Covering the same-sex marriage debate

One reader didn’t like a WORLD story on the debate about same-sex marriage. She said we should have more stories on other “human failures that are surely more widely damaging to the church and its witness: gossip, lust, greed, gluttony, etc. … Let’s muster the same sober-minded indignation about the disintegration of the gospel!”

She’s mostly right. The disintegration of the gospel (or faith in it, to be precise) is the greatest problem of our age—but the movement toward same-sex marriage displays that disintegration. Recent events show the tendency of some Christians to abandon the Bible when the heat’s on, but also the tendency of just about all of us to overlook our two major foes as we concentrate on the fracas right in front of us.

One of those foes is internal. The other is external. Regarding the external foe, no one has said it better than the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians: “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Regarding the internal foe, no one since the Bible has said it better than Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

The people who oppose biblical teaching are not our foes, but through miseducation and pride they have become puppets of those cosmic powers. Nevertheless, here’s our problem: What should we do when the puppets attack Christians who are just minding their own business of cake- or pizza-making, photography or printing? We don’t want to major in stories about the gay lobby’s aggressive tactics, but we also don’t want to abandon Christians under attack.

A second problem we face is this: It’s true that gossip, lust, greed, and gluttony certainly damage the church, but the Gossip Rights Campaign is not one of America’s most effective lobbies—the (Gay) Human Rights Campaign is. “Greed is good” was a line in a movie, yet in real life few say that. Food channels on TV promote good cooking, yet they don’t outrightly praise gluttony. The gay lobby, though, demands not just tolerance but approval—yet approving what the Bible clearly condemns leaves us with gospel disintegration.

A third problem is the church’s history of responding to homosexuality. I once spoke to an audience of elders and deacons and got a deservedly chilly reception by emphasizing the importance of discernment in helping the poor without first emphasizing the need for generosity. We need to take those biblical imperatives in order: First, be generous, and second, be discerning. The church has erred at times by emphasizing law before first stressing God’s generosity in grace. Nevertheless, once we give grace primacy of place, don’t we also have to honor God’s law?