Carl Trueman: The pride shift

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, June 3rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, what we choose to celebrate.

Veterans get a day. Martin Luther King Jr. gets a day. The Pilgrims get a long weekend. But the LGBTQ movement? It gets an entire month. What is the message? Here’s WORLD Opinions contributor Carl Trueman.

CARL TRUEMAN: How a society marks time reflects what it thinks is important. The 30-day allowance given to Pride is no exception. It is clearly considered very important indeed. Simple math suggests it’s 30 times more so than MLK—making the claim improbable that the LGBTQ community is somehow marginalized.

Pride month has become a reminder over the years for many Christians that we are strangers in an increasingly strange land. Values such as sexual continence, public modesty, and the need to protect children from garish displays of promiscuity have been in short supply for many years. Pride month exemplifies that.

Yet there does seem to have been a shift. Three years ago, I was in Toronto in June. The Pride flag was everywhere, far more visible than that of Canada itself. The same was true when a week or two later I walked through Philadelphia. Any visitor from another planet could have been forgiven for thinking it was the values of the LGBTQ community that provided the unifying principle of the culture, not some shared national narrative. And yet in the two years since, the month’s sexual radicalism seems to have become much more muted.

One reason is likely the fact that the T, the trans issue, was always a step too far. It flew in the face of common sense, and it intruded into everyone’s lives in ways that gay marriage did not. The experiences of Target and Budweiser revealed the public relations problem. People who had no objection to two men living together in a sexual relationship might still have very strong opinions about other things. Like their daughter’s privacy being compromised, or sports being reduced to nonsense by third-rate male swimmers defeating top female competitors, or male rapists being allowed in women’s prisons like children given a free-hand in the candy store. Add to that the way in which the issue has been used to attack parental rights. The presence of the T in the Pride alliance became a terrible public relations liability.

Whether the trend of Pride month being more low-key and less ubiquitous continues remains to be seen. We can only hope that it does so. But as Christians we must also ask whether some of this is due to developments that are less encouraging than a dose of sanity on the trans issue. It may well be that the sound and fury is dying down because so much of that which it was intended to achieve has been accomplished.

Gay marriage did not destroy the world as we know it. That’s because marriage had been destroyed long ago with the advent of no-fault divorce. It turned the institution into a sentimental bond, not a relationship designed for both companionship and procreation. It downgraded children, making them peripheral to any normative understanding of the marital union. And that made the necessarily sterile notion of gay marriage entirely plausible. It also reinforced the acceptability, even desirability, of IVF and surrogacy. All of these things are now normalized, and all raise very serious challenges for Christians.

As we head into another Pride month, we can hope this year will continue the trend of becoming more low-key. A less pornified public square benefits us all. But if it does so, it would be premature to assume that this is unmitigated good news. It might simply indicate that so much of Pride’s ambitions have become an intuitive part of our culture and that orthodox Christian attitudes are even more outlandish than they were before.

I’m Carl Trueman.

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