17 September 2015 A.D. Russell Moore: Why Evangelicals Will Not Surrender to the Sexual Revolution
17
September 2015 A.D. Russell
Moore: Why Evangelicals Will Not Surrender to the Sexual Revolution
Moore, Russell D.
“Evangelicals Will Not Cave: Why Evangelicals Will Not Surrender to the Sexual
Revolution.” First Things. Oct 2015. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/10/evangelicals-wont-cave. Accessed 16 Sept 2015.
Could the next Billy Graham be
a married lesbian? In the year 2045, will Focus on the Family be “Focus on the
Families,” broadcasting counsel to Evangelicals about how to manage jealousy in
their polyamorous relationships? That’s the assumption among many—on the
celebratory left as well as the nervous right.
Now that the Obergefell
v. Hodges Supreme Court case has nationalized same-sex marriage, America’s last
hold-outs, conservative Evangelical Protestants, will eventually, we’re told,
stop worrying and learn to love, or at least accept, the sexual revolution. As
Americans grow more accustomed to redefined concepts of marriage and family,
Evangelicals will convert to the new understanding and update their theologies
to suit. This is not going to happen. The revolution will not be
televangelized.
In any given week, I’m asked by multiple reporters about the “sea change”
among Evangelicals in support of same-sex marriage. I reply by asking for
evidence of this shift. The first piece of evidence is always polling data
about Millennial support for such. I respond with data on Millennial
Evangelicals who actually attend church, which show no such shift away from
orthodoxy. The journalist then typically points to “all the Evangelical
megachurches that are shifting their positions on marriage.” I request the
names of these megachurches.
The first one mentioned is almost always a church in Franklin, Tennessee—a
congregation with considerably less than a thousand attendees on any given
Sunday. That may be a “megachurch” by Episcopalian standards, but it is not by
Evangelical standards, and certainly not by Nashville Evangelical standards.
The church is the fifth-largest, not in the country, not in the region, not
even in the city; it is the fifth-largest congregation on its street within a
mile radius. I’ll usually grant that church, though, and ask for others. So
far, no journalist has named more churches shifting on marriage than there are
points of Calvinism. They just take the Evangelical shift as a given fact.
That presumption is a
widespread case of wishful thinking. Many secular progressives believe that
Evangelicals, along with their religious allies, just need a “nudge” to catch
up with the right side of history, a nudge they are more than willing to
provide through social marginalization or the removal of tax exemptions or
various other state-mandated carrots and sticks. Our churches can simply
accommodate doctrines and practices to new family definitions, these
progressives advise, and everyone will be happy. Religious liberty violations,
then, aren’t really harming Evangelicals, this reasoning goes, but instead are
helping us to get where we’re headed anyway a little faster.
This narrative is entirely consistent with the sexual revolution’s view of
itself—as progress toward the inevitable triumph of personal autonomy and
liberation. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, in the context of the New Deal, “In a
democracy the crowning triumph of a revolution is its acceptance by the
opposition.”
But however confident and complacent are these helpers, they can’t change
the fact that the Evangelical cave-in on sexual ethics is just not going to
happen. There is no evidence for it, and no push among Evangelicals to start
it. In order to understand this, one has to know two things about Evangelicals.
One, Evangelical Protestants are “catholic” in their connection to the broader,
global Body of Christ and to two millennia of creedal teaching; and two,
Evangelicals are defined by distinctive markers of doctrine and practice. The
factors that make Evangelicals the same as all other Christians, as well as the
distinctive doctrines and practices that set us apart, both work against an
Evangelical accommodation to the sexual revolution.
The first stumbling block to
any Evangelical cave-in is the Bible. Evangelicals are not “fundamentalists” in
the way many have come to use the term—characterized by uniformity on secondary
or tertiary doctrines along with a fighting sectarian spirit. But conservative
Evangelicals are—and always have been—“fundamentalists” in the original meaning
of the term, within the context of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of
the early twentieth century. The controversy there was not over whether the
millennium of Revelation 20 is literal or whether the days of Genesis 1 are
twenty-four-hour solar cycles, much less over whether the King James Version of
the Bible is the only legitimate English translation of Scripture.
The issues were the most basic aspects of “mere Christianity”—the virgin
birth, the miracles, the atonement, the bodily resurrection, and the
inspiration of Scripture. The Evangelical commitment to biblical authority
means that the Bible is not written by geniuses but by apostles, to use
Kierkegaard’s distinction. The words of the Bible are breathed out by the
Spirit, as the apostle Paul puts it (2 Tim. 3:16). “For no prophecy was ever
produced by the will of man,” the apostle Peter teaches. “But men spoke from
God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21).
The Reformation principle of sola
scriptura does not mean, as it is often caricatured by non-Protestant Christians,
that the only authority is the Bible and the individual Christian. It means
instead that the only final authority is the
prophetic-apostolic word in the writings of Scripture. If an Evangelical needs
driving directions to Cleveland, she consults Google maps, not her concordance.
If, though, Google tells her that first-century Judea was uninhabited, she
knows Google is wrong. The authorities here conflict, and Scripture trumps
other authorities, not the other way around.
It’s also not accurate to say that sola scriptura negates church authority or
the necessity of tradition or a teaching office. The most vibrant sectors of
American Evangelicalism are those most committed to creedal definition and to a
disciplined church. Evangelicals, though, do not believe in a “once saved,
always saved” sort of eternal security for any particular institutional church.
A church can lose the Gospel and with it the lampstand of Christ’s presence
(Rev. 2:5).
Whether one agrees or disagrees
with the Evangelical view of scriptural authority, a persistent cultural
pattern has emerged from it. Evangelical Protestants are always aware of the
possibility of false teachers. They judge every human teacher or teaching
against the text of Scripture. This by no means is foolproof—see the heresies
of prosperity gospel teaching, for just one example—but it does mean that
innovators must be especially cunning, able to explain their views in a way that
does not seem out of step with the Bible—if they are to win a long-term hearing
among Bible-believing Evangelicals.
Revisionist arguments will not work among conservative Evangelicals because
people read the texts, and the biblical texts—as orthodox believers and
antagonistic unbelievers agree—hold to a vision of marriage and sexuality
wholly out of step with post-Obergefell America.
Revisionists get around that flat conflict by citing a context for the
text, asserting the difference between ancient and modern notions of sexual
orientation. But, Evangelicals reply, the definition of marriage is not
grounded in ancient Near Eastern culture but in the created order itself (Gen.
2:24). That’s why Jesus speaks of man-woman marriage and its permanence as
“from the beginning” (Mk. 10:6). Moreover, the canon asserts that even this
natural “one-flesh union” points beyond nature to the blueprint behind the
cosmos, the mystery of the union of Christ and his Church (Eph. 5:32).
Much has been made in media circles of Evangelical dissenters from
traditional orthodoxy on questions of sexual ethics. These dissenters, however,
are not leaders known for Bible-teaching or church-building or
institution-leading. They are known for the dissent itself. In virtually every
case, the high-profile “Evangelicals” who have shifted on sexual ethics were
already theologically liberalized on multiple other issues, often for decades.
An “Evangelical” who attends a mainline, liberal Protestant church or who
shares platforms with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is not likely to be
received as an Evangelical by Evangelicals.
Journalists covering such
dissenters should ask them these basic questions: Where do you go to church?
What do you believe about the inerrancy of Scripture? Is there a hell, and must
one believe consciously in Christ in order to avoid it? They cannot portray
these figures as representative Evangelicals unless they give certain answers.
I would bet that a little probing would show that these stories are the
equivalent of writing an article about the Democratic party’s views on foreign
policy by citing hawkish independent-Democratic former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman.
In his commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, the late Anglican
Evangelical John R. W. Stott offers a prescient point relevant to this issue.
It turns on Paul’s defense, in the opening chapter of the letter of his
apostleship, of his genuine witness to the risen Christ and his authority to
speak on Christ’s behalf by the Spirit. Against Paul were the “super-apostles”
who sought to divide Paul from the original apostles in Jerusalem and even from
Jesus himself. This contest did not end with the apostle’s beheading in Rome,
Stott observes, nor with the close of the canon.
“The view of modern radical theologians can simply be stated like this: The
apostles were merely first-century witnesses to Christ. We on the other hand
are twentieth-century witnesses, and our witness is just as good as theirs, if
not better,” Stott wrote. “They speak as if they were apostles of Jesus Christ
and as if they had equal authority with the apostle Paul to teach and to decide
what is true and right.”
The sexual revisionists within
Evangelicalism appeal not merely to the priesthood of all believers. They
appeal to the apostleship of all believers, something orthodox Christians of
all branches reject. It underlies the crux of the revisionist argument: that
the apostles did not know what we know now about sexual orientation.
The fact that homosexuality—and other forms of sexual immorality—is always
and everywhere spoken of negatively in Scripture is explained away by a lack of
scientific knowledge about loving, monogamous same-sex unions, the immutability
of sexual orientation, or something else. Such arguments make sense if the
authority of Scripture rests in the expertise of the apostles and prophets
themselves. If, on the other hand, the authority of Scripture rests in the
Spirit inspiring and carrying along the authors, the arguments collapse. If the
Bible is a coherent book, with an Author behind the authors, one can hardly say
that God is ignorant of contemporary knowledge about sexuality.
The revisionist position stands, then, not on an interpretation of the
words of Scripture, but on a choice of who is the author of them. The revisionists
are not only teachers; they are apostles, too.
They can pronounce the meaning of Christ just as the first-century apostles
did. The revisionists most often wish to keep the attention on Moses and Paul,
pointing to the fact that Jesus said nothing about homosexuality. Of course, by
defining marriage in terms of male–female complementarity and by affirming the
moral teachings of the Torah, Jesus did speak to the issue. Not only that, but
Evangelicals don’t set the words of Scripture not explicitly uttered by Jesus
in so malleable a condition. If “all Scripture” is breathed out by the Spirit
(2 Tim 3:16), and if the Spirit inspiring the biblical authors is the “Spirit
of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:10–11), then every text of Scripture is Jesus speaking,
not just those that publishers code out in red letters.
Increasingly, though,
revisionists have to deal with Jesus himself. Journalist Brandon Ambrosino
argued that the best argument for same-sex marriage is that Jesus was simply
wrong about marriage, owing to the fact that he was ignorant of contemporary
scientific notions of sexual orientation and the evolving standards of a
morality of love. It takes quite a messiah complex to school the actual Messiah
on moral and ethical truth, all while claiming to follow him. This argument is
immediately off-limits for Evangelicals because they are, first of all, “mere
Christians” who agree with Nicaea and Chalcedon about who Jesus is. The
argument that “Jesus would agree with us if he’d lived to see our day” won’t
work for people who know that Jesus is alive today—and that his views aren’t
evolving (Heb. 13:8).
Some would say, though, that even if the Bible can’t be easily made to fit
into a sexual revolutionary matrix, the culture will change quickly enough to
make traditional Christian sexual ethics implausible. The Church will adapt to
same-sex marriage the way the Church adapted to divorce. Pastor Danny Cortez,
for instance, who was dis-fellowshipped from the Southern Baptist Convention
for moving his church to a “welcoming and affirming” position on homosexuality,
argued that Evangelicals have already moved in this direction on divorce and
remarriage. Few celebrate divorce in theory, but there are many divorced and
remarried people in our pews, sometimes even in our pulpits. There’s some truth
to this.
I’ve argued for years that too often Evangelical churches are filled with
“slow-motion sexual revolutionaries,” adapting to where the culture already is,
simply ten or twenty or thirty years behind.
Divorce is all too common in Evangelical congregations, even the most
conservative ones. But divorce does not show us the future as it relates to the
current controversies over marriage and sexuality.
First of all, most Evangelicals (unlike Roman Catholics and some other
groups) believe there are some instances in which divorce and remarriage are
biblically permitted. Most Evangelical Protestants acknowledge that sexual
infidelity can dissolve a marital union and that the innocent party is then
free to remarry.
The same is true for abandonment (1 Cor. 7:11–15). Disciplined churches
that held couples accountable to their vows would see far fewer of these
situations, but, still, remarrying after divorce is not, on the face of it, sin
in an Evangelical perspective, and never has been.
Beyond that is the question of
what repentance looks like. In an Evangelical Protestant view, a remarriage
after a divorce may well constitute an act of adultery, but the marriage itself
is not, in the view of most Evangelicals, an ongoing act of adultery. Even if
these marriages were entered into sinfully in the first place, they are in fact
marriages. Jesus spoke of the five husbands of the woman at the well in
Samaria, and differentiated them from the man with whom she lived, who was not
her husband (John 4). Same-sex unions, which do not join male and female
together in the icon of the Christic mystery, do not constitute marriages
biblically.
Repentance, in this case, looks the same as it does for every other sexual
sin—fleeing from immorality (1 Cor. 6:18).
A better example for the future shape of this debate is that of
“Evangelical feminism.” In the 1970s and 1980s, a movement gained steam in
Evangelicalism to read biblical texts on gender in a more egalitarian way.
These feminist groups stood with other Evangelicals on biblical inerrancy (and
on the prohibition against homosexuality) but argued for women’s ordination.
They wrote scholarly books and articles on why the apostolic prohibitions on
women “teaching and exercising authority over men” (1 Tim. 2:12) were
culturally conditioned, addressing specific problems in the first-century
churches rather than timeless prescriptions for the Church. Several years ago,
I argued that although I strongly disagree with it, I thought Evangelical
feminism would win the day in American Evangelicalism. The cultural currents
were simply too strong, I thought.
I was wrong. It is now hard to find leaders of Evangelical feminist
organizations who are recognized by the rest of the movement as solidly
conservative and orthodox. The ones who speak up and often about gender are
those with “complementarian” (traditional) views. The largest Evangelical
denominations and church-planting organizations and conferences are now
complementarian (in a way that wasn’t true at all just a decade or two ago).
What happened?
The center of gravity in Evangelicalism moved from “seeker sensitive”
pragmatism to a yearning for connection to older, theologically robust,
confessional traditions, which often had developed theologies of gender. Moreover,
the “slippery slope” from Evangelical feminism to heterodoxy proved to be real.
More and more Evangelical feminists applied their gender views to sexuality in
ways clear enough for conservative Evangelicals to see it as a rejection of
biblical authority.
It is not the case that gender
egalitarians challenge Christian orthodoxy at the same fundamental level as
same-sex marriage revisionists do. I disagree with these egalitarian arguments,
but they have a far stronger case for their views than the sexual revisionists,
both in terms of the biblical text (examples of women leaders such as Deborah
the judge and the joint inheritance of men and women in Christ, etc.) and in
terms of the history of the Church (some orthodox groups in, for instance, the Wesleyan
and Pentecostal wings of the Church had women preachers and leaders long before
the modern feminist movement). Yet if Evangelicalism can withstand the strong
cultural tides of feminism—even in its most popularly palatable
forms—Evangelicalism can do the same with the even more clearly defined issues
of sexual morality.
The Christian sexual ethic is controversial, to be sure, and in different
ways at different times, it always has been. But it’s not the most
controversial thing orthodox Christians believe. That would be the doctrine of
hell. In almost every generation of the Church, someone seeks to negotiate away
the doctrine of hell through a universalism that sees to it that judgment will
not fall on sin. Churches that embrace universalism typically start out on that
path with exuberance, as they are freed from the shackles of guilty consciences
and fears of eternity. But those churches quickly wither and die. There are no
universalist megachurches, no universalist church-planting movements. That’s because
consciences are not burdened with an externally imposed eschatology;
consciences are pre-loaded with an eschatology. The law written on the heart,
the Apostle Paul writes, informs the conscience which “bears witness” toward
the day when “God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Rom. 2:15–16).
What the sexual revolution’s revisionist ethic asks is that the Church
adopt a pinpointed surgical-strike universalism, one that denies that judgment
is coming for this one particular set of sins. As with any form of
universalism, this doesn’t liberate people, but rather enslaves them to their
own accusing consciences. Even if we can excise what the revisionists call
“clobber verses” from the Bible, we cannot overpower the witness of the
conscience.
Will some high-profile
Evangelicals cave on a Christian sexual ethic? Yes, of course, a few will. Some
Evangelical leaders are entrepreneurial and driven by pragmatism and a need for
relevance. Others use Evangelicalism the way an aging rock star uses the country
music audience when he’s too old for top-40 radio. They make a living peddling
mainline Protestant shibboleths to Evangelical markets because, after all,
that’s where the money is. But, as the apostle Paul says of the Egyptian
magicians Jannes and Jambres and of the false teachers in the first-century
church at Ephesus, “They will not get very far, for their folly will be plain
to all” (2 Tim. 3:9).
Secularization and sexualization have put orthodox forms of Christianity on
the defensive, especially the most culturally odious form of Christianity,
conversionist Evangelicalism. This not only changes the nature of the Church’s
mission field; it also clarifies the Church’s witness. What previously could be
assumed must now be articulated.
For nearly the past two centuries, Evangelicals, especially in the South
and Midwest, could count on the culture to do a kind of pre-evangelism. The
culture encouraged people to aspire to a kind of God-and-country citizenship,
to marriage, and to stable family life.
Even when people didn’t live up to those ideals, they knew what they were
walking away from. Evangelicals, then, could use “traditional family values”
to build a bridge to people for the Gospel. Churches could plan on crowds to
hear counsel for a better marriage, or how to put the sizzle back in a sex
life, or how to discipline toddlers or maintain a good relationship with one’s
teenagers. One could trust that the culture shared the “values.”
People just needed practical tips on how to achieve those values, starting
with “a personal relationship with Jesus.”
We can no longer assume, even
in the Bible Belt, that people aspire to, or even understand, our “values” on
marriage and family. These parts of our witness that were the least
controversial—and could be played up while playing down hellfire and brimstone,
for those churches wanting a softer edge—are now controversial. Churches that
reject the sexual revolution are judged as bigoted. Churches that don’t won’t
fare much better, for in a secularizing culture, churches that embrace the
revolution are unnecessary—just as the churches that rejected the miraculous in
favor of scientific naturalism were in the twentieth century.
In post-Obergefell America, Evangelicals and
other orthodox Christians will be unable to outrun our freakishness. That is no
reason for panic. Some will suggest that a Christian sexual ethic puts the
churches on the “wrong side of history.” Well, we’ve been on the wrong side of
history since a.d. 33. The “right side of history” was the Eternal City of
Rome. And then the right side of history was the French Revolution. And then
the right side of history was scientific naturalism and state socialism. And
yet, there stands Jesus still, on the wrong side of history but at the right
hand of the Father.
If we are right about the end of human sexuality, then we ought to know
that marriage is resilient. The sexual revolution cannot keep its promises.
People think they want autonomy and transgression, but what they really want is
fidelity and complementarity and incarnational love. If that’s true, then we
will see a wave of refugees from the sexual revolution, those who, like the
runaway son in Jesus’ story, “come to themselves” in a moment of crisis.
Churches so fearful of cultural
marginalization that they distort or ignore the hard truths of the Gospel will
not be able to reach these refugees. Churches that scream and vent in perpetual
outrage won’t, either. It will be of no surprise if the churches most able to
reach those wounded by sexual freedom, and the chaos thereof, will be the
churches most out of step with the culture. Whatever one thinks of the
“temperance” of many wings of American Evangelicalism, it is no accident that
so many ex-drunks, and their families, found themselves walking sawdust trails to
teetotaling Baptist and Pentecostal churches, not to the wine-and-cheese hour
at the respectable downtown Episcopalian church.
The days ahead require an Evangelicalism that is both robustly theological
and warmly missional, both full of truth and full of grace, convictional and
kind. This does not mean a kind of strategic civility that seeks to avoid
conflict. The kindness that is the fruit of the Spirit is of the sort that
“corrects opponents,” albeit with gentleness and patience (2 Tim. 2:24–25). A Gospel-driven
convictional kindness will not mean less controversy but controversy that is
heard in stereo. Some will object to the conviction, others to the kindness.
Those who object to a call to repentance will cry bigotry, and those who
measure conviction in terms of decibels of outrage will cry sell-out. Jesus was
controversial among the Pharisees for eating at tax collectors’ homes, and he
was no doubt controversial among the tax collectors for calling them to
repentance once he arrived there. He sweated not one drop of blood over that,
and neither should we.
While I am not worried about Evangelicals’ caving on marriage and sexuality
in post-Obergefell America, I am worried about
Evangelicals panicking. We are, after all, an apocalyptic people, for good and
for ill. We can wring our hands that the world is going to hell, but then we
ought to remember that the world did not start going to hell at Stonewall or
Woodstock but at Eden. Adam was our problem, long before Anthony Kennedy.
Mayberry without Christ leads to hell just as surely as Gomorrah without Christ
does. We cannot respond pridefully to the culture around us as though we
deserve a better mission field than a sovereign God assigned to us.
This means that Evangelicals
can best serve the culture by being truly Evangelical. We are not in a
“post-Christian” America, unless we define “Christian” in ways that disconnect
Christianity from the Gospel. The mission of Christ never calls us to use
nominal Christianity as a bridge to redemption. To the contrary, the Spirit
works through the open proclamation of truth (2 Cor. 4:1–2). It is the
strangeness of the Gospel that confounds the wisdom of the world, and that
actually saves (1 Cor. 1:18–31). The Gospel does not need idolatry to bridge
our way to it, even if that idolatry is the sort of “Christianity” that is one
birth short of redemption. Our frame of reference is not happier times in the
1770s or 1950s or 1980s. We are not time travelers from the past; we are
pilgrims from the future. We are not exiles because American culture is in
decline. We are exiles and strangers because “the world is passing away, along
with its desires” (1 Jn. 2:17).
I don’t think American Evangelicals will fold on our sexual ethic. But if
we do, American Evangelicalism will have nothing distinctive to say and will
end up deader than Harry Emerson Fosdick. If so, the vibrant Evangelical
witness God has called together in Nigeria or Argentina or South Korea or China
will be alive and well and ready to send missionaries to preach the whole
Gospel. Whether from America or not, a voice will stand, crying in the
wilderness, “You must be born again.”
Russell D. Moore is president of the Ethics and
Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and author of Onward: Engaging the Culture
Without Losing the Gospel.
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