For Americans who used to dread June and its suffocating rainbow excess, this year feels different. A week into the obligatory LGBT pandering, and the storyline hasn’t been Pride — but Pride pushback. From companies’ overwhelming timidity to sports leagues’ scaled-back messaging, there’s new respect for (or fear of) grassroots’ backlash. “Activism ain’t selling like it used to,” Michael Serazio argues. But that doesn’t mean conservatives — and Christians in particular — aren’t coming face to face with the celebration of ideas that completely contradict their worldview. And the question is: How should they respond when they do?
Despite the huge success Americans have had driving home their outrage at LGBT extremism, our cities will still be full of flags, parades, drag shows, and every other kind of perversion. “Millions of Americans also will work in environments where they will feel pressure to celebrate things they know should not be celebrated,” Family Research Council’s Joseph Backholm reminds us. So what kind of Pride Month wisdom should we all take to heart, he asked Dr. Voddie Baucham?
The pastor and best-selling author had some surprising advice. “There’s a couple of things that I would say about Pride Month,” he told Backholm on the “Outstanding” podcast. “Number one, I would say — and I say this hesitantly, and anybody who’s experienced it will understand why — I think more Christians need to experience a Pride parade.” He paused to let the idea sink in. “… [All that most people] know about Pride Month and these Pride parades is what to see on the news. They don’t realize that the news is very selective in what they present, and what they present is a small snapshot of what is not at all the norm at a Pride event — because the norm at a Pride event would not be allowed on the evening news.” Essentially, Baucham said, what we’ve seen has “been sanitized for us.” “We have no concept of the level of debauchery that is being celebrated this month.”
His second piece of advice? “… Be prepared to be unpopular because … it’s going to be demanded of us that we celebrate this, that we celebrate things that we simply cannot celebrate, and we can’t get around it.” The reality is, “All this month, people are demanding that we bow the knee and confess that Caesar is Lord, that we bow the knee and confess that Caesar gets to tell us what marriage is, [or] Caesar gets to tell us what a man is, what a woman is. Caesar gets to change pronouns and grammar and everything else. And we have to say no. We have to be ready to deny ourselves, take up our cross, follow Him, and confess that Jesus is Lord.”
If individual churches or Christians can’t do that, Voddie warns, then they’re moving themselves “and the people that they’re trying to appease further and further away from our only hope and their only hope — which is the person and work of Christ.”
When the mob pressures the church to be silent, we need to stand our ground, Baucham emphasized. “… We must not allow people to define love as not speaking truth. And that’s where we are, right? As Christians, we come into the marketplace of ideas and we’re like, ‘Okay, we have to speak the truth in love.’ And then every truthful thing that we say about biblical manhood, womanhood, marriage, and sex [causes people to declare], ‘That’s not loving.’ And so we constantly back away, back away, back away until there’s no truth left in the name of love. Well, you know, love doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing. Love rejoices in the truth. That’s in I Corinthians 13. So what we need to do, what we must do, is we must have a commitment to thinking biblically about manhood, womanhood, marriage, family, sex, [and] sexuality. And we must have a commitment to speaking the truth in love.”
Maybe that will cost us, Voddie admits. But at the end of the day, “we have to be willing to proclaim the truth of the person and work of Christ and pay whatever price we’re going to have to pay for it — and we’re going to have to. People are seeing that now. It’s ‘Bake the cake,’ [and] if you don’t, you lose your bakery. ‘Make the dress,’ [and if] you don’t, you’ll suffer for that. It’s ‘Use the pronouns,’ [and] you won’t lose your job. … So many of these things are happening. … [P]eople are losing custody of their children because they’re refusing to go along with so-called ‘gender-affirming care.’ Care that, by the way, we now know because of research that came out just a week or so ago, that leads to a 12 times higher suicide rate. So again, we’ve got to stand firm against this stuff regardless of the price that we are going to pay — and we are going to pay a price. But Christ has to be more. He has to be worth more to us.”
Ultimately, the world is on an unsustainable path, Baucham points out somberly. “… [P]eople are at war with the God of the universe, and they will face his wrath. [They’re] running headlong toward a cliff, and the loving thing to do is to shout as loud as we can, put up as many signs and warnings as we can, and if necessary, grab people you know before they go over the cliff. That’s the loving thing to do, even when it doesn’t feel like it’s loving. … We’ve got to show people the car that’s about to run them over.”
When Joseph asked how this movie ends, Voddie shook his head. “It ends badly. We’ve seen this before [when] empires fall. And this culture is devolving.” But there’s still hope that the Lord will intervene, that there’s revival and awakening. “And that’s my prayer,” he said. “I’m not praying for the destruction of the West. I’m praying for revival.”
Christians have seen the kind of impact they can have when they refuse to embrace the agenda that’s saturating our education system, marketplace, government, sports, entertainment, and so many other arenas. We’ve watched the entire script flip on LGBT activism in board rooms we never thought would change just because we were determined to make our voices heard.
So what’s the mindset we should have now? “Two things,” Voddie insisted. “One, the Kingdom of God is undefeated. It has never lost, and it never will lose. And the second thing is that we have dual citizenship, and that our heavenly citizenship trumps whatever other citizenship we hold. If we hold on to those two truths, we will take heart and we will be encouraged even during dark days.”
No matter what, we’re still in the world, he wanted people to know. “But not of the world.” In other words, “You can’t hide — so stop trying. Besides that, there are people who desperately need what we have — and we can’t give it to them if we run away from them.”
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.
