Written by Megan Basham

In September, Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer interviewed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on his podcast, “Church Leadership” about why Christians who want to obey Christ’s command to love their neighbors should get the Covid vaccine and avoid indulging in misinformation.

For those not familiar with Stetzer, he’s not just a religious liberal arts professor and this wasn’t just another dime-a-dozen pastorly podcast. To name just a few of his past and present titles in the evangelical world, Stetzer is also the executive director of the Billy Graham Center and the editor-in-chief of Outreach media group. He was previously an editor at Christianity Today and an executive director at LifeWay, one of the largest religious publishers in the world. That’s to say nothing of the dozen-plus books on missions and church planting he’s authored.

Which is why, when Stetzer joined a line of renowned pastors and ministry leaders lending their platforms to Obama-appointee Collins, the collaboration was noteworthy.

During their discussion, Collins and Stetzer were hardly shy about the fact that they were asking ministers to act as the administration’s go-between with their congregants. “I want to exhort pastors once again to try to use your credibility with your flock to put forward the public health measures that we know can work,” Collins said. Stetzer replied that he sometimes hears from ministers who don’t feel comfortable preaching about Covid vaccines, and he advises them, in those cases, to simply promote the jab through social media.

“I just tell them, when you get vaccinated, post a picture and say, ‘So thankful I was able to get vaccinated,’” Stetzer said. “People need to see that it is the reasonable view.”

Their conversation also turned to the subject of masking children at school, with Collins noting that Christians, in particular, have been resistant to it. His view was firm—kids should be masked if they want to be in the classroom. To do anything else is to turn schools into super spreaders. Stetzer offered no pushback or follow-up questions based on views from other medical experts. He simply agreed.

The most crucial question Stetzer never asked Collins however, was why convincing church members to get vaccinated or disseminating certain administration talking points should be the business of pastors at all.

Christians and Conspiracy Theories

Stetzer’s efforts to help further the NIH’s preferred coronavirus narratives went beyond simply giving Collins a softball venue to rally pastors to his cause. He ended the podcast by announcing that the Billy Graham Center would be formally partnering with the Biden administration. Together with the NIH and the CDC it would launch a website, coronavirusandthechurch.com, to provide clergy Covid resources they could then convey to their congregations.

Much earlier in the pandemic, as an editor at evangelicalism’s flagship publication, Christianity Today (CT), Stetzer had also penned essays parroting Collins’ arguments on conspiracy theories. Among those he lambasted other believers for entertaining, the hypothesis that the coronavirus had leaked from a Wuhan lab. In a now deleted essay, preserved by Web Archive, Stetzer chided, “If you want to believe that some secret lab created this as a biological weapon, and now everyone is covering that up, I can’t stop you.”

It may seem strange, given the evidence now emerging of NIH-funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, to hear a church leader instruct Christians to “repent” for the sin of discussing the plausible supposition that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory. This is especially true as it doesn’t take any great level of spiritual discernment — just plain common sense — to look at the fact that Covid first emerged in a city with a virology institute that specializes in novel coronaviruses and realize it wasn’t an explanation that should be set aside too easily. But it appears Stetzer was simply following Collins’ lead.

Only two days before Stetzer published his essay, Collins participated in a livestream event, co-hosted by CT. The outlet introduced him as a “follower of Jesus, who affirms the sanctity of human life” despite the fact that Collins is on record stating he does not definitively believe, as most pro-lifers do, that life begins at conception, and his tenure at NIH has been marked by extreme anti-life, pro-LGBT policies. (More on this later).

But the pro-life Christian framing was sure to win Collins a hearing among an audience with deep religious convictions about the evil of abortion. Many likely felt reassured to hear that a likeminded medical expert was representing them in the administration.

During the panel interview, Collins continued to insist that the lab leak theory wasn’t just unlikely but qualified for the dreaded misinformation label. “If you were trying to design a more dangerous coronavirus,” he said, “you would never have designed this one … So I think one can say with great confidence that in this case the bioterrorist was nature … Humans did not make this one. Nature did.”

It was the same message his subordinate, Dr. Anthony Fauci, had been giving to secular news outlets, but Collins was specifically tapped to carry the message to the faithful. As Time Magazine reported in Feb. 2021, “While Fauci has been medicine’s public face, Collins has been hitting the faith-based circuit…and preaching science to believers.”

The editors, writers, and reporters at Christian organizations didn’t question Collins any more than their mainstream counterparts questioned Fauci.

Certainly The Gospel Coalition, a publication largely written for and by pastors, didn’t probe beyond the “facts” Collins’ offered or consider any conflicts of interest the NIH director might have had before publishing several essays that cited him as almost their lone source of information. As with CT, one article by Gospel Coalition editor Joe Carter linked the reasonable hypothesis that the virus might have been human-made with wilder QAnon fantasies. It then lectured readers that spreading such ideas would damage the church’s witness in the world.

Of course, Stetzer and The Gospel Coalition had no way of knowing at that point that Collins and Fauci had already heard from leading U.S. and British scientists who believed the virus had indeed escaped from a Chinese lab. Or that they believed it might be the product of gain-of-function engineering, possibly with funding from the NIH itself. Nor could they have predicted that emails between Collins and Fauci would later show the pair had a habit of turning to friendly media contacts (including, it seems, Christian media contacts) to discredit and suppress opinions they didn’t like, such as questioning Covid’s origins and the wisdom of masks and lockdowns.

What Stetzer and others did know was that one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the world was calling on evangelical leaders to be “ambassadors for truth.” And they were happy to answer that call.

The question was, just how truthful was Collins’ truth?

Evangelicals of a Feather

Stetzer, CT, and The Gospel Coalition were hardly alone in uncritically lending their sway over rank-and-file evangelicals to Collins. The list of Christian leaders who passed the NIH director their mics to preach messages about getting jabs, wearing masks, and accepting the official line on Covid is as long as it is esteemed.

One of the most noteworthy was the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), an organization funded by churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.

While a webinar featuring Collins and then-ERLC-head Russell Moore largely centered, again, on the importance of pastors convincing church members to get vaccinated, the discussion also moved on to the topic of masks. With Moore nodding along, Collins held up a basic, over-the-counter cloth square, “This is not a political statement,” he asserted. “This is not an invasion of your personal freedom…This is a life-saving medical device.”

Even in late 2020, the claim was highly debatable among medical experts. As hematologist-oncologist Vinay Prasad wrote in City Journal this month, public health officials like Collins have had a truth problem over the entire course of Covid, but especially when it comes to masks. “The only published cluster randomized trial of community cloth masking during Covid-19,” Prasad reported, “found that…cloth masks were no better than no masks at all.” [emphasis mine].

At this point, even the CDC is backing away from claims that cloth masks are worth much of anything.

Yet none of the Christian leaders platforming Collins evidently felt it was worth exploring a second opinion. And the list of pastors who were willing to take a bureaucrat’s word that matters that could have been left to Christian liberty were instead tests of one’s love for Jesus goes on.

Former megachurch pastor Tim Keller’s joint interview with Collins included a digression where the pair agreed that churches like John MacArthur’s, which continued to meet in-person despite Covid lockdowns, represented the “bad and ugly” of good, bad, and ugly Christian responses to the virus.

During Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren’s special broadcast with Collins on behalf of Health and Human Services, he mentioned that he and Collins first met when both were speakers for the billionaires and heads of state who gather annually in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. They reconnected recently, Warren revealed, at an “off-the-record” meeting between Collins and “key faith leaders.” Warren did not say, but one can make an educated guess as to who convened that meeting and for what purpose, given the striking similarity of Collins’ appearances alongside all these leading Christian lights.

Once again, Warren and Collins spent their interview jointly lamenting the unlovingness of Christians who question the efficacy of masks, specifically framing it as a matter of obedience to Jesus. “Wearing a mask is the great commandment: love your neighbor as yourself,” the best-selling author of “The Purpose-Driven Life” declared, before going on to specifically argue that religious leaders have an obligation to convince religious people to accept the government’s narratives about Covid.

“Let me just say a word to the priests and pastors and rabbis and other faith leaders,” he said. “This is our job, to deal with these conspiracy issues and things like that…One of the responsibilities of faith leaders is to tell people to…trust the science. They’re not going to put out a vaccine that’s going to hurt people.”

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that government does have a record of putting out vaccines that “hurt people,” is it truly the pastor’s job to tell church members to “trust the science?” Is it a pastor’s job to slyly insult other pastors who chose to handle shutdowns differently, as Warren did when he quipped that his “ego doesn’t require” him to “have a live audience to speak to.”

And still the list goes on.

The same week MacArthur’s church was in the news for resisting California Governor Gavin Newsom orders to keep houses of worship closed, Collins participated in an interview with celebrated theologian N.T. Wright.

During a discussion where the NIH director once again trumpeted the efficacy of cloth masks, the pair warned against conspiracies, mocking “disturbing examples” of churches that continued meeting because they thought “the devil can’t get into my church” or “Jesus is my vaccine.” Lest anyone wonder whether Wright experienced some pause over lending his reputation as a deep Christian thinker to Caesar’s agent, the friends finished with a guitar duet.

Even hipster Christian publications like Relevant, whose readers have likely never heard of Collins, still looked to him as the foundation of their Covid reporting.

Throughout all of it, Collins brought the message to the faithful through their preachers and leaders: “God is calling [Christians] to do the right thing.”

And none of those leaders thought to question whether Collins’ “right thing” and God’s “right thing” must necessarily be the same thing.

Why not? As Warren said of Collins during their interview: “He’s a man you can trust.”

A Man You Can Trust

Perhaps the evangelical elites’ willingness to unhesitatingly credit Collins with unimpeachable honesty has something to do with his rather Mr. Rogers-like appearance and gentle demeanor. The establishment media has compared him to “The Simpson’s” character Ned Flanders, noting that he has a tendency to punctuate his soft speech with exclamations of “oh boy!” and “by golly!”

Going by his concrete record, however, he seems like a strange ambassador to spread the government’s Covid messaging to theologically conservative congregations. Other than his proclamations that he is, himself, a believer, the NIH director espouses nearly no public positions that would mark him out as any different from any extreme Left-wing bureaucrat.

He has not only defended experimentation on fetuses obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it. Among the priorities the NIH has funded under Collins — a University of Pittsburgh experiment that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the harvested organs of aborted, full-term babies. Some doctors have even charged Collins with giving money to research that required extracting kidneys, ureters, and bladders from living infants.

He further has endorsed unrestricted funding of embryonic stem cell research, personally attending President Obama’s signing of an Executive Order to reverse a previous ban on such expenditures. When Nature magazine asked him about the Trump administration’s decision to shut down fetal cell research, Collins made it clear he disagreed, saying, “I think it’s widely known that the NIH tried to protect the continued use of human fetal tissue. But ultimately, the White House decided otherwise. And we had no choice but to stand down.”

Even when directly asked about how genetic testing has led to the increased killing of Down Syndrome babies in the womb, Collins deflected, telling Beliefnet, “I’m troubled [by] the applications of genetics that are currently possible are oftentimes in the prenatal arena…But, of course, in our current society, people are in a circumstance of being able to take advantage of those technologies.”

When it comes to pushing an agenda of racial quotas and partiality based on skin color, Collins is a member of the Left in good standing, speaking fluently of “structural racism” and “equity” rather than equality. He’s put his money (or, rather, taxpayer money) where his mouth is, implementing new policies that require scientists seeking NIH grants to pass diversity, equity, and inclusion tests in order to qualify.

To the most holy of progressive sacred cows — LGBTQ orthodoxy — Collins has been happy to genuflect. Having declared himself an “ally” of the gay and trans movements, he went on to say he “[applauds] the courage and resilience it takes for [LGBTQ] individuals to live openly and authentically” and is “committed to listening, respecting, and supporting [them]” as an “advocate.”

These are not just the empty words of a hapless Christian official saying what he must to survive in a hostile political atmosphere. Collins’ declaration of allyship is deeply reflected in his leadership.

Under his watch, the NIH launched a new initiative to specifically direct funding to “sexual and gender minorities.” On the ground, this has translated to awarding millions in grants to experimental transgender research on minors, like giving opposite-sex hormones to children as young as eight and mastectomies to girls as young as 13. Another project, awarded $8 million in grants, included recruiting teen boys to track their homosexual activities like “condomless anal sex” on an app without their parents’ consent.

Other than his assertions of his personal Christian faith, there is almost no public stance Collins has taken that would mark him out as someone of like mind with the everyday believers to whom he was appealing.

How did Collins overcome all this baggage to become the go-to expert for millions of Christians? With a little help from his friends, who were happy to stand as his character witnesses.

Keller, Warren, Wright, and Stetzer all publicly lauded him as a godly brother.  When presenting Collins to Southern Baptists, Moore gushed over him as the smartest man in a book club he attends that also includes, according to Time Magazine, such luminaries of the “Christiantelligentsia” as The Atlantic’s Pete Wehner and The New York Times’ David Brooks.

In October, even after Collins’ funding of the University of Pittsburgh research had become widely known, Moore continued to burnish his friend’s reputation, saying, “I admire greatly the wisdom, expertise, and, most of all, the Christian humility and grace of Francis Collins.” That same month, influential evangelical pundit David French deemed Collins a “national treasure” and his service in the NIH “faithful.” Former George W. Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson struck the most poetic tone in his effusive praise, claiming that Collins possesses a “restless genius [that] is other-centered” and is a “truth-seeker in the best sense.”

Except, apparently, when those others are aborted infants or gender-confused children and when that truth pertains to lab leaks or gain-of-function funding.

Since news began breaking months ago that Collins and Fauci intentionally used their media connections to conspire to suppress the lab-leak theory, none of the individuals or organizations in this story has corrected their records or asked Collins publicly about his previous statements. Nor have they circled back with him to inquire on record about revelations the NIH funded gain-of-function coronavirus research in Wuhan. They also haven’t questioned him on the increasing scientific consensus that cloth masks were never very useful.

The Daily Wire reached out to Stetzer, Keller, Wright, Warren, Moore, and French to ask if they have changed their views on Collins given recent revelations. None responded.

Francis Collins has been an especially successful envoy for the Biden administration, delivering messages to a mostly-Republican Christian populace who would otherwise be reluctant to hear them. In their presentation of Collins’ expertise, these pastors and leaders suggested that questioning his explanations as to the origins of the virus or the efficacy of masks was not simply a point of disagreement but sinful. This was a charge likely to have a great deal of impact on churchgoers who strive to live lives in accordance with godly standards. Perhaps no other argument could’ve been more persuasive to this demographic.

This does not mean these leaders necessarily knew that the information they were conveying to the broader Christian public could be false, but it does highlight the danger religious leaders face when they’re willing to become mouth organs of the government.

What we do know about Collins and his work with Fauci is that they have shown themselves willing to compromise transparency and truth for PR considerations. Thus, everything they have told the public about the vaccines may be accurate and their message a worthy one for Christians. But their credibility no longer carries much weight. It would’ve been better had the evangelical establishment never platformed Collins at all and shipwrecked their own reputations to showcase their lofty connections to him.

While these evangelical leaders were warning about conspiracy theories, Collins was waging a misinformation campaign himself — one these Christian megaphones helped further.

Why they did it is a question only they can answer. Perhaps in their eagerness to promote vaccines, they weren’t willing to offer any pushback to Collins’ other claims. Certainly, the lure of respect in the halls of power has proved too great a siren call for many a man. Or perhaps it was simply that their friend, the NIH director, called on them for a favor. If so, a friend like Collins deserved much, much more scrutiny.

There’s an instructive moment at the end of Warren‘s interview with Collins. The pastor misquotes Proverbs 4, saying, “Get the facts at any price.”

That, of course, is not what the verse says. It says get wisdom at any price. And it was wisdom that was severely lacking when so many pastors and ministry heads recklessly turned over their platforms, influence, and credibility to a government official who had done little to demonstrate he deserved them.

This article was originally published by The Daily Wire, which is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. 

While theologians Dr. Denny Burk, Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon, Dr. John Piper, and Pastor Douglas Wilson say Christians should not use incorrect pronouns when referring to people who pretend to be the sex they aren’t, increasing numbers of purportedly theologically orthodox Christians believe Christians should use them. They believe that refusing to use “preferred pronouns” will result in “trans”-identifying persons severing relationships. And to “woke” theologians and pastors, maintaining relationships supersedes truth.

Christian capitulation to sin will always be accompanied by theological rationalizations that will sound superficially reasonable. In a recent episode of his “Ask Me Anything” podcast, JD Greear, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, proffered such rationalizations as he revealed that he uses incorrect pronouns when referring to “trans”-identifying persons. He argued that his complicity with the false and destructive “trans” ideology constitutes “generosity of spirit,” which he contrasts with “truth-telling.” Greear also claimed that Preston Sprinkle, president of the Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender, does likewise.

Before going further, I want to note that several of the quotes cited by Greear and to which I will be responding appear to be wrongly attributed by Greear to Sprinkle. These incorrectly attributed quotes come instead from a paper by Gregory Coles who identifies as a “celibate, gay Christian” and is part of the celibate, “gay” Christian movement criticized by many, including Denny Burk who wrote this about Coles’ memoir:

Coles seems to equate differences about homosexual immorality with differences that Christians have about second order doctrines. But how can homosexual immorality be treated in this way when the Bible says that those who commit such deeds do not inherit the kingdom of God.

Coles doesn’t merely say Christians may use incorrect pronouns. In his paper titled, “What Pronouns Should Christians Use for Transgender People,” which is littered with PC language created by the “LGBTQ” community to advance its ideology, Coles argues Christians should use incorrect pronouns:

… [T]he most biblical response to transgender people’s pronouns is a posture of unequivocal pronoun hospitality. That is, I believe that all Christians can and should use pronouns that reflect the expressed gender identities of transgender people, regardless of our views about gender identity ethics. If a person identifies herself to you as “she,” I hope you will consider it an act of Christ-like love to call her “she” out of respect, whether or not you believe that the way she expresses her gender identity is honoring to God.

Astonishingly, Coles grounds his defense of appeasement “Christ-like pronoun hospitality” in this passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:

Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

Coles applies this passage to the current pronoun mandates, appealing also to “respect” to justify appeasement:

When we apply Paul’s linguistic approach to the pronouns we use about transgender people, I believe we arrive at a posture of pronoun hospitality: a willingness to accommodate the pronouns of our transgender neighbors regardless of our own views about the Christian ethics of gender identity. That is, when we order our language toward making sure that the truth of the gospel can be heard in an understandable way by those around us, we are compelled to use pronouns in a way that effectively communicates our respect for transgender people, even if we still believe that followers of Jesus are called to express their gender identity in accordance with their appointed sex.

If, instead of referring to “our own views about the Christian ethics of gender identity,” Coles had referred to “the truth of Christian ethics regarding gender identity,” the problem with his worldview would become clearer. Imagine a Christian saying, “We should be willing to use the pronouns of our transgender neighbors regardless of the truth of Christian ethics regarding gender identity.”

Does the anger of “trans”-cultists toward Christians who refuse to mis-sex people signify lack of understanding or does it signal rebellion? Is it an act of respect to concede to demands to call someone something that is an integral part of an ideology that denies reality, affirms sin as good, and grievously harms both individuals and society?  Can true respect—like true biblical love—ever entail denial or even the appearance of denial of another person’s embodiment as male or female?

Coles’ interpretation of the passage in Corinthians is at odds with that of theologian Thomas Schreiner:

Cultural flexibility, however, is not infinitely elastic. For instance, Paul does not compromise on moral norms or on fundamental truths of the gospel.

Theologian Paul E. Garland shares a similar understanding:

[Paul] does not think that fundamental and distinctive Christian demands are negotiable depending on the circumstances. He did not eat idol food in order to become “as one  without the law to those without the law.” He did not tone down his assault on idolatry to avoid offending idolaters or curry favor with them. His accommodation has nothing to do with watering down the gospel message, soft-pedaling its ethical demands.

Evidently, Coles doesn’t view Genesis 1:27 (“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”) or Deuteronomy 22:5 (“A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.) as fundamental, distinctive, and non-negotiable.

It should trouble Coles, Greear, and Sprinkle that they are participants in what New Testament scholar N.T. Wright describes as a new and damaging incarnation of the heresy of Gnosticism:

The confusion about gender identity is a modern, and now internet-fueled, form of the ancient philosophy of Gnosticism. The Gnostic, one who “knows”, has discovered the secret of “who I really am”, behind the deceptive outward appearance. … This involves denying the goodness, or even the ultimate reality, of the natural world. Nature, however, tends to strike back, with the likely victims in this case being vulnerable and impressionable youngsters who, as confused adults, will pay the price for their elders’ fashionable fantasies.

To bolster his position, Coles points to Christianity Today (CT), which has now regrettably adopted secular journalistic practices, using incorrect pronouns for cross-sex passers.

A 2015 article by Dr. Mark Yarhouse in CT provides evidence that both CT and Yarhouse have capitulated to the wicked and deceitful “trans” ideology. Yarhouse writes,

I still recall one of my first meetings with Sara. Sara is a Christian who was born male and named Sawyer by her [sic] parents. As an adult, Sawyer transitioned to female.

Sara would say transitioning—adopting a cross-gender identity—took 25 years. It began with facing the conflict she [sic] experienced between her [sic] biology and anatomy as male, and her [sic] inward experience as female.

With absolute certainty, Sprinkle offers this dire warning about refusal to participate in the “trans” lie:

“If you want to immediately cut off a relationship with somebody, which is ending all opportunity to embody and share Jesus with the person, then don’t use the pronouns they want you to use. It is an immediate relational killer.”

He is saying that if unbelievers lost in spiritual darkness will become so angry at the refusal of Christians to participate in their reality-denying, body- and soul-destroying fiction that they sever relationships, Christians should capitulate. This position will result in an enfeebled relinquishment of culture-making to sinners lost in darkness.

The homosexual and “trans” communities use language as a tool to transform culture. They redefine words, emptying them of their former meanings, and invent new words that embody subversive and false assumptions. They become enraged at anyone who refuses to yield to their language diktats, and then some faith leaders say, “If we refuse to use their language, we kill relationships thereby killing our ability to witness.” What a diminished view of God’s sovereignty such a position reveals.

Moreover, enraged responses to encounters with truth sometimes signify the pricking of a conscience. Sometimes a respectful demurral from participating in serious sin is a seed planted. The ethics of speech are not determined by the subjective response of hearers of that speech. The ethics are determined by the content (i.e., is it true) and the delivery (i.e., is it civil).

Coles repeatedly appeals to the feelings of “trans”-identifying persons as determinative of the terms Christians should use. If, Coles argues, “trans”-identifying persons feel—or claim to feel—“shamed, invisible, sidelined, defiled, invalidated, microaggressed, disappeared, or leprous,” Christians should use whatever pronouns these people prefer, or we destroy our witness.

Is there any evidence that Jesus engaged in such “relational/missional” evangelism or fretted about how sinners would feel if he refused to affirm the sin they engaged in or placed at the center of their identities? When he encountered the rich, young ruler; the woman caught in adultery; or Zacchaeus, the tax collector, how long did Jesus dally in relationships before he told them to repent of their sins?

If refusing to concede through our language that a biological man is a woman makes such a man feel “defiled” or “microaggressed,” imagine if he had been part of the multitude that John the Baptist called a brood of vipers.

Dr. Gagnon, author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Text and Hermeneutics, makes clear what Greear’s, Coles’, and Sprinkle’s purported hospitality and respect signify:

It is not an act of “hospitality” or “respect” to the offender to use fake pronouns and proper names but rather (1) a scandal to the “weak” and young in the church and a rightful violation of conscience for many that will lead many to stumble to their ruin; (2) an accommodation to sin that God finds utterly abhorrent, to say nothing of the fact that it is an egregious lie; and (3) a complicity in the offender’s self-dishonoring, self-degrading, and self-demeaning behavior that does him or her (and the grieving ex-spouse and children, if there are any) no favor because it can get the person in question excluded from the kingdom of God.

What’s next? Treating as a married couple an incestuous union involving a man and his mother, allegedly as a show of hospitality and respect? Is that what Paul would have done at Corinth? Addressing the man and his stepmother as “husband” and “wife” so as to extend “hospitality” and “respect”? What kind of revisionist lunacy is this? Paul would not have taken this approach even for those who don’t profess to be believers.

Attorney, journalist, senior editor at the recently launched political website The Dispatch, and Christian, David French exposes the error in manipulative tactics used to shame Christians into rhetorical concessions to the destructive “trans” ideology:

When I use a male pronoun to describe Chelsea Manning, I’m not trolling. I’m not being a jerk. I’m not trying to make anyone angry. I’m simply telling the truth. I’m reflecting biological reality, and I’m referring to the created order as outlined in Genesis 1 — “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Nor is this a matter of “manners.” I’ve encountered many well-meaning people who’ve told me that I should acquiesce to new pronouns because it’s the polite thing to do. I want to avoid hurting feelings, don’t I? I want to treat someone the way I’d like to be treated, right? What’s the harm in a little white lie?

But when your definition of manners requires that I verbally consent to a fundamentally false and important premise, then I dissent. You cannot use my manners to win your culture war. I will speak respectfully, I will never use a pronoun with the intent of causing harm, and if I encounter a person in obvious emotional distress I will choose my words very carefully. But I will not say what I do not believe.

Coles asserts there are two assumptions “about the nature of language” on which Christians who reject “trans” language diktats rely:

Assumption #1: Pronoun gender always and only refers to an individual’s appointed sex.

Assumption #2: When our definitions of words differ from other people’s definitions, “telling the truth” means using our own definitions.

Assumption #2 implicitly rejects the Christian view that objective truth exists. Christians have no obligation to treat assumption #2 as if it’s true. It’s passing strange that a Christian would treat his own definitions of words like “he,” “she,” and “they” as just other assumptions. Coles seems to hold the view that Peter Kreeft disdains when he says the phrase “your truth” is both oxymoronic and moronic.

Burk reveals the sullied underbelly of Coles’ expectation that Christians treat their biblically informed definitions—not as true—but as merely one set of assumptions in the diverse universe of competing assumptions:

So much of the evangelical conversation on these issues has been colonized by secular identity theories. Those theories are premised on an unbiblical anthropology which defines human identity as “what I feel myself to be” rather than “what God designed me to be.” If there is to be a recovery and renewal of Christian conscience on sexuality issues, secular identity theories must give way to God’s design as revealed in nature and scripture.

Coles justifies the redefinition of pronouns by the “trans” cult by arguing—accurately—that language changes, but the reality of linguistic shifts doesn’t mean that Christians should acquiesce to politically driven changes that embody lies and which are increasingly imposed by force.

Greear also quoted conservative theologian Andrew T. Walker’s book God and the Transgender Debate in which Walker says,

“My own position is that if a transgender person comes to your church, it is fine to refer to them by their preferred pronoun.”

Greear failed to include what Walker said in an article published four months after publication of his book:

“Though it is politically incorrect to do so, I will not refer to someone with their desired pronoun in a public venue such as a talk. Those with writing or speaking platforms have an obligation to speak and write truthfully and not kowtow to political correctness or excuse falsehood.”

The abandonment of theological orthodoxy always happens incrementally, as it’s happening today. C. S. Lewis warned of this in The Screwtape Letters in which the senior demon Screwtape writes this to his nephew Wormwood, a Junior Tempter:

My dear Wormwood,

Obviously, you are making excellent progress. My only fear is lest in attempting to hurry the patient you awaken him to a sense of his real position. For you and I, who see that position as it really is, must never forget how totally different it ought to appear to him. We know that we have introduced a change of direction in his course which is already carrying him out of his orbit around the Enemy; but he must be made to imagine that all the choices which have effected this change of course are trivial and revocable. He must not be allowed to suspect that he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space.

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~Correction/Update: Although Neuqua Valley High School still lists Hemant Mehta on its Math Department faculty webpage, he no longer works there. Linked screenshot below* was taken today, Dec. 19, 2014.~

A new Chicago-area billboard campaign from the aggressively offensive Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) exposes again this organization’s hostility to and childish misunderstanding of Christian faith.

The FFRF has announced that eleven billboards are going up with these special holiday messages:

• “Kindness comes from altruism, not from seeking divine reward.”
• “We are here to challenge you to think for yourself.”
• “I believe in reason and logic!”
• “Equality for all shouldn’t be constrained by any religion.”
• “Free of faith, fear and superstition”
• “I put my faith in science.”
• And this featuring Neuqua Valley High School math teacher* Hemant Mehta (aka the “Friendly Atheist”): “I’d rather put my faith in me.” (It’s curious that the billboard doesn’t identify Mehta as a public high school teacher. To learn more about Mehta, click here, here, and here.)

A few brief responses to the FFRF’s shallow slogans:

1. Kind acts are “friendly, generous, warmhearted, charitable, generous, humane, and/or considerate acts.” Altruism is unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Kind acts may be motivated by ignoble, selfish sentiments—perhaps even a wrong theological belief that one earns salvation through one’s actions. But kind acts can also be motivated by altruism that derives from faith in Christ.

Kindness can be the result of the regeneration that God performs in the hearts of believers, which deracinates selfishness and naturally results in desires more in line with God’s nature. Kindness can result from an overflowing of thankfulness for God’s great gift of salvation, which makes followers of Christ love and give more unselfishly, often even sacrificially.  They act kindly and altruistically not to gain reward but to thank God and to express his love to others.

2. Finding the Old and New Testament writers to be persuasive no more constitutes a failure to “think for yourself” than does finding the ideas of Bertrand Russell, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, or Richard Dawkins persuasive. And believing that reality is not exclusively material does not constitute a failure to think logically.

Are the members of the FFRF actually arguing that Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, G.K. Chesterton, Karl Barth,C.S. Lewis, G.E.M. Anscombe, Pope Benedict XVI, John Finnis, Hadley Arkes, Alvin Plantinga, D.A. Carson, Eleonore Stump, N.T. Wright, William Lane Craig, Francesca Aran Murphy, Doug Wilson, Robert George, Francis Beckwith, David Bentley Hart, and Alex Pruss did or do not think for themselves and/or that they reject reason and logic?

3. Equality—properly understood—is advanced by Christian faith. Equality demands treating like things alike, and increasingly both those who embrace an atheistic scientific materialism and people who embrace heterodoxy are incapable of recognizing fundamental truths—including even facts—about human nature. Therefore, they are incapable of identifying which phenomena are in reality alike.

4. First, one can make an argument that those who most fear, for example, death are those who have an unproven faith in the non-existence of an afterlife.  Second, a superstition is “a belief held in spite of evidence to the contrary.” As such, the Christian faith does not constitute a superstition, because there is ample evidence for the existence of God and his human incarnation, Jesus Christ. Atheists reject the evidence based on their a priori assumptions about what constitutes evidence.

5. Christians too put their faith in science. Christians, including Christian scientists, trust and have confidence that science proves what it can prove. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of an immaterial reality. And science cannot prove whether altruistic acts are objectively morally good acts or merely acts that humans have evolved to believe are objectively good because such a belief serves to enhance survival.

6. Faith in self alone reflects the kind of hubris that leads more often to intellectual and moral error than it does to altruism.

“The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity—hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory—because at the Father’s will Jesus Christ became poor, and was born in a stable so that thirty years later He might hang on a cross.” ~J.I.Packer

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The Left has either a problematic inability to think analogically and logically or a Machiavellian willingness to pretend they don’t.

When I compared the rationalizations that religious leaders offered for their refusal to stand against the Nazi regime to the rationalizations contemporary pastors offer for their refusal to stand up against homosexuality-affirming ideologues, the Left said I likened homosexuals to Nazis.

When I suggest that the Left’s recasting of marriage as an institution centrally constituted by subjective experiences of erotic and romantic love leads ineluctably to the legalization of incestuous marriage, the Left says I claimed homosexuality per se is analogous to incest per se.

It’s one thing to accuse a regular Joe or Jane, like me, of poor thinking, it’s quite another to accuse someone of the intellectual stature of British theologian N.T. Wright of such intellectual failures, which is just what Sarah Moon did. Fortunately, another thinker far better than I am has exposed the non-sense of Moon and so many of her ideological compeers.

In a post titled “How Arguments (Do Not) Work,” Matthew Franck takes Moon to the intellectual woodshed (concluding with a dollop of humor):

…I was alerted to someone named Sarah Moon at Patheos, blogging in high dudgeon about the “bigotry” of N.T. Wright, the renowned Anglican theologian. What has Ms. Moon so exercised? Here is how she begins:

In case you haven’t heard, N.T. Wright—author of theology books such as Surprised By Hope and Simply Christian, and former Bishop of Durham—recently did an interview in which he compared people who support marriage equality to Nazis and Soviet Communists.

Nazis.

And Soviet Communists.

No. No, he didn’t. Not even close. The link Ms. Moon provides is to the transcript, posted here at First Things by our own Matthew Schmitz, of an interview Wright gave to the Philo Trust. I’ll save you the trouble of going back to the full transcript. Here is the only part to which Ms. Moon can possibly be referring:

What do you think are the major challenges to the church and the Christian message in the light of the current legislation on the redefinition of marriage?

N. T. Wright: …I do want to say a word about a word. When anybody—pressure groups, governments, civilizations—suddenly change the meaning of key words, you really should watch out. If you go to a German dictionary and just open at random, you may well see several German words which have a little square bracket saying “N.S.,” meaning National Socialist or Nazi. The Nazis gave those words a certain meaning. In post-1917 Russia, there were whole categories of people who were called “former persons,” because by the Communist diktat they had ceased to be relevant for the state, and once you call them former persons it was extremely easy to ship them off somewhere and have them killed.

In the same way, there was a letter in the Times Literary Supplement just a few weeks ago saying that when we’re talking about assisted suicide, we shouldn’t actually use words like “suicide,” “killing,” and those sort of words because those imply that you shouldn’t do it. Whereas now our civilization is saying that maybe there are reasons for that. I find that sort of stuff chilling, the attempt to change an ideology within a culture by changing the language.

Now, the word “marriage,” for thousands of years and cross-culturally has meant man and woman. Sometimes it’s been one man and more than one woman. Occasionally it’s been one woman and more than one man. There is polyandry as well as polygamy in some societies in some parts of history, but it’s always been male plus female. Simply to say that you can have a woman-plus-woman marriage or a man-plus-man marriage is radically to change that because of the givenness of maleness and femaleness. I would say that without any particular Christian presuppositions at all, just cross-culturally, that’s so.

As any intelligent reader will immediately recognize, Wright is arguing from analogy. As the Nazis willfully altered the meaning of German words for ideological reasons, and the Soviet Communists altered the meaning of Russian words (or coined expressions like “former persons) for ideological reasons, so too the advocates of assisted suicide want to banish words like “suicide” and “killing” from discussions of the subject in order to gain an ideological advantage, and same-sex “marriage” advocates want to change the meaning of “marriage” for ideological reasons.  

For Ms. Moon, this is “compar[ing] people who support marriage equality to Nazis and Soviet Communists.” I take it she means likening the one to the others, so that she is accusing Wright of saying that “people who support marriage equality” have a propensity toward using secret police, terror, torture, totalitarian control of society, and concentration camps in order to carry out their ideological objectives. That is simply idiotic. She does, however, prove that Wright is right to argue as he does when she employs the question-begging phrase “marriage equality,” as though it were entirely settled that a same-sex couple and an opposite-sex couple are “equal” so far as the union called “marriage” is concerned. Ms. Moon is either a purveyor of the linguistic ideology Wright observes, or a prisoner of it. Perhaps she is both.

Like people who think Justice Antonin Scalia has likened homosexual sodomy to murder because he regards both of them as species of conduct that the law can legitimately condemn on moral grounds, Ms. Moon appears to have no idea how logic works or arguments function. (Tell me again why it was a good idea to get rid of the analogies section of the SAT?) N.T. Wright no more likened same-sex “marriage” advocates to Nazis and Communists than I am likening her to a planetary body in the following analogy: as the moon orbits the earth, so the mind of Ms. Moon orbits an empty space devoid of logic.

The Left’s troubling relationship with analogical thinking is also demonstrated in their absurd comparison of homosexuality per se to race per se, a comparison for which they provide no evidence. But no evidence is no problem for those who live and move and have their being in a non-rational world where everyone is expected to worship at the altar of the subjective feelings of the exalted autonomous self.

What we notice from all occasions that demonstrate the Left’s inability or feigned inability to think analogically is that the Left takes umbrage at any comparison of any aspect of homosexuality to any aspect of any phenomenon generally viewed as morally dubious. The reason for their umbrage—or rage—is that the Left has unilaterally concluded that homosexual activity is morally licit and demand that everyone treat their non-factual disputable assumptions about homoerotic activity or marriage or gender confusion as if they are either facts or indisputable first principles.

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