In 2015, the Supreme Court (in Obergefell v. Hodges) voted to legalize so-called same-sex marriage in all fifty states. With this decision came the concept of “dignitary harm,” declaring the failure to affirm LGBTQ+ identity a damaging harm to those who define themselves by these letters. While the gospel of Jesus Christ affirms only one fundamental identity — male or female image-bearers of a holy God (Genesis 1:27) — the laws of the land declare that how you feel is now who you are.

In 2020, the Supreme Court (in Bostock v. Clayton) added LGBTQ+ to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, thus making that which God calls sin a protected civil right. This decision led to changes in Title 9, the landmark federal civil-rights law of 1972 that prohibited sex-based discrimination in government schools and sports programs. Americans live in a nation of redefined terms, including “sex,” which now means “gender identity.” This explains why it is legal for biological men to play women’s sports and undress in women’s locker rooms.

In 2021, the U.S. government, following Bostock and the redefined Title 9, promoted a federally mandated anti-bullying program for use in government schools — all of them. A “bully” is now someone who refuses to be an ally to the LGBTQ+ movement.

Such are the times in which we live. And we are tempted to believe that these cultural circumstances make us strangers and exiles in a world that once embraced our values. But that’s not the whole story.

What Makes Us Strangers?

Biblical giants such as Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Sarah, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and others “died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13). When political dangers in a post-Christian society threaten loss of reputation, job, or even life, we are tempted to conclude that our pilgrim and exile status came through recent circumstances.

But that misses the all-important point: we are exiles and strangers not primarily by circumstance but by confession of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

There is no doubt that the personal relationship believers have with Jesus Christ is our greatest comfort in this world — and the next one. But there is an additional side to our Christian witness that we must not neglect — the side that understands the ascended Christ sitting at the right hand of God the Father. Christ’s exaltation — his heavenly enthronement at God’s right hand — positions him as Head over all things, in fulfillment of the Great Commission, for the sake of his bride, the church, and the blessing of the world (Ephesians 1:22; Matthew 28:18).

Our station as exiles and strangers surely tests our faith. And this test may tempt us to take cover in one of two extremes: hiding with passive piety in private or fighting with worldly anger in public. The former elevates our personal relationship with our Lord and Savior over his state of exaltation (Psalm 2:10–12). The latter elevates the exaltation of Christ as King as something separate from the Great Commission.

Exiles with an Open Door

Practicing hospitality — loving strangers — is one vital way to bring together our personal relationship with Jesus with honoring him as King. We can practice hospitality with joy in a post-Christian society — and we must.

Where should we start?

1. Your Church

Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. (Romans 12:13)

On many a Lord’s Day, you meet strangers at church, visitors who may have traveled a long way to arrive at the pew next to you. Get into the regular practice of having your house ready to provide spontaneous guests with a meal after church. The meal does not have to be elaborate. A short respite of fruit and snacks along with Christian fellowship and prayer is a welcome treat for weary travelers.

Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. (Hebrews 13:1–2)

God commands us to show hospitality to strangers — a category that includes both believers and unbelievers — and he has set aside blessings for us when we obey. Who are the people in your church easy to neglect? Older and younger singles? Shut-ins? Young mothers? Work with your church to develop consistent opportunities for singles to be in your home, and together develop an outreach to those unable to leave their homes.

Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. (1 Peter 4:9)

Often, we fall into grumbling when we feel that we are shouldering a hard task alone. Don’t practice hospitality alone. Have you considered organizing a regular Lord’s Day lunch after worship for all who wish to join? This can be done at the church building directly after worship, and if you do this every week, the routine becomes something that everyone looks forward to. Every household could simply bring a Crock-Pot with a favorite dish. Sharing the hospitality duties with others makes for more joy, less awkwardness, and no grumbling.

2. Your Neighborhood

For over a decade now, my husband and I have invited neighbors over for food and fellowship. Last year, we invited neighbors to join us in Christmas caroling. We delivered handmade cards and invited everyone on the block to come over before going out to sing. Over thirty people came, some even bringing extended family members from out of town.

“Hospitality is a command for a reason: it never fails to show Christian compassion to the stranger in need.”

We gathered in the house, and our associate pastor, Drew Poplin, delivered an evangelistic message, reading from Luke 2 and introducing Jesus Christ, who came into the world to save sinners just like us. We prayed, distributed songbooks, and headed out the door. The children squealed in delight, ringing sleigh bells, forging ahead of the grown-ups to gather at open, welcoming doors. Accompanied by our pastor’s guitar and strong voice, we sang our hearts out, sometimes even in four-part harmony! When it was too dark to keep a careful eye on children and dogs, we returned to our house for coffee and cookies.

My new neighbor, Jacob, asked if I would hold his sleepy toddler, Jimmy, while he poured himself a cup of coffee. After some small talk about where they live, when they moved in, and general glee about the fun night we were all experiencing, Jacob said, “Hey, I read about you in the newspaper, and I have a question for you.”

I told him to ask me anything.

“You seem like a nice lady. So, why do you hate trans folks?” Jacob asked.

“I don’t hate anyone,” I replied. “I’m a Christian, and I truly love all of my neighbors. But I hate worldviews that lie to people about who we are — image-bearers of God. Because worldviews have consequences and bad ones have casualties, I hate transgender ideology.”

“Why?” Jacob inquired.

I shifted Jimmy on my hip and held him up, saying, “This is why. Jimmy is a boy, and I will defend his right to be a boy.”

Jacob nodded in complete agreement. It turns out that Jacob works in the school system, and he, a young white man, feels both the squeeze of political correctness and the threat of job loss.

“So why do you speak at school-board meetings when they hate you?” he asked.

“I believe that my job as a Christian is to restore truth to the public square. I worked on the bill that became the Parental Rights Law. I think parents have the right to protect their children and that enrolling a child in public schools does not make the school a co-parent.”

Jacob nodded his head and said that finding truth in the public square seems harder and harder. I introduced him to some of the other Christians in the neighborhood, also milling about the kitchen looking for coffee and cookies, and soon we had a lively discussion about parental rights underway, with phone numbers swapped and invitations to churches pouring out.

3. Your City

I’m a twenty-year veteran of homeschooling, but I care deeply about the Christians whose children are enrolled in the public school system for the simple reason that I am a Christian. We are called to let our reasonableness be known to all men (Philippians 4:5), and some of those men (and women) are on the school board.

Parental-rights laws across the nation have been hotly contested by school boards. Last year, I and others from local churches in Durham prepared three-minute speeches explaining and defending parental rights and responsibilities and the concerns we all had about the activist “science” behind transgenderism. Although these meetings are stressful, we stick around to talk to the people who oppose our message. “This is the world that Jesus came to save,” my 21-year-old son, who accompanies me to these meetings, often reminds me. We have found that people are people, and that all people need Christ.

Last year, we had the privilege of having dinner with a family whose gender-anxious and autistic son had been living a secret life as a girl at school. It took the parents two years to uncover the truth, and they were flabbergasted to realize that concealing this important information from them was legal under Title 9. They happily received our invitation to talk, and we exchanged phone numbers and addresses. When the night arrived to host this family, we were delighted to discover that we shared many things in common. Throughout the dinner, the parents peppered us with questions about God: Who is he? Does he care about me? After dinner, my husband led in family devotions: Bible reading and prayer.

We learned that parents are often treated like the enemy by the transgender movement, and they — and their children — are in great need of the gospel. For many people who have been ferried down the transgender conveyor belt — traveling from social transition (false pronouns and clothes) to hormonal transition (cross-sex hormones) to surgical transition (genital mutilation) — the great promise of glory, of a new heaven and a new earth where souls and bodies of believers are reunited and glorified, is uniquely cherished. That family we invited to dinner after a school board meeting is now attending church, and their son is healing from the hurt of those years.

Hospitality is a command for a reason: it never fails to show Christian compassion to the stranger in need. Practicing hospitality in a post-Christian society loves the stranger while remembering that we too are strangers and exiles by confession and not merely circumstance.

The Christian grandmother, talking with me about her daughter and grandson, was heartbroken.

As her daughter unveiled her new life, beliefs, and rules, this grandmother felt the ground was no longer solid. She raised this prayed-for daughter in the church. As a teenager, her daughter made a profession of faith. But then everything changed. The daughter rapid-fired her war against “heterosexism” and the new rules that would be mandatory for any future relationship. She demanded exclusive use of preferred names and pronouns. And she told her mother she could never share Bible verses or church lessons that contradicted LGBTQ+ beliefs.

This grandmother was sure she couldn’t keep the rules straight in her head even if she tried. She could barely understand what “heterosexism” was, although her daughter had explained it many times as “the dangerous belief that heterosexuality is normal.” Why would anyone go to war against this? the grandmother wondered.

Wrong Side of History

The ultimatums and blackmail landed hard: failure to comply resulted in being cut out, disowned. Her daughter, Jade, declared herself “non-binary” and used the pronouns “they” and “he.” Her three-year-old grandson, Allan, would now be raised as a girl and addressed as Sierra, presumably because he wore a tiara at a child’s birthday party and liked it. None of this made sense. The grandmother was sure her daughter was deluded by some social contagion.

This grandmother wanted to do the right thing. She tried to find the middle road and walk the thin line that allowed her to retain a relationship with her daughter, but she wondered: Am I on the wrong side of history? Should I comply with my daughter when I believe she is seriously deluded? And what about my grandson? Is he a “trans” child or an abused one? She asked herself, What if I get it wrong?

When the grandmother reached out to her pastor, he didn’t know what to say. He told her to extend empathy and try to see things from her daughter’s point of view. The small group she attended was divided on what to do as well. Some people in her small group even warned her against being “transphobic” and told her anyone can be trans and Christian, or gay and Christian. Is this true? she wondered. Some people in her small group treated her like she caused her daughter’s problems.

Life in the War Zone

I know there are many sides to stories like these.

I know for years some evangelical leaders have wanted to understand this story from the LGBTQ+ perspective, some even sponsoring gay-sensitivity checklists and conferences. But what about the grandmother? Does her point of view matter? And what about God’s? Romans 3:4 makes God’s perspective the priority: “Let God be true though every one were a liar.” What God reveals about our lives is the true truth. The Bible knows us and our needs better than we do. And that is the very best news of all.

This grandmother’s family and church life had suddenly become a war zone, and she is not alone. I hear stories like this almost every day. If you, like the grandmother, have ever felt that you live amid a civil war, you are not alone either. On the one hand, we expect the church to conflict with the world. Indeed, John Calvin tells us to “count the rage of the whole world as nothing” (365 Days with Calvin, March 19). We see the rage of unbelief all around us. We understand the rage of the world because we remember when we were once God’s enemy.

It’s not conflict with the world that surprises us; the division within the visible church confounds us. Our Lord calls us to walk in unity amid this “crooked and twisted generation” (Philippians 2:15). He does not ask us to become compliant with its perversion, and especially when the world demands as much. Jesus calls us to model the fathomless unity of the holy Trinity: “that they may be one even as we are one” (John 17:22). But how can we do this when some use the Bible to call sinners to repentance and others use the Bible to call the repentant to sin?

These are the times in which we live, and Christians must face the facts.

Three Subtle Reasons

I believe there are three reasons for our divided churches. And these three reasons have unleashed five lies that many evangelical churches have embraced.

Because I have believed all these lies at different points in my life, I understand how seductive they are. God knows the times in which we live and has provided a solution. Our calling is to repent of the lies that we have believed and attempt to stay connected with loved ones lost to them — and without our becoming indoctrinated. Easy to say, but impossible to do without God’s help. What are the three reasons?

REASON 1

First, we have failed to see that the seeds of the gospel are in the garden.

Many of us foolishly believed that we could reinvent our calling as men and women, render men and women interchangeable, defy God’s pattern and purpose for the sexes, and somehow reap God’s blessing.

God’s plan for men and women — the creation ordinance — is first found in Genesis 1, and it is central — not peripheral — to the gospel of Jesus Christ: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it’” (Genesis 1:27–28).

We bear the image of God by growing in the knowledge, righteousness, and holiness of the Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 4:24). Homosexuality and transgenderism represent forms of rebellion against God’s creation ordinance and image-bearing. They are manifestations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and must be repented of, not celebrated.

Homosexuality and transgenderism are not part of anyone’s creational design, no matter what our feelings say. Our feelings are not free of sin, and they don’t trump God’s truth. Christ promises to forgive and restore all who repent and trust in him for salvation. Christ does not make an ally with the sins his blood crushes on the cross and washes clean. There is hope for all in the gospel.

REASON 2

Second, we have failed to read the times in which we live (Romans 13:11–14; Luke 12:56).

In the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, the United States Supreme Court declared so-called gay marriage the law of the land. It also introduced the idea of “dignitary harm.” According to Obergefell, we are harming someone’s dignity by failing to “affirm” their LGBTQ+ identity.

In our post-Obergefell world, we now have two competing ideas of what it means to be human — and these ideas have collided. The Freudian/Obergefell idea is that sexual orientation is an accurate category of personhood; LGBTQ+ is who you are rather than how you feel. After Obergefell, laws quickly were put in place to honor, affirm, and celebrate being LGBTQ+. The biblical idea, however, is that bearing the image of God according to eternal and creational categories of man or woman determines who you are. It’s Obergefell or Christ: you either celebrate and affirm your sin nature, or you repent of the culpable and unchosen sin nature you inherit in Adam.

REASON 3

Third, we have failed to love our enemies and instead pretended that our enemies are our friends.

Many of us have failed to understand that loving our enemies is an act of godly confrontation, a weapon of our warfare and a great kindness (2 Corinthians 10:4). Christian love destroys arguments and lofty opinions raised against Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). Christian love doesn’t pretend that the world is a safe place or that the enemies of Christ are harmless — even if they are your daughter. Christian love seeks to make friends out of enemies through repentance and forgiveness. Christian love doesn’t delude us into believing that sin is no big deal, or that we are more merciful than God. Pretending our enemies are our friends is a cowardly cop-out.

Five Seductive Lies

These three reasons have introduced five lies into far too many evangelical churches. The five lies coalesce in rejection of biblical authority, defiance against Christ, and celebration of pride.

Lie #1: Homosexuality is a normal sexual variant.Lie #2: Being a “spiritual person” is kinder than being a biblical Christian.Lie #3: Feminism is good for the church and the world.Lie #4: Transgenderism is a normal gender variant.Lie #5: Modesty is an outdated burden that serves male dominance and holds women back.

These five lies rely on several false claims, but the biggest is the feminist invention that “gender” is distinct from biological sex. To create false categories of personhood, and then try to build a Christian life on top of them, is futile and foolish. As pastor Christopher J. Gordon puts it in The New Reformation Catechism on Human Sexuality, “To introduce gender as a new category of personhood, separate from the biological category of sex, in pursuit of a different sexual identity, is unnatural to the creation order and harmful for the purpose for which God made us” (13).

God promises that lies — even prominent ones that have become foundational to powerful governments and academic institutions — do not have the last word. He tells us that only the truth will set us free. As Jesus says, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32). Jesus does not say freedom will come if you stand in the shoes of your “non-binary” grandchild by inviting a “gay Christian” ministry into your church, or if you march in the pride parade with your lesbian daughter, or if you go to your son’s gay wedding. It’s not kindness to stand in someone’s shoes when that person needs to be rescued.

Freed from the Fear of Man

The Bible calls the fear of man a snare (Proverbs 29:25) — an instrument of execution from which you cannot extricate yourself. But as my husband says a lot, the gospel sets you free from the fear of man. So, if you find yourself wondering if you are on the wrong side of history, and if you have all of this wrong, remember the blood of Christ. Remember how it bore down on demons and delivered you from hell. Remember how Jesus became a curse so that you could receive blessing. Remember that the truth of Christ sets you free, not compliance with lies.

Understand the times. Know the reasons. Defy the lies. And love your enemies well enough to tell the truth.

As Americans celebrate our nation’s founding on July 4, we remember the group of disparate leaders who came together in Philadelphia in the middle of the 1770s to forge enough unity to set thirteen individual colonies on the road to nationhood. What we have in the Declaration of Independence (itself primarily a document listing disagreements with the English government) came together with much contention and political wrangling. These founding leaders had much in common, but that commonality was put to the test over differences in regional interests, economic concerns, and political philosophy.

Different religious convictions also came into play. While most of the members of the Continental Congress were required to hold to basic Christian truths in order to serve in public office, their denominational commitments and doctrinal distinctives played in the background of the formal debates leading up to the ratification of the Declaration, and those tensions carried on into the founding era of the nation.

It is not hard for us to see in our rancorous times how political and religious differences intertwine as they did in our founding era. What was often in short supply then, as it seems to be now, is a model for holding differences in principles and convictions that do not undermine “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” which sets the people of God apart in a fractured world (Ephesians 4:3).

Among that group of eighteenth-century disparate leaders, however, I did find an unusual founder — in my estimation, a model still worth considering. His name is Elias Boudinot.

Uncommonly Christian

Boudinot (1740–1821) is an important but little-known member of America’s founding generation. He grew up a child of the Great Awakening, sitting under the preaching of George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, and, for a brief time, Jonathan Edwards in Princeton. He rose to prominence in New Jersey politics and was a man of national influence in the lead up to the American Revolution. During the war, Boudinot served on George Washington’s staff and later in the Continental Congress; he was also president of the Congress at the signing of the Treaty of Paris to end the war. Boudinot was a major player in the first three federal congresses and then served in the administrations of Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.

After retiring from public service in 1805, he spent the last decade and a half of his life supporting gospel mission in the states and abroad. His lasting legacy was his formative role in establishing the American Bible Society.

“Boudinot endeavored to lead an honorable life of consistent and ardent Christian faith.”

Throughout all of his public engagements, Boudinot endeavored to lead an honorable life of consistent and ardent Christian faith. Historian James Hutson, who has spent years studying the religious thoughts and lives of the founders, writes, “Boudinot is of particular importance, because he was a born-again Presbyterian, whose evangelical views were probably closer to those of the majority of his countrymen than were those of most of his fellow Founders.”1

Man of Gracious Convictions

Boudinot caught his view of God and the world in the great evangelical revival of the mid-eighteenth century, and he never deviated from the path of his early convictions. At the age of 18, he wrote to his friend William Tennent III,

May the Lord grant that we may make a proper use of the short time we have yet remaining. I can’t but record the great goodness of my gracious Protector as well as Preserver, in granting me restraining grace in my youth, and discovering the inestimable worth of an offered Savior unto me. I bless my God for the great hope that is wrought in us, by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, without which this life would be an intolerable burden, an inconceivable load of anxiety and despair, for vain are the days of man.2

Then, sixty years later, he would testify in his will to his

firm, unfeigned, and prevailing belief in one sovereign, omnipotent, and eternal Jehovah, a God of infinite love and mercy . . . [who] has been and is still reconciling a guilty world unto himself by his righteousness and atonement, his death and his resurrection, through whom, alone, life and immortality have been brought to light in his gospel, and, by all the powerful influences of his Holy Spirit, is daily sanctifying, enlightening, and leading his faithful people into all necessary truth.3

Boudinot did not cloister himself away from conflict and disagreement, however. An attorney by vocation, he made arguments for a living. He was a patriot, an identified member of the colonial elites who chose to rebel against the most powerful nation in his world. During the war, it fell to him to wrangle with the British over the treatment of captured American soldiers, who were treated not like prisoners of war but as traitors. In government, Boudinot was closely tied to Alexander Hamilton, the most polarizing politician of his era. He was also a committed abolitionist, which put him in unresolvable opposition with half of his country.

How might Elias Boudinot teach us, more than two centuries later, to stand on our own convictions with a firm but gracious disposition?

‘One Lord and Master’

First, Boudinot tended to major on what unites and not what divides.

Boudinot never wavered in his own doctrinal convictions, which were thoroughly Calvinistic. Yet the effect of the Bible’s good news on his life played out in both strong personal convictions and a gracious spirit that looked first for commonalities, not division. His interactions with those with whom he differed on issues of faith consistently displayed the biblical call to “pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (Romans 14:19). It was a lifelong impulse.

When he was 18, he wrote to a friend, “What a glorious Prospect (said I to myself) would it afford, if mankind in general would unite together, in living harmony and concord, and endeavor to make every circumstance of life tend to the common advantage.”4 Nearly sixty years later, he expressed his enduring desire to “pare off the rough points of party and conciliate minds of those who ought to consider themselves of one family, acknowledging one Lord and Master.”5

“Boudinot tended to look for what unites and not what divides.”

This Christian impulse toward unity when possible would serve him well in the public positions he held during the Revolution and beyond. It would also be a driving motivation late in life, leading him to gather support from across the Christian landscape to form the American Bible Society.

‘Truly Reviving to His People’

Second, Boudinot welcomed evidence of God’s activity even when he differed with those in whom he observed it.

Boudinot was a lifelong friend of the Anabaptist Quakers, seeing in them a piety that he aspired to emulate, though he disagreed deeply on important doctrinal points. Later in life, when the Second Great Awakening broke out in the early 1800s, though leaders in his denomination reacted with concern over its crowd-gathering practices and populist theology, Boudinot watched with fascination. While he shared their cautions, Boudinot had learned firsthand from his father and the leaders of the First Great Awakening to look for authentic spiritual fruit wherever it might be found.

In a letter written in the middle of the War of 1812, we get a glimpse of Boudinot’s mature view of the Christian revival experience.

Blessed be God, who in the midst of judgement remembereth mercy. Although our country is involved in a ruinous offensive war, yet is he proving to his church that he has not altogether forsaken us. The pouring out of his Spirit in various parts of the United States, is truly reviving to his people who stand between the porch and the altar, crying, Lord save thy people. In the eastern parts of New York, in Vermont and Connecticut, the revivals are more interesting than has ever been known. In Philadelphia, the appearances are very promising, and generally speaking in these parts, although there are no appearances of remarkable revivals, yet there is a growing attention to the ordinances of the gospel. Bless the Lord, O our souls, and let all that is within us bless his holy name.6

‘Hearts May Agree, Though Heads Differ’

Third, Boudinot valued denominational fidelity without succumbing to denominational sectarianism.

Boudinot was a man of national prominence for nearly five decades. By the end of his life, he was a revered statesman and a driving influence in Christian mission. But he was at heart a churchman who expressed his religious convictions throughout his life. He was a founding trustee of the Presbyterian General Assembly and was moderator of the assembly at the time of his death. He was also a trustee of the Presbyterian College of New Jersey for nearly half a century, and played a significant role in the formation of Princeton Seminary.

In retiring to Burlington, New Jersey, where there was no Presbyterian church, he could have simply enjoyed his wide range of Presbyterian associations. Instead, he joined the church across the street, St. Mary’s Episcopal, where his participation was lively and committed until the end of his life. A prominent Presbyterian joining an Episcopal church was eyebrow-raising in his day, but Boudinot’s actions demonstrated his large heart and vision for the church of Christ beyond its various and often competing expressions. He wrote to the pastor of his former Presbyterian church about his view of denominational differences,

Hearts may agree, though heads differ. There may be unity of Spirit, if not of opinion, and it is always an advantage to entertain a favorable opinion of those who differ from us in our religious sentiments. It tends to nourish Christian charity. I welcome with cordial and entire satisfaction everything that tends to approximate one denomination of Christians to another, being persuaded that he who is a conscientious believer in Christ cannot be a bad man.7

In a day where the church is wrestling with how to engage the society (and often internal differences) with Christian conviction and conduct, the example of Elias Boudinot can provide a much-needed perspective. Even in times of contention, we can stand with conviction without forfeiting a gracious and peace-loving spirit, and the very conduct commended by Christ and his apostles.