You see, you look like a Christian. You talk about Jesus and love and God’s word. You claim faith in Christ. You dress appropriately, you are an engaging speaker, a compelling author, and you seem unashamed to share your faith. On a surface level—the only level that perhaps my young daughter or the thousands of readers who visit your blog every day can discern—you seem legit. In a nutshell, you are a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
A couple months ago, I wrote a blog in response to the whirlwind of media attention Miley Cyrus had been receiving. At the time, all kinds of groups were coming out to condemn or condone her sexually explicit behavior both on and off the stage. For me, it was simple: Miley Cyrus, like much of our Western culture, has bought in to a secular humanistic worldview that reduces her worth to that of an animal and so it should not be surprising that she often acts as such.
You see, Cyrus “represses the truth” (Rom 1:18) that she is created in God’s image, and as a created being she has a Creator whose rules she must live by. Because she has been created in God’s image, this truth is written on her heart and thus she must live every day in denial of her rebellion to God’s law (Rom 1: 21-22). It is not difficult to see the great lengths she (and everyone else who represses God’s law) goes to in order to distract herself from her guilt.
I do not fear Miley Cyrus. When I pray to God for my daughter’s future salvation, the influence of Miley Cyrus is rarely (albeit not never) what I pray for God to protect her from. I plan on doing my job as a parent and, by God’s grace, instructing my daughter in the way she should go. What this means is that by the time she is twelve years old and wants to buy her first music album, regardless of the eternal state of her soul, she will be able to see the cover artwork on Miley Cyrus’s albums and know that this young woman belongs to, and approves of, the world.
Who I fear, Rachel, is you.
You see, you look like a Christian. You talk about Jesus and love and God’s word. You claim faith in Christ. You dress appropriately, you are an engaging speaker, a compelling author, and you seem unashamed to share your faith. On a surface level—the only level that perhaps my young daughter or the thousands of readers who visit your blog every day can discern—you seem legit. In a nutshell, you are a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
As you have said in your blog,
“For many years, I felt that part of my call as a writer and blogger of faith was to be a different sort of evangelical, to advocate for things like gender equality, respect for LGBT people, and acceptance of science and biblical scholarship within my community.”
Rachel, if you feel that this is your calling, then your calling is from the world and not God. It is not Jesus’s example you are following, but that of the culture you live in. I can hear all about gender equality and the issues facing the LGBT community by turning on CNN or reading Rolling Stone or various sundry other godless news outlets and blogs. What the world needs, both the believer and unbeliever, is to hear the call of Christ and His truth. This is not what you deliver when you concern yourself with sounding like the world.
It makes me sad that you are a leading voice in the evangelical movement because I see no evidence in any of your writing that you honor God above men. Your worldview aligns with our culture, which is in complete opposition to Jesus’s teachings. Your worldview over-values feeling and emotion and has sacrificed truth on the altar of “being nice.”
[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]