Making Christianity Safe for Liberalism

David French Capitulates Again to the LGBTQ Agenda

Chip and Joanna Gaines made their Christian faith central to their public personas. Integrating faith and work is a move of integrity, reflecting the Reformation-era insight that all work is done to the glory of God. And yet what builds an audience is also what it takes to keep that same audience. Bud Light was built on an image of working-class masculinity; Target was supposed to be the family-friendly upscale version of Wal-Mart. When both engaged in overt LGBTQ+ marketing, their bases abandoned them. Both have since recovered their market share by going back to their original positions.

This helps explain the heated online response to Chip and Joanna Gaines’s casting decisions in their new show, Back to the Frontier. Foregrounding a gay couple and their twins is a betrayal of principle for Christians, a cultural compromise that too often comes with gaining a larger platform. Beyond the immediate concerns, this cultural moment raises a series of serious questions that are vital for all interested in advancing Christian culture:

Can Christians ascend the heights of culture and hold on to theological orthodoxy?
Should Christians in business foreground their faith or focus on the quality of a product?
How should Christians relate to positive law?

These questions merit thoughtful consideration. The potential for Christians seizing the heights of culture and pushing culture towards biblical principles is significant, but the Gaines’s recent kerfuffle shows that the cost of cultural success may well be doctrinal fidelity.

Christ or Caesar?

Into this moment rides David French, deploying his standard attack with the mass distribution network of the New York Times. He argues that Christians should act in the most non-Christian way imaginable, and if they don’t, he implies they are bigots. (As Mike Sabo documents here, such an approach led French to affirm Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and drag queen story hour.) French asserts that there are hundreds of “hateful” comments on Chip Gaines’s initial post. He does not provide screenshots, links, or quotes to support the charge.

Throughout his op-ed, French refers to “two dads and their twin boys” without a hint of moral condemnation. He ignores the question asked by SNL: Where did the babies come from? Rather than noting these children were born through surrogacy, French normalizes the purchase of children and the absence of their mother through the way he describes these men and these twins.

French proposes a novel reading of Federalist 10 in which extending the sphere to take in a plurality of interests is read as endorsing a plurality of moralities. Such a reading is nonsense. The Founding Fathers could not have imagined the debates held in 2025 about gender, sexual orientation, or family structures.

Writing with a pseudo-logical tone, French’s sophistry makes him persuasive to the uncritical reader. But examining the logic of his argument causes his case to collapse. Consider one representative example.

He opens his op-ed by contrasting a 2016 Buzzfeed article about Chip and Joanna Gaines’s church refusing to affirm homosexual marriage, and he compares that to “Christian cancel culture.” French concludes through this comparison that Christians are wildly unfair. In a comparative argument, the two things being compared must be similar. In this case, they are different. An evangelical church holding an institutional position rooted in centuries of theological tradition is not the same thing as an HBO show choosing to foreground a homosexual marriage with two children. The comparison does not work.

Rather than reading the Christian response to the Gaines’s casting as concern for their acceptance of sin, French reframes it as Christians engaging in public shaming, their own form of cancel culture: “[A] large number of conservative Christians are in the midst of their own shame campaign. It turns out that they didn’t hate cancel culture so much as they hated feeling powerless and vulnerable.” French has lost the capacity to process cultural moments through the theological categories of Christian doctrine, and thus wildly misreads the response.

Judge Well

Christians understand that sin ravages the world; sin devours people’s lives and destroys the possibility of happiness. It is the human condition that we are subject to sin, and we desire sin. We naturally incline toward vice. C.S. Lewis uses the language of “bent” to describe sin in the Ransom Trilogy. If our natures ought to be a straight line, we are “bent” slightly out of line. Such an image fits the Greek word for sin Paul uses—’amartia—which he borrows from archery: missing the mark.

As the Bible makes clear, there is a way humans ought to live. Our problem is a failure to live that way. Any other way of living causes harm, heartache, and devastation. The Christian opposes sin not because he is a stick-in-the-mud prude or because he longs for authoritarian power to crush enemies. The Christian condemns sin because, as the Orthodox Presbyterian liturgy pronounces, he has been “freed from the power and reign of sin” and longs to prevent others from being enslaved to sin.

The reality of sin and a realistic understanding of human nature is why Christians care about positive law. We believe there is natural law, perceivable by nature, and the Mosaic law of God, which we are no longer under in the same way because of Christ’s victory on the cross. When it comes to positive law, we seek to craft and follow laws that cohere with God’s revelation and shape culture through sound legal structures.

Take gambling, which impoverishes the poor and holds out to those with the least economic margin the possibility of an easy win. Gambling preys on a human potential for addiction. It is itself a violation of the biblical principle that “as a man sows so shall he reap.” Christians have historically opposed the building of casinos as an application of loving their neighbor, who is better off without culturally approving and legally permitting a business built on the foundations of sin.

By French’s logic, such opposition is an authoritarian move intended to crush pluralistic desires in a democracy. His reasoning is false and fails to account for the duty of Christians to “love thy neighbor.” One way the Christian loves his neighbor is by continually pointing him to the source of actual peace. Augustine wrote that “my heart was restless until it found itself in thee.” Until the sinner rests in the God who died and rose to save him, nothing will truly satisfy. Caring about sin and longing for a neighbor to sin less is not a judgmental act—it is an act of love.

French turns to the Apostle Paul and a section of I Corinthians where Paul urges the church to solve its problems internally rather than going to the courts. He uses this to advance a general argument that Christians ought not to judge, and when they do, they should do so with great humility and caution. But he misapplies the passage in question. Here again, the things being compared are fundamentally different in kind: Paul is talking about problems within the church, and the choice of handling them internally or going to the courts under Roman authority. French is referring to Christians who respond to Chip Gaines’s post. In fact, one could argue that under the idea of the church universal, Christians are following Paul’s command. Christians like Joel Berry and Megan Basham are, in fact, rebuking a brother and sister in Christ who have failed to steward their public platform in a distinctly Christian way.

Contrary to progressive opinion, Jesus did not forbid judging: “Judge not, lest you be judged. For by the same measure you use will you be judged.” Judgment is a human action. Jesus here warns that the same measure will be turned back and used on the one issuing judgment. The same principle is in play with the speck and the log: “Before removing the log from your brother’s eye, remove the speck from your own.”

The Christian life is one of pursuing holiness—“Be holy as your Father in Heaven is holy”—and Christian love extends to acts of judgment, rebuke, and encouragement to pursue righteousness. Such moments require maturity, grace, and wisdom. But they are part of how Christians express the love of God to one another. Friends don’t let friends remain in sin. Instead, we help each other avoid folly and pursue working out our faith “in fear and trembling.” French ignores this part of Christian discipleship, settling for the progressive caricature: “Judging is bad; don’t judge.”

No Compromising with the World

Chip and Joanna Gaines have clearly compromised on biblical ethics. While they have not endorsed LGBTQ+ lifestyles directly, they are using their show to highlight an aberrant family structure. Such a choice is a refusal to uphold the biblical way of life. David French is in a similar vein. He first made waves as a constitutional lawyer who could bring a sharp legal analysis to bear on current events, but his Christianity gradually receded behind a libertarian pluralism. Christians, French argued, ought to support drag queen story hour and the Harris/Walz ticket because that is the price of upholding a pluralistic society.

The biblical model is different. Daniel was kidnapped from Judah, forcibly educated in pagan Babylon, and faced a crisis of obedience instantly: what would he and his friends eat? Would they keep the kosher laws, the dietary parts of the covenant? The courage to make a stand for the small things enabled Daniel’s later stance: his public prayer to the God of Israel resulted in his being thrown into the lion’s den. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego faced their own greater temptation: would they bow before the king? In a crowd of thousands bowing before Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image, these three alone stood, refusing to violate the First Commandment.

Esther illustrates the same pattern. She was taken into the royal harem and, for a year, was made more beautiful. She was selected and married to Xerxes, the emperor of Persia. But their marriage was not initially one of influence—she could only approach her husband when he summoned her, on pain of death. And Esther did nothing about Persian paganism until her uncle got word to her that God’s people were under attack. Esther had been put in her position “for such a time as this.” And she risked it all. She could have died, and yet God rewarded her faithfulness.

No one can know the human heart, yet from all external appearances, the Gaineses have sacrificed their public Christian stance to compromise on a secular acceptance of sin. Doing so has gotten them a presumably more lucrative show on a larger platform. But they illustrate that there may be limits on how much cultural influence a Christian can acquire without compromise. The real question is not how big the Magnolia business can grow. The real question is the one every Christian will face: What will Jesus say when we meet him? Will we hear, “Well done, my good and faithful servant. Enter into your master’s reward?” Or will we hear, “Depart from me, for I never knew you”? There will be a response—and that’s the response that matters above all.

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