Self-Censoring Your Faith is Denying It
The boldness of the anti-God contingent around the world has been withering over the last five years. While it rose in the final two years of Trump’s presidency, it boiled over in the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020 and then with the election for Joe Biden that fall.
It all goes together. You cannot separate Woke ideology from anti-Christian ideology. You CAN separate racist ideology from Christianity. Behind the George Floyd riots was a communist/socialist philosophy that was decidedly anti-Christian. The same is true for the LGBTQ movement that opposes the moral ethic of Christianity.
The opposition was so bold and so angry that many Christians went underground with their faith. They self-censored for fear of losing their jobs, being doxxed, or being rejected by friends and co-workers—sometimes even by family. To some extent, some Christians have always done this. They want to be liked and fear being rejected.
However, that is starting to change. And that change is not just with evangelical believers who have a solid grasp on the biblical gospel, but also with Mormon, Catholic, and other groups. The Catholic Herald posted an article on August 5, entitled Is Religion Bouncing Back During These Olympics?
The article focuses on how “athletes no longer feel the need to stay silent about the role of religion in their approach to sport”.
While the fallout from the strange scenes of the Olympics’ opening ceremony continues to play out – the BBC’s latest Moral Maze focused on the question of whether anything is sacred any longer – the call from the French Bishops Conference to move on from “the outrageousness and provocation” and to revel in the magnificence and “delight” offered by sport seems to be occurring.
At the same time, though, it’s notable that a religious streak has unexpectedly marked these Olympics, one that’s very much at odds with the highly anti-Christian moments of that opening ceremony, and at odds with the French principle of “laïcité” state secularism that is meant to keep religion out of the public picture.
Most of the athletes cited are Catholic. But if they can stand for their traditional works-based view of salvation, why can’t we who hold the truth boldly stand for the gospel and the faith once delivered to the saints? It is time for us to stop self-censoring and speak up for our faith!
We do not need to be ugly about it but we must not be ashamed. As Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered King Nebuchadnezzar, so we must be willing to answer boldly, clearly, and with confidence in our God.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego answered and said to the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If that is the case, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king. But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up.
We are not only being opposed aggressively from without, we are also being infiltrated aggressively by the forces of darkness. If you have not read this article by Megan Basham in First Things, you should. It is entitled The Plot to Queer Evangelical Churches. Andy Stanley is at the forefront of this movement. The following describes a message delivered by Andy Stanley, the son of beloved SBC pastor Charles Stanley (from the same article).
For the next hour and a half, he listened as Stanley went on to contend that modern pastors must make allowances for gay and lesbian couples to be married in their churches because “that’s as close as they can get to a New Testament framework of marriage.” Visconti remembered Stanley likening same-sex attraction to a disability, something that can’t be helped. An expectation of celibacy, he argued, would be unfair.
Finally, Stanley revealed that while he had never officiated a same-sex wedding, he could see himself doing so eventually, especially for a family member. “I know I shouldn’t let experience dictate my theology, but I have. Maybe I’m wrong.”
This is heresy. This is as important as any of the fundamentals of the faith of the early 20th Century. This is the battle of our time. We are commanded to separate from and denounce such false doctrine. We must love sinners, but we cannot love sinners by affirming their sins and denying the Word. Rosaria Butterfield expressed the problem of the gay lifestyle affirming Christianity when she said this.
How sad indeed for someone who is already weighed down by sin to be denied the true remedy for the problem. That is what gay Christianity does. It denies the sexual sinner repentance.” Without repentance, there is no salvation.
There is an organized movement intending to convert you and your church into one that denies the moral foundations of Christianity. Again, this is from the First Things article.
In recent years, Vines has turned his attention to Pastors in Process, a confidential program that secretly trains pastors to stealthily “move the conversation on LGBTQ inclusion forward in [their] congregation[s].” Faithful American Christians could soon be facing—if we’re not already—thousands of Andy Stanleys. And the Reformation Project is only one of the many organizations carrying on this work. That’s to say nothing of the courses and extracurricular groups at ostensibly Christian colleges and seminaries dedicated to the same effort.
Many pastors, doctrinally sound but unaware of the boot camp efforts that have been under way for years, have, out of a desire not to appear judgmental or overly focused on one sin to the exclusion of others, been successfully shamed into barely mentioning homosexuality, transgenderism, or the rest of the LGBTQ array. Given this imbalance in commitment to our respective beliefs, faithful Christians can hardly wonder at the fact that the LGBTQ movement is chewing up ground and claiming new converts as quickly as evangelical churches are meekly ceding the field.
We must lovingly, kindly, but honestly, stand for the truth of scripture. To self-censor is to deny the faith. It is the same sin over which Paul confronted Peter in Galatians 2.
The faith is at stake. We cannot remain silent.
Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. Jude 3
Listen to the audio version of this post here: Self-Censoring Your Faith is Denying It (substack.com)