When Christians play the self-flagellation game and insist that all of Jesus’ disciples need to spend some time reflecting on their own sins, they tend to forget that the secular world is made up of sinners, too—sinners who enjoy fornication and cruelty and selfishness and who will gladly enact laws that allow them to feast on these transgressions the second the church doesn’t frighten them anymore.

Leftists love the self-flagellation game, a fun little exercise where you gather in a circle with people of your tribe, say you’re going to punish yourself for causing some problem in the world, and then whip the tar out of the guy standing next to you. Technically, of course, this is not self-flagellation. But that’s the fun part. As long as you act like you’re tearing up your own flesh, you can give as many lashes as you want to the guy that you think is really guilty of the transgression.

Leftists are masters of this game. They’re quite skilled at wincing and saying, “I, a poor, miserable sinner, deserve pain for refusing to check my cisgender privilege,” while unleashing all nine tails o’ the cat on the real culprits, those awful conservatives who cause a transgender suicide every time they assume that a person with an Adam’s apple, a five o’clock shadow, and a Y chromosome is a male.

But when losses in the culture war frustrate conservatives, they can occasionally be persuaded to try their hand at a round of the game liberals invented. In March of 2014, Ross Douthat grabbed the whip and repented of the sins other Christians have committed against the LGBT community, essentially arguing “we made our bed of having to bake gay wedding cakes by treating our gay neighbors with intolerance instead of charity, now it’s time to lie in it.” Recently, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry joined the self-flagellation circle, arguing that Christians only have themselves to blame for the recent Irish referendum in support of gay marriage.

Focusing on Gobry’s fresher words, I suppose it’s possible that he meant to unleash the lash on himself. But considering how clearly and consistently he has articulated Christian sexual ethics in the past, it’s difficult to believe he’s having an Oscar Schindler moment, thinking, “I could have written one more column detailing the connection between marriage and procreation in Christian thought.” Rather, it seems far more likely that, in frustration at Ireland’s vote, he’s pulled the leftist trick of criticizing his own group so he can unleash the lash on his fellow Christians for undermining his efforts.

Christians Did Object to the Sexual Revolution
Gobry begins his argument by noting that Christians are sinners whose hypocrisy sours people to the faith. This is, of course, true in an overarching sense. Christians have been bad at letting people come to Christ since Christ was right in the middle of blessing those people. But Gobry’s argument falls apart when he implies that Christians managed to hinder gay-marriage supporters from coming to Christ by ignoring every unholy advancement of the sexual revolution, only to start pelting gay couples with chunks of the Ten Commandments after they asked for the right to marry.

“After the Sexual Revolution,” Gobry asks, “did they preach against heterosexual contraceptivism, adultery, and divorce?” Did Christians preach against contraception? Yes. Popes preached against it. Duggars preached against it. And many Christians who don’t believe that birth control is inherently immoral still preached against using it to enable premarital sex or to lord material possessions over children.

Did Christians preach against adultery? Yes, which is why Christians spent most of the ’80s being mad at televangelists who got caught committing adultery. Divorce? Just because the Episcopalians didn’t defrock Gene Robinson after either one of his divorces doesn’t mean that most other Christian churches haven’t disciplined members who put asunder what God joined together.

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