We Must Stand

Those with Courage to Resist Wickedness Must be Honored

Friday, July 26th, I, along with hundreds of millions of Christians around the world, sat down to watch the 2024 Olympic Opening Ceremonies. We hoped to experience something that would express the beauty of historic French culture and the spirit of international competition.. Instead, what we experienced was a grotesquerie of beheaded monarchs, bearded drag-queen stripteases, and an alphabet person recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. One of Western Christianity’s most well known and beloved pieces of religious art, inspired not only by the holy moment of institution, but by the Christian civilization that sprung up and took dominion over the European continent. 

To top it off, a blue man with curly blonde beard, supposedly representing Bacchus or Dionysus, lying within a human sized cloche, the subject of the “feast” took up a microphone and quipped, gamboled and paraded before the international television audience. Dionysus was the “Christ Figure,” and as the openly lesbian DJ Barbara Butch’s stated on her Instagram story, it was an attempt at “recreation.” They had apparently not heard that, “The great god Pan is dead.”  Where once bread and wine were transformed by yeast into food and food into the presence of God through Christ, we ourselves are transformed into yeast through the incarnate presence of debauchery. It was a fitting tribute to the new sacred religion of the Negative World. We in the West now feast upon debauchery itself.

I immediately texted my wife to make sure our children would not watch this Opening Ceremony, and followed that up with similar messages and images to family and friends. I reflected on what the Christian response should be to this obvious blasphemy and degeneracy. Christians have faced these things before. Art exhibits displaying heresy, “Pride” parades putting degeneracy in the public face, Satanic transgender nuns subverting America’s pastime by being honored during Dodger’s Games. Television and cinema that Christians have felt compelled to avoid. But this seemed different. This was an attempt by satanic and nefarious actors to seize public space, proliferation of a “new” good news. 

Nature abhors a vacuum and in the attempt to create a naked public square devoid of religious expression, we have supplanted the old Christian moral order founded on the rule of Christ and the resurrection of the dead with a new moral order that promises a different kind of transcendence. A replacement of nature’s restrictions with an eternal hope grounded in technology (surgery and surrogacy with a view to artificial wombs) and medicine (hormone blockers and antiretrovirals).

And this was done on the world’s largest stage before the world’s largest audience. Billions of dollars and some of the largest human institutions back this event. What am I, the lone Christian to do? As always, I believe we can turn to scripture for the answers we so desperately seek.

In the penultimate passage from the Sermon on the Mount, we read one of the most terrifying pieces of scripture in the New Testament. After expanding the law to include acts of the eyes and thoughts of the mind and warning the people against falseness of both their hearts and the hearts of others, Jesus brings a warning that many who claim Him, who name him, and even do work in His name will be cast away from Him and banished to that place of external suffering where there is “darkness and gnashing of teeth.” A potentially terrifying thought to anyone who has spent a lifetime as a Christian attempting to live out the faith.

So how do we understand such a cryptic message? Are we to continually doubt the status of our own salvation, or is there some Rosetta Stone to help us decipher the meaning of this teaching? To understand, we need to investigate the parenthetical citation around the second half of verse 23. When we do so, we recognize that Jesus is quoting from Psalm 6:8, “Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity; For the Lord has heard the voice of my weeping.” Here, the psalmist is afflicted and oppressed on all sides by enemies. He is crying out to the Lord to save him from the physical, psychological, and emotional assault which is causing him to lose sleep, sweat through his clothes, and cry in his bed. It sounds like an ancient form of threat. Bullies whose calumnies have been supported or overlooked by authority. The last three verses change tone and the speaker tells his enemies to flee because the Lord has heard his cries and will come to set things right by making his enemies experience deep shame and regret that will cause them to turn.

What does all this mean? It means that as Christians, carrying forward Christ’s dominion across creation, we are required to see the oppression of fellow Christians and love our neighbors by helping to free them from that subjugation and misrule. How we engage in this will depend on time and circumstance, our current oppressing force is that LGBT ideology which is used to coerce and compel believers into acceptance. The New Gay Testament and bearded trans stripper of the Opening Games made that clear. The politically motivated prosecutions of teenagers who ran over Pride crosswalks in Spokane or Huntington, while U.S. flag burning vandals of the monuments at the capital go free, makes that clear. The normalization of buying and selling of surrogate children makes that clear. The open displays of degenerate sexual deviance make that clear. The elementary school clubs dedicated to exploring “alternative sexualities” make that clear.

And so if we simply cry out “Lord, Lord,” or even if we do good works in His name and drive out demons, we fail if we do not seek to free people from this terror, from the terror that parents hold when they send their kids to school, praying they do not fall under the spell of sexual deviance. We must free fellow Christians from the fear they face when they talk about marriage, and sex, and gender, and family. We must free pastors from the fear they have of bringing unwanted attention to their churches from outside activists. They search high and low for anything upon which to turn the attention of the current American rights regime, bringing the SPLC, the NGOs, and the Federal Government’s power to bear. A constant state of fear surrounds us and mocks us and seeks to humiliate Christians or transform Christianity itself into something it has never been. If we fail to end this fear, we will be cast aside by Christ as fellow oppressors of his faithful people.

And, so, for this I propose an award to be given out to Christians who actively seek to free their fellows from the oppressive Reign of Terror of the Pride Regime, like French Catholics of the Vendée who grew weary of a ceaselessly God mocking oppressive Republican regime and in 1793 put their lives on the line for truth and the church. Because this is what we see from those progressives who seek to overthrow nature and God. They reward with status and esteem those who participate in the toppling of the old world. William Ayers, who participated in multiple bombing plots against local and state officials received a professorship for his efforts in the same way that his adopted son, radical marxist Chesa Boudin, became the DA of San Francisco, and when ousted by vote, was given a sinecure at UC Berkeley. 

Like Colin Kaepernick taking a knee before the opening kickoff and receiving not just public support from his fellow leftist radicals, but an even larger contract from Nike, we on the Christian Right should be able and willing to stand behind and support those individuals who are called in courage and are able to act. Northern Abolitionists funding the Underground railroad, Evangelical churches supplying bibles to underground churches in China, Martin Luther disseminating the German translations of the bible, the support of the Mediterranean churches for the poor and oppressed church of Jerusalem. This is not a new Christian practice, but it is new for the America of the 21st century.

Awards of real courage, along with compensation for legal fees for young men who instinctively knew that the pride flag was a direct assault on their faith and their manhood. An award should be given to pastors who have been subject to endless media and government campaigns of silence to prevent them from speaking. Awards must be received by parents who either through direct action or public speech were maligned, defamed, and imprisoned for upholding the Christian truth about sex and gender, by students who stood up and would be silent no more. Most importantly, we need awards for political leaders who exercise their proper dominion to rule in such a way that nature might continue to exist as it awaits its ultimate perfection by grace, not eradicated by techne. Only by honoring courage will we free future generations to live as Christians in freedom and abundance, built upon the solid foundation stone of Christ.

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