In today’s culture wars, the mainstream media are endeavoring to redefine traditional biblical morality as hate speech, while pushing their own version of gender ideology, says Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput.
In a powerful new article, the archbishop comments at length about the recent “Nashville Statement” on human sexuality by a group of prominent evangelical scholars and pastors, as well as the violent backlash the text has received. As Chaput notes, there is nothing “shocking or belligerent” in the document. It is a simple restatement of historic biblical beliefs about marriage, chastity and the nature of human sexuality.
As Breitbart News reported at the time, the manifesto, signed by more than 150 Evangelical leaders, reaffirmed Christian teaching on God’s creation of human beings as male and female, countering recent attempts to proclaim a nearly infinite “gender fluidity” based on “autonomous preferences.”
The statement immediately came under heavy fire from LGBT activists as well as secular mainstream media, who denounced the document as bigoted, prejudiced and antiquated. The media were especially upset about the statement’s unapologetic rejection of same-sex relations as somehow normal or morally acceptable, which they are not.
Salon magazine, for instance, slammed the statement as “bigotry-filled,” alleging that the manifesto contains “many discriminatory positions” and has rightly been denounced as “un-American toilet paper” written by hypocrites.
In his analysis, Archbishop Chaput said that a “methodical effort is now playing out in the mass media to recast biblical truths as a form of ‘hate,’ to reshape public opinion away from those biblical truths, and to silence anyone who stays faithful to Christian teaching on matters of sexual behavior, sexual identity, family and marriage.”
“The message is simple,” Chaput added. “Conform to the new herd dogmas or enjoy the consequences. Which explains the river of public contempt that was quickly poured out on the Nashville Statement.”
Resistance to the well-financed LGBT lobby and its agenda is immediately labeled as “homophobia,” while preaching Christian truth about human sexuality is now judged as “hate speech.”
The happy news for Christians, the archbishop asserts, is that despite the best efforts of the mainstream media and their toadies to change public opinion on human sexuality, nature will always prevail in the end.
“Sooner or later, nature defeats ideology,” he writes. “It doesn’t matter how strong or widely shared or persuasive a bad system of ideas might seem to be. It will always lose.”
The downside to this, he adds, “is that foolish and perverse thinking can take a long time to die. And it can ruin countless lives and poison whole societies in the process.”
In spite of Americans’ insistence on privacy, the archbishop continues, sexual behavior and relationships “are never purely private matters,” since they “always have social implications and consequences.”
“The dysfunctions in our nation’s current attitudes toward sex thus amount to a kind of mental virus, a flight from reason and common sense,” he states.
Chaput ends his piece by appealing to Christians to continue witnessing to biblical truth, no matter what the media may say or do.
“A great many faithful Christians still do let their convictions ‘live loudly’ in their hearts and actions. It’s called witness,” he said.
“What it takes is a little courage. So maybe they – and all the rest of us who seek to follow Jesus Christ — should turn up the volume.”
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
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