “things that matter.”
This is wrong-headed for many reasons, but most significantly, those making this article underestimate the radicalism of trans activists. Consider, for example, the fact that J.K. Rowling — a pro-abortion, pro-gay progressive — has not been invited to the 20th anniversary of the first Harry Potter film. Trans activists are so brazen that Rowling has been almost constantly threatened with violence. Recently, her home address was posted online by activists who showed up in person, and Rowling noted that this was accompanied by ominous warnings:
I’ve now received so many death threats I could paper the house with them, and I haven’t stopped speaking out. Perhaps — and I’m just throwing this out there — the best way to prove your movement isn’t a threat to women, is to stop stalking, harassing and threatening us.
It’s not just Rowling, either. Other liberal feminists are also facing a backlash. As Rowling wrote on Twitter:
Over the last few years I’ve watched, appalled, as women like Allison Bailey, Raquel Sanchez, Marion Miller, Rosie Duffield, Joanna Cherry, Julie Bindel, Rosa Freedman, Kathleen Stock and many, many others, including women who have no public profile but who’ve contacted me to relate their experiences, have been subject to campaigns of intimidation which range from being hounded on social media, the targeting of their employers, all the way up to doxing and direct threats of violence, including rape.
In fact, trans activists are going further than that in attacking those to their Left. Lesbians are being accused of “transphobia” for not being interested in “trans women”— that is, biological men with penises.

The use of gay special interest stories for purposes other than those of actual news: perhaps making up for lost time, or perhaps just rubbing things in the faces of those not yet up to speed with the changed mores of the age. Either way something strange and vaguely retributive is in the air.

At the 2018 Oscars, while Hollywood was in the throes of revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s serial predations, Jimmy Kimmel took the stage to mock those who still hold to a Christian view of sexuality. Referring to a gay love story featuring a teenage boy and a 24-year-old man, Kimmel noted to raucous laughter: “We don’t make moves like Call Me by Your Name to make money. We make them to upset Mike Pence.”
I was reminded of that quip when I saw yet another story about a biological male identifying as female getting featured on the front page of another prominent magazine. Last time, it was the infamous swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. Now, transgender Ariel Nicholson will soon grace Vogue as a cover model. From Glamour to TIME, transgender pinups are all the rage.
I suspect that this goes beyond a desire to mainstream the transgender movement, although there is certainly that. Part of this is the desire, expressed by Kimmel, to rub their sexual identities in the faces of all those who still dare to disagree. He framed it as a joke, but it is impossible to miss the underlying contempt. That’s why it was such a laugh line at the Oscars—the room filled with celebrities understood what he was saying. Those dumb hicks don’t know what’s good for them, and we’ll force-feed it to them every way we know how.
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It is too early to tell whether Orbán’s agenda will ultimately be successful—but it is indisputably true that he is one of the only conservative leaders who is actually attempting to fight back in any significant way. He is funding conservative institutions, working to spread conservative ideas, fighting to keep LGBT propaganda away from children, seeking to reduce abortions and promote families, and refusing to back down in the face of elite opposition.

If there is to be a backlash to the cultural revolution that has conquered the West, what might it look like, politically speaking? Many writers have been considering what it means for Christians to live in a post-Christian world, but outside of the United States, where every federal election has taken on a frenetic and frantic tone, there is little discussion about what political leaders seeking to turn the tide might actually do to accomplish that—if it is even possible.
One example of what it might look like is the Viktor Orbán agenda in Hungary. I’ve been fascinated with the ongoing government project to reduce abortion, boost the birthrate, and encourage marriage for some time, and have interviewed both Hungarian ambassador Eduard Habsburg (yes, from that Habsburg family) as well as Family Minister Katalin Novák for The American Conservative to discuss this agenda. We don’t yet know how the Hungarian agenda will play out in the long-term, but there have been some encouraging short-term results.
Rod Dreher of The American Conservative has been writing from Hungary for several months while he works at the Danube Institute, and it has been interesting to see him become a full-throated supporter of Orbán (while admitting that it is obviously not all roses.) Most conservative leaders tend to conserve whatever status quo they get handed when achieving power. Thus, progressives utilize their time in office to move the ball down the field; conservatives do nothing to turn back the clock, and we go from debating same-sex marriage to whether or not minors can get castrated in two decades without any meaningful opposition from conservatives. Especially in the Anglosphere countries (Canada being a particularly egregious example), so-called conservative politicians have shown little to no appetite for fighting back even when it comes to minors getting sex changes. Cultural surrendur is the standard.
Viktor Orbán, perhaps due to his past as an anti-Communist, understands how progressives won (and win) in the first place. Interestingly, when Orbán does precisely what progressives do—appointing like-minded people, funding conservative outfits, and launching a right-wing long march through the institutions—he gets called an authoritarian. The New York Times, for example, recently reported that Orbán’s government has granted a total of $1.7 billion to Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) “with the aim of training a new generation of conservative elite across Europe.” That is precisely what conservatives should have been doing for decades, instead of ceding one field after another to those who hate Western civilization. Progressives, of course, don’t care for being beaten at their own game.
Hungary has even modeled one potential method of pushback to the LGBT agenda. Over the last several years, an internecine fight broke out amongst American conservatives over the limits of the use of government power, with David French representing the libertarian wing and Sohrab Ahmari making the case that conservatism has conserved almost nothing over the past several decades. I think Ahmari was being hyperbolic, but then again, French did refer to Drag Queen Story Hour as one of the “blessings of liberty” in his insistence that there was nothing conservatives could do in response to these new cultural cancers. Over at his blog, Rod Dreher describes how Hungary has responded to the explosion of LGBT propaganda targeted at children:
Hungary is being punished severely by the European Union for having passed a law this summer that restricts the presentation of LGBT content to children and minors. Hungarians are not religious, but they are culturally conservative. The government, seeing how the constant stream of LGBT propaganda aimed at children is changing Western societies (e.g., a 4,000 percent increase over a decade in the number of UK minors referred for transgender treatment), chose to fight back in a modest way. Every society chooses what is appropriate for its youth to experience, and usually codifies that in law. Not every society agrees on these points, but every society sets these rules. There is a reason why our laws set the age of sexual consent at a certain point. Societies differ on what that age is, but all societies recognize that children must be protected from the sexual desire of adults. Societies also set restrictions on whether or not minors can receive certain kinds of sexualized information — porn, I mean. Unlike the countries of Western Europe, Hungary believes that children and minors should not receive information normalizing LGBT. They are trying to protect their youth from the cultural revolution that has consumed the West. They are trying to protect their kids from decadent propaganda.
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