The Incarnation is the greatest gift ever given in the history of the universe. God, the Creator of the universe, distinct from his creation, is so great that he cannot be wrapped up by our limited human minds, yet in the manger, God was wrapped up as the gift of himself to us, in the person of his Son, the Redeemer of sinful creatures. This immense God humbly entered human culture via a baby in an animal feeding trough. He humbled himself for our benefit. This should be our attitude to others as we humbly speak the gospel that defends binary sexuality and also offers us a place at the wedding feast of Jesus Christ. 

I can remember when public Christian witness was a welcomed contribution to the life of the culture. In my recent article The Fourth Phase: Persecution? I mentioned Aaron Renn, who describes three phases of the relationship between the secular culture and biblical Christianity. He notes the general acceptance in the 1960s to general opposition today. I have lived through that period, since I saw the enormous influence of evangelical Christianity when I came to study in the US in the 1960s. In its adamant rejection of God the Creator, today’s progressivism illustrates the chasm between two opposing moral systems of social justice in the culture; between biblical faith and wokism. Both compete for the same ground. This is perhaps why Christian cultural witness is now so confusing for Christians. Politics has become religious and, in the main, religiously anti–Christian, ever ready to “cancel” traditional biblical morality.
Progressivism attempts to normalize what was once considered abnormal behavior. It seems to be succeeding. Christians must be ready to live in this new situation, just as the early Christians, who lived in Rome, were surrounded by an overwhelmingly degenerate culture. Imagine the President of the United States publicly marrying two men, one as his wife and one as his husband! That is what the Emperor Nero did during the time of Paul. Imagine a Vice President as a lesbian witch.
From Abnormal to Normal
Our leading politicians openly endorse Drag Queen Story Hour readings for children. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), a professing Roman Catholic, posted a clip on Twitter in which she declares that drag queens are “what America is all about.” A Department of Energy whistleblower’s letter notes that a drag queen, Sam Brinton, had been picked as a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the DOE “over other more highly qualified candidates.”[1] Brinton is a self-proclaimed “kink activist” (dog fetishes are his specialty), who belongs to a drag queen group known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.[2] The administration sent Brinton to a diplomatic function for a Bastille Day celebration at the French Embassy in Paris. He proudly appeared in his dress and heels together with the first trans-woman Admiral, Rachel Levine, father of two grown children. The public worship of scandalous, unbridled sexuality is waved aloft around the world as an emblem of our newly enthroned US morality. It’s all perfectly normal.[3] We have normalized LGBTQ+ sex, drag, pornography, abortion, and a host of newly named iniquities. It has recently become known that Yoel Roth, chief of Twitter’s “Trust and Safety board” determining what was published and what was silenced for the general public on Twitter, including the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, was a gay practicing drag queen.[4] In the same vein, a well-known drag artist, Marti Cummings, invited to the White House to celebrate the new law on gay marriage, celebrated his invitation to the event by tweeting, “To be a non-binary drag artist invited to the White House is something I never imagined would happen. Thank you President and Dr. Biden for inviting me to this historic bill signing. Grateful doesn’t begin to express the emotions I feel.” One of his tweets about children is so degrading that I only dare put it in a footnote.[5] Open decadency has climbed into the highest seats of power in the country.  
Christian parents are quickly realizing that their children are in danger and under attack. One California teacher boasted about a “queer library” she keeps for her class. It contains sexually explicit content, including kink and orgies, as well as information on BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadism). She claims that these books help students to “figure out who they are.”[6]
In the recent Children’s and Family Emmy Awards, sponsored by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the winners’ acceptance speeches overwhelmingly promoted pro-LGBTQ content and other far-left concepts. Hosted over the course of two nights, the event was intended for an audience of children ranging from “infancy to age 15.” One quarter of the awards featured characters or stories involving sexual preference or gender identity. One winner, the Disney-owned series “Muppet Babies,” received the award for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Program. One episode in that series puts a heavy focus on “Gonzo-rella,” a male character, Gonzo, who decides to identify as “non-binary,” to wear women’s dresses, and to use “they/them” pronouns.[7] Our ruling elites are recasting sin as virtue and virtue as sin, daring us to object. Kurt Schlichter bluntly and sarcastically suggests a way of reacting: “America, We Can Choose Not to Tolerate Weirdos: Time to stop accepting the idea that we need to pretend weirdos are not weird.[8]Unfortunately the situation is not amusing. At the highest level of leadership, we find a determined agenda to make the weird normal.
Christians must find a way of speaking in the public square, especially to the LGBTQ sexual ideology. Knowing and honoring God is at stake, and gay sex, says Paul, is unnatural; against nature. Progressives howl in rage if you say they are grooming children. But they are. Why are pedophiles and their sympathizers allowed to run rampant in our society? Victor Davis Hanson, a guest lecturer at Hillsdale College, proposes ten political ways to save America, but the closest he gets to sexual issues is the phrase: “Like it or not, the nuclear family remains the bulwark of the American nation, which will not survive if current fertility rates of below 1.7 children per woman continue to diminish and age the population. The government must incentivize childbearing and child raising.”[9] Even our more conservative politicians will not save us from cultural sexual degeneracy and demographic collapse. Even Ex-President Donald Trump has emerged as a social radical, which we already knew he was. At a reception at Mar-a-Lago for the gay Log Cabin Republicans on December 16th, 2022 Trump received a standing ovation after delivering an enthusiastic affirmation of gay rights. “We are fighting for the gay community, and we are fighting and fighting hard.”[10]According to Gallup, 55 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Americans overall support same-sex marriage. In normalizing homosexuality, our culture is determined to follow the example of ancient Roman culture. That culture eventually collapsed, of course. Apparently “conservatives” do not see the problem. Can Christians join the happy chorus?
Standing in the Gap for our Children
Statistics show that COVID-19 lock-downs and closed schools have caused many school children to suffer psychological problems, including suicidal thoughts. Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network, which studies educational issues. Among the problems seen among children learning via the internet was “anomie,” that is, “no law.” In thinking about this issue, Strand follows American sociologist Robert K. Merton, who pioneered the sociology of deviance, based on Emile Durkheim’s theory of anomie. Following Merton, Sand describes this situation as
the breakdown of law…a breakdown of the ties that bind people together to make a functional society…Periods of anomie are unstable, chaotic, and often rife with conflict because the social force of the norms and values that otherwise provide stability is weakened or missing.[11]
Sand remarks that anti-racist classrooms have devolved into little more than a series of “scoldings, guilt-trips, and demands to demean oneself simply to make another feel empowered. And of course, the schools’ forays into intimate sexual areas are also doing great damage.”[12]
Changing laws about male and female, which have lasted for thousands of years and are confirmed by human biology, can surely be described as creating a situation of anomie, of unsettling lawlessness, to which Christians must speak, even at the risk of cultural rejection, for the sake of human beings and for the honor of God.
But speaking out is costly. Paivi Rasanen, a 27-year member of the Finnish parliament, has been accused by government prosecutors of hate speech, for comments she made on three occasions about gay people. Mrs. Rasanen denies the charges and stands by her words, which she says are based on the Bible.[13] In America, Christians may also be charged for hate speech, incendiary language, or of speech leading to intended or even unintended violent actions. Their words are considered to be an encouragement for real-world violence. Christians must speak carefully, while still speaking truth.
In denouncing gay ideology, Christians must find a discourse that avoids emotionalism, moralism, hatred or bigotry, while reaching to the heart of the issue. There can be no contempt for gay individuals. A homosexual or trans person deserves respect and love as a unique and complex fellow human being, made in God’s image. God extends love to any who will come to him in repentance. In the original Fall, every human being apart from Jesus himself, is tainted by sin. In addition to the basic respect we owe every individual, we must also be keenly aware that many have known much suffering and hurt by early sexual abuse, rejection, confusion and even from heartless, dismissive expressions of judgment from misguided believers. Christians cannot forget the gospel context in which there is a priority for the communication of God’s forgiving love, of which all human beings stand in need. If God is rich in “kindness, forbearance and patience…that lead to repentance” (Romans 2:4), so must be God’s people. We must love our homosexual friends.
Millennial Christians are leaving the church in droves over this issue and need a clear statement of the truth from their elders. To understand sexuality, we need to hear not a judgmental, but a holistic, ontological account of what the Bible says about sexuality. If you worship God, you will believe that he is the Creator—an external, intelligent, personal God. According to Scripture, the world is the work of an external Creator who caringly made it but is separate and different from it. We have a hetero-cosmology (a binary worldview based on otherness and difference), not a homo-cosmology (the nonbinary blending of all things). Homo-cosmology has nothing to worship except the creation itself, since it rejects the God who made the world and put distinctions within it. As the Apostle Paul argued, we worship either the Creator or the creation (Romans 1:25).
How have these two fundamental worldviews worked themselves out in recent culture with regard to sexuality? People now speak of non-binary spirituality and non-binary sexuality. They are clearly related. Non-binary spirituality believes everything is God and that there is no divine, separate Creator. Non-binary sexuality holds to androgynous sex, in which there are no ultimate sexual distinctions. Binary, distinction-making thinking is the foundation of the gospel, in which God the Creator, totally other from us, in his Son, identifies with created reality, dies to pay the price of sin, but remains distinct from the creation. Binary sexuality witnesses to this truth in its own way, since we are made in God’s image, distinctly male and female.
Some this Christmas will stand next to a pagan priest of Satan, rather than worshiping the newborn King. We should not be surprised. The early church witnessed this in the pagan cities of the Roman Empire. Some of the Christians had once participated in such ceremonies, but the power of the gospel is unquenchable.
We may think that our culture has wandered far from binary gospel truth, but as I drive around in late December, I see our neighborhood festooned with bright lights telling me it is Christmas. Christmas means the worship [Christ-mass] of Christ. Though it has largely been stripped of its true message, the Christmas celebration is still a major event in our cultural history. Let’s use this so that people hear the good news of God, which, in turn, is good for the culture. The Incarnation is the greatest gift ever given in the history of the universe. God, the Creator of the universe, distinct from his creation, is so great that he cannot be wrapped up by our limited human minds, yet in the manger, God was wrapped up as the gift of himself to us, in the person of his Son, the Redeemer of sinful creatures. This immense God humbly entered human culture via a baby in an animal feeding trough. He humbled himself for our benefit. This should be our attitude to others as we humbly speak the gospel that defends binary sexuality and also offers us a place at the wedding feast of Jesus Christ.
Have courage. We are on the winning side.
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1] https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-nuclear-drag-queen-stole-womens-clothing.
[2] David Strom, “Biden’s transgender DOE appointee is charged with a felony,” Hot Air, Nov. 28, 2022.
[3] https://www.frontpagemag.com/this-thanksgiving-the-nation-was-grateful-for-abortions.
[4] http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/joseph-vazquez/2022/12/17/fbi-files-musk-releases-new-docs-exposing-twitters.
[5] “Kids are out to sing and suck D!” https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4116181/post.
[6] https://nypost.com/2022/12/04/teacher-claims-queer-library-with-bdsm-themed-books-helped-kids-figure-out-who-they-are.
[7] Eric Lendrum, “First-Ever Emmy Awards for Children Heavily Pushes LGBT Content,” American Greatness, (16 Dec, 2022).
[8] SeekAndFind, Townhall, 12/15/2022, https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4116528/posts
[9] Victor Davis Hanson, “10 Steps to Save America,” American Thinker, 18 Dec, 2022, “Cut the Debt, Secure the Border, Tap Natural Resources, Oppose Discrimination, Disrupt and Reform Higher Education, Revive the Armed Forces, Fix Voting. Drain the Swamp, Upend the Welfare State, Restore Norms.”
[10] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/16/celebration-same-sex-marriage-mar-a-lago-00074441.
[11] Larry Sand, “Losing a Generation: School-related cultural upheaval is taking a serious toll on children,” December 19, 2022, https://www.frontpagemag.com/losing-a-generation.
[12] Art.cit.
[13] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/finland-s-bible-tweet-trial-should-trouble-us-all.
Related Posts:

Of course, believers’ humble practice of God-honoring heterosexual marriage, though it may be costly, will also bear witness to the joy men and women have in biblical marriage. And in spite of stubborn resistance from opponents in contemporary culture, God’s powerful love and mercy is irresistible, as is his creative wisdom–in making us male and female—in his image. This we must seek to share in love with those who adopt androgynous sexual expressions. We must continue to express the love of Jesus, who was crushed on the cross for our redemption and for anyone who will receive it.

In a perceptive article on the recent history of Evangelicalism in America (which I recommend),[1] Aaron Renn, a writer for First Things, confirms something I have been thinking for some time: politics has become religious. It is thus difficult to speak out about traditional moral behavior without being “cancelled” or charged with being a Christian nationalist—by people who doubtless plan on making America a pagan nation! In other words, contemporary progressivism and biblical faith now occupy many areas of common ground. How has this come about? Renn describes three recent distinct phases of secular culture as it relates to Evangelicalism and biblical Christianity, moving from general acceptance to general opposition. They are, in Renn’s terminology:
A Positive World (Pre-1994) 
In this stage, as Renn puts it, “society at large retains a mostly positive view of Christianity. …Publicly being a Christian is a status-enhancer. Christian moral norms are the basic moral norms of society and violating them can bring negative consequences.”
I cannot resist my oft-repeated phrase: “When I came to America in 1964 I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” As a European, I was surprised that a Christian student movement like Campus Crusade for Christ would try to attract students to the Christian gospel by drawing attention to the much-admired BMOC (Big Man on Campus), who happened to be a Christian. Renn shows that “this period is the last period of generalized Christendom where most in Western culture shared the same moral norms and where Christians could concentrate on sharing the Gospel.”
A Neutral World (1994–2014) 
The next stage takes a neutral stance toward Christianity. “Christianity no longer has privileged status but is not disfavored. Christian moral norms retain some residual effect.”
I note that this period immediately follows the appearance in 1990 of a book by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s. This book is presented as a “compelling and compassionate work that never fails to stimulate. After the Ball is required reading for straights interested in understanding a minority that comprises 10% of the population and for gays who are learning that the revolution is far from over.”[2] The authors encouraged gays “to come out of the closet, and they outlined a code of gay ethics calling for mature love relationships and greater moderation in sex.” The book was a massive success, creating general ambiguity in the way people began to think about both homosexuality and Christianity.
A Negative World (2014–Present)
According to Renn, “Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. …Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and to the new public moral order.”
Biblical Christianity is now in this third antagonistic phase. Renn sees cultural antagonism in the conflict between progressivism’s re-definition of “the public good and the new public moral order” and that of the biblical moral order. Incisively, Renn dates the transition from the neutral to the negative phase in the year 2014, just before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which, he notes, “institutionalized Christianity’s new low status.” He does not explain why the new status is low. By granting to homosexuality constitutional status and by recognizing same-sex marriage as a “civil right” (which many “conservative” figures applauded at the time), the US Supreme Court paganized the “profound mystery” of the Christian gospel, expressed in male/female marriage, which reveals God’s love for his people (Eph 5:31–32). Two men copulating cannot represent God’s love for his people, since, throughout history, this was the pagan image of the divine and human relationship.[3] Indeed, as Paul says a few verses previously, sexual immorality and impurity…must not even be named among you (Eph 5:3). In our time, the LGBTQ ideology has been accepted as a perfectly valid lifestyle, but it is an ultimate rejection of biblical faith.
Thus, in the “Negative World” we are opposed by a non-Christian, religiously pagan worldview. This is why we see such hesitation to appeal to the Creator as the source of our human rights. IN POD WE TRUST has become the new humorous statement of faith. It is just what Paul argued so long ago in Romans 1. In verse 25 he describes the basic worship exchange (worshiping the creation rather than the Creator). In the next verse, he argues, “For this reason,” people practice homosexuality. The pagan, religious opposition in the “Negative World” is causing our Christian young people to leave the faith of their youth in droves, either because they are afraid to be unpopular or because they are convinced of the validity and value of the new “public good” and “public moral order” of personal rights.
The place of sexuality is the dividing point between biblical and progressive morality and between the politics of the Left and the Right. For many progressives the “public moral order” is becoming more “free” and now consists of normalizing all pagan sexual expressions, which can be loosely categorized as “androgyny.” This term joins male and female, whereas God created these as distinct. We see androgyny in various forms of non-binary sexuality—homosexuality, bi-sexuality, trans-sexuality and drag culture, all of which claim civil rights, since they believe that there are no ultimate distinctions; all is homo, the same. It is little wonder that antagonism against Christianity is so often connected with issues of sexuality. Christianity affirms one foundational difference, namely the distinction between God and his creation. The male/female distinction is the capstone of all the other distinctions God put into the universe (such as land and sea, night and day, etc.). Yet that very male/female distinction is the target of most current public lawsuits against Christians who want to maintain their right to turn down work that would go against their belief in those creation distinctions. Christian business owners, such as bakers and photographers, want to maintain their public witness regarding sexuality. When Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) retired from the Senate and was chosen as the University of Florida’s next president, no one was particularly surprised, since Sasse had already been a university president earlier in his career. But the University’s Faculty Senate held an emergency meeting in which a large majority railed against the administration’s decision to make Sasse the sole finalist. Sasse’s conservative position on gender caused faculty members to express “no-confidence” in his appointment. Affirming conservative views on sexuality is the best way to get you cancelled!
Dr. Al Mohler’s November 2 “Briefing” was dedicated to showing how thoroughly the medical profession has adopted LGBTQ ideology as normative. “On LGBTQ issues and on a host of other issues,” Mohler said, “it is clear that the medical establishment is taking sides. And overwhelmingly, the medical establishment is taking sides by siding with those who are enthusiastic for the LGBTQ revolution.”[4] Perhaps the clearest example of the power of LGBTQ ideology on culture is the promotion of life-altering techniques—surgery and puberty-blockers that permanently sterilize an individual—on minor children who question their personal fit with the stereotypical sex of their birth. A huge majority of voters (78.7 %) “believe underage minors should be required to wait until they are adults to legally use puberty blockers and undergo permanent sex-change procedures.”[5] Yet Democrat politicians, aware of the vindictiveness of the transsexual movement and fearing to lose the huge campaign contributions of the LGBT lobby, refuse to support the public’s preferences.[6] Large corporations who were once culturally conservative have gone “woke,” progressive, and politically Leftist. Their vast wealth has allowed them to become monopolies, thus freeing them to cast off market theories of fair competition and to align with the newly erected moral icons of the day: targets for “environmental, social and governance” (ESG), and individual sexual freedom.
The future includes the emergence of a “new [Catholic] Church” under pro-homosexual Pope Francis, who is completely at odds with traditional Catholicism as understood by Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. Just before becoming Pope in 2005, Ratzinger noted: “Very soon it will no longer be possible to affirm that homosexuality, as the Church teaches, is an objective disorder in the structuring of human existence.”[7] Perhaps as he saw the compromises of the Vatican and realized that he would not be able to change them, Ratzinger had no option but to resign.
On the Protestant Reformed side, the decisions of Calvin University are disturbing. The school’s board recently chose to allow LGBTQ-affirming faculty to remain as recognized professors, even those who offer statements that they are not in agreement with the church’s confessional beliefs on homosexuality. “The big story here is that a college that has claimed evangelical identity for more than a century, completely owned by a denomination that has raised its affirmation of biblical sexuality to confessional status, is surrendering to the sexual and gender revolution.”[8]
So what cultural time is it? In what phase is our culture now? Emily Rizzo, clinical professional counselor in D.C. with the Counseling Center of Maryland, describes the present as a time in which “we’ve already moved away from the cis, straight world, [so] there is more of a possibility to be open.”[9] Rizzo plies her trade, counseling LGBT+ clients and individuals in non-monogamous or polyamorous relationships since “open relationships just tend to come more naturally to queer people.”
Today’s “time” sees teachers exposing young children in state schools to radical gender and sexual notions. Such instruction is surely part of the normalization of the LGBTQ agenda. Two spokesmen for “Drag pedagogy,” justify “drag queen readings for children. …[W]ithin the historical context of the USA and Western Europe, the institutional management of gender has been used as a way of maintaining racist and capitalist modes of (re)production.” To disrupt this dynamic, the authors propose “drag pedagogy,” as a way of stimulating the “queer imagination,” teaching kids “how to live queerly,” and “bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children.”[10] The goal is to expose “childhood innocence” as an “oppressive heteropatriarchal illusion,”[11]to make “queer thinking” the future “moral order” of society. Their task, they say, is to disrupt the “binary between womanhood and manhood,” seed the room with “gender-transgressive themes,” and break the “reproductive futurity” of the “nuclear family” and the “sexually monogamous marriage”—all of which are considered mechanisms of heterosexual, capitalist oppression. Powerful politicians support this ideology, in one way or another. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the third in line for the presidency, posted a clip of her cameo on the fifth episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 7” on Twitter, endorsing drag queens as “what America is all about.” She stated that “it was an honor” to make an appearance on the reality TV show and that she was “inspired by the contestants because they knew their power. Pelosi’s district is the site of a huge, annual public street fair for a sado-masochistic sex celebration, which she endorses.
Another politician, none other than President Biden, recently received in the White House the trans TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, who publicly presented himself, dressed and speaking as a teenage girl, and discussed transgender issues with the President, who agreed with him that it was “immoral” to deny sex-change surgery to children. John Fetterman, senate candidate for Pennsylvania recently stated that “LGBTQ education should be mandatory in all schools.”[12] Will our future belong to proponents of “queer sex”?
The Human Rights Campaign thinks it will. They show that LGBTQ voters are on track to become one of the fastest-growing voting blocs in the country. They predict that by 2040, one in five Texas voters will be part of the group. “(LGBTQ voters are) emerging as among one of the most influential voting constituencies in the country, whose impact will permanently transform and reshape the American electoral landscape.”[13]
The church is already in Renns’s third culturally “negative period,” and I am taking the liberty to add a fourth stage. As the strength of pagan religious power increases, we will, no doubt, enter a fourth period.
A World of Persecution 
The church must be ready to face intense opposition. Already “cancel culture” has arisen from the reasoning of the LGBTQ community, who are convinced that their constitutional status removes any religious rights from Christian believers who might evoke their rights of free speech and free commerce. For the moment, most court cases on these issues take seriously the protections guaranteed by our constitutional religious liberty laws. What will happen when the moral high ground is held by the LGBTQ community? They believe that nature’s norm of heterosexuality has become an unjustified, outmoded definition of normalcy. The natural order has evolved into normative non-binary androgyny of all sorts. One cannot help but think of the Roman culture of Paul’s day.
In view of a possible fourth period, what should be the current stance of the church? To be sure, we must preach clearly the love of God available for all, since all are made in God’s image. But the pulpit must also show God’s created plan for men and women and the connection between worshiping creation and sexual degradation. Both unbelievers and believers, old and young, need encouragement to stand firm. Our younger believers are under immense pressure from the culture and often have no idea how to speak about the sexual issues in relation to the gospel message. They are often tempted to abandon their faith. Recent Barna research shows that “only 50 percent among teens who identify as Christians say Jesus was resurrected; not even half (44%) say Jesus was God in human form.[14] Only 40% open their Bible more than twice a year, and only 9% open it more than once a week. How will they be able to analyze and reject the pagan spirituality that surrounds them? Significantly, Barna did not even bother to ask them their views on sexuality which, as we have demonstrated, is the dominant worldview of our day.
Preaching a blend of gospel declaration and cultural apologetics follows the example of the apostles and of Paul in particular. Though he was not interested in creating a Christian empire, he was committed to training Christians how to represent God before the pagan world. Thus he taught the church, as well as any pagan who might hear him, how to think specifically about honest commerce, the traditional family, marriage and male/female sexuality—doubtless because it got them to think about God the Creator and Redeemer and how to glorify God in their daily living. Our Christian young people especially need wise instruction about the things they are hearing and seeing in their school and social settings. Yet some are deprived of any solid teaching about today’s androgynous, identity-oriented perversions. I beg all Christian pastors and youth leaders to dig deeply in understanding the theological connections with today’s sexual behaviors and then to train your young people to understand the issues and to stand firm, while reaching out to their friends with the gospel.
Of course, believers’ humble practice of God-honoring heterosexual marriage, though it may be costly, will also bear witness to the joy men and women have in biblical marriage. And in spite of stubborn resistance from opponents in contemporary culture, God’s powerful love and mercy is irresistible, as is his creative wisdom–in making us male and female—in his image. This we must seek to share in love with those who adopt androgynous sexual expressions. We must continue to express the love of Jesus, who was crushed on the cross for our redemption and for anyone who will receive it. To announce that love, we must be ready to give our lives, as Luther wrote 500 years ago:
Let goods and kindred go,This mortal life also;The body they may kill:God’s truth abideth still,His Kingdom is forever.
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1] Aaron M. Renn, “The Three Worlds Of Evangelicalism,” FIRST THINGS, Feb 2022,
[2] See Amazon presenting page.
[3] Peter Jones, “Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal”: https://truthxchange.com/resource-library/articles/androgyny-the-pagan-sexual-ideal/
[4] Al Mohler, The Briefing, 11/2/2022.
[5] https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/poll-americans-support-banning-transgender-surgeries-drugs-for-minors/article_a969ff1a-5156-11ed-9243-733436a08713.html
[6] https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4103360/posts
[7] https://www.frontpagemag.com/has-benedict-xvi-been-indicating-he-still-reigns-as-pope/
[8] Albert Mohler, The Great Evangelical Deconstruction, World, (November 4, 2022).
[9] https://www.verygoodlight.com/2021/08/19/gay-couples-open-relationships
[10] Christopher F. Rufo Oct 24, 2022.
[11] H Dyer – “Global Studies of Childhood, 2017,” – journals.sagepub.com
[12] Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman Agrees “LGBTQ Education” Should Be “Mandatory In All Schools”.
[13] https://hrc-prod-requests.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/LGBTQ-VEP-Oct-2022.pdf?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioslocal_austin&stream=
[14] Nick Hartman, “A Reflection on Barna’s Open Generation Report,” GenZ, October,26, 2022.
Related Posts:

The authors of Overture 15, Westminster Presbytery, argue that ministers of the gospel are to be above reproach in their Christian character and self-conception and that a man would disqualify himself from ordained office in the PCA if he identified himself in terms associated with the LGBTQ+ movement or has a Gay self-conception.

I have been asked to write on why the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) presbyteries should formally vote to include the new paragraph, Overture 15 in the Book of Church Order 7-4:
Men who describe themselves as homosexual, even those who describe themselves as homosexual and claim to practice celibacy by refraining from homosexual conduct, are disqualified from holding office in the Presbyterian Church in America.
With my wife Rebecca, we were one of the first three missionary families sent out by the first General Assembly (GA) of the PCA in Birmingham, AL, in 1973. Thus, I was greatly moved by the GA speech of Palmer Robertson, a fellow missionary professor and a long-term friend, of around my age, who has been noting the growing and unique emphasis on homosexuality that he has seen in so many cultural expressions like television and public life. Like him, my conviction is that the issue will become the cause of serious Christian persecution. Clearly, we have to get this right—for ourselves and for the next Christian generation we are raising.
I will argue that presbyteries must vote in Overture 15 for two reasons: 1. For the integrity and purity of the ordained ministry; 2. for the clarity of the Gospel message we bring to the world and especially to the youth in our churches.

For the integrity and purity of the ordained ministry

We charge new candidates for ministry to “adorn the profession of the Gospel in your life, and to set a worthy example before the church” (BCO 24-5-4).
One cannot help but compare this to the words of TE Greg Johnson: 
…you wanna know about my sexual brokenness? I am happy to talk to you about what I talked about in the pulpit two weeks ago, and that I think is relevant to this conversation. I am a pornography addict. I have had a pornography addiction for 15 years. that pull is still as strong as it was. I’ve mortified this for 15 years and it still, you know, I see a computer terminal unmonitored and immediately my mind thinks, I want to look at porn. Fifteen years of strangling this thing, and it doesn’t die, it doesn’t go away…  
I know that if I look at one image, I’m going to look at a thousand. I know I’m not going to come up for air for hours.
The authors of Overture 15, Westminster Presbytery, argue that ministers of the gospel are to be above reproach in their Christian character and self-conception and that a man would disqualify himself from ordained office in the PCA if he identified himself in terms associated with the LGBTQ+ movement or has a Gay self-conception. Johnson’s “gay self-conception” is indicated by the small but significant detail that the spine of his book, Still Time To Care features the gay rainbow.
Some admire Johnson’s honesty and oppose Overture 15 because it is unfair that homosexuals alone be targeted since there are many other sinful conditions that need to be addressed that tempt ordained ministers. This year I was asked to evaluate a Ph.D. thesis by Jeffery Adams Moore whose very well argued and exegetically supported thesis is that there are three sins that Scripture specifically highlights as the most significant: the three are: “abortion, [and] assisted suicide [forms of murder]…and homosexuality.[1]  These sins “oppose the one-man, one-woman multiplication of humanity for earthly rule under the triune God’s heavenly rule. Such sins are inversions of the created order and resist the spreading of God’s image for his glory.”[2] Though a Baptist, soon-to-be Dr. Moore identifies among others John Calvin, Francis Turretin, Charles Hodge, Herman Bavinck, and Louis Berkhof as theologians adopting this conclusion. The gravity of this sin must also be understood in terms of its role in our present godless culture.

For the clarity of the Gospel message that we bring to the world and especially to the youth in our churches.

A second major issue regarding homosexuality, sometimes called “sexual androgyny” [the mixing of male and female] since it includes transgenderism, transvestitism, bi-sexuality, agenderism, drag, and cross-dressing, is not only whether it is, as such an immoral way of behaving but in what way does it deeply and fully express the worldview of paganism and thus has an important ideological status. In other words, without practicing androgynous sexuality, can one affirm it as valid, and thus be just as pagan as the small percentage of actual practitioners.
The paganization of Western culture began with the invasion of Eastern spirituality in the Sixties when people discovered personal, New Age “spirituality.” But for progressives that individual experience had to become a Western worldview, and some of the leaders knew what to do. The Jungian/Gnostic, June Singer, in 1977 made a programmatic statement that others are now putting into practice. Have you ever wondered why recently the LGBTQ agenda is now everywhere, being promoted as the great issue of contemporary social and moral rights, as professor Palmer Robertson pointed out at the GA? Why must children be taught to think this way in schools? Why is Disney committed to promoting it, at the expense of losing many parental customers? Why Drag Queens must be reading in happy hour to children in public libraries? Why has transexual Adm Rachel Levine, an overweight middle-age man and father of a number of children, appointed the 17th Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and Sam Brinton, appointed as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy, shows up to work in the White House and in Paris in heels and a short dress and make-up and stiletto heels, and who boasts about his involvement in “puppy play,” that is, grown men putting on dog masks and behaving like submitted animals for sexual stimulus—why have these two been sent to represent the US government at the celebration  Bastille Day at the French Ambassador’s residence?
Sam Brinton wrote a scathing rebuke of federal law enforcement agencies for raiding Rentboy.com, a now-defunct website that reportedly ran an illegal prostitution ring that often sold the sexual services of young boys to much older clients.[3] He stated: “The raid on its headquarters has thrown many gay, bisexual, and transgender young adults into turmoil as their main source of income has been ripped, away due to irresponsible and archaic views of sex work.”[4]
The short-term answer to these questions is the Biden administration’s radical commitment to LGBTQ ideology. The long-term answer goes back to 1977 when June Singer asked: “Can the human psyche realize its own creative potential through building its own cosmology and supplying it with its own gods?”[5] The new cosmology would include, as Singer said, “the longed-for conjunction of the opposites,” and “a new androgynous sexuality.”[6]The spirituality of the Sixties, she declared programmatically:
…[since] we have at hand…all the ingredients we will need to perform our own new alchemical opus…[the great work, a term from satanist traditions]… [we will] fuse the opposites within us: “the archetype of androgyny appears in us as an innate sense of…and witness to…the primordial cosmic unity—functioning to erase distinction…this was nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition…and a patriarchal god-image.[7]
“Primordial cosmic unity” eliminates the very notion of a distinct divine creator, thus eradicates the biblical revelation of God. Singer understood that the spiritual Age of Aquarius had to become the Age of Androgyny, that the “new humanism” predicted by Carl Jung required the full acceptance of “androgynous sexuality.
This term, androgyny, is employed in a significant way by the great expert in the history of religions, the Romanian, Mircea Eliade who argues that androgyny is a religious universal or archetype of pagan priests or shamans that appears virtually everywhere and at all times in the world’s religions. Mircea Eliade explains the spiritual meaning of androgyny as “a symbolic restoration of chaos, of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation.” The androgynous being thus sums up the very goal of the mystical, monistic quest, whether ancient or modern:
…androgyny in many traditional religions functions as “an archaic and universal formula for the expression of wholeness, the co-existence of the contraries, or coincidentia oppositorum . . . symboliz[ing] . . . perfection . . . [and] ultimate being. . . .[8]
Modern witches call for “a nonbinary look at Source itself,… finding our power as we reweave ourselves back into the reflection of god-herself, as the divine-androgen. [9] The androgyne is thus the physical symbol of the pagan spiritual goal, which is the merging of two seemingly distinct entities, the self and god, and a mystical return to the state of godhead prior to creation, which is the essence of idolatry.
This is the very same logic that Paul employs in Romans 1:18-27. The homosexual act exchanges the worship of God for the worship of creation. In creation, homosexuality is an inversion of God’s design for one-man, one-woman “fitted” sexual intimacy with openness to procreation. In redemption, same-sex sexuality fails to herald and signify the sacrificial redemptive relationship between Christ, the Bridegroom, and his bride, the church, as two distinct bodies united by grace.
That the pagan priesthood would be so identified, across space and time, with the blurring of sexual identity via homosexual androgyny indicates, beyond a doubt, the enormous priority paganism has given, and continues to give, to the undermining of God-ordained monogamous heterosexuality, and the divine image, and the enthusiastic promotion of androgyny in its varied forms.
Chapter 7 of the PCA Book of Church Order affirms that “teaching elders [must be] specially gifted, called and trained by God to preach…” If ever was needed this kind of worldview preaching and teaching it is surely now.
Are pastors who accept Side B thinking about homosexuality able to help students navigate through the worldview of androgynous sexuality as a fundamental opposition to biblical orthodoxy. Taking Greg Johnson as an example, he boasts, as a gay, celibate man, that not experiencing marriage in this life, is a foretaste of heaven. He sees celibacy as an “intrusion ethic,” an in-breaking of the ethics of the coming age into our present era, since in heaven “none of us will be married.”[10] This is not strictly speaking true. Though he holds up his life of celibacy as a sign of selfless Christian sacrifice, one may wonder if, in as subtle way, he uses celibacy not, as it should be, as a unique divine mission but, as, in a certain way, of maintaining his single homosexual lifestyle.[11] Perhaps a better way would be for Rev. Johnson to marry a godly Christian woman to better understand the importance of biblical heterosexual marriage. For Johnson, the mystery that moves him is that Jesus took him on “as his little brother,”[12] not his bride. For Paul, the profound mystery that God’s establishment of marriage in Genesis 2:22-25 expresses, is Christ, the bridegroom’s love for church. (Eph 5:31-2). In this sense, marriage will go on forever.
I end with a citation of my final paragraph of my review article of Greg Johnson’s book, Still Time to Care. “The call for cultural apologetics is not an appeal to pastors to preach politics! It is a matter of understanding the implications of our theology so we all can understand and live out those implications through the power of the Word and the Holy Spirit. A solid understanding of worldview is an increasingly great need in our nation’s churches and pulpits, which are abandoning orthodoxy in favor of cultural myths. They are turning away from God the Creator and Redeemer to celebrate depraved forms of pagan living. May we all speak clearly and boldly to Christians and non-Christians alike, with grace, humility, clarity, and power—following the example of the Apostle Paul.”[13] 
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1] Jeffery Adams Moore, “Greater Sins: Are Certain Violations of God’s Moral Law Weightier Than Others?” A Dissertation Submitted to The Faculty Of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary In Candidacy For The Degree Of Doctor Of Philosophy (Kansas City, Missouri May 2022), p. 301
[2] Ibid., p. 20.
[3] https://www.theblaze.com/news/brinton-lgbtq-child-prostitution
[4] https://www.theblaze.com/news/brinton-lgbtq-child-prostitution
[5] June Singer, Androgyny: Towards a New theory of sexuality (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1977), 237. Incredible, and never dying, this book is just as relevant today as it was initially. For Singer, there is no greater deed of mankind than to accept and integrate our opposites within. To know the androgyne is to unify the self.
[6] See the title of Singer’s book, Androgyny: Towards A New Theory Of Sexuality.
[7] Singer, Androgyny, 207.
[8] Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, 154.
[9] “Getting Straight with Spirit,” Tommie StarChild, (PantheaCon 2020 conference agenda, workshop description), p.34.
[10] Still Time to Care, 100, 158
[11] I am thankful to Rev. Also Leon for this insight.
[12] Op.cit., 241.
[13] Peter Jones,  Still Time to Care About the Whole Gospel – TruthXchange  (March 2, 2022).
Related Posts:

In our time, beyond the ultimate issues of theism and atheism, two fundamental and very practical theories regarding patriarchy oppose each other, with essential implications for human survival: either a biblical view of human existence (which presupposes the flourishing of the natural or nuclear family and the male/female distinction) or a CRT atheist “anti-racist” view that ultimately eliminates all distinctions for the sake of the installation of a godless Marxist utopian equity.

Part of Critical Race Theory is the assumption that racism is inevitably related to white male heterosexuality and the oppressive patriarchy that occurs under the selfish rule of powerful father-figures. Thus, the contemporary version of a “man” in U.S. society is “hyper-masculine, straight, and white…the wealthy white male property owner.” So “…we must begin to dismantle the racist and patriarchal systems.”[1] Theorist Rob Okun calls for an “anti-patriarchy Peace Corps with dedicated organizers fanning out across the country to help communities figure out ways to rid their local schools, courts, workplaces, hospitals, and houses of worship of entrenched white supremacy and patriarchy.”[2]
Black thinker, John Washington, a self-described “liberal” examines this goal provocatively.[3] His analysis deserves our attention. His autobiographical essay begins with a stunning observation: “CRT identifies the problem as white supremacist fathers that produce black victims—but this black man [the author] identifies the absentee black fathers as the problem.”[4]
Washington wonders if the criminal behavior of young black males today owes something to a sense of lost masculinity that others get to see in their faithful fathers at home. In inner-city communities, he argues, viciousness often defines what fatherless young men imagine is manhood. He sees much truth in the 1965 controversial report entitled “The Negro Family: A Case of National Action” by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist working at the Labor Department. Moynihan concluded that many of the social problems affecting American blacks are due to the disintegration of the black family. Washington supports this thesis by going into great detail to show how one-parent families, whether black or white, create all kinds of problems for children, and especially boys.
There is a sad irony in Washington’s conclusion regarding the reasons for the state of affairs in the black family. As long as patriarchy is considered evil (as Critical Race Theory maintains), then the real solution—wise fatherhood—can never be applied because it is openly attacked as the ultimate cause of the problem. The genuine solution is seen as the essential cause. Thus the race problem will never be solved as long as CRT is considered to be the solution for racism. My observation is supported by certain black thinkers who, like Washington, analyze the fundamental black problem as the absence of fathers in the home. Christian believer and black activist, Jason Whitlock, believes that the only real solution to black issues is the introduction of a biblical understanding of the role of a father. He asks: “Our family structure is way outside of God’s design. Do we think the charity of guilt-ridden white people (CRT) can fix problems resulting from the destruction of the family unit?”[5]
A case needs to be made for biblical patriarchy, granted both its effectiveness and its contemporary demonization. Patriarchy means the rule (arche) of the father (pater), which, since the rise of radical feminism, has now becoming identified as a great social evil. Any time there is rule, sinful human beings will exploit it and/or rebel against it. Unfortunately, even Christian husbands are capable of gross oppression of their wives and children. Having perhaps seen such abuse, feminist thinkers demonize the arche of the father. Feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin believes that
Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice…[6]
For radical theologian, Mary Daly, patriarchy comes from way back. The works of Aristotle, for example, portrayed women as morally, intellectually, and physically inferior to men, to be considered as property. Their role in society was to reproduce and to serve men in the household, where male domination of women is natural and virtuous.[7] “I intuitively understood,” says Daly, “that for a (person) trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin.’” Thus a patriarchal culture is profoundly sinful.[8] Such a negative view of patriarchy is understandable, considering some expressions of it. This negative analysis of patriarchy also holds true in history in regards to racism, in which the white patriarch consigns black people to slavery, suffering, and injustice. It would seem that both those suffering in a racist society and those suffering under an unhealthy patriarchy have reached the only valid solution: Eliminate family and creational sexual norms.
But biblical patriarchy does not teach what Aristotle believed nor does it teach human beings to oppress and hate one another in systems of racism. The Christian era developed the principles already laid down in the creation. Women and men are “naturally” different and together they constitute the core element of human societies: biological families created by God. Since the world is a dangerous place, men act as protectors of women and children and work selflessly to bring in wages that make family life possible. In the Genesis account of the beginnings of human society, men worked in tough conditions and women gave birth to children who were raised by father and mother together. To the first woman God said: “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children” (Gen 3:16). To the first man he said: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground” (Gen 3:19). The fundamental reality of patriarchy emerges not from an evil desire for power but from the very caring structures of creation and the natural roles of men and women living in a sinful world.
There is nothing evil about patriarchy. God gave it to us and revealed it to us because it expresses his image. The ultimate Pater who rules is God himself, who reveals himself in Scripture as a Father of the fatherless and protector of widows (Ps 68:5) and as a provider for the needy (Ps 68:9–10). Thus, the believer exclaims: “You are my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation” (Ps 89:26), the one who shows compassion to his children (Ps 103:13). In the New Testament Jesus reveals God as both his Father (John 3:35) and our Father,” to whom we pray (Matt 6:9). According to Jesus, God is the caring Father of those in need (Matt 18:14), a loving Father (John 14:23). Paul quotes from a collection of verses in the Old Testament Scriptures where God says: I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty (2 Cor 6:18).
Since human beings are made in God’s image, we are exhorted to live out and express the biblical reality of patriarchy, both as males and females, understanding what the will of the Lord is (Eph 5:17), as expressed in verses 22–33, which show an interplay of the marital relationship of “one flesh union” via “love” and “reverence” (Eph 5:33).
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body. Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourishes and cherishes it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife respect her husband.
Clearly the biblical version of patriarchy seeks to maintain the different male and female roles and the mutual respect between the husband and the wife. The husband submits to the constraints that Christ lays out for him and the female submits to her husband in the same way that the Church comes under the fatherly tenderness of the Church/God relationship. The arrangement is an exquisite and unparalleled description of the symphony of marital love that God intended and where children thrive. The “great mystery” of Genesis 2:24 is the amazing fact that God inspired the Old Testament text regarding marriage to act as a mere preview of the mystery of the gospel.
In our time, beyond the ultimate issues of theism and atheism, two fundamental and very practical theories regarding patriarchy oppose each other, with essential implications for human survival: either a biblical view of human existence (which presupposes the flourishing of the natural or nuclear family and the male/female distinction) or a CRT atheist “anti-racist” view that ultimately eliminates all distinctions for the sake of the installation of a godless Marxist utopian equity. The extent to which this social justice ideology has taken over our educational institutions and even some of our Christian schools and churches indicates that contemporary racism is not merely a question of moral choices but a conflict of essential ideological truth. Behind this, there is something truly sad taking place. The real solution to racism, namely a faithful husband and father staying at home, playing the role of a real patriarch, caring for his children (especially his sons for their emergence into manhood), can never be allowed according to the ideology of anti-racism, since patriarchy is defined as the ultimate expression of social evil.
Jesus defines divine patriarchy as the essence of love when he says to his opponents, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God…I came not of my own accord, but he sent me” (Jn 8:42). This is the essence of the gospel Jesus brings to the human situation. “God (our Father) is love” (1 Jn 4:8). Ultimately, our human home will not be empty. It will be transformed and ruled by our eternal patriarch —God the Father, who, in his love for his children, provided salvation through his Son. Our tender Father will wipe away every tear (Rev 21:4). Men and women of every race who have confessed their sins and acknowledged Jesus as their Savior will find indescribable joy as they bow in reverence to their God and Father and take their place in the final expression of family.
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1] https://voicemalemagazine.org/white-male-supremacy-and-the-patriarchy-racism-pandemic/
[2] Art.cit.
[3] https://quillette.com/2022/03/21/awol-black-fathers/
[4] Art.cit.
[5] https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/whitlock-the-nfls-black-leadership-and-ownership-crisis-is-a-symptom-of-the-black-family-crisisSee also the work of Bob Woodson, founder and president of The Woodson Center and the author of “Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.” https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/feb/14/hope-and-empowerment-for-troubled-communities-a-vi/
[6] Art.cit.
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy
[8] https://www.thoughtco.com/patriarchal-society-feminism-definition-3528978
Related Posts:

But Johnson fails to insist that Jesus the Redeemer is also the Creator who created male and female. There is a crucial Reformed worldview hole in Johnson’s gospel preaching and cultural analysis. His desire to evangelize the gay community lacks a full-orbed view of existence. His gospel invitation to gays to adopt celibacy, without any hope of change, is, as he says, “a doorway into a godly hopelessness because there is no locus of hope in this life” (239). Cure is removed but care is not attractive.

In his book Still Time to Care (2021), Greg Johnson, an intelligent Christian thinker, seeks to make a valid case for allowing someone who, like himself, is openly same-sex attracted, gay, and celibate to be an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Johnson adopts a profoundly orthodox and well exegetically supported view of biblical sexuality. He affirms the fundamental importance of “gender complementarity” (154), that is, of one-flesh, male/female sexuality, as clearly expressed in Genesis 2:24: “therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” He shows (155) that this must be the case by arguing that the Hebrew term ezer kenegdo, translated as “a helper fit for him” (Gen 2:20), reflects the sexual complementarity necessary for the realization of the divine call to the original male and female couple to “be fruitful and increase in number” (Gen 1:28). Not a male but only a female “helper” could make this happen. Throughout the book, and throughout his ministry, Johnson maintains this biblical teaching as the basis for his commitment to celibacy.
He states clearly:
“Personally, what I find so convicting is this: As we look at the unfolding narrative of Scripture, we see that whenever sexual desire is cultivated outside of that original design—whether lust, sex with animals, sex outside of marriage, prostitution, incest, adultery, deserting a spouse, or, yes, sex with a person of the same sex—it is presented as something distorted. Something God doesn’t want us to do. (156).”
Johnson is to be respected for his life-long commitment to this teaching, shown by his adoption of personal celibacy. At great personal suffering, he refuses to marry and will not endorse full engagement in same-sex relationships for Christians. He takes the position of “Side B” thinking, rejecting “Side A,” which endorses full engagement in sexual expression for Christians. “[T]hose unable to marry a person of the opposite sex are called to celibacy,” affirms Johnson (217). This choice causes those who adopt it to trust in “God’s power” (100) and gives believers who self-identify as gay “a very clearly defined redemptive historical trajectory concerning sexuality in the Bible.” He sees “celibacy as an intrusion ethic, an in-breaking of the ethics of the coming age into our present era” (158). Celibate Christian gays are an example to other believers, since in heaven none of us will be married.
Taking Care of Johnson
One main emphasis in Johnson’s book is his adamant rejection of “ex-gay” or “conversion therapy,” which believes that gays, especially believers, can and should be liberated from (or be on the way to liberation from) the gay life-style, even including its desires. His conviction that same-sex attraction (SSA) cannot be changed determines his vision of personal sanctification, the crucial place of celibacy, the nature of the church, and of the rightful place of gay pastors. To emphasize this conviction, Johnson begins with accounts of horrendous attempts in history to eliminate homosexuality, including the Nazi experimentations in Dachau and Buchenwald and later electric shock methods later used by secular therapists in the US during the 70s.
Much Christian counseling seemed ineffective. In July, 1999 “Exodus International [the largest ex-gay ministry] publicly declared that some believers cannot change their sexual orientation” (100). Exodus director, Alan Chambers, would later say that “change in orientation was not possible or happening (118).  …The majority of people whom I have met, …99.9 percent of them, have not experienced a change in their orientation” (122). Citing Chambers as an authority, however, relies on the opinion of a man who has now accepted the (“Side A”) belief that Christians can live a fully active homosexual lifestyle and be pleasing to the Lord (129).
Having examined a number of leading “ex-gay” ministries, Johnson makes a “postmortem” judgment, concluding that hope for sexual change is now “dead” (134), because “the sexualized pull toward people of the same sex is not likely to go away.” For Johnson, the ex-gay movement “fostered an overrealized, triumphalistic eschatology which lines up neither with Scripture nor Experience” (135). Thus, he says, “we bid farewell to the ex-gay movement” (148).
In this review, I will briefly discuss the teaching of Scripture and the experience of same-sex attracted Christians, but I also wish to address the deep principles of holiness in creation as well as the cultural quagmire in which we live, as these relate to the issue at hand.
Scripture
Johnson comments on one of the passages of Scripture that speaks directly to the subject of homosexuality, namely 1 Corinthians 6:9–11, in which the Apostle Paul observes:
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
Johnson posits that Paul was not talking about a radical emotional change and a deep cleansing of sexual desire: “God was not promising orientation change, that is, the constant desire for homosexual sex. …He was promising the grace to forsake an unrepentant pattern of sex with other members of the same sex” (144). But we must wonder: Can this principle be applied to the other categories of sinful unbelief mentioned by Paul?  Can a believer live his whole life constantly lusting over women though never committing adultery and still affirm his unity and fellowship with a holy Savior? Can a believer constantly think idolatrous thoughts, as Paul says, “devot[ing] themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God, which is by faith”? (1Tim 1:4). Can a thief claim to be a believer though thinking without respite about how to steal from his neighbors? There is surely in this text a notion of fundamental liberation from a constant life of sin, thanks to the Christian’s washing, purifying and sanctifying in Christ’s blood, as the classic form of Reformed sanctification affirms. J. C. Ryle describes sanctification as “that inward spiritual work by which the Lord Jesus Christ puts a new principle in [the believer’s] heart.”[1]
Paul seems to say that past pagan desire for sin is no longer the pattern for the believer. Johnson classifies a Christian exhortation to gays to abandon their desires as “spiritual abuse” (208).[2] For Paul, homosexuality is always “contrary to sound doctrine” (1 Tim 1:10) and is a denial of the being of God (Rom 1:25–27).
Experience
Johnson’s personal experience of unrelenting homosexual desire leads him to a total rejection of the “ex-gay script,” but this judgment does not meet with the approval of all in the field of gay therapy. For example, he dismisses the work of Joseph Nicolosi, a well-known and respected counselor in reparative therapy. Johnson critiques Nicolosi’s life-long practice on the basis of one failure (64) and on the fact that he was not accepted as an authority by the evangelical group Exodus (65) due to the fact that Nicolosi was a Roman Catholic.
Another who would disagree is Andrew J. Sodergren, PsyD, adjunct professor at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C., and a licensed psychologist at Ruah Woods Psychological Services in Cincinnati, Ohio. Sodergren approves of Nicolosi’s work:
[Nicolosi] has done a laudable job of developing the academic and clinical foundations of reparative therapy. They deserve study by any psychologist or other academic or professional motivated to understand how family experiences may contribute to the development of homosexuality, and how psychotherapy may help to resolve it for those who wish to be healed.[3]
Nicolosi’s colleague, therapist Dr. David Pickup, reports daily changes in clients who come to his office as they discover their true selves.[4] Both Pickup and Nicolosi affirm that every person[5] is born heterosexual, a biological reality, essential for any serious response to present-day transgenderism.
Sodergren also describes the work of two evangelical scholars, Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse,[6] who were the first to attempt a longitudinal study of adults who desired to change their sexual orientation by religious means.[7] They found that over the course of study, on average, their sample experienced statistically significant change on various measures of sexual orientation away from homosexuality and toward heterosexuality.[8] Even Johnson grants their varied success (125).
Johnson cites research showing that gays are more likely to have suicidal desires (181) because straight culture is dangerous for them. However, Paul Sullins, professor of sociology from the Catholic University of America, opposes legislation that seeks to criminalize “conversion therapy.” He demonstrates that undergoing SOCE (sexual orientation change efforts) reduces suicide risk. His study found that:
Experiencing SOCE therapy does not encourage higher suicidality [as the opponents of conversion therapy maintain], rather, experiencing higher suicidality appears to encourage recourse to SOCE, which in turn strongly reduces suicidality, particularly initial suicide attempts. Restrictions on SOCE deprive sexual minorities of an important resource for reducing suicidality, putting them at substantially increased suicide risk.[9]
Regarding the efficacy of therapy, Prof. Sullins’s research on the situation in the UK reveals that from 45% to 69% of SOCE (sexual orientation change efforts) participants achieved at least partial remission of unwanted same-sex sexuality after counseling; full remission was achieved by 14% for sexual attraction and identification, and 26% for sexual behavior.[10] Another recent study in the UK shows that “British population data tell us that more people have left same-sex partnerings to take up heterosexual partnerships than have remained with that behavior.”[11] A recent Christian video series, “Such Were Some of You,” Pure Passion Media,[12] movingly tells the stories of sixteen SSA people who were deeply changed spiritually and sexually when they met Christ. The California Family Council has recorded the testimonies of many who have voluntarily left the LGBTQ world.[13]  Perhaps the ex-gay script is not as moribund as Johnson maintains. We should surely keep the subject open for debate. Can the entire PCA denomination depend on Johnson’s personal judgment that the “ex-gay script” is dead in order to establish a whole new view of ordained ministry?
Taking Care of our Youth
Sara Collins, wife of Nate Collins, founder of Revoice, describes Johnson’s approach as “a philosophy of ministry that doesn’t try to cure people’s orientation, but rather care for them as fellow image bearers of God and heirs of grace in Christ.”[14] Such care, argues Johnson, protects young people from leaving the church because of the way the church treats gays. But care for our young people must include warnings against homosexuality as a lifestyle, as well as thorough instruction in the biblical worldview and the pagan worldview that homosexuality implies. The Apostle James would not agree that warning is spiritual abuse. On the contrary, James encourages such warning: “Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins” (James 5:20). The same passage also offers hope: “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (James 5:16).
Johnson speaks of the image of God on many occasions. On a podcast he states that as homosexuals “we image God as trinity in our love of intimacy.”[15] But in addition to love, the trinity expresses the crucial difference in the divine persons, whereas homosexuality celebrates sameness. C. S. Lewis, whom Johnson often cites, understood that there are only two religious options: Hinduism or Christianity.[16] He saw Hinduism (which denies the separation between God and Nature) and Christianity (which maintains the difference between Creator and creation) as the two major opposing religious traditions. Steven D. Smith, professor of Law at the University of San Diego, raises this in a fresh way. His book Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac[17] shows how the pagan thinking of first-century Rome, where homosexuality was rampant, has returned to the West. He lays out the two worldview systems that faced off at the beginning of Western history, namely pagan religion and early Christianity:
[T]he pagan gods were actors (albeit powerful and immortal actors) of and within this world. The God of Judaism and Christianity, by contrast, is “the creator of the world…who dwells beyond time and space.” … Pagan religion locates the sacred within this world…[in a] religiosity relative to an immanent sacred. Judaism and Christianity, by contrast, reflect a transcendent religiosity; they place the sacred, ultimately, outside the world.[18]
God is separate from creation. He is hetero (other and different), not homo like the pagan gods (one with or the same as creation). The Apostle Paul distinguishes between pagan Oneism and biblical Twoism and immediately discusses sexuality as a theological outworking of the Oneist choice:
…they exchanged the truth about God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. (Rom 1:27 ESV)
Throughout time and space there has been a major struggle between heterosexuality (expressing, via the image of God, the objective reality of difference) and homosexuality (expressing the normativity of sameness, or pantheism).[19] Johnson describes “a decades-long culture war against ‘the gays’” (215) and argues that it is dangerous not to be straight in modern Western culture (181). But he fails to see the essential worldview opposition between Oneism and Twoism, between biblical theism and pagan nature worship, of which homosexuality has always been a symbol [see my long article mentioned in footnote 18].
What would Johnson’s message be to students at Gordon College who recently organized a rally “in solidarity with women and the LGBTQA+ community”? The rally was in protest of a chapel talk given by Pastor Marvin Daniels, a black Christian leader, who defended the biblical notion of sexual identity as restricted to male and female and described “a culture in chaos” that is “trying to redefine sexuality for us.” The opposing students declared: “We want to show Gordon that they cannot continue inviting someone who will spread more hate than love.” [40]
Our recent generations might not realize that they are living with the effects of the Oneist Eastern spirituality and sexual liberation that invaded the West in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1977, June Singer, a Jungian and Gnostic scholar, made a programmatic statement that our most recent generations are now putting into practice: “What lies in store as we move towards the longed-for conjunction of the opposites [Oneism]? … [C]an the human psyche realize its own creative potential through building its own cosmology and supplying it with its own gods?” [emphasis mine].[20] To those involved in New Age spirituality, she was calling for a coherent, all-encompassing, attractive and religiously pagan account or cosmology of the nature of existence. This is stated programmatically in her book Androgyny: Towards a New Sexuality (1977). This “new” paradigm fits perfectly with the witness of the paganisms of the past.[21] The New Age Movement in its quest to tap into some kind of universal divinity seeks to usher in a golden age of Utopia which denies the value of distinct individuals created in the image of their Creator.
Singer saw and affirmed that the spiritual Age of Aquarius was also the Age of Androgyny, that the “new humanism” of this new age required a new view of sexuality, which she found in androgyny. She also understood its implications, and declared programmatically: “We have at hand…all the ingredients we will need to perform our own new alchemical opus…[the Great Work] to fuse the opposites within us. This is what individuation [the Jungian state of human maturity] is all about.”[22] Singer further states: “The archetype of androgyny (a synonym for homosexuality) appears in us as an innate sense of…and witness to…the primordial cosmic unity—functioning to erase distinction…this was nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition…and a patriarchal God-image.”[23]  
The importance of this quote and of her book is that Singer, as a true Jungian, is conscious of promoting the deeply important sexual element in the coming “new humanism” that Jung envisaged: “The androgyne [the human being aware of being both male and female] participates consciously in the evolutionary process, redesigning the individual…society and…the planet.”[24] She recognizes that a fundamental element in this “new sexuality” in its affirmation of Monism or Oneism is a radical rejection of the biblical God and the creational cosmology of the Western Christian past.[25]
Alan Chambers, ex-head of Exodus, got the message and saw the implication of androgyny/homosexuality for contemporary evangelicalism: “Good and evil is a distraction, a detour.”[26] This is theologically devastating and makes one wonder if many “Side B” Christians will eventually end up in “Side A,” where Chambers is. Such an attack on Western civilization through both spirituality and sexuality is succeeding beyond anything one could imagine. The erosion of ethical standards is evident everywhere. An angry response (among many) to a book suggesting the value of sexual reparative therapy shows where we are now.
It’s far too late for you. The gay is everywhere, creeping in, taking over your friends, your children, maybe even you. You can feel it deep down can’t you? The gayness taking over. Soon the world will be fully overtaken. As I type, I can feel it taking hold of me too. I have a sudden urge to listen to Lady Gaga and kiss girls. But there is nothing you can do to stop it. It’s coming for you.[27]
Does Johnson not realize how deeply the LGBTQ ideology has permeated our entire culture? Our young people see that ideology promoted even in official American foreign policy. Our State Department recently closed applications from LGBTQIA+ advocacy groups seeking grants totaling $2.5 million from the new Global LGBTQI+ Inclusive Democracy and Empowerment Fund.[28] Our young people see aberrant sexual identities glorified in high places. Sam Brinton (preferred pronouns “they/them”) wrote to his friends and followers on LinkedIn recently: “I have accepted the offer to serve as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy.”[29] A drag queen practitioner who shows up to work in the White House in female make-up and stiletto heels, Brinton also publicly boasts about his involvement in “puppy play,” grown men putting on dog masks and behaving like submitted animals for sexual stimulus. Brinton’s appointment and others like it make clear where the present administration wishes to take us.
Clearly the LGBTQ “community” and its political allies aren’t just after tolerance and peaceful coexistence for gays; they are determined to force Americans to treat behavior such as that in which Brinton indulges and celebrates as completely normal. What will it mean for our culture to give someone so depraved the governmental authority to decide what is right and wrong for everyone? The transformation of culture is far from over. Consider the successful media blitz that mainstreams the sexualization of children and promotes the idea that pedophilia is a sexual orientation, not a behavior. USA Today cited “experts” who called pedophilia a “misunderstood” condition and argued that not all pedophiles harm children and that we should call them “MAPS,” since they are only “minor-attracted persons.” Does Johnson take such cultural disaster too lightly? He makes no mention of the culture’s influence on the young people sitting in our churches.
Johnson’s approach to SSA and homosexuality seems naïve and inconsistent. He states: “…the only study that ever looked at the adult sexual attractions of child molesters found that none of them was homosexual” (141). He goes on: “There is no statistical link between pedophilia and homosexuality” (169). At the same time, he admits that “the most common form of same-sex sexual practice in antiquity was pederasty. …[It was] socially accepted for a Greek man to have a teenage male lover.” “The partner half your age is a fantasy most gay men have entertained on more than one occasion” (162). “Sex with a younger man was the primary homosexual expression in the Hellenistic world” (176). His title to this section is provocative: “Teenage Greek Boys and the Men they Melted” (169).
Johnson makes the distinction between pederasty (adolescents) and pedophilia (children), though one has to wonder if the distinction is significant in many cases, since some adolescents are basically children. However, a report from the French Catholic Church admits to 216,000 cases of pedophilia, many of them involving homosexual acts[30] committed by priests from 1950 through 2020.[31] It would seem that homosexuality is just as open to pedophilia as are other forms of sexuality.
How can Johnson preach a prophetic message against sodomy (as the Bible does with such insistence)[32] to both his Christian young people and to the world at large? To be sure, we must insist that God loves gays and straights, because they are humans in God’s image. All of us are sinners and it should not surprise us that one of God’s most powerful and beautiful institutions would be used by the evil one to tempt human beings. Johnson’s solidarity with the gay community, however, leads him to warn against the “ethical system” of Christianity that “systematically favors straight people and marginalizes and oppresses nonstraight people” (180). Are we not also to warn our Christian brothers and sisters about the effects of the Oneist philosophy in all its Creator-denying forms? The doctrine of creation and the notion of the binary are fundamental to biblical orthodoxy. This is the meaning of holiness—in creation, God has separated all things, setting them apart in their rightful, God-honoring places. Calling young people to holiness, which Johnson often does, lacks content if we fail to understand that God is holy because he is distinct from us, and that heterosexuality, as the image of God in us (Genesis 1:27–28), expresses a holy distinction between the sexes. He calls for the church to “champion their human dignity as image bearers” (33), but the sexual image for gays, straights, and transgenders is, according to Scripture, biological heterosexuality. Johnson constantly says he loves Jesus, but does that love sometimes border on sheer emotion rather than on deep Reformed theology? His description of his faith is strong:
My heavenly Father isn’t an angry ogre shaking a stick at me. He’s my Dad. He delights over me with song (23).
…And even now, I have Jesus. He is my life’s positive vison. He rescued me. He forgave all my sin. He clothed me in his righteousness. He took me on as his little brother. He has given me family among his people, the church. Jesus is everything (241).
But Johnson fails to insist that Jesus the Redeemer is also the Creator who created male and female. There is a crucial Reformed worldview hole in Johnson’s gospel preaching and cultural analysis. His desire to evangelize the gay community lacks a full-orbed view of existence. His gospel invitation to gays to adopt celibacy, without any hope of change, is, as he says, “a doorway into a godly hopelessness because there is no locus of hope in this life” (239). Cure is removed but care is not attractive. To avoid an exodus of the young, he calls for a church where gays can be open about their temptations but non-practicing (216). But these same young people face huge, anti-Christian worldview attacks on their faith that are coming through the sexual revolution.
Johnson believes our young people are leaving the church because they do not see any gays in the congregation. He naively sees the positive empathy for gays in the thinking of our rising generations as the understandable rejection of the cultural past of “fear, defensiveness and politicized” opposition to gays (152). Without abandoning those with same-sex attraction, should we not also warn against the cultural indoctrination that normalizes gay sexuality? For the sake of evangelizing gays, he honors “the secular LGBTQ community’s cultural liturgies reflecting the image of God and echo[ing] a very human longing for redemption, providing points of contact”(194). While such longing might be true in certain individual cases, he does not see the brainwashing of our youth by godless progressivism, the outrageous loss of sexual restraints, and the massive descent into immoral depravity. He does not ask what will happen to the culture when queer Oneist thinking dominates those in government positions of power, and when gay judges reject the biblical binary tradition of right and wrong and the notion of individual rights flowing from God the Creator of male and female distinctions. Johnson seems ready to accept forms of gay culture. He implies that gay marriage is a valid option for secular culture (9). But where will that take us? Not satisfied with tolerance, LGBTQ activists are now clandestinely grooming children to join their ranks without parental knowledge. Two teachers in a California school district are accused of coaching a student into coming out as transgender behind the backs of the student’s parents. [33]
Taking Care of Christian Orthodoxy
I fear that Johnson’s active, naive support for gay pastors and openly gay church members will eventually mean that the PCA will follow the recent history of our Reformed brothers in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). This historic church now faces a massive movement to normalize active homosexuality in church practice and doctrine. This could not happen to us, you say. The CRC denomination adopted the Statement of 1973, affirming that believers with same-sex attractions are to be fully accepted in the church, while declaring homosexuality to be “a condition of disordered sexuality.” But they discovered that LGBTQ members were speaking about “hurt-feelings over the 1973 position.”[34] Supported by certain Calvin College professors, the Synod of 2016 included messages in rainbow sidewalk chalk, stating:

“We are the church too” …
 “[W]e are dying to be who God made us” …
 “57 years in CRC, GAY, What will you do w/ me? And 1000s others?”[35]

Inclusive advocates gathered in the audience wearing rainbow colored clothing for the debate. Imagine a future PCA General Assembly with similar sartorial color effects. The up-coming CRC Synod of 2022 meets June 10–16 at Calvin University and will likely be “monumental,” as many believe, as orthodox delegates seek to hold all church leaders to the historic biblical view of sexuality. No one knows how things will turn out.[36]
Christianity is being redesigned. In the Catholic Church, Pope Francis announced a re-ordering of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), splitting the doctrinal and disciplinary elements into two separate parts so that the Congregation will become LGBT friendly. These changes are hailed as “the most significant organizational changes to the office in over 30 years.”[37]
In my opinion, those like Greg Johnson can be genuine church members if they clearly affirm Johnson’s biblical conviction: “Personally, what I find so convicting is this: As we look at the unfolding narrative of Scripture, we see that whenever sexual desire is cultivated outside of that original design…it is presented as something distorted. Something God doesn’t want us to do” (156).
But should such Christians be qualified to become ministers of the gospel? Not if they feel they should publicly and boldly declare their sexual weaknesses without hope of change. To claim ordination under these circumstances is to base church fellowship on an open admission of continuing and accepted sinful desire. Johnson seems to advocate public openness. Surely, we do share our sins in confidence with wise leaders, as we struggle to overcome them. It is interesting that Johnson cites John Stott[38] and C. S. Lewis as examples of long-term celibates.[39]
However, these men never spoke one word of any same-sex attraction or of a lack of heterosexual desire. Even if they did experience unchosen homosexual desire (which is not proven) or saw the homosexual condition as an unchosen orientation that would favor gay inclusion in the church, they never called for public recognition. Their example is healthy. They got on with their ministry without speaking of any eventual sexual difficulties. Which is the way most Christians function. Just as people feeling tempted by heterosexual indulgence or alcoholic excess ought to deal with the problem privately with their pastor, counselor, or close friend, so gay Christians who cannot control their feelings should seek counsel and keep their problems private. Johnson recommends privacy in certain areas. “Most non-straight spouses acknowledged their sexual orientation privately to a spouse or friend but kept the matter private” (238). Privacy is to respect the “straight” partner in such a marriage, and to be aware of the spiritual and theological weakness of young people in the pews faced with the present sexually “liberated” culture and tempted to follow its example.
Johnson wants care for himself and others in his situation but can he care for everyone—gay or straight— in a generation bombarded by Oneist thinking without a clear and courageous exposition of biblical orthodoxy in the areas where the culture is encroaching? He states: “It is not enough to have a gospel-centered pulpit” (223), arguing for the equally important role of communal life. But does Johnson minimize the power of the gospel-centered pulpit? Though Schaeffer had “compassion and empathy” for homosexuals, he stated clearly that he saw in homosexuality a breakdown of the biblical distinction between the sexes, a “denial of antithesis.’”[40] Schaeffer saw the worldview issues, never held back on affirming the dangers of homosexual ideology, and gave hope to a whole generation of believers based on Twoism. One can do this and not “hate gays.”
As long as Greg Johnson maintains his celibate vow, he surely has a place in the church. Unfortunately, his constant sexual temptations and the need to make them publicly known raises questions about the effectiveness of preaching that might avoid passionate worldview exposition. Such worldview analysis is lacking in his book. Is it also lacking in our Reformed pulpits? What would Johnson’s message be to those students at Gordon College?
The call for cultural apologetics is not an appeal to pastors to preach politics! It is a matter of understanding the implications of our theology so we all can understand and live out those implications through the power of the Word and the Holy Spirit. A solid understanding of worldview is an increasingly great need in our nation’s churches and pulpits, which are abandoning orthodoxy in favor of cultural myths. They are turning away from God the Creator and Redeemer to celebrate depraved forms of pagan living. May we all speak clearly and boldly to Christians and non-Christians alike, with grace, humility, clarity, and power—following the example of the Apostle Paul.
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1] J. C. Ryle, Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2018), 22.
[2] “We all face the temptation to put a fence around God’s law because we’re afraid someone might stray into sin. It’s well intended, but when people start feeling controlled, they start feeling abused.” Still Time to Care, 208.
[3] See Course Notes: “Restoring the Broken Image: Healing Homosexuality.” https://humanumreview.com/uploads/pdfs/Sodergren_for_SSU_6pp.pdf.
[4] https://www.davidpickuplmft.com/solutions.
[5] Between .02% and .05% of people are born “intersex,” with physical abnormalities that disturb the normal binary pattern.
[6] Andrew J. Sodergren, “Restoring the Broken Image: Healing Homosexuality,” Humanum Issues in Family, Culture & Science: Same Sex Unions (Fall, 2012).
[7] “A Longitudinal Study of Attempted Religiously Mediated Sexual Orientation Change,” appeared in issue 37 of the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy (404—27) in 2011. “23% demonstrated ‘Success: Conversion.’ These were individuals who established a fairly robust heterosexual identity and lifestyle. Another 30% achieved ‘Success: Chastity,’ meaning that they were no longer acting out nor distressed by homosexual impulses but had not fully achieved a heterosexual identity and lifestyle. Sixteen percent (16%) had experienced some progress and were ‘Continuing’ to pursue change but had not yet achieved either form of ‘success.’ The last (“Failure: Gay Identity”) comprised 20%.
[8] Art.cit.
[9] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3729353.
[10] Sullins and Rosik 2021, “Efficacy and Risk of SOCE“; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33968367/, See also Pela and Sutton 2021, “Sexual Attraction Fluidity and Well-being in Men.” https://www.journalofhumansexuality.com/journals).
[11] https://www.psephizo.com/sexuality-2/do-efforts-to-change-sexual-orientation-conversion-therapy-cause-harm.
[12] Originally filmed in 2014, then remade in 2018 and 2020.
[13] See https://changedmovement.com.
[14] Sara Collins, Along the Way: Still time to Care, a Review,” SaraCollinscounseling, (Sept 7, 2021).
[15] https://lauriekrieg.com/podcast/the-church-wasnt-always-so-terrible-at-the-lgbtq-conversation-with-greg-johnson/.
[16] C.S.Lewis, God in the Dock: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1241712.
[17] Steven D. Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018). Readers should note that this book independently confirms what the present author has been seeking to show during the last twenty years in publications such as The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age (P&R, 1992), and Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America (Main Entry Editions, 1998). See also Whose Rainbow? God’s Gift of Sexuality—A Divine Calling(Ezra Press, 2020). Other titles are available at www.truthXchange.com.
[18] Smith, Pagans and Christians, 111–12. Internal quotations are taken from Jan Asmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford University Press, 2010), 39; emphasis added by Smith.
[19]“Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal,” JETS 43/3 (September 2000) 443–69.
[20] June Singer, Androgyny: Towards a New theory of sexuality (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1977), 237.
[21] See the historical expressions of this cited in Jones, “Androgyny.”
[22] Singer, Androgyny, 207.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Singer, Androgyny, 333.
[25] The more overt pronouncements about homosexuality appeared in lectures by Jungian followers and contemporaries of Jung, applying his theories to issues of bi-sexuality and homosexuality, like that of Beatrice Hinkle on “Arbitrary Use of the Terms Masculine and Feminine,” and one by Constance Long, “Sex as a Basis of Character,” as plea for a positive affirmation of homosexual love. Jung’s followers, like June Singer and Toby Johnson develop Jung’s thinking to include the full justification of homosexuality.
[26] Read more at http://barbwire.com/2015/10/19/my-exodus-by-alan-chambers-a-book-review/.
[27] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1344301.
[28] https://www.state.gov/statements-of-interest-requests-for-proposals-and-notices-of-funding-opportunity/drl-fy2021-global-lgbtqi-inclusive-democracy-and-empowerment-glide-fund/.
[29] https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/02/10/bidens-new-energy-department-pick-is-his-most-outrageous-and-appalling-yet-n1558281.
[30] See also the amount of homosexual pedophilia–Dr. Gerard J.M. van den Aardweg, “Abuse by Priests, Homosexuality, Humanae vitae, and a Crisis of Masculinity in the Church,” Linacre Q, 2011 Aug; 78(3): 274–293.
[31] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211005-french-catholic-church-inquiry-finds-at-least-216-000-paedophilia-cases-between-1950-and-2020.
[32] Sodom appears forty-eight times in the Bible.
[33] https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/4036549/posts.
[34] https://juicyecumenism.com/2022/02/08/abide-project-christian-reformed-church-lgbtq-theology/. Johnson is deeply bothered by a statement in article 7 of the Nashville statement on Sexuality, which states: “We deny that adopting a homosexual…self-conception is consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption.” Johnson wants to hold on to his homosexual self-conception.
[35] Art.cit.
[36] This is the opinion of the author of the article, https://www.crcna.org/ministers/19792, the Rev. Aaron Vriesman, pastor of North Blendon Christian Reformed Church in Hudsonville, Michigan.
[37] Michael Haynes, “Pope Francis restructures major Vatican office tasked with defending the faith,” Life Site News, February 14, 2022.
[38] John Stott and Al Hsu, “John Stott on Singleness ‘Uncle John’ Explains Why He Stayed Single for 90 Years,” Christianity Today Online, Aug 17, 2011, www.christiniatytodya.com/ct/2011/augustweb-only/johnstottsingleness.html.
[39] Though Lewis married later in life.
[40] Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 57. Quoted by Johnson, 11.

Easter and Christmas do belong together. There is no hope of eternal life and the glorious hope of resurrection bodies that can pass through clothing and leave it undisturbed without the determination of the Creator of the universe not to abhor the virgin’s womb and willingly wear in humility the swaddling clothes of a baby in a feeding trough in a stable in the little town of Bethlehem and in that lowly body, bear our sins in our place.

There are two miracles associated with the life of Jesus, his birth and his resurrection. At Christmas we celebrate the miracle of his birth and at Easter the miracle of his resurrection, but they are related—in particular by clothes.
The Easter event was not the resuscitation of a corpse, as when Jesus raised Lazarus. This was certainly an amazing event but Lazarus subsequently died. Jesus raised him after the decaying process took over, restoring his flesh, yet they had to strip off his grave clothes. The text says: The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go” (Jn. 11:44). However, in the case of Jesus, something very different happened and it was shown in the case of the clothes around the body of Jesus. The Gospel of John, written by one of the eye-witnesses of the event, states: Then Simon Peter came, following him [John], and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself (Jn. 20:6-7). The verb translated “folded” here, in the two other times it is used, Matt 27:59 and Luke 23:53, speaks rather of being wrapped or rolled.
“Folded” gives the impression that the resurrected Jesus got up, folded his clothes the way any well-brought-up adult would do, and then left the tomb in an appropriately tidy state. Actually, what Peter and John saw was the linen scarf that had been wrapped around the head of Jesus, (as in the case of Lazarus) lying apart, still wrapped or maintaining the rolled shape of the head of Jesus who was no longer there.
Since this is a Christmas letter, Christmas will help us. The blown-up, lit-up decorations we see in the evenings on the lawns of many houses end up in the morning lying flat with no air in them. That is what the disciples saw. The body had passed right through the clothes without disturbing them. Jesus did not need to be unbound. He passed right through them and left them empty. The miracle of Easter is not only the empty tomb but the empty grave clothes, and the transformation of Jesus’s earthy body into a glorious spiritual body is like the bodies we will get one day!
The miracle at Christmas was not in the clothes as such but in the fact that there was actually a baby in those swaddling clothes. This baby had no earthly, physical father. Babies do not come from nowhere so we are faced with the miracle of the Virgin Birth. Either Mary was an adulteress and Jesus was the illegitimate result of her sin or what Scripture says is true: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God (Lk. 1:35). Just as Jesus was raised by the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4), he was also born by the Spirit of holiness in a miracle as comparable to that of his resurrection.
I gave myself a Christmas present this year. I re-read very carefully the impressive study on the virgin birth by J Gresham Machen, the father of modern Christian orthodoxy. At the beginning of the twentieth century as he fought liberalism in the mainline Church, and while he was engaged in the politics of maintaining the faith against the powerful bureaucracy of the Presbyterian church, and the powers of liberalism in Princeton Seminary, he was also a faithful and gifted scholar who defended true religion by serious scholarship. His study of 415 carefully argued pages, The Virgin Birth of Christ (Harper and Row, 1930), took on all the critical thinking in English, German and French, on this essential subject of the birth of Christ, showing that the supernatural explanation of the birth of Jesus is the only one that makes ultimate sense of the Gospel witness. I was impressed to note that the greatest liberal scholar of his day, the German Adolf Harnack actually twice cited Machen’s work. Machen shows that there was no early textual evidence that did not include the account of the virgin birth, and that the biblical doctrine of Christ’s sinless and atoning death cannot be maintained without the fact of the virgin birth. He states: “…the two elements of Christian truth belong logically together; the supernatural Person of our Lord belongs logically with his redemptive work: the virgin birth belongs logically with the cross” (p.391). In other words, there is no good news of redemption without the supernatural fact of the virgin birth.
Easter and Christmas do belong together. There is no hope of eternal life and the glorious hope of resurrection bodies that can pass through clothing and leave it undisturbed without the determination of the Creator of the universe not to abhor the virgin’s womb and willingly wear in humility the swaddling clothes of a baby in a feeding trough in a stable in the little town of Bethlehem and in that lowly body, bear our sins in our place.
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.
Click here to watch the Significance of the Incarnation

The problem gets worse. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a form of political Oneism, because it denies individual distinction. The concept of individual rights is a political form of Twoism, that is, it affirms that every individual, made in the image of God with rights from the Creator, is different and distinct and deserves the right of free speech. Since there is no longer common civic ground, various forms of Twoism must simply be annihilated. CRT will make it happen.

We rarely pay attention to one of the most shocking warnings Jesus ever gave: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea (Mark 9:14). This is the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, speaking to everyone, addressing everyone as whoever.
One of the great signs of degradation in our present culture is the attack progressivism has made and is making on our children. The Puritans in Massachusetts in 1647 “ordered that every township in this jurisdiction after the Lord hath increased them to fifty households shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read. . . .” via the teaching of the Bible.[1] Our Puritan forebears doubtless sought to put into practice the biblical exhortation: “These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 6:6–7).
Three hundred years later, John Dewey (1859–1952), the leading force in public education in the early twentieth century, rejected his Puritan Christian up-bringing, converted to atheism and proposed for education a philosophy of human-centered progressivism and socialism.[2] This man, who made American secular education what it is today, signed on to the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, which, in its very first point, states: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”[3] A century later, this affirmation—“self-existing and not created”— lies at the very heart of what is now taught to our children in the public schools. It defines what is socially and morally acceptable, namely the denial and rejection of God the Creator, which leads, in turn, to unbridled adultery, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, trans-sexualism and the loss of individual identity, human worth, and civil rights.
Through public education, Christians are deeply influenced by secular culture. To be sure, home-schooling and Christian day schools play a role in protecting our believing children, but not all Christian parents can afford such schooling. Ninety percent of Americans who consider themselves Christians send their children to public schools.[4] The results are inevitable. Sixty percent of twenty-somethings who were churched as teens are now disengaged from the church,[5] doubtless the result of the secularism taught in public schools. In a certain sense, with the invasive power of the internet and social media, there is no sure way to keep young children from hearing and being influenced by the ideology of contemporary progressivism. As Christian parents and grandparents, we must at least try to protect and educate our progeny by facing and discussing these issues head on with our children and grandchildren.
Our children are caused to sin in three areas today: in theology, sexuality, and sociology.
Theology 
Our schools deny God as Creator not just by outright affirmations of secularism, but also by the “scientific” worship of matter as self-creating, eternal and evolving. Dewey, an evolutionist, is celebrated in today’s public-school science classrooms. In the case Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), the U.S. courts barred intelligent design from the nation’s classrooms, declaring it to be unconstitutional. If God is just an ancient myth and science is an infallible source for understanding the universe, then little wonder our children, as they mature, find the Christian faith unbelievable. Those who lead them deliberately down that path are certainly “without excuse” (Rom 1:20). But we and our children must also resist unbelief and take seriously, both at home and at church, the responsibility to instruct our children carefully and thoroughly in God’s Word and to set an example of purity, love, faith, and Holy-Spirit power as we live with and pray for them until they move into full adulthood. Part of our responsibility is to help them analyze and answer the propositions they receive from outside sources.
Our Christian children (perhaps especially those in public schools) need to be taught some of the latest discoveries in science. Though secular sources are never ultimate, it can be helpful for our children to realize that certain leaders of scientific naturalism are now convinced by the powerful logic of theism and intelligent design. “The heavens declare the glory of God, day after day they pour forth speech” (Ps 19). The work of Stephen C. Meyer needs to be made known more widely. I recommend his book Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe (Harper Row, 2021) and his lecture on You Tube, “God and the Origin of the Universe.”
Unlike the Creator, matter is not eternal because the natural universe has a beginning. Erwin Hubble’s discovery of an expanding universe via the red shift from a single beginning, shows this. Hubble’s findings convinced even Albert Einstein. Darwin did not explain how life originated but tried to imagine how new forms of life evolved from previous forms of life. But if the universe and matter have a beginning, then the real mystery of life—the origin of the universe—is not solved by evolution.
What has caused the undermining of naturalism in our time? The discovery in the 50s of the information-bearing properties of the genetic code expressed in DNA, is a mystery the materialist understanding of life cannot explain. Stephen Meyer states: “Just as the Rosetta Stone points to the activity of an ancient scribe, and the software in a computer program points to a programmer, so the digital code within the DNA molecule suggests the activity of a designing mind in the origin of life.”[6] The origin is an intelligent personal mind.
One non-Christian Yale micro-biologist, Professor David Gelerntner, faced with the sophistication and complexity of DNA, wrestled with Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt, which holds that “Our uniform experience of cause and effect shows that intelligent design is the only known cause of the origin of large amounts of functionally specified digital information.”[7] Though Gelerntner does not accept Meyer’s conclusions that the only “feasible [explanation] is intelligent design,” he does recognize that specific “digital information,” such as DNA codes that are intended for one purpose only might indeed lead one to consider not only intelligent design but even an “intelligent designer.” After reading Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt (2013), this leading scientist states: “Stephen Meyer’s thoughtful and meticulous Darwin’s Doubt convinced me that Darwin has failed.”[8] The ongoing discussion among current scientists is encouraging. Over a thousand PhD scientists declare themselves publicly as “evolution skeptics.”[9] This may lead some to seek the real intelligent designer, our infinite yet personal God, who created the universe and humans, male and female, in his image.
Our children need to know that Psalm 33:6,9 was right all the time: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and all the hosts of them by the breath of his power…for he spoke, and it came to be, he commanded and it stood firm.” What some have recently learned in reflection on science begins to fit the biblical doctrine of creation. We need to encourage our junior high and high school students to become familiar enough with such debates that they can speak up confidently in their classrooms.
Sexuality
“‘Drag Queen Story Hours’ Expose Pre-Schoolers to What Some Parents Call ‘Gender Insanity.’” This article’s title suggests that the insanity probably lies more with parents who think the experience of adult drag is broadening to their children’s little minds and so happily bring them along to the local public library. They believe the event “captures the imagination and play of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive and diverse role models.”[10] The library “system’s youth and family services manager” justifies the event in a similar way: “We wanted to make sure we cover a wide variety of interests and speak to all members of our community.”
The National Sexuality Education Standards, according to the Centers of Disease Control, propose to mid-grade school children, in vivid and often pornographic forms, that all sex acts are valid except vaginal intercourse (which produces pregnancy). For the sake of decorum I will simply cite an article that readers can peruse as factual proof.[11]
Here are some of the sexually explicit books (for toddlers to teens) that appear on school reading lists on the subject of homosexuality and transgenderism:

Gender Queer, an illustrated memoir, contains explicit illustrations of oral sex and masturbation.
The novel Lawn Boycontains graphic descriptions of sex between men and children.
George contains explicit illustrations of men engaging in homosexual acts.
A further category is transgender booksfor children of all ages, including Neither, describing to infants a land of “this and that,” of “neither,” and of “both.”
Another book’s title declares that It Feels Good to Be Yourself, no matter what your gender identity is.

Written about the educational situation in the UK, the following quote is also what many US schools promote:
Much of culture nowadays assumes sex is just for play. Porn is sold as something that is light-hearted and fun; teenagers are encouraged to “experiment” as long as it’s “with consent”; schools are now teaching explicit sex education, including programmes such as “All About Me,” which discusses self-stimulation from age 6. Some 99% of 12–15 year-olds are online in the UK. A recent survey found that 94% of children had been exposed to porn by the age of 14. And yet 75% of parents believe their children are not viewing pornography online.[12]
Such deliberate attempts to cause “little ones to sin” by proposing at tender ages immoral sexual thoughts and actions will doubtless produce generations of hardened adults for whom sexual purity is meaningless. Our children need to know, understand, and believe the serious theological analysis of God as the unique image by which we understand our sexuality. The difference between the sexes is reflective of the essence of the gospel, of God as Trinity, and of Christ’s love for the Church. Only by the gospel can we hope to save our rising generations from utter moral degradation. We must not allow our children to be exposed to such poisonous material.
Sociology and Critical Race Theory 
Something is happening in the classroom that has never happened before. Another tenet of the Humanist Manifesto to which Dewey signed his name was a socialized and cooperative economic order. Dewey was a great admirer of Soviet communism and atheism. He was happy to endorse radical socialism. Bringing about this social revolution in our day is the teaching of Critical Race Theory, by which people are being indoctrinated across the land—in government, business, the military and higher education, but also in grade schools and kindergartens. One Tennessee mom recently warned Williamson County parents that her seven-year-old daughter came home from school saying, “I’m ashamed that I’m White.” Her daughter asked, “Is there something wrong with me? Why am I hated so much?” The mother is considering putting her seven-year-old in therapy.[13] The child is being encouraged by her teachers to be ashamed of the color of her skin.[14] One private school parent, born in a Communist nation, states: “I came to this country escaping the very same fear of retaliation that now my own child feels.”[15] This is a sin, the sin of the use and mistreatment for political ends of vulnerable children. When a government sets its sights on corrupting children’s souls, it no longer has any legitimacy. Children can be taken from their parents and their gender forcefully reassigned.[16] Radical theories of racism and politically motivated propaganda have no place in the classroom. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona recently declared that parents should not be the “primary stakeholder” in their children’s education.[17] This repeats BLM’s Marxist website which declared: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.”[18] Vladimir Lenin, a precursor of progressivism, is reputed to have said: “Give me four years to teach children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”[19] According to Don Feder, “For Marxists, killing the family is the key to everything. The war on the family isn’t peripheral; it’s central to the revolution.”[20] But Scripture teaches that children are born into families, not into governments. This notion of the powerful state is converting our schools into centers of ideological and political indoctrination contrary to the norms of the Constitution and the Judeo-Christian way of life.
The problem gets worse. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a form of political Oneism, because it denies individual distinction. The concept of individual rights is a political form of Twoism, that is, it affirms that every individual, made in the image of God with rights from the Creator, is different and distinct and deserves the right of free speech. Since there is no longer common civic ground, various forms of Twoism must simply be annihilated. CRT will make it happen.
In a more overtly religious frame, the California Department of Education recently voted on a new statewide “ethnic studies” curriculum (inspired by CRT) that advocates for the “decolonization” [actually the dechristianization] of American society via the elevation and worship of the old Aztec gods of South America.Since the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist [racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous], capitalist [classist], patriarchal [sexist and misogynistic], heteropatriarchal [homophobic], and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe,” and since White Christians committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes, killing the Aztec and Mayan gods and replacing them with Christianity, now the God of Christianity must go—all in the service of a left-wing political ideology to be imposed upon California’s entire primary and secondary education system, which consists of 10,000 public schools serving a total of 6 million children.[21] The goal is for children to attain “critical consciousness” and, consequently, to develop the capacity to overthrow their oppressors. The ultimate goal is to “decolonize” American society, cancel white Christian culture, and bring about the “regeneration of indigenous spirituality.”[22] The curriculum suggests the chanting of prayers that invoke the deity Tezkatlipoka, an Aztec god that was honored with human sacrifices, “to be used as energizers to bring the class together, build unity around ethnic studies principles and values, and to reinvigorate the class.”[23]
The assault on children is also an assault on parents. A new memorandum issued by Attorney General Merrick Garland to the FBI and federal prosecutors across the country threatens concerned parents who have been showing up at school-board meetings to protest the teaching of CRT and pornographic sex. The memo condemns “threats of violence” but adds “other forms of intimidation and harassment,”[24] making heated opposition on the part of parents into a possibly punishable offence. This is pure political intimidation.[25] The irony is that their indoctrinated children are taught to believe that their parents are to blame for the state of social injustice.
We need to pray that the millions of brain-washed children, as they reach adulthood, will not do to their children and to their fellow citizens what the prophet Isaiah says of the ancient pagans: Their bows will slaughter the young men; they will have no mercy on the fruit of the womb; their eyes will not pity children(Isaiah13:18). In the light of what the pagan culture is doing to children, Jesus’ love for them must give to believers in these difficult days a firm resolve, whatever the cost, whatever the sacrifice, to protect their children from false ideology, to bring them up in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord,” and to faithfully proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in an apostate culture (Ephesians 6:4).
We leave to God’s wisdom the use of millstones.
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1] https://parkviewchristianschool.org/2018/06/05/sending-christian-children-to-public-schools-what-the-results-show.
[2] https://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/john.html.
[3] https://parkviewchristianschool.org/2018/06/05/sending-christian-children-to-public-schools-what-the-results-show.
[4] Art.cit.
[5] Art.cit.
[6] Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis, 6.
[7] Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt (pdf version, 343/568).
[8] https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/giving-up-darwin.
[9] https://www.discovery.org/a/number-one-of-our-stories-of-2019.
[10] https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2018/august/drag-queen-story-hours-expose-pre-schoolers-to-what-some-parents-call-gender-insanity.
[11] Nick Bell, “New Sex Ed ‘Common Core’ Would Force Explicit Images, Gender Mayhem, and Abortion on Kids,” The Federalist  (Oct 12, 2021).
[12] ”How to sex-proof your children,” https://christianconcern.com/resource/how-to-sex-proof-your-children.
[13] Christ Butler, “Williamson County Parents Warn Critical Race Theory Has Already Entered their Public School System.” https://tennesseestar.com/ April 22. 2021.
[14] https://www.blackburn.senate.gov/2021/7/why-is-critical-race-theory-dangerous-for-our-kids.
[15] Bari Weiss, “Woke Kids: The Miseducation of America’s Elite,” March 9, 20121 City Journal.
[16] Rich Sweir, “Shocking Video: Educators Push Racism and Extremist ‘White Privilege’ Propaganda on Children,” BARBWIRE (5 June, 2014): See http://barbwire.com/2014/06/05/shocking-video-educators-push-racism-extremist-white-privilege-propaganda-children/#Uqd0DHgOOdfFtKGq.99.
[17] https://www.wnd.com/2021/10/bidens-education-secretary-parents-not-primary-stakeholder-kids-education/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=wnd-breaking&utm_campaign=breaking&utm_content=breaking&ats_es=%5B-MD5-%5D.
[18] Though BLM took down its website in order to conceal its Marxist beliefs, others preserved it. See https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/left-locked-life-and-death-struggle-family-don-feder/.
[19] https://www.quora.com/How-relevant-do-you-think-these-words-are-Give-me-four-years-to-teach-the-children-and-the-seed-I-have-sown-will-never-be-uprooted-by-Vladimir-Lenin.
[20] https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/left-locked-life-and-death-struggle-family-don-feder/.
[21] https://www.city-journal.org/calif-ethnic-studies-curriculum-accuses-christianity-of-theocide.
[22] https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-students-pray-aztec-gods-school-lawsuit.
[23] Art.cit.
[24] https://www.justice.gov/ag/page/file/1438986/download.
[25] Gerard Baker, Merrick Garland Has a List, and You’re Probably on It (WSJ, Oct 11, 2021). See also Michael Cutler. “Targeting American Parents-Biden administration finds new ‘domestic terrorists,’” Frontpagemagazine (Oct 12, 2021).

“It’s not a culture war, not anymore. There is no common civic ground on which liberals and conservatives meet and hash things out…The debates are over now. The Woke brigades won’t battle your ideas. The marketplace of ideas offends them—you offend them. Now, they have the power of termination…[T]he Revolution is here and you’re in it…They follow the motto of that brilliant manager of men, Joseph Stalin, who reasoned quite soundly: ‘No man, no problem.’”

Roman Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò describes the globalist “Great Reset,” devised by Davos billionaires and powerful politicians, as the work of Satan and “Luciferian Globalists.”[1] Protestant American believers warn that “America is writhing in the grip of a full-scale Marxist political and cultural revolution.”[2] Some conclude that the two movements are deeply related. As responsible citizens, Christians must certainly consider what role the church should play in seeking to hold back the progress of godless political power in their own nation.
It may seem unduly sensationalist to describe progressive current politics as Marxist, but wisdom dictates that we think seriously about how the future could pan out. Slow changes can suddenly speed up, causing us to regret not having seen a movement coming. As Mark Bauerlein, professor at Emory University and senior editor of First Things, states: “One moment you’re a citizen of a well-running republic. The next moment you see that the federal government seems unable to fulfill its most basic responsibilities.”[3]
I continue to be motivated by the serious, yet delicate, challenge of showing believers how their faith and gospel witness must be applied to this changing culture, just as Moses warned Israel when going into Canaan. He warned them to be aware of the dangers of living among people who worship false gods, citing the Lord’s judgment: They made me jealous by what is no god and angered me with their worthless idols (Deut 32:21).
When I arrived in America for the first time in 1964, as a naive young European, I was struck at both how “Christian” and how anti-Communist America was. Now recent arrivals from China, like Lily Tang-Williams, and from North Korea, like the youthful and brilliant Yeonomi Park, warn that they see much in America that reminds them of the horrendous cultures they left behind. Ms. Park recently studied at Columbia University and was shocked to see that the Marxist ideology she was taught in North Korea was now being taught in every class at this well-respected American school.[4] As I study Critical Race Theory and the antiracism movements of the day, I realize how ideologically Marxist these movements are; yet they are spreading throughout the culture with relative ease and increasing power—even in the country’s churches. These movements are successfully dividing American culture down the middle, in typical Marxist fashion!
Let’s be clear. The Marxist grab for social power has always sought to divide culture into antagonist segments: the oppressors and the oppressed. In Russia the divide was created between the bourgeois oppressors (land and business owners) and the proletariat oppressed (workers). In China the division was made between the “Black” (professionals) and the “Red” (under-class ) Chinese, whom Mao convinced to murder millions of fellow “Black” Chinese. In Cambodia the divide was between the intellectuals (which included anyone wearing glasses – true!) and the agricultural workers, who were roused by the Khmer Rouge and their cruel leader, Pol Pot, to murder nearly a quarter of the Cambodian population. In our time, Marxist-inspired Critical Race Theory divides Western culture into the oppressors (Whites) and the oppressed (Blacks and other minorities). Some leaders of this movement have clearly stated Marxist goals.
This is not new. According to a first-hand witness, black American Manning Johnson, in his book Color, Communism and Common Sense (1958), describes a vast attempt by Soviet and American communists in 1934–35 to undermine faith in American institutions through a program that would convince the general public that America is deeply racist. Mr. Johnson signed up for this revolutionary program. The goal was to create “a common front against the white oppressors.”[5] Johnson documents that the plot to use “Negroes as the [expendable] spearhead” of the undermining of America was created by Stalin in 1928, ten years after the creation of the Commintern (the World Organization of Communism). This was employed by “the top white communist leaders” hypocritically playing the idea of racial conflict in “a cold-blooded struggle for power” to “advance the cause of Communism” in America.[6] The goal was “to make the white man’s system, the white man’s government, responsible for everything.” He noted: “Smear is a cardinal technique,” seeking to “divide America” that can only be called “a propaganda hoax.”[7] “Black rebellion was what Moscow wanted. Bloody racial conflict would split America. During the confusion, demoralization and panic would set in.”[8] Apparently, the movement had little time for black people. Marx dismissed the black race as much closer to the animal kingdom.[9] Finally understanding his role as a pawn, Manning abandoned the program.
As Black Lives Matter (ironically awarded the Nobel Peace prize of 2021) ultimately shows, the controversy over racism is not so much an attempt at purging real racism as it is a Marxist-driven attempt to divide our culture between the oppressed Blacks and their White oppressors, in order to overthrow civilized Judeo-Christian American culture. The accusation that police brutality is causing black genocide has been shown to be false,[10] but BLM’s self-definition as emerging from Marxism is certain. Using racism as its cover story, Marxism pushes forward with its goal to divide America and to cause a revolution that will “upset the set-up!” An anonymous first-hand ex-participant in BLM (like Manning Johnson, years earlier) states: “I have seen this [racist] ideology up close and seen how it consumes and even destroys people, while dehumanizing anyone who dissents.”[11] In other words, BLM’s Marxism is an essential part of the neo-Marxist revival that seeks to bring an end to traditional Western civilization by the age-old technique of antagonistic cultural division.
Ibram X. Kendi, founder of Boston University’s Center for Antiracism Research was recently given a $10 million “no strings attached” grant by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.[12 ] This is a clear example of “woke capitalism,”[13] by which Dorsey uses his financial power to promote his vision of social justice while silencing opposing views on his Twitter platform, thereby undermining the democratic process. This money will help create a U. S. Department of Antiracism, with the power to overturn any law or policy at any level of government if the department determines that such policies do not contribute vigorously enough to antiracist theory. With the subjective notion of “equity” as the defining term, such a branch of government could, by fiat, redefine public morality. Fallible, omnipotent, moral busybodies will apply inscrutable rules to everyone except themselves. Nothing could be more Marxist! Ironically, Kendi, richly supported by successful businessmen and profiting hugely from the free market system, has announced that he opposes capitalism and free enterprise: “To love racism,” he states, “is to end up loving capitalism.”[14] Equity now determines action, and we will define what it is
Professor Bauerlein understands precisely where we now are.
“It’s not a culture war, not anymore. There is no common civic ground on which liberals and conservatives meet and hash things out…The debates are over now. The Woke brigades won’t battle your ideas. The marketplace of ideas offends them—you offend them. Now, they have the power of termination…[T]he Revolution is here and you’re in it…They follow the motto of that brilliant manager of men, Joseph Stalin, who reasoned quite soundly: ‘No man, no problem.’”[15]
Stalin had many of his dissenting colleagues shot through the head. With cancel culture, it is now, as Bauerlein perceptively observes: “No conservatives, no problem.”[16] Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, and a careful social analyst, says, reflecting on Norway’s recent law declaring illegal speech against transgenderism, even at home:[17] “Free speech in the United States these days is becoming described as a danger that needs to be controlled as opposed to a traditional value that defines this country as a democracy.… [F]ree speech…is under fire and may even be a minority view today.”[18] He refers to President Biden who selected Richard Stengel to take the “team lead” position on the US Agency for Global Media. “Stengel has been one of the most controversial figures calling for censorship and speech controls, a person who rejects the very essence of free speech. He promises the “unity” of a nation silenced by government speech codes and censorship.”[19] He is one of those who knows what equity is.
If this is true, we may be increasingly close to the situation of the German church in the 1930s. It watched the political rise of Hitler and the promotion of NAZI ideology. Individual Catholics and Protestants spoke out, but the church made no public opposition to antisemitism or to state-sanctioned violence against the Jews.[20] After 1945, the silence and even complicity of the church during the Holocaust produced major issues of guilt and recrimination. We may ask, without any sense of superiority: What should the German church have done to stop the slaughter of 6 million Jews, a bloodbath going on right under its nose?
Now is the time to ask what our Christian response must be to a dangerous political program that seeks to the divide culture and may well end up in far more physical violence than we have yet seen. May God grant us wisdom to face such a possible cultural future, not in order to produce a “Christian nation” but out of respect for God and for those made in his image. Yet while we live in this fallen world, we must also defend biblical principles of sound living, and of fair and polite discussion. We have the blessing of a First Amendment, which we would do well to defend. We must also defend the rule of law, any policy that promotes the nobility of the individual, normative male/female distinctions, and defense of the pre-born.
Clearly, truth must speak to power, whatever response it receives—even if it is a violent one. We must preach the gospel fervently both to the oppressors and the oppressed, for we all share a world temporarily under the oppression of the Evil one. We have true peace with God only through the suffering, sacrifice, death and resurrection of our coming King. We must make known the truth about God, the good Creator, whose common grace is extended to everyone and whose special grace is shown to all who will hear and respond to the saving death of his Son, which will produce the redemption of the entire creation (Romans 8:18–21), for God’s final glory—and for perfect, divinely defined, equity.
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1]WND LINK: “…corrupt civil and church authorities have joined forces to exploit the coronavirus pandemic in their quest to bolster global sovereignty.”[2] “How Big Tech, Big Media, lying Democrats, deep staters and vote fraudsters cheated Trump – and America,” WND (September 02, 2021).[3]AM GREATNESS LINK, see also FRONT PAGE MAG LINK[4] Alex Newman, “Critical Race Theory: Marxist Poison Infecting America,” The New American (August, 9, 2021), 11-17.[5] Manning Johnson, Color, Communism and Common Sense (Martino Fine Books,1958), 7 and 15.[6] Johnson, ibid, 37.[7] Johnson, ibid., 44, 52 and 54.[8]FREE REPUBLIC LINK Joseph Hippolito BLM, Antifa and the Communist Strategy to Destroy the United States Frontpagemagazine | Sep 24, 2020 |[9] According to the recently deceased Walter Williams, see NEWS HERALD LINK[10] The BLM myth is turning the many encounters law enforcement had with African-Americans in 2019 into a racist genocide. In fact, only 9 unarmed blacks were killed by police in 2019 and, according to police records, a majority of the fatal encounters were the outcome of fully justified police actions of self-defense. In the same year, 19 unarmed whites were shot dead by police; yet no one hears or even seems to care about these victims, because they don’t fit the Left’s narrative of black genocide. 93% of all black homicide victims are killed by other blacks. This is the true genocide that needs to be stopped. Police are NOT waging war on African-Americans. This is a profound lie. This is NOT a nation mired in systemic racism. No one knows leftist radicals better than David Horowitz. He says Black Lives Matter, Antifa and Occupy Wall Street all seek the same thing: a progressive, socialist revolution in America – and they are far closer to achieving it today than ’60s radicals ever were.[11]NEW DISCOURSE LINK[12]BU EDU LINK[13] See Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, (Center Street, NY, 2021), 19.[14] by FRONT PAGE MAG LINK [15] Art.cit.[16] Art.cit.[17]FAITHWIRE LINK[18]THEHILL LINK[19]JONATHANTURLEY LINK[20]ENCYCLOPEDIA LINK

The emergence of sexual liberation as a rising public value and an essential human right means that Christians are accused of “bigotry,” “hatred,” “homophobia,” “heterosexism,” and “heteronormativity.” As gay people believe that their gayness is “who they are,” an in-born aspect of their essential personality, there will be an inevitable clash between biblical truth and personal rights. Inevitably, the Christian view on sexuality will become a major reason for persecution of Christian believers. Rarely could two sides stand in starker opposition.

I recently heard a sermon that gave me deep concern. It was on 1 Peter 4:12–13, a text that predicts serious suffering for Christian believers. Peter, who was crucified upside down by the “civil” authorities of Rome, wrote: “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.” Peter was writing to Christians under persecution for not worshiping the Roman emperor, who believed himself to be god. As I listened to the sermon preached in 2021, I couldn’t help wondering what Christians will suffer and are already suffering in our time and in cultures around the world.
A few days before hearing that sermon, I received an email from Christian Concern, a UK legal defense ministry similar to the Alliance Defending Freedom. The article described the experience of Rev. Dr. Bernard Randall, 48, an Anglican minister and a chaplain at Trent College, a Church of England school of “protestant and evangelical” traditions for children up to 18 years of age. A student had approached Dr. Randall, asking him to give a chapel talk on the subject of LGBT sexuality, since Dr. Elly Barnes, a leader of Educate and Celebrate, had been invited by the school to train staff on how to “equip you and your communities with the knowledge, skills and confidence to embed gender, gender identity and sexual orientation into the fabric of your organization.” In that training session, Dr. Barnes had openly called on the school to chant: “Completely smash heteronormativity.” We can hear cultural echoes of the Sixties chant by radicals and friends of President Obama, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn’s slogan: “Smash monogamy.” Addressing the students from a different perspective, using a different tone, Dr. Randall stated:
Now when ideologies compete, we should not descend into abuse. We should respect the beliefs of others, even where we disagree. Above all, we need to treat each other with respect, not personal attacks – that’s what loving your neighbor as yourself means. By all means discuss, have a reasoned debate about beliefs, but while it’s OK to try and persuade each other, no one should be told they must accept an ideology. Love the person, even where you profoundly dislike the ideas.”
Dr. Randall nevertheless proceeded to argue principles:
But there are areas where the two sets of ideas are in conflict, and in these areas you do not have to accept the ideas and ideologies of LGBT activists. Indeed, since Trent exists “to educate boys and girls according to the Protestant and Evangelical principles of the Church of England,” anyone who tells you that you must accept contrary principles is jeopardizing the school’s charitable status, and therefore it’s very existence.
For the beliefs on marriage, sexuality and gender, he pointed to the Church of England’s public liturgy, especially the Book of Common Prayer and Canon Law, specifically naming heterosexual marriage as an essential Christian belief.[1]
How was Randall’s balanced approach received by school authorities? Following an interview with the headmaster, the school reported Dr. Randall to the government’s counter-terrorism watchdog, Prevent, which seeks to “prevent people being drawn into terrorism.” The Rev. Dr. Randall is being treated as a potentially violent religious extremist. He was also reported to the Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO) as a danger to children (essentially treating him as a pedophile). At the next staff training day, the school announced that it had fully adopted the “LGBT inclusive curriculum” including a section for 3–5 year old nursery children, proposed by the afore mentioned expert and well-known lesbian, Elly Barnes. Approval of homosexual practice is spreading like an out-of-control virus throughout the Anglican Church of England. Previous church disputes were over the two natures of Christ and other weighty theological issues; now this historic church is split over sexuality.[2]
This could not happen in America, right? Al Mohler in his Briefing of August 17, 2021, described the powerful push for LGBTQ+ training in all schools, whether private or public. Children are being taught the various methodologies of sexual intercourse and how to intelligently watch pornography! An article in USA Today asks: “…do we teach our children what is true in reality and history and nature, [regarding] queer, inclusive sex, or do we teach them what we want them to know?”[3] The choice is proposed between objective LGBTQ+ reality and parental closed-mindedness.
This emphasis on sexuality is international. The current US State Department is in league with the United Nations Human Rights Council, which affirms the “fundamental duty of [each] State…to recognize every human being’s freedom,…including children of any age…to determine the confines of their existence, including their gender identity and expression and the human right to alter their gender entirely by self-identification.”[4]
PROGRESSIVE SEXUAL IDENTITYIdentity politics has emerged as a major point of conflict in both the culture and the church. Specifically, sexual identity is one of the most important aspects of a person’s life. Clothing itself in the contemporary moral values of diversity and social difference, homosexual identity presents itself as an expression of Critical Race Theory. An oppressed “sexual minority” does no harm in its good-hearted celebration of all things queer. Each individual is understood as having the inviolable right to determine his, her, or “their” own sexual option. Even non-religious conservatives like Tucker Carlson never say a public critical word of the LGBTQ agenda, whatever they think in private. Scores of conservative politicians sent an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting same-sex marriage.
The emergence of sexual liberation as a rising public value and an essential human right means that Christians are accused of “bigotry,” “hatred,” “homophobia,” “heterosexism,” and “heteronormativity.” As gay people believe that their gayness is “who they are,” an in-born aspect of their essential personality, there will be an inevitable clash between biblical truth and personal rights. Inevitably, the Christian view on sexuality will become a major reason for persecution of Christian believers. Rarely could two sides stand in starker opposition.
A massive 2019 study that analyzed DNA samples and lifestyle information from 477,000 people (the largest such study to date) found “no clear patterns among genetic variants that could be used to meaningfully predict or identify a person’s sexual behavior.” [5] This study indicates that “non-genetic factors—such as cultural environment, upbringing, personality, nurturing—are far more significant in influencing a person’s choice of sexual partner.”[6] This surely means that the only biological determinant is heterosexuality. Other forms are self-imposed or chosen. Homosexuals often say they are “born that way,” but this is not true when it comes to biology, though some people struggle with homosexual attraction from a very early age.
Neither objective biology nor the rights of God as the divine Creator are recognized in our increasingly anti-biblical contemporary society. Sexual identity has become the ultimate expression of human autonomy. Identity politics cannot be questioned. “It’s none of your business!”
BIBLICAL EVIDENCEProclamation of the gospel requires a clear description of the human person as a glorious, though fallen, being made in God’s image. The human being is so noble that the eternal God sent the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, to enter into the human lot, take on human form, and save us from our sins by his atoning death. Part of the glory of God’s image is his creation of both male and female, a warm and amazing reality that reflects both unity and distinction, just as the divine Trinity expresses both unified love between the three persons and distinct functions. Distinction is essential; humans carry within themselves an expression of the deep distinction between themselves as created beings and God, their totally “other” Creator. This binary value, what I have called “Twoism,” is the basis of all creation. Sexual complementarity is bound up in our biology as male and female, in our genetic make-up as either XX or XY. This is what both Jesus (Matthew 19:1–6) and Paul (1 Corinthians 6:9 and 16 and Ephesians 5:31–32), taught, referring back to God’s creative act in Genesis 1:27: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them; and Gen. 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Both Jesus and Paul understood that the “image of God” is expressed both in sexual unity and in sexual distinction. They understood that since we are specks in a vast universe (which we did not make), we cannot begin by defining reality by how we feel. With gentleness and understanding, believers must find a way of telling gays that sexual sameness is not who they are, even though they believe it represents the deepest part of how they feel. We need the wise approach of Dr. Randall, but remember how he was treated!
A CAUSE FOR SERIOUS PERSECUTIONTacitus (AD 56–118), an early Roman orator and public official, is often described as the greatest Roman historian of the ancient world. I have often wondered why he, of all people, called the Christians of the second century “haters of humanity” (Tacitus, Annals 15.44), even though Christians were known as honest citizens who took care of the sick and rescued abandoned babies. Some believe this harsh judgment was because of the exclusivity of the Christian faith, but it may also have been because Christians refused to celebrate the Roman norms of homosexuality, abortion and adultery. The ancient world everywhere honored homosexuals as religious shamans because they affirmed Oneism or sameness in their sexuality— that is, the pagan notion of human sameness with the divine, thereby denying the Twoist image of God.[7] As we become more like the ancient Roman culture and as Washington’s Potomac and Rome’s Tiber meet head on,[8] the subject of sexuality becomes increasingly sensitive and deeply controversial. On one side, progressives assert the autonomy of human beings and are incensed by the very idea that a Creator could determine human behavior. On the other side, biblical Christians make equally massive statements about human sexuality, based on their understanding of its relationship to the being of God the Creator. In this sense, sexuality is an unavoidable issue in Christian witness and will doubtless grow as a cause of opposition and eventual persecution. The Equality Act, which the Democrats are planning to pass, legalizes the LGBTQ+ agenda and imposes it everywhere, while specifically denying on this subject any religious freedom of opinion. Thus, a serious clash with Christian orthodoxy seems unavoidable. In their discourse regarding the being of God the Creator and the nature of created human beings Christians cannot be silent (though we must not generate unnecessary antagonism as in the Westboro Baptist’s—”God hates f…s” approach). The gospel does not pick out one sin, because while presupposing the dignity of all human beings, it affirms that we are all sinners. At the same time, all sins must be named, including sexual behavior that opposes the will of God the good Creator—A Father who desires human flourishing.
May God grant the church of the twenty-first century understanding, clarity, boldness, courage, humility, and compassion as it enters days of great persecution. “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.”
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1] See https://www.newsweek.com/uk-chaplain-sues-college-discrimination-after-his-dismissal-sermon-questioning-lgbt-policy-1590269.
[2] Virtue, David W. Who Blinks First? Rowan Williams Challenges Peter Akinola on Homosexuality (10 Aug 2021). https://virtueonline.org/who-blinks-first-rowan-williams-challenges-peter-akinola.
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2021/08/05/sex-education-importance-lgbtq-inclusivity-
[4] https://outlook.office.com/mail/deeplink?popoutv2=1&version=20210802002.13
[5] Kelland, Kate. “No ‘gay gene’, but study finds genetic links to sexual behavior.” Reuters (29 Aug 2019). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-sex/no-gay-gene-but-study-finds-genetic-links-to-sexual-behavior- idUSKCN1VJ2C3.
[6] Kelland, “No ‘gay gene.’”
[7] See my article: Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal; https://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/43/43-3/43-3-pp443-469_JETS.pdf
[8] Stephen D. Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, 2018).