We shouldn’t be so naive as to believe that if we focus exclusively on serving the homeless and fighting to end human trafficking that they world will stop hating us. We must both serve our neighbor and tell them the truth about the human condition, that the wages of unrepentant sin is death. No one can truly love their neighbor and affirm their sin. For us to remain silent about homosexuality would show that we hate the world as much as the world hates us.

The Story: Louie Giglio, pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta and founder of the Passion Conferences, an organization that brings college students together in prayer and worship, was selected by President Obama to deliver the benediction at his inaugural this month. He was disinvited, though, after it was discovered he had delivered a sermon about homosexuality in the mid-1990s.

The Background: According to Addie Whisenant, the spokeswoman for the Presidential Inaugural Committee, “Pastor Giglio was asked to deliver the benediction in large part for his leadership in combating human trafficking around the world.” But criticism over the selection came after the liberal website Think Progress posted audio of a sermon that Giglio gave in the mid-1990s. In the audio, Giglio calls unrepentant homosexuality a sin and adds:

That’s God’s voice. If you want to hear God’s voice, that is his voice to this issue of homosexuality. It is not ambiguous and unclear. It is very clear. If you look at the counsel of the word of God, Old Testament, New Testament, you come quickly to the conclusion that homosexuality is not an alternate lifestyle. . . . homosexuality is not just a sexual preference, homosexuality is not gay, but homosexuality is sin. It is sin in the eyes of God, and it is sin according to the word of God.

[. . .]

The only way out of a homosexual lifestyle, the only way out of a relationship that has been ingrained over years of time, is through the healing power of Jesus. . . . We’ve got to say the homosexuals, the same thing that I say to you and that you would say to me . . . it’s not easy to change, but it is possible to change.

Think Progress described the sermon as “vehemently anti-gay”, a sentiment that seems to be shared by the White House. As Whisenant added, the inauguration committee was “not aware of Pastor Giglio’s past comments at the time of his selection and they don’t reflect our desire to celebrate the strength and diversity of our country at this Inaugural.”

On his church’s website Giglio says that “after conversations between our team and the White House I am no longer serving in that role.”

Why It Matters: For the past several decades voices inside and outside the church have said that Christians have hurt our witness by focusing on issues that challenge individualistic sexual permissiveness. They say that if we would only focus on actions that show how much we love our neighbor, actions like ending human trafficking, we would be welcomed in the public square. But as the Giglio incident reveals, no amount of good works can atone for committing the secular sin of subscribing to the biblical view of sexuality.

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