Divine Simplicity Focus on the things that matter…sweep aside the things that don't.

The Stoning of St. Stephen
by Bernardo Daddi (1324)

Over the past several days I’ve heard and read a number of Christians expressing their dismay over the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling making gay marriage the law of the land. The decision should not have come as a shock to anyone. The vote was only the affirmation of a social movement that has been quickly gathering speed for at least a decade.

What the vote did succeed in doing was to remove any remaining doubt that America has entered a post-Christian era of its history. Christians are now a minority with diminishing cultural and political influence. Whether or not we become a hated minority will be determined by our actions.

Gallup conducts a poll on American morals and beliefs each May. Polling data from the last decade indicate a significant shift to the left on a number of controversial social issues, including divorce, abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, gay marriage and human embryonic stem cell research. This shift is, at least in part, a product of the growing wave of moral relativism that has permeated the America media and many American Christian denominations at least since the free love movement of the 1960’s and perhaps earlier.

The term describes a paradigm shift from the completeness of Christian Scripture to so-called progressive revelation. Relativism insists that the Scriptures did not fully provide theological, legal, moral, scientific, medical and other knowledge from the beginning. Rather, God gradually reveals new truths over time whenever humanity is capable of receiving it.

This philosophy is splitting many mainstream Christian denominations today through a continual reinterpretation of the scriptures that increasingly waters down God’s word to the point it becomes socially irrelevant. Moral relativism enables the social justification of anything and everything, from immodest clothing and casual sex to the extremes of abortion, euthanasia and even pagan religions.

I would caution advocates of social change in America, on the left and right, to remember that freedom is not the ability to do whatever you please. That is the definition of anarchy. Freedom is the ability for people to coexist by following a set of rules based upon an accepted moral code. If morals in America are not to be based upon Christian beliefs, then on whose beliefs will they be based? This discussion has barely begun.

Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away;
for truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter.
Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey.
                                          Isaiah 59:14-15

The Rev. Franklin Graham has expressed concern that the Supreme Court ruling will lead to Christian persecution. Perhaps he is correct and perhaps not. Christians wishing to know why the table has turned against them so quickly need look no farther than their own houses. It happened, as God says in the first chapter of the book of Haggai, “Because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house.” Christians should get their own act together before worrying about what the Supreme Court is doing.

We Christians are free to blame anyone we choose for American society’s woes, but we should start by taking a good look in the mirror. We bear a good deal of the blame. Many of today’s social and cultural problems could be reduced and in some cases eliminated if Christians would just start living like Christ taught us.

Once a person accepts God’s gift of salvation by placing faith in Christ as his personal Savior, something important happens. Like it or not, that individual becomes a walking billboard for Christ to all of the unbelievers he knows. What unbelievers see in this Christian’s behavior serves to either honor or dishonor Christ. Does the Christian strive to be more Christ-like, as the Bible teaches, or does he simply fall in and conform to the secular world’s pursuit of wealth, position, power and other forms of self-gratification? A Christian’s behavior should reflect the Gospel to unbelievers—actions speak louder than words.”

The persecution of Christians in America might come someday. To some degree I suppose it has already begun. I’ve spoken with numerous Christians who say they dare not mention their faith at work for fear of losing their jobs. Christians, if we don’t change, could someday become a hated minority, just as the Jews were hated in Nazi Germany. Some will inevitably shrink away in public; hiding their faith and becoming sort of “closet Christians.” Others might ignore Christ’s example and turn militant.

As I wrote last October, Christianity has historically endured its greatest tests and proven strongest and most effective when operating from a position of weakness within society as a whole.  Jesus was the perfect example of this. The son of God allowed Himself to be crucified, and in so doing took all of the sins of mankind upon himself. In all of history there is no greater example of love than this.

What Christians in America have today is an opportunity—not an opportunity to debate or reverse the court’s decision. It is an opportunity to show love. We can follow the recent example of many of the family members of victims of Charleston Emanuel AME Church shootings; they publicly forgave the shooter. It is not a time for erecting barriers. We should be reaching out in love to those who disagree with us. We can do this without sacrificing our beliefs or principles.

Around 312 A.D, during the reign of Emperor Constantine, Rome recognized Christianity as a legal religion.   This remarkable feat, going from persecuted underground church to a legal religion recognized by the Empire, was accomplished not through violent revolution, but by years of adhering to the tenets of the faith while suffering terrible persecution.

“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”
                         ―James Russell Lowell