Any churches that remain faithful to clear Biblical teaching about sexuality — gay or straight — and on the meaning of marriage and the human person, will be increasingly anathematized in this country. And those that compromise will, in time, fade to nothingness, as the ongoing unwinding of the Mainline Protestant churches demonstrates.

This is seriously interesting news:

More Americans feel comfortable with a presidential candidate who identifies as gay or lesbian than with one who identifies as an evangelical Christian, according to a new poll.

The latest WSJ/NBC poll listed a series of qualities in a potential presidential candidate and asked respondents whether they’d “be enthusiastic,” “be comfortable with,” “have some reservations about” or “be very uncomfortable with” a candidate with each of those qualities.

The results revealed that Americans are actually quite open to having a gay presidential candidate. Sixty-one percent said they would be either enthusiastic about or comfortable with a gay or lesbian candidate, while only 37 percent said they would have reservations or be uncomfortable.

By comparison, respondents were a little less comfortable with the prospect of a candidate who is an evangelical Christian. Fifty-two percent said they’d be enthusiastic about or comfortable with an evangelical Christian running for president, while 44 percent expressed some degree of hesitancy about the idea. (Two percent of respondents said they were not sure about a gay or lesbian candidate, while four percent were not sure about an evangelical.)

Here is a link to more detailed information on the poll, which shows that a clear majority of Americans now want gay marriage.

Look, we can complain that the negative opinions that many, perhaps most, Americans have toward Evangelical Christians are the fault of biased media, and we would have a point. The relentless cheerleading in the MSM for same-sex marriage over the last decade, plus the fact that Evangelicals have been the Christians most opposed to it, has taken its toll. I really do believe Evangelicals have gotten a raw deal from our media. But that’s beside the point now.

The point is, there’s nothing Evangelicals can do to turn it around, short of totally abandoning Christian orthodoxy on same-sex marriage — which a fair number of younger Evangelicals are eager to do. The Q Ideas conference kindly invited me to speak recently about the Benedict Option, and I told them that the Indiana moment was an “apocalypse” — which I explained meant here “an unveiling,” not “the end of the world” — in that it showed how few people in America 2015 cared about religious liberty, and how powerful the pro-SSM movement was. The fact is, ours is a post-Christian society moving towards an anti-Christian one, when Christianity conflicts with secular orthodoxy. Any churches that remain faithful to clear Biblical teaching about sexuality — gay or straight — and on the meaning of marriage and the human person, will be increasingly anathematized in this country. And those that compromise will, in time, fade to nothingness, as the ongoing unwinding of the Mainline Protestant churches demonstrates.

The United States has avoided Europe’s fate for a long time, but the churches here have finally lost the ability to coast on cultural momentum. The churches that don’t retrench around building their internal strength and coherence around orthodoxy — and that requires far more than catechesis, but it requires at least that: teaching our story to our children —  and evangelizing from that position of strength, aren’t going to survive. The overculture is just too strong. The forces of atomization and desacralization are very hard to resist.

This is a reality that many Christians, Christians of all kinds, do not want to face. I know very little about Evangelical culture, so prior to Q, I asked a prominent Millennial Evangelical, a thinker I greatly respect, to tell me what I might expect there. He told me that Evangelicals, especially those of his generation, have a particular blind spot about the broader culture. In his view, they have a naive understanding of cultural dynamics, and think that they will be more acceptable to the mainstream if they simply behave with more winsomeness towards them.

Let me make something clear: it is not not not the case that being a self-righteous jerk is the solution! A new book I need to read is Collin Hansen’s aptly titled Blind Spots, which is about how Christians react out of their own experiences, and fail to see truths about themselves and their approach to the world that are obvious to others. Early in the book — this, according to what I could read on Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature — Hansen talks about how what drew him to faith as a teenager who had grown up in an unbelieving home was the happiness and confidence radiating from Christian kids in his school. From what I gather about the book, it’s about teaching Christians how to be fully Christian — that is, knowing the Christian story, living it out counterculturally, and doing so not with brittleness and hostility, but with joy. I ran across Hansen’s book researching this post; it sounds like something well worth reading. Anyway, anybody who thinks I’m advocating a Christian response that’s angry and hostile is wrong, and that needs saying before we go further.

Now, we ought to react to the rest of the world with kindness, empathy, and respect not as an evangelism strategy, but because it’s the right thing to do. That said, I think it’s simply true as a general matter that you can be as nice as you can be, and the world will still hate you. This is massively true when it comes to the gay rights question. There’s a racist joke that speaks to an ugly truth here: “Q: What do you call a millionaire black brain surgeon? A. [racial slur].” The idea is that for people who hate black folks, nothing that black folks do matters; it’s who they are that the racist cares about. Similarly, for many (though certainly not all) modern people liberal conviction, it doesn’t matter that orthodox Christians serve the poor, or do good in their own communities. What matters is their stance on homosexuality.

Read More