All posts by Darris Brock

Darris Brock is an ordained minister in the Christian Church. He is a past professor at Johnson University (Johnson Bible College) and is an elder and worship minister at Lighthouse Christian Church.
Gay Marriage, Homosexual Marriage, Homosexuality, same-sex marriage

Of Wisdom and Foolishness

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The realm of comedy for making political statements and shaping public opinion has long been dominated by the liberal left. It makes sense. Conservatives are more straight-laced and serious and therefore easy targets. But as Jay Leno demonstrated in the weeks before stepping down from the Tonight Show, heavily criticizing liberal politicians and social policy can draw exceedingly high ratings. So the sword cuts both ways; it is just that fewer people swing the sword leftward.

Comedic talents on the political right include Rush Limbaugh and his parodist cohort, Paul Shanklin, as successes but most other attempts have been weak or failed, whether they be in TV or movies. Nevertheless, it is a growing trend among those on the right to parody and poke fun at those on the left in an attempt to turn the tables to some degree. Where intellectual arguments are most often met with failure, the poignant punchline can prick the pickle, so to speak, sometimes.

Leftward logic and humor tend to be heavily dominated by mockery, derision, hostility, often lots of foul language, and a strong play on emotions. Shallow arguments based emotion and stirring rhetoric are called sophistry, a form of false wisdom. Rightward thinking people tend to use actual logic (like noting that men and women were made for sexual union and same-sex couples were not) but this escapes the leftward thinker. Rightward thinkers also tend to not play on emotions as successfully as leftward thinkers do, probably because they are less emotionally driven than their counterparts. We who engage in apologetics readily admit emotionally driven people are the most irrational we encounter. One person who commented on the cartoon below was happy to tell me that he hated Christians because of the Christian stance against homosexual marriage.  I asked him if he also hated Orthodox Jews and Muslims, but never got a response. Oddly enough, he said he was a Christian and somehow that allowed him to feel free to hate his fellow Christians.  Hate for fellow Christians isn’t a Christian value, but perhaps he’s not read the Bible yet. We can consider him logically challenged. His emotions clearly overwhelm his reasoning faculties.

So it is with so many who claim to be Christians and yet deny core church doctrines on marriage and homosexual sin. It’s doctrine à la carte day in Christianville!  “I’ll have a little sin please, but leave off the homosexual sin. I just don’t like the way it tastes. Too gritty or something.  A touch of adultery would be fine, though. And I’ll need a little drunkenness to go with that. Oh, and not too much Hell this time around either. Grace? Yes, I’ll have a heaping helping of grace! Pour it over the mashed potatoes and false doctrine, please.”

The cartoon below appeared on the Facebook page of a very liberal former student. It is sophistry.  It attempts to mock parental concern about homosexual marriage. The inference one is to draw from this is that children don’t care about homosexual marriage so no one else should care about it either. It is dismissed with a cookie as if the topic were utterly irrelevant. However, because a child finds things irrelevant doesn’t mean that they actually are irrelevant.  Thus, my muse was struck and I proposed a more witty and realistic follow-up conversation following the child getting a cookie. As a father of four, I have some experience in such matters.  But, shockingly, my liberal friend and his friends on Facebook (all but one) did not find my sense of humor all that amusing. Therefore, feeling under appreciated, as a humorist, I have posted the cartoon and my witty rejoinder here, where I trust it will be more highly valued (wink, wink) by a more general audience.

gay-marriageAfter the Cookie
Then, when the child gets his cookie he asks, “But how are babies made without a mommy and daddy?”

The biological father gets to answer, “Oh babies come from lots of places. Sometimes they’re found at a godless, secular adoption agency (because Catholic adoption services and those like them were closed since they had religious objections to homosexual marriage). Other times they are made in a lab test tube because gay marriage is unnatural marriage. It can’t produce children but sometimes people like to pretend there’s no difference! You’ve played pretend before haven’t you?”

The gender-specific-male child replies, “Yes! We used to pretend that there was a monster under the couch and it would eat me if I put my foot on the floor. But I’m too old for that now. Is it something like that, daddy?” to which the naturally male father who conceived the child with his naturally female mother says, “Something like that son. There’s also a cabbage patch option and a stork delivery system, too. But we can talk about that later. “

Glancing down at his cookie and 2% farm fresh milk from a cow naturally conceived by a male and female bovine, the son thoughtfully says, “But my friend Johnny says it’s wrong for boys to marry boys.” “Oh, really, son?” the natural father replies, “Why does he say that?” The young progeny replies, “Because his dad said that God says it’s wrong. And his dad says that God made marriage for boys and girls and that it’s a sin if you do it wrong.”

Dad (the male complement to a mom) replies, in his [note the use of the male pronoun “his” which is opposite of the female pronoun “her”] great wisdom, “Like I said, sometimes adults like to play pretend. Sometimes adults like to pretend boys marrying boys is the same as natural marriage – like when a boy marries a girl, the way Johnny’s dad said God designed it. And sometimes adults like to pretend that it isn’t a sin. That way they feel better about themselves.”

“Why don’t they feel good about themselves, daddy?” the boy asks. “Well,” says dad, “it’s because the Bible that Johnny’s dad reads says they will go to Hell if they don’t stop sinning.”  Puzzled, the boy asks, “What is Hell, dad?” “Oh,” adds the father, “it is a terribly hot place run by a bad guy and his army of bad people where people go when they die if they’ve not done what God said they should do. Kind of like, . . . Cuba. So if they pretend it’s not sin, then they can have all their fun and live guilt-free!”

The sexually conceived male offspring now replies, “I thought when you got big you quit playing pretend, daddy.” Wisely the biological father now says, “You should, son, you should.” The boy responds, “Gay marriage sounds dumb.” The conjugally married male parent responds, “I knew you’d figure it out son. Way to go! I knew your mother’s genes weren’t that bad. Have another cookie.”

Bible Interpretation, Bible Translation, Homosexuality

Amateur Hour with Rachel Held Evans

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Until recently I was blissfully unaware of Rachel Held Evans. That is, until I encountered this column ostensibly dealing with the church and how Christian business people “should” react when confronted with an affront to their religion.  The offending passage that appeared on my Facebook wall was this:

The truth is, evangelical Christians have already “lost” the culture wars. And it’s not because the “other side” won or because evangelicals have failed to protect our own religious liberties. Evangelicals lost the culture wars the moment they committed to fighting them, the moment they decided to stop washing feet and start waging war.

Upon reading the article, I found it very flawed in its use of Scriptural exegesis, its applications, and even the understanding of what is at stake in the so-called culture wars. Furthermore, when I looked into the background of Mrs. Evans I found that she is not a biblical scholar. Yet, here was this column published by the New York Times. So what gives her special standing that the New York Times publishes her column?  She holds only an English Literature degree from Bryan College. She has published two books: Evolving in Monkey Town (which is about her religious life in Dayton, Tennessee – the home of the Scopes Monkey Trial) and A Year of Biblical Womanhood.  She is a Christian but she has become a liberal Christian who supports gay marriage and such things in contradiction to Church doctrine.  She is one of the                                                                                               Christians. She takes what she wants and leaves the rest. Her work is clearly amateur hour in research and journalism but particularly so regarding biblical studies.

The first thing that struck me about the quote above was that she is simply wrong.  The church has never stopped “washing feet”.  This is a false argument that seems to be popular in liberal circles. The church was never faced with an either/or situation. Nor did it abandon the “foot washing” she so admires.  If she had any source to backup this statement she did not provide it or any insight into why she imagines this is so.  The same hospitals are still funded by the church, as are missionaries, orphanages, hospice care, feeding the homeless, homeless shelters, and dozens more good works.

We have seen parachurch organizations rise up to take on the culture wars.  James Dobson founded Focus on the Family; Tony Perkins founded the Family Research Council; Jay Sekulow founded the American Center for Law and Justice. We could list dozens of similar ministries or para-ministry organizations that have been established to fight the cultural decay in our country.

What the church — and it’s people — did was take on the culture wars in addition to all of the other good works it was doing. Where she got her idea that the church somehow changed when confronted with the culture wars is a mystery.This is just the repetition of a liberal talking point which is designed to play upon the guilt of people in the Christian community.  I, for one, reject that guilt. Of all the institutions that have done damage to American culture, the Church is the least of these offenders. It has been the church and its people who have tried to hold things together and keep us on a proper and good course.

Perpetual Culture Wars

In fact, the modern culture wars were forced on the church by opponents who wished to rewrite the Bible, church doctrine, and social norms as well. Furthermore, what is gloriously ignored by liberal commentators such as Ms. Evans is the fact that the church has been fighting the culture wars since its inception 2,000 years ago!

Christianity has always been at war with the culture around it because that culture has always been pagan or heathen. The fact that the church has been successful in the long-term culture war has led to Western civilization and our own country’s existence. Both have been built on biblical principles, why should Christians sit by while those principles are undermined? There is no reason! This is just a liberal guilt ploy to which some non-analytically-thinking Christians are susceptible.

It always amazes me that liberals expect the church to just roll over and play dead whenever they wish to promote something that is both biblically perverse and hurtful to the national social fabric. Christians are part of the country, too, and they have every right to object to changes that they deem are hurtful to the people of the country. The culture wars gave us drugs,  free sex, cohabitation, abortion, and are now to the point of deeming two men equal to a man and woman in marriage (polyamory is not far down the street). The church knows that all this is both sinful and harmful to the individuals and to the country that supports such “Twilight Zone” behavior. Yet, according to liberals like RHE, we’re not supposed to get involved! We’re just to be good “foot washers”.  Well, if good foot washing had worked before the culture wars, then we wouldn’t have had the culture wars, right? She seems to live in some dreamy illusion that the church would have won the culture war if it didn’t engage in the culture wars. How do you win a battle that you do not fight?  That can only be described as logically deficient thinking. It is a strategy of defeat.

Craig and Katy Bennett are missionaries to Vanuatu my church supports. When Craig was at our church a few weeks ago he gave a lesson which included an illustration of a whole list of things that we would find repulsive. He mentioned primitive tribes who engaged in orgies for worship; who would throw a person down a well to drown as a sacrifice to their gods; brutal warriors who would kill their enemies and drink blood from their skulls.  Then he surprised everyone by saying, “These are probably the ancestors of most of you in this room. These were things that were done by the Angles and the Saxons.  What changed them? They clashed with the culture of Christianity.  The Church won them over from their wicked ways.”

I once had a professor in college who said, “If you can’t trust a man’s history how can you trust the man?” I don’t see how we can trust Mrs. Evans’ history.

I could go further into this and how the 60s radicals have infiltrated the university system, politics, the judiciary but I will leave that for another time.  Suffice it to say we are at what I believe is the crest of the radicals’ wave and like all wave crests, it will fall.

Put the Bible Down and Back Away Slowly

Of further concern to me was the way RHE handled Scripture.  She attempted to take some passages dealing with Roman law, Jews or Christians and apply them to the current debate over whether or not an American business owner should be forced to do work for someone when he finds it offensive to his deeply held religious beliefs.  But her parallels fail miserably.  Let me explain.

The main passage she relies on is Matthew 5:39b-48 which comes from the Sermon on  the Mount:

“If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you… Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

She relies on the example of a Roman soldier to illustrate how she thinks that Christians ought to respond to people with whom they do not wish to do business.  This shows her ineptitude with Scripture.

First, this is Roman law. Second, it did not compel a person to violate deeply held religious beliefs. Third, it was emphatically not persecution to Jews and Christians. Fourth, her application to 21st century American culture and politics is completely incompatible for private business transactions. Fifth, and perhaps most critical, is the fact that the omits a key verse-and-a-half which governs the illustration she loves to use. That passage is Matthew 5:38-39a.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person.

This passage has the famous law of lex talionis which deals with retributive justice.  If a person was injured by another party, that person had the right to fair and just compensation. Such compensation was usually in the form of a fine of some sort. The “eye for eye” statement simply means a “suitable compensation for the injury received”.  Then when we add verse 39 to it we see that the Christian is being wronged in some way.  The Common English Bible states it this way, “But I say to you that you must not oppose those who want to hurt you.”  So what is going on here?  Let me explain.

The first three examples of what hurting someone is like are given: one is a slap on the face; another is a lawsuit; the third is the Roman soldier.  All three of these are considered to be doing some wrong to the Christian for which he might retaliate in an appropriate measure. But Jesus tells them not to seek retributive justice – “fair compensation” – instead, they are to give more to the person who injured them than is asked or required!

Roman law compelling someone to carry a soldier’s bags was nothing new.  People did resent it, but it was viewed by the Romans as a civic duty owed by the people.  It would cost lost wages, that much is true, but it was not a violation of any religious belief. The Roman soldier did not make the person deny their God, eat unclean food, or make sacrifices to a pagan deity. That was not the purpose of the law.  Thus, compelling service cannot be considered persecution of either Jews or Christians! In that situation a  government member forced a member of the empire  to provide a legal civic duty.  That is not the relationship of a customer to a business either then or now.

Mrs. Evans cannot tell the difference between persecution and retributive justice.  Nor does she realize that nothing in the Sermon on the Mount teaches people to compromise their religious values!

Liberty or Tyranny?

The situation being discussed today is really fairly limited. Basically it deals with small businesses where the owner might be perceived as supporting the activity for which he is supplying his talents. This is particularly applicable to artistic services where the artist’s work may be considered an endorsement of their subject matter. Unlike the situation where the Roman soldier has the ability to force a temporary, defined and limited service to the government, today’s situation is about a private business person voluntarily negotiating a deal with another private party, a religious issue on the owner’s part arises, and there is no clear civic duty in play.1 These are crucial distinctions in the comparison.  There is nothing to force the business person to take on the transaction if a negotiated agreement cannot be reached for a said service. In fact, you can deny service by saying you are booked on that date or are on vacation or some other excuse. Where do we draw the line?  Suppose the proposed job fell on a significant religious day, should we be compelled to have an observant Jewish photographer work on the Sabbath or work on a feast day or work on an annual holy day? Should that man be forced to go to a pig farm and take photographs when he considers pigs to be unclean?  In a libertarian society the seemingly obvious answer would be no.  Frank Tuerk in his Cross Examined podcast provides a helpful answer: discriminate against behavior, not people.  Law is discriminatory about behavior. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed it took such a stance.  Race, religion, and national origin were not grounds for discrimination in the defined services.  Issues such as moral behavior were not addressed.

What too few people realize is that compulsory commerce is a form of slavery.  The liberal contingency is happy to interject the government into the equation to force private business owners to do what they want regarding their social agenda de jour. However, this means that we are changing the fundamental relationship of the business owner and customer.  The customer can now demand a service and the owner must comply despite any religious objections. At this extreme, this has moved from mutual agreement to government tyranny.  In fact, it borders on Fascism since the government is now the entity controlling local business deals. Entering into the contract is no longer optional. By opening the doors of your business you are forced to accept any and all “customers” unless you meet a very narrow band of exceptions or are crafty enough to deny offensive services on other grounds.

One of the businesses I’ve operated was a deejay business back in the 1980s. If I had been asked to provide my services for something like a KKK rally, I would have declined because I would not want to be associated with such ideology because it is wrong on multiple fronts, including religious ones.  But, under rules being constructed at this time, I would have been forced to provide services for the KKK rally simply because they asked me.  It would not allow me to direct them to another deejay service who might want to do the job. No, I would be forced into the work for no other reason than I was offered the job. “Offer”, however, would no longer be the right term: “demand”, “cajoled”, “forced”, or “under duress”  would be the right term. Pick your favorite. With such, we have created something we can call commerce slavery.

Imagine . . .

Imagine if the tables were turned. When you walked into a store at the mall the owner could demand that you buy something. In fact, he could define for you what you could buy even if you found it religiously objectionable.  A Muslim man who walked into a deli could be forced to buy a ham sandwich, for example, even though it is religiously offensive to him.  That would be a ridiculous world, and it is equally as ridiculous to force a private business owner to do business with someone he does not wish to do business with – for whatever reason, but especially for religious ones.

Play Along or Persecution?

It is also not clear to me how RHE thinks that simply playing along with something in violation of your conscience is a helpful ministry tool. Why should we respect someone who does whatever is put before him when it violates deeply held religious beliefs?  How deeply held can they be if they are ignored? In fact, she wishes to compare this to suffering persecution in the early church. But the church suffered because it did take a stand against the culture of its day. It suffered because of its religious stance in the culture wars of the first centuries. She doesn’t even understand what persecution really is.

She wishes to see some meaningful comparison in passages that say “love one’s enemy and pray for those who persecute you”.  Both of those terms, “enemy” and “persecute”, require that there be hostility toward you, the business owner!  In order for this to be the situation, you have to have taken a position in opposition to your enemy and persecutor.  That means, in fact, that you are standing on your religious values and not “playing along”.  It means that in spite of the fact people sue your bakery or photography studio, you still pray for them and love them.

RHE is also very oblivious to a topic I discussed in another article as to what religious persecution looks like in 21st century America. We have virtually eliminated physical suffering as a form of religious persecution, to our credit. What has replaced it is the legal form of religious persecution since we are a litigious society  and social bullying tactics. The “War on Christmas” and the “Happy Holidays” saying fall into these categories as do “In God We Trust” cases and crosses on memorials. So she again fails to see the larger picture or recognize how the face of persecution has changed in a free and civil country.

Of Sowing and Reaping

What the political left has been doing recently has people justifiably afraid for their religious liberties. The cases of a baker in New Mexico and a photography studio in Colorado who refused to provide services for homosexual ceremonies on religious grounds seemed to be ironclad. That is, until the courts ruled against them based on state laws. So the homosexual activists find themselves reaping what they have sown – and they don’t like it.

When people are forced to do something against their will, it causes a reaction against it. In this case, in a country where we are supposed to have religious liberty, we suddenly find that we are having it stripped away in favor of a liberal social agenda. So enshrining religious liberty into the state law seems to be the natural course of events.

Force is never a good tool for conversion. If the homosexual people in these cases had simply taken “no” for an answer and gone on to another baker or photographer, they would not have caused all the hostility and resentment that have led states to consider constructing legal countermeasures (countermeasures that apply to much more than just homosexual issues). They are the ones who are bringing discord into the public arena. In fact, if they would take the attitude that RHE wants the church to take, they would look at it as form of persecution and pray for their enemies. Somehow they are not asked to take the same stance as the church, even though many are ostensibly Christians. (The Colorado photography case is being appealed to the Supreme Court.)

In the article, RHE tries other scriptural references, such as paying your taxes to Caesar, as a means of supporting her assertion that Christians should simply provide the services without objection. Again, her analogy fails for the same reasons as before: it was Roman law, it did not address a private business negotiation between two people, it is wholly incompatible with today’s debate, and it was not a form of persecution – despite what she thinks.

As is typical with the New York Times, they don’t have any conservative writers. RHE has no discernible intellectual or academic credentials that make her a spokesperson on matters of the church, culture, or Bible. She’s literate and she can write.  She claims to be a Christian, yet she supports homosexual marriages in contradiction with historic Christian doctrine and in opposition to the Bible’s claim that homosexuality is a sin and marriage is for men and women. So she ignores what she doesn’t like in the Bible, claims by her own power that homosexuality is suddenly not a sin and moves on with her liberal social agenda to chide the church for not going along with it all. If she treated the laws of the state or the rules of a corporate office with such contempt she would be fired or arrested!  Such an irresponsible exegesis and application of the text of Scripture as RHE has demonstrated would have earned her an “F” on this paper in my university class. An informed and responsible editor would have shutdown this article before it shamefully came to publication. The fact that the NYT gives her prominence to flout her ignorance is a disgrace. But what do you expect? It’s the New York Times.

Amateur Hour is fun when you’re singing Karaoke.  But it is a disaster when it is applied to Scripture and used to shape public policy.

1.↩I recommend the following articles from the Heritage Foundation to get an orientation on the difficulty between civil liberties and anti-discrimination issues. Article One. Article Two. Article Three.

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The Louisiana Paraphrase

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The Bible carries any number of warningphil-robertson-p11 about how people will reject or deny God’s word. We have an example in the book of Jeremiah (36) where King Jehoiakim cut up and burned a letter from the prophet Jeremiah. We have an example in the Book of Acts where the apostles are called before the Jewish authorities and commanded not to speak in the name of Jesus any more. We also have from the apostle Paul in the letter of 2 Timothy a warning that people will not always listen to sound doctrine.

4:3 For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

And Jesus even warned us that if people dared to persecute him – their teacher and leader, they would surely be bold enough to persecute them, – his students. This is being carried out around the world on a daily basis causing Christians suffering and even costing some their lives. There’s nothing new under the sun in this regard.

Since the United States came on the scene, the Western world has been increasingly tolerant of various forms of religion. Our founding fathers were intent on that and it has been picked up and carried on to other Western countries. Because we don’t have to really, seriously suffer for our faith people often mock us when we say “There’s a war on Christmas”, “There’s a war to keep God out of schools and government”, we even see a certain form of persecution when people say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” I will grant you that this is not the same type of persecution Christians face around the world, but it is still an important type of persecution as well. This is because the United States is the center of worldwide Christianity. Just to give you one idea of how important it is, the Roman Catholic Church comprises about 24% of the U.S. population. It is the largest, single denomination we have here. But it is only about 6/100ths of a percent of the Catholic population worldwide. Nevertheless, it supplies 60% of the money to the Catholic church worldwide. When you look at other Christian-related numbers, such as missionary outreach, you still find the United States at the top of the list. America is the greatest single power in worldwide Christianity today, which is why the type of persecution we face here is particularly troublesome. It is aimed and designed to undermine Christianity and if it were to be successful, it would have a devastating impact on the world. There is no place to fill the vacuum that the United States would leave if its population were to turn away from God.

We have to measure the battles we have to fight in the context we have to fight them. We have succeeded in virtually eliminating physical religious persecution in our country. That is quite commendable. But what that has left us with is an intellectual battleground. We don’t force people to belong to a particular church – as was the case in Europe. That was the type of situation the Pilgrims fled. The question is not “which church do you belong to” anymore; it has become “do you belong to a church”?

The opposition to God has not gone away just because we have learned to live at peace with others of different religions. It still goes on. The Bible tells us we are in a spiritual warfare and the same spirit that hated the church in the 1st century still hates it in the 21st century. But the topography of the battlefield has shifted in our time. It has become common to subtly attack and undermine our morality, traditions, and religion by trying to expunge it, defame it, mock it, ridicule it in order to turn people away from Christianity.

Removing prayers from school – in fact, almost all religious education from school so that we can only teach the Bible as literature and just barely teach it then – was rightly seen as an attack on religion. Taking down manger scenes, removing crosses from memorials, removing the Ten Commandments from courthouses, suing to take “In God We Trust” off our money are all part of the cumulative goal of removing God from public life.

Political Correctness

Politically correct language is just another attempt to do the same thing. When the movement to substitute “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas” began it outraged people. In fact, saying “Happy Holidays” was seen as a term that branded you as one of the Christ-haters or secular-sellouts. It was a backlash of the common people to do less business with such places and it has been effective enough that companies began to revert their policies on this. Politically correct speech is an attempt to control the population by forcing us to use only “approved speech”. That means that someone has to set the standard for what is “approved speech”. The dominant force here seems to be social pressure from various special interest groups.

Since December 19th we have been engaged in a battle against Christianity waged by special interest groups and done on the terms of politically correct speech. On Friday, the A&E channel surrendered and restored Phil Robertson to his Duck Dynasty program. I don’t know how closely you followed this, but I know you couldn’t have missed it entirely.  Some people have downplayed this.  They look at other things going on in the government and around the world and can’t get excited about a duck hunter getting kicked off a TV show.  But they’re wrong.  In case you didn’t follow it, I want to outline a few points about it and explain to you why this was such a big deal and why you should care very, very deeply about it.

I’ve been watching the Duck Dynasty show since February of this year and I think it is one of the best shows on TV. I like it because I know guys like this. I like it because it is clean, funny, and these are God-fearing people who want to use the show as a platform for good family values and talking about Jesus. It is this last reason that I knew something like this was going to happen. You can’t be famous and preach or even speak to people about God without expecting a backlash. And I knew that, eventually, the self-appointed Politically Correct Police were going to jump on them for their faith.

Since the GQ magazine interview was made public, we have been treated to a glorious display of biblical ignorance, political correctness, and cultural collision. Phil Robertson managed to start what has been called a “controversy” by simply answering a question: What is sin?

What is sin?

You might think that is a reasonable question. After all, if you believe in sin and want to avoid being punished for sin, you should want to know what sin is and how to avoid it. In fact, you can do a quick evaluation on yourself by measuring your response to the question “what is sin”? If you thought it was a good question, you’re normal. If you got a little uncomfortable – perhaps fearing that your sin might become the point of discussion – you’re normal.

The subject of sin should make us all a little uncomfortable. The Bible is clear that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” This is a basic doctrine of Christianity. So our Christian life should not be about glorifying ourselves for how righteous we have become, but it should be about glorifying the God who made us righteous and helping others to come into that same relationship with God. But worldly people don’t want to hear such things. When you put anything ahead of God, you have expressed a love for worldly things and not for the ways of God.

1 John 2:15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father[d] is not in them. 16 For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. 17 The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

John gives us a threefold description of worldly sins: Lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. When you encounter people who are sold out to one or more of these sins then you can expect backlash. People who are deeply involved with sin don’t want to hear about it. These people have a reaction like Dracula to a cross in the old movies. This is exactly the reaction we’ve seen from people recently. Any of us in the business of religion should know this. Phil Robertson knew this. He permitted the UK Daily Mail exclusive access to his Bible study group this past Sunday. He told them: “I have made hundreds and hundreds of speeches and you can pick them apart and the center has always been Jesus Christ. Do many people get up and walk out? Yeah, all the time, do I hold it against them? No. Anybody can get up and stop listening. We are all just humans on this planet.” Then he added: “Jesus Christ was the most perfect being to ever walk this planet and he was persecuted and nailed to the cross, so please don’t be surprised when we get a little static.”

This is simple, biblical truth.

Some Silly Sayings

But some people have said silly and even disturbing things these past few days. We find some people have been genuinely undereducated about the Bible, others have a willful ignorance of Scripture, others know just enough to make themselves dangerous, and others are in open rebellion against the Bible. Piers Morgan of CNN is a well-educated man, ostensibly a Christian, but he has demonstrated he knows (or cares) next to nothing about the Bible. His comments have been very disturbing. He pulled up a video of a sermon Phil Robertson gave in 2010 and he deemed what Phil had to say as “racist, homophobic bigotry.” He said he doesn’t think the First Amendment should apply to “vile bigots” like Phil. What Piers didn’t recognize was that the clip he had was nothing more than Phil Robertson reading from the Bible. It was a colossal blunder that showed Piers Morgan really knows nothing of substance about the Bible. The words he claimed were so vile were nothing more than words of from Romans 1. Those were not Phil’s own words, they were words from God and Piers Morgan condemned them as hateful because he did not like what they said. It wasn’t politically correct. So Piers Morgan wants to rewrite the Bible and rewrite the Constitution to prevent a man from reading from the Bible. That is very, very disturbing.

Interestingly enough, I had a former student of mine at Johnson University who now works at Carson Newman post the same segment of video of Phil that Morgan had criticized. He then wrote, “WTF did I just hear?” So I wrote back, “You heard a man reading from Romans 1.” He wrote back, “[I]f that were true, and it’s not, Christianity would be dead in a generation. Thankfully it’s just a poor misreading of an ancient text.” Now here is a man who has had the benefit of a Bible College education who simply wants to rewrite 2,000 years of church doctrine because it suits him. He wants to dismiss what he doesn’t like by blaming the messenger. I’m reminded of the words of Thomas Sowell: “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.” To these men and others like them, the Bible doesn’t sound good because it is not politically correct. It doesn’t approve of their pet social issues. Again from the UK Daily Mail, Phil Robertson said this to his Bible study class last week: “I am just reading what was written over 2000 years ago. Those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom. All I did was quote from the scriptures, but they just didn’t know it. Whether I said it, or they read it, what’s the difference? The sins are the same, humans haven’t changed. If you give them the bad news, they’ll start kicking and screaming. But you love them more than you fear them, so you tell them.”

I really like that. It sums up the motivation of evangelism so well: “You love them more than you fear them, so you tell them.” But this is such a foreign concept to so many people that they just don’t understand. To borrow an idea from David Wheeler’s sermons earlier this year, we look like aliens to them. We have a genuine collision of cultures happening. The culture that calls people to forgiveness, righteousness, and sanctification clashes with the culture that is sinful, rebellious, and stubborn. Even some good, decent people don’t quite understand it.

Bill O’Reilly is a nice man. He has a popular show on Fox News Channel, but whenever I hear him comment on the Bible I want to claw my face off. Among the several silly things he said that reveal him as one who knows a little but not enough about the Bible was this: “Mr. Robertson, I believe, made a mistake by the condemnation line. It’s not about the Bible, or believing, or not believing in the Bible. It’s singling out a group, it could be any group, and saying to that group, ‘Hey, … you are not worthy in the eyes of the Lord, or in the eyes of God. You are not worthy because of who you are.’ So once you get that personal, once you get down and into that kind of a realm, problems arise.” Then turning to his guest, Laura Ingraham, he asked: “Do you think Robertson made a mistake in the condemnation line? See, that’s where I think he made his mistake. Right up to there, he was OK. But once he went in and said you are not going to go to heaven.” To her credit, Ingraham showed a good grasp of the Bible and of evangelical culture and she told him his thinking was wrong.

I don’t know what Bible Bill O’Reilly is reading that doesn’t have condemnation in it, but it’s not the real Bible! Maybe it is the expurgated version.  But the real Bible has lots of threats of condemnation in it!

Then, finally, the big issue on the table was addressed. O’Reilly stated that the decision to suspend Robertson was designed “to marginalize a Christian who has a big platform.” Ingraham replied, “They want him to shut up. It’s the new blacklist. If you don’t submit to their worldview, they will try to destroy you.” O’Reilly said, “There is no doubt about that.”

This is what Politically Correct language is designed to do – SHUT UP PEOPLE WHO DISAGREE WITH YOU. In this case, they want to shut up the Bible and anyone who dares to remind people of what the Bible actually says.

During the week I was also directed to a page called Rage Against the Minivan where a woman who is a family therapist spouted some of the same foolish, politically correct talk others had before her. What was disturbing to me about that is it came to me, again, by a former student who had gotten it from a university professor’s page. The professor (not a Bible professor) had originally approved of the article as the most balanced presentation he’d seen on the topic. There was nothing particularly balanced about it. It had several errors in thinking and about the Bible as well. I was sorry to see it was written by a fairly-well educated woman and that it was recommended by a professor. I was glad, however, to see another professor offering some correction on the matter.

Later I was directed to a commentary by a Youth Minister who was upset that homosexual teens commit suicide about three times more than other teens. He said that if he had to choose between being theologically correct and morally right, he would choose being morally right every time. When I read that I was sorry to see that his thinking was still so immature. It is possible to be theologically correct and morally right at the same time. In fact, if you are morally right you are also theologically correct. Morality comes from God. It comes from good theology.

There was also a couple of GLAAD representatives who called Phil “unchristian” for his comments. News Director, Ross Murray, wrote: “GQ Magazine’s profile of Phil Robertson included some of the vilest and most extreme statements uttered against LGBT people in a mainstream publication.” GLAAD spokesperson, Wilson Cruz, said “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe.” Both of these men are at best “wrong” and at worst “liars”. But their organization was the primary source of politically correct speech censorship out there. They were instrumental in causing A&E to drop Phil and for Cracker Barrel to pull some of the Duck Dynasty merchandise. Fortunately, the outcry was such that Cracker Barrel reversed its decision the next day and now A&E has done the same.

So many of these people made mistakes because they don’t know the Bible well enough or because they want the Bible to be different than it is. God forbid that Piers Morgan ever rewrites the Bible or the Constitution because you wouldn’t recognize either one of them when he got through with them.

This was all clearly an attempt to tell Christians to SHUT UP AND GO AWAY. Don’t remind us of Christian doctrine. We don’t like it! It is a good thing that this was not allowed to stand, but it can still have a chilling effect on others who might not dare speak out in fear of persecution. Phil Robertson did not need money or fame when the Duck Dynasty show started. He already had both. His family convinced him to do the show by telling him it would give him more opportunity to do what he wanted to do – preach about Jesus. And that is exactly what he is doing and so are the rest of the family members.

I was surprised to see Albert Mohler, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president, speculate that Phil probably didn’t sleep well that first night when he was suspended from the TV show. That simply shows how Mohler doesn’t really understand Phil. Phil quit making duck calls years ago. He is now a preacher and evangelist. He expects the sinful world to rebel against the Biblical message. His own words about “a little static” tell you that he was not surprised this happened and that he didn’t lose a minute of sleep over it. That is part and parcel of proclaiming the Gospel. As I mentioned at the beginning, the apostles were told to sit down and shut up by the Jewish authorities. They respectfully declined to do so.

Listen to what Phil had to say about himself: “I myself am a product of the ’60s; I centered my life around sex, drugs and rock and roll until I hit rock bottom and accepted Jesus as my Savior. My mission today is to go forth and tell people about why I follow Christ and also what the Bible teaches, and part of that teaching is that women and men are meant to be together. However, I would never treat anyone with disrespect just because they are different from me. We are all created by the Almighty and like Him, I love all of humanity. We would all be better off if we loved God and loved each other.”

If you want to take only one thing away from this sermon today, jot down “love God and love each other.” People in the world don’t think that is possible. They think that if you tell them they are sinners that you’re a “hater” of some sort. The truth of the matter is that you are a “lover” of their soul.

Fundamentalists

Another Politically Correct term that is used to try to discredit someone is to call them a “fundamentalist”. Because the term “fundamentalist” is supposed to imply that you are a “simpleton” you’re “non-sophisticated”, you can’t see the “gray” areas of life – everything is black and white; you’re probably uneducated and certainly not worth listening to on matters of social concern.

So Phil Robertson and his family are called “fundamentalists”. But this, again, shows us how little people who make that charge know about the Bible. It is the fundamental belief of all of Christianity that homosexuality is a sin (as it is in Islam and Judaism). That belief is not an odd or new belief. It did not come from some nutty religious leader in some obscure sect. You can’t blame it on a Jim Jones, or a David Koresh, or a Marshall Applewhite. In fact, you can’t even claim it is a doctrine developed by ignorant people or even by a conspiracy group with the Catholic church. No, this doctrine came directly from the Bible and it has been established Church doctrine for 2,000 years. It has been discussed and affirmed by the brightest minds in theology over the centuries. The doctrine itself is fundamental to Christianity – so much so – that whether you’re a backwoods Louisianian or a upper Manhattan Anglican it is the doctrine of your faith. But this is how the PC Police have tried to turn the language against Christians.

If we were talking about a sports team and we said “that coach is a fundamentalist” we would think that was a good thing. It meant the quarterback knew how to set up in the pocket, the basketball players knew how to shoot free throws, the hockey players knew how to keep their stick on the ice. Knowing the fundamentals to whatever you are doing is essential to your success.  And it is no different with our religious doctrines.

Coarse Language

One of the most universal comments even commentators friendly to Phil have made is to call his language “coarse” or “crude”. Unlike these, I contend that Phil Robertson’s comments were simple, straight, and to the point – just what you want from a backwoods man – and just what you should expect. They were not rude, crude, or coarse. The reactions of some of these commentators has not simply been to smack down politically correct speech as an abhorrent Stalinistic tactic to shut Christians up, but to agree to a softer form of Politically Correct tone. They don’t like the way Phil talked about sex. They wouldn’t have said it that way. Albert Mohler even tries to invoke the apostle Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and Romans as he says Phil’s mild use of medical terminology was “crude” and unnecessary. After all, if Paul didn’t have to use those terms, then Phil shouldn’t either. But Mohler and others overlook the fact that we are 2,000 years separated from Paul and that some things need to be said in our day that were not necessary to say in Paul’s day.  Phil was not vulgar, he did not use slang or even euphemisms to discuss sexual organs. He used strict medical terminology and yet so many of these people found that “too rough” for their tastes!

Most of these people are simply genteel and don’t prefer to discuss sexuality as part of polite chatter. Andrea Tantaros openly wished we could just not talk about sex at all – and I wish we could, too, but the homosexual activists and the sexual libertarian activists see to it every day that it is a topic always in front of us.

The language that Phil used was deeply disturbing to the homosexual activists because it shattered their public image. Phil dared to vaguely describe what takes place during male homosexual intercourse. We’re not supposed to talk about that. Instead we’re to listen to the PR talk the homosexual activists approve of about “love” and “equality”. The subject of anal intercourse is too graphic for public dialogue, but we’ll quietly ignore and condone it if we talk about “love” or “equality”. The homosexual activists can’t stand for the public to be reminded of the deviancy that homosexual intercourse requires. It’s not good for the cause. And for this reason, we need to be reminding people of the deviant nature of homosexuality and other sins as well. To allow sin to be cleaned up and normalized in our public dialogue is to shirk the Christian duty of reminding people about the vile nature of sinful acts. Christian speech could be a little more frank than it is and Phil is a good example of that approach. It is a bit of an awakening that our culture seems to need today.

The Wrong Venue

A number of people have criticized Phil for interviewing with GQ magazine because it is not a venue that would be friendly to him. I can’t imagine that he didn’t already know that. Anyone can preach to the choir. It’s easy to do. They’re convinced you’re right before you start. Besides, Jesus went to where the sinners were and told them what they needed to hear. If opening up to GQ wasn’t enough, Phil did it again by granting the UK Daily Mail exclusive access to his Bible study class last week. Again, this was not a particularly friendly organization he let in the door. But Phil is a preacher and he’s not one to avoid speaking truth in love to those who need to hear it.

We live in a world where many of the secular and barely-religious people don’t even realize anybody thinks that there are sexual sins at all! It’s jolly good for Phil to remind them of it. We do them no service by treating it lightly, glossing it over, or failing to discuss it from our pulpits.

Few preachers get this much national attention. Phil has opened a dialogue that will not soon go away. And it is a biblical message that people need to hear. People commit sins and there is forgiveness in Jesus Christ. Oddly enough, there is a segment of the world that wants to hear what the Bible has to say. Phil said, “We are a bunch of rednecks from Louisiana, but I am not uneducated, I have a degree from Louisiana Tech. ‘But this week I have been called an ignoramus. This week I have been asked, ‘Is this the first time you have brought up sin?’ I said, ‘Are you kidding? I have been traveling to and fro spreading this message.’” ‘Then he [was asked], “Well do you invite yourself to go and get your Bible and tell people what you are now sharing with us?” I said, ‘No they are inviting me.’”

That is essentially the same thing his son, Willie has said. There is a hunger for the Words of God in places of business. Willie frequently encounters very rich people who know they are missing something in their lives. They want to hear what he has to say.

Selective Offense

Sin can be a touchy subject. But what’s more is that the definition of sin that Phil gave included heterosexual sins as well as non-sexual sins. Many of the commentators were too unaware of the Bible to recognize this. His comments included fornication and adultery as well as bestiality. These are all sins that the Bible condemns. These are all sins that the Bible says will not allow a person to “inherit the kingdom of God.” Let me translate that for you, “go to heaven”. These are sins that keep you out of heaven. My apologies to Bill O’Reilly if the condemnation is too much for him. Phil was paraphrasing from 1 Corinthians 6

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men. Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

You might call that The Louisiana Paraphrase.  Or perhaps The Verse Heard ‘Round the World.  It is very close to a quotation.

The NIV puts it this way:

1 Cor. 6:9 Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men[a]10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

The category of “wrongdoers” is a broad category. It includes anything and everything that God would consider sin. After that we get just a brief breakdown of some of the types of sin in what is called a “vice list”. It’s not an all-inclusive list of sins, but just a few examples to make the point.
The “sexually immoral” is a broad category for all types of sexual sin, primarily heterosexual sin and it includes bestiality.
The “idolaters” are any pagan group regardless of sexual conduct.
The “adulterers” is a heterosexual group.
“Thieves” is a non-sexual group. The “greedy”, the “drunkards”, the “slanderers” the “swindlers” – all of these are people who will not “inherit the kingdom of God” and it has nothing to do with their sexual practice.

Closing Remarks

If you got nothing else out of this sermon, I hope you understand the importance of resisting the self-appointed Politically Correct Police. If we allow American Christianity to be shut up or or shut down, the whole world will suffer. We are up against an insidious enemy on an intellectual battlefield. The hearts and minds of millions of people here and around the world are at stake. It is a much more serious battle than people often think. It is more serious than taking Christ out of Christmas. It is about taking Christ out of the country. The world needs to hear the message of the Bible. It needs to know that there is such a thing as “sin” and that God has provided a remedy for it.

Some have called Phil Robertson “unchristian” which is absurd. The idea that it is unchristian to speak of sin when asked about what sin is, is simply bizarre. Being more charitable, Albert Mohler wrote, “Phil Robertson would have served the cause of Christ more faithfully if some of those comments had not rushed out.” I completely disagree. We are now having an open and frank discussion about homosexuality that we were not having before. The perverse nature of homosexual acts is being brought to public attention, the homosexual activist community is being exposed for its hateful bigotry, intolerance, and Stalinistic tactics, and the Bible’s teaching on sin is being talked about in places it would not normally have been talked about. It has been wall-to-wall on cable news shows. It has been the topic of sustained discussion on radio talk shows. It has been in print and all over the Internet.  Phil spoke of love and forgiveness while his opponents hurled the only hateful and vitriolic speech that has been heard today. Phil Robertson did the cause of Christ a tremendous service by saying what needs to be said and what needs to be heard in his simple, southern, backwoods style.

Phil Robertson has hit a nerve and people are confused as to why. I’ll tell you why. Because the people who watch Duck Dynasty are largely like the Robertson family. They go to church, they read their Bibles, they go to work, and they’re connected to the land through hunting, fishing, and agriculture. And they know when they’re core values are attacked.

The world can do what it wants. It can redefine marriage, it can legalize prostitution, it can call homosexuality normal, it can tell us abortion isn’t murder, but in the end God wins. Every time. It doesn’t matter how many times and how many ways you try to discredit or rewrite the Bible, what God has said is sin is still sin and will be sin into eternity.

The Bible has a lot of warnings about condemnation, but the verse that Phil Robertson quoted from to define sin has one more verse following it. It is a verse of hope for all the wrongdoers:

11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

There is hope. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of God when your time ends. And you don’t have to be. If you need a plan of action for the week,here’s one:
Step 1: Love God and love each other.
Step 2: Expect static.
Step 3: Repeat Step 1.

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A Quantum Vacuum Nothing for Christmas

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A QUANTUM VACUUM NOTHING FOR CHRISTMAS
By Lawrence Krauss and the Moral Supporters
To the tune of “Nuttin’ for Christmas”

LK: I broke my math on Bill Craig’s head.
MS: Nobody ever told me.
LK: That quantum vacuums are not nothing.
MS: You gotta be kidding me.
LK: I filled the place with words and rants,
Cashed my publisher’s advance,
Bought some big new brown floor mats,
Nobody ever told me.

Chorus
So I’m getting nothing for Christmas.
Melbourne and Brisbane went bad.
I’m getting nothing for Christmas,
But I think that nothing is rad.

LK: I tried to edit one email.
MS: You’ve got to be kidding me.
LK: Al Vilenkin snitched on me.
MS: We can’t take you seriously.
LK: Two plus two is five.
MS: So dumb!
LK: My buzzer is really plumb.
I’ll talk til my lips are numb.
Nobody’s gonna beat me.

Chorus
Cause I’m getting nothing for Christmas!
Quantum equations are fab!
Quantum vacuums are my Christmas!
They are quite unstable not drab.

LK: I don’t believe in a First Cause.
MS: You gotta be kidding me.
LK: I’d rather believe in Santa Claus.
MS: Are you kidding me?
LK: He checked his list not twice but thrice, couldn’t find me!
MS: But you’re so nice!
LK: I just want to put God on ice.
MS: Santa says he’s naughty.

Chorus
O, nothing is something for Christmas!
Christmas and nothing are grand!
From nothing comes something on some day,
I just hope it’s not something bad.

LK: I can’t stand philosophy.
MS: Now you’re telling me.
LK: Who can think that way? Not me!
MS: So think scientifically!
LK: All those arguments are bad!
MS: Who believes them?
LK: Undergrads!
MS: They’re so dumb with their iPads!
LK: They should all just believe me!

Chorus
O, I’m getting nothing for Christmas!
Dawkins and Denton are mad.
What’s wrong with nothing for Christmas?
Somehow they think I’m getting had.

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Killing the Duck that laid the Golden Egg

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The A&E channel seems content to kill the Duck that laid the Golden Egg for them. There’s nothing logical about disciplining Phil Robertson. He’s revived thDuck Dynasty Season 3e network but they don’t seem to care. They’re more concerned with being Politically Correct and siding with 2% of the population as opposed to the majority of the population watching the show.  Like many before them in Hollywood, they make choices that are against their best interest (see Michael Medved’s Hollywood vs. America).

Unlike some commentators (Albert Mohler, Bill O’Reilly, most of the gang at The Five, et al.) I contend that Phil Robertson’s comments were simple, straight, and to the point – just what you want from a backwoods man – and just what you should expect.  They were not rude, crude, or spoken in an inappropriate venue.  The reactions of some of these commentators has not simply been to smack down politically correct speech as an abhorrent Stalinistic tactic of the liberal left, but to agree to a softer form of PC tone. They don’t like the way Phil talked about sex. They wouldn’t have said it that way. Mohler even tries to invoke the apostle Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and Romans as he says Phil’s mild use of medical terminology was “crude” and unnecessary. After all, if Paul didn’t have to use those terms, then Phil shouldn’t either.  Mohler overlooks the fact that we are 2,000 years separated from Paul and that some things need to be said in our day that were not necessary to say in Paul’s day. Even Andrea Tantaros admitted she worries about saying or writing the wrong thing that is going to get her fired. Unwittingly, she admitted to living in a world of softer-toned Political Correctness. And to charge Phil with “crude” language is still this form of PC speech. Phil was not vulgar, he did not use slang or even euphemisms to discuss sexual organs. He used strict medical terminology and yet so many of these people found that offensive! What kind of world do they live in? Apparently one that finds medically terminology to be Politically Incorrect. How, then, are we supposed to talk about sexual organs and sexual behavior?

Most of these people are simply genteel and don’t prefer to discuss sexuality as part of polite chatter. Tantaros openly wished we could just not talk about sex at all – and I wish we could, too, but the homosexual activists and liberal sexual activists see to it every day that it is a topic always in front of us. A number of these good people also demonstrated how they are out of touch with real southerners and backwoods kind of people. They simply don’t quite understand us yet, though they’re on our side. They’re “subdivision kids” as my dad would say, or “yuppies” as Phil would say. But a tip-of-the-hat goes to Laura Ingraham who does understand better than most and tried to correct Bill O’Reilly in his way of thinking. She told him his way of thinking was wrong! And she was right.

The Stalinists of the Politically Correct community won’t tolerate anything other than the party line.  The rabid homosexual activist movement has sought to shut down opposition both secular and religious. There’s no sign it wants to stop, to negotiate, or to dialogue. It simply wants all opposition squashed. I warned my Canadian friends in 2001-2003 that the homosexuals there would not stop with simple marriage rights, they would make it a crime to speak against homosexuality and would eventually try to force the churches to perform homosexual marriages. Don’t expect them to stop evangelizing and proselytizing and agitating. They will not be appeased and they will not quit. Their most vocal and staunch opponent is the Church, therefore, it remains the #1 target – and Phil Robertson is a Church member, thus a target.

I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen. Phil’s comments on abortion were largely passed over by the liberal left. This or something like it was bound to happen because Phil is a Christian and he is an open spokesman for Jesus.  In fact, he initially refused to do the Duck Dynasty show because he was as famous as he wanted to be (and he was already rich). But what convinced him to do the show was that it would be a way for him to preach more – which is what he really wanted out of life at that time.  Any Christian should know that when you speak about sin to a sinful world you can expect backlash.  By the PC Stalinists count, Phil Robertson committed 4 Politically Correct sins. Firstly, he described what takes place during male homosexual intercourse. We’re not supposed to talk about that. Instead we’re to listen to talk the homosexuals activists approve of about “love” and “equality”.  The subject of anal intercourse is too graphic for public dialogue, but we’ll quietly ignore and condone it if we talk about “love” or “equality”.  The homosexual activists can’t stand for the public to be reminded of the deviancy that homosexual intercourse requires. It’s not good for the cause. And for this reason, we need to be reminding people of the perverse nature of homosexuality. To allow it to be cleaned up and normalized in our public dialogue is to shirk the duty of reminding people about the vile nature of sinful acts. They go against the natural and normal functions of the body. Christian speech could be a little more frank than it is and Phil is a good example of that approach.

Secondly, Phil touched on the topic of basic biology 101 – the male/female body design. We are supposed to ignore that, too. We can teach sex ed in school and all of the various liberal perversions of sex in school, but we dare not be reminded that the male and female body are designed for complementary compatibility.  This, too, undermines the liberal cause because it injects basic purpose-driven design into the homosexual dialogue. The homosexual activists would have us pay no attention to basic physiology. They want us to think of “love” and “equality” not “utility” and “design” (much less a Creator who designed us for a certain utility!).  So, while the homosexual activists and the sexual liberals would have us believe that the main purpose of the sexual organs is for recreational entertainment, the fact of the matter is they are designed for the purpose of procreating. But we’re asked to ignore that basic function so that homosexual activists can feel “normal” since sex is all about “fun” and not about spawning new life.

Thirdly, Phil paraphrased the Bible’s teaching on the subject of sin. Like many people, he sees homosexuality as a severe deviance in human behavior. It is 180 degrees out of phase. It requires intercourse in orifices that were not designed for such. It completely violates what Phil considers God’s intention was at mankind’s creation.  So Phil begins there and expands on to other sexual sins (bestiality, fornication and/or adultery) all of which are sins by biblical standards. He further goes on to list other non-sexual sins as well, which is overlooked by most. Additionally, he did not equate homosexuality with bestiality. The biblically ignorant might think so, but both fall under the category of “sexual sins” in the Bible. Furthermore, the list of sins that Phil gave is not one of his own concoction. They’re all biblical sins. So his answer was to list sins that the Bible condemns and promises to punish with hellfire and damnation. These can’t even be properly qualified as “his” opinion as it was God who expressed them first in Scripture and they’ve been Church doctrine ever since.  Phil is siding with God on these matters.  But the homosexual activists can’t allow the Bible into the conversation because it convicts them of their sin and prompts others to recall the Divine morality they so wish to ignore (remember “love” and “equality”?).

The oft-used description of Phil and his family a “fundamentalists” today is also ridiculous. It is the fundamental belief of all of Christianity that homosexuality is a sin (as it is in Islam and Judaism). Their belief is not an odd or new belief. It did not come from some nutty religious leader in some obscure sect. It came directly from the Bible and it has been established Church doctrine for 2,000 years. The doctrine itself is fundamental whether you’re a backwoods Louisianian or a upper Manhattan Roman Catholic.

Fourthly, Phil dared to say that homosexuality was illogical behavior. This is so obvious based on history and biology that it should draw no reaction whatsoever. But the Twilight Zone we live in today tries to tell us that right is wrong, up is down, and that male-male anal intercourse is no different than heterosexual intercourse (remember “love” and “equality” not “sin” or “perversity”).  If a person had an extension cord with two male ends and they were trying to plug the two ends together, we would seriously question their sanity. Yet we are being asked to take two men or two women and declare them normal so they can have sex with each other. Perhaps we should also declare that the double-male extension cord is “normal” so we can use it. Neither makes any sense. Both are highly illogical.

A number of people have criticized Phil for interviewing with GQ,  but Jesus went to where the sinners were and told them what they needed to hear. Phil is a preacher and he’s not one to avoid speaking truth to those who need to hear it. We live in a world where many of the secular and barely-religious people don’t even realize anybody thinks homosexuality is a sin. It’s jolly good for Phil to remind them of it. We do them no service by lightly treating it,  glossing it over, or failing to discuss it from our pulpits. Few preachers get this much national attention. Phil has opened a dialogue that will not soon go away.

Some people (like Mohler) speculated that Phil didn’t sleep well last night. I contend that he did because he doesn’t need the Duck Dynasty TV show or A&E to bring him riches or fame. He had both before the show. He is content with who he is, what he says, and what he does. Reactions that swirl around him might amaze him, but so long as he is at peace with God he is at peace with himself.

Some have called Phil “unchristian” today which is as absurd as is the homosexuality he spoke of. The idea that it is unchristian to speak of sin when asked about what sin is, is simply bizarre. Being more charitable, Albert Mohler wrote, “Phil Robertson would have served the cause of Christ more faithfully if some of those comments had not rushed out.” I completely disagree. We are now having an open and frank discussion about homosexuality that we were not having before. The perverse nature of homosexual acts is being brought to public attention, the homosexual activist community is being exposed for its hateful bigotry, intolerance, and Stalinistic tactics, and the Bible’s teaching on sin is being talked about in places it would not normally have been talked about. Phil spoke of love and forgiveness while his opponents hurled the only hateful and vitriolic speech that has been heard today.  Phil Robertson did the cause of Christ a tremendous service by saying what needs to be said and what needs to be heard in his simple, southern, backwoods style.