Definitions change but God marches on

In his recent book, The Bigot: Why Prejudice Exists, Rutgers University professor Stephen Eric Bronner tries to redefine intolerance. Bronner works at the university’s Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, and he’s on a United Nations panel for genocide prevention. Bronner equates support for traditional marriage to bigotry.

“The bigot now employs camouflage in translating his prejudices into reality,” Bronner writes. In other words, the defense of religious liberty is camouflage. It must be unmasked. It must be called bigotry.

The stunning thing about that claim is it is an intellectual justification from someone who studies genocide prevention. Suddenly the view that marriage is only between a man and a woman is considered wrong, implying that essentially every other culture throughout the history of the world was fueled by bigotry.

Cultures throughout history tolerated and even celebrated different sexual relationships, including homosexual relationships, but they still did not consider those relationships the equals of marriage. Those relationships served a different purpose. But the marriage relationship had to do with children and the building of society and cultivation of citizens. Even cultures that clearly did not have any moral bias whatsoever against homosexual behavior still thought it was a different sort of relationship than marriage, because it obviously is.

Without even getting to the point that one relationship is right and one is wrong, we can at least say they’re different, can’t we? According to Bronner, to say that they’re different is nothing more than prejudice and bigotry. It doesn’t fit historically. It’s a bullying tactic that pretends the issue is already settled. It pretends that the desire to have a particular sexual relationship justifies calling it marriage, when marriage has for centuries been understood to be something completely different.

There has been a tsunami of shift in public opinion about this issue. As the new definition of bigotry becomes embedded into cultural elites—The New York Times, the UN, and academia—maybe it is time to be a little bit alarmed. We at least need to know the culture that we live in.

This is a huge deal, and yet, the kingdom of God marches on. I had a pastor look at me and say, “John, it’s over. We’ve lost,” and I wanted to say, “What’s ‘it,’ and who’s ‘we?’” Because the kingdom of God and our responsibility to God’s definitions of moral norms do not change based on cultural shifts. We live out of a bigger story. We live out of the gospel story. We live out of the story of the God who created the world and is reconciling and redeeming it through Christ to himself. And so we should be people of hope even as we see more and more signs that it’s about to get pretty uncomfortable for anyone who stands on this particular issue.

Listen to John Stonestreet’s Culture Talk segment on The World and Everything in It: