So I am free to determine my own morality, as long as my morality matches the politically correct secular orthodoxy. If I dare challenge the politically correct establishment and submit myself to Scripture instead, I am labeled a bigot and excluded from polite society. What is the final result? God’s natural reality and moral law are replaced by the constructions of the PC crowd’s secular orthodoxy. The gracious rule of a loving God who extends mercy to sinners is replaced by an absolute tyranny of the intelligentsia, who dictate what we may think and say.

 
Much of the reigning secular orthodoxy in our country is based on the denial of natural reality. The LGBT rights agenda is based on denying the obvious natural reality of gender and instead insisting that gender is merely a social construct. Individuals are free to identify with whatever gender they choose. The LGBT crowd even goes so far as to say that saying that a boy is a boy by birth because he has male genes and anatomy is cruel, oppressive and discriminatory.

How did we get to the point where simply calling someone what they obviously are is “cruel” and “oppressive”? It comes from a strong impulse to deny any inherent, natural reality in the world. Why would people want to deny reality? It’s simple, really: They want to construct their own.

This human impulse is as old as humanity. In the Garden, the temptation that tripped up our first ancestors was the promise that they “would be like God.” Ever since God created man in His image, man has been trying to climb just a bit higher and take God’s place on the throne over reality.

Here’s the hard truth the secularists deny: If God created the world, then it is what it is and we are not free to change it. That means we are subject and accountable to a higher authority, the One who created us and the whole universe. To put it another way: If the world has an inherent reality, a fixed nature, a natural order, then this points to a Supreme Creator, One to whom we must be subject. That is simply unacceptable.

Instead, reality must be elastic, to be bent and shaped as we please. Gender is a social construct, and individuals must be free to determine their own gender or else we are giving power to society to control people’s core identity. The idea that identity is assigned by God and not society, as a created and not a constructed reality, is simply unthinkable. So now we have a law being passed in California giving boys the right to use the girls’ restroom and locker room and participate in girls’ sports. God must be de-throned, even if reason is unseated alongside Him.

Indeed, reason must be unseated when God is rejected, for God is the author of reason. So a boy is not a boy, a girl is not a girl, a man can marry a man and a woman can marry a woman, even if they are physically incapable of consummating the marriage union. No longer does “the act of marriage” mean what it used to, nor do the reproductive systems of male and female have any relevance to reality as we define it.

The same secular orthodoxy declares that right and wrong are social constructs, like gender. Again, to resist having the society tyrannize the individual, each person must be free to determine for himself or herself what is right or wrong. But here’s where we run into a contradiction in the system: If each person is free to determine right or wrong for himself or herself, why am I not free to determine that homosexuality is unnatural and that homosexual behavior is deviant and immoral? No, I am not free to come to that moral conclusion, for such a conclusion is “hateful” and “intolerant.”

So I am free to determine my own morality, as long as my morality matches the politically correct secular orthodoxy. If I dare challenge the politically correct establishment and submit myself to Scripture instead, I am labeled a bigot and excluded from polite society.

What is the final result? God’s natural reality and moral law are replaced by the constructions of the PC crowd’s secular orthodoxy. The gracious rule of a loving God who extends mercy to sinners is replaced by an absolute tyranny of the intelligentsia, who dictate what we may think and say.

It’s the Garden of Eden all over again: In rejecting God’s rule and limitations on our freedom, we have exchanged a benevolent monarchy for tyrannical rule by lesser gods.

Jason A. Van Bemmel is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Pastor of Faith PCA in Cheraw, S.C. This article appeared on his blog Ponderings of a Pilgrim Pastor and is used with permission.