What Pride Month is really about, and how we got here

No one wants to be the bad guy. No one wants to have that finger of accusation (or that other finger) pointed at them, calling them a hateful, sexist, homophobic bigot. Christians don’t ask to be persecuted. So that’s why so many Christians remain silent on this issue. We don’t like to get ganged-up on, and we don’t like creating division or adding fuel to an already raging wildfire. We certainly don’t like the distance or rift it causes in relationships–many have had that happen once, and once is more than enough. But there’s still that fire in our bellies for truth and righteousness, and hopefully I can take a few minutes at least, and present to you a reasonable and gracious explanation, in truth and love, as to why we believe what we believe when it comes to the LGBTQ+ issue.

So what is Pride Month to the conservative Christian? Why do we disdain it so much? The answer is simple: it’s the pride; it’s the rebellion against God. In some cases deliberate, in other cases not.

Now, before I get into that, let me explain how we got here as a society from the Christian perspective. It’s hard to know exactly where and when it began, but I might say it probably started with the advent of the theory of evolution, maybe more specifically in the wake of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which allowed the teaching of evolution in schools. I don’t mind specifically the freedom for schools to teach evolution, but I’m not too keen on the lack of freedom for schools to not teach evolution, or to teach the blunders of Evolution (which is just as, if not more scientific).

Regardless, it may have started there. Perhaps it didn’t. Maybe it was the advent of Rock n’ Roll in the 1950s. Some point to the SCOTUS decision to remove prayer from schools in the early 60s. At some point, though, there was a small trickle of rebellion in our society. That small trickle ran rather rapidly until ‘free love’ became a mantra for the Hippie movement in the later 60s. That ‘free love’ found its way through our entertainment media (the advent of the James Bond movies, just prior to the Hippie movement, is a good example) and that slow trickle became a running stream throughout the Baby Boom era.

By the time MTV came along in the early 80s, Gen X’s parents were a bit more permissive of the former social ills of sex, drugs and Rock n’ Roll. As AIDS became more prevalent, society replaced Biblical standards with the use of ‘safe sex’ (even though Biblical standards, one could argue, could eradicate AIDS and any other STD over the course of one generation). As Gen-Xers grew into young adults, they helped advent the acceptance of another former sexual ill–homosexuality. Twenty years later, homosexuality was so well accepted that the SCOTUS almost had no other option but to allow same-sex marriage.

To me, that was our final fist at God–our “Cidar House Rules” moment; our new Tower of Babel. We had decided to set God’s laws aside and do things our own way. It’s interesting, as a side note, that the Gay Pride flag has six colors, whereas the actual rainbow has seven. Seven is the Biblical number of God’s perfection, whereas the number six represents man. In other words, though probably not deliberate, the pride flag is an underlying symbol of mankind exalting itself above God.

So here we are, several years after gay marriage was legalized (though, I question whether it was legally legalized since it was a Supreme Court decision, not a legislative decision–much like Roe v. Wade), and now, since the homosexual battle has been won, the next sexual revolution for social justice warriors is transgenderism. Now, what I have said so far, shouldn’t be anything too controversial, just an observation of Western Civilization’s social history and slide from its Biblical foundations to that of shifting sand for the past century or so (if we start with the Scopes trial).

I think it should also be said that in the midst of all of that, a couple of other social changes came at us from other directions. First, as I mentioned above, we lessened the importance of (and in some cases completely stopped) taking our children to church; then we lessened (and in some cases completely stopped) disciplining our children; and bouncing off of that logic, we began to raise the “participation trophy” generation somewhere around Y2K. The children who were raised under these circumstances have now grown up with sort of an ‘Oprah-Winfrey-meets-Mister-Rogers’ concept of Jesus; and with a subconscious belief that they are entitled to have everything about them accepted. No one is allowed to tell them that they are wrong. That is a no-no. We are to encourage and enable them in their choices, whatever they may be.

What that means now, is that we have a generation of grown adults who–to a degree–have no shame or humility when it comes to standing before a holy and righteous God. Ergo, they are prideful.

And if you follow the logic of the “Oprah-Winfrey-meets-Mister-Rogers” Jesus that they have grown up to believe in, “he loves us just the way we are; and Jesus taught us to love and not judge one another.” They believe they are entitled to everyone in the world accepting their sexual identity as good and righteous, and from God. Any disagreement is considered hateful and unchristian.

But what about the argument that we are to love one another and not judge? Jesus explains this well in the parable of the Good Samaritan, and Paul the apostle spoke about loving our neighbor to the Roman and Galatian churches, and gives us a great Biblical definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13.

In those verses you can see, when Biblical love toward our neighbor is rightly defined, it is not what many people believe it to be. And you can see how over time, this trickle that I talked about became a stream, then a river, and eventually eroded our society to the point where it has become a ravine with progressivism on one side, and conservativism (primarily Christian conservatives) on the other. Though many moved along with the rift, some didn’t–some stood their ground. And so here we are today on two opposite sides without a bridge (we had one at one point, but it seems to have been collapsed during the rift).

So what is Pride Month all about in the eyes of a conservative Christian? Well, like I said, it’s pride. But pride in what? Primarily pride in self…and I don’t think the progressives will disagree with that. The difference is whether or not that is a good thing. The progressives will say that it is good to have pride in who you are. But in the case of transgenders, this makes no sense. Why? Because pride in transgenderism is the celebration of rejecting God’s design, yet at the same time, it’s the celebration of supposedly accepting God’s design.

But is someone born gay or tansgender? Probably. And yes, even so, it is still a sin. I know it sounds to some like I’m contradicting myself but Biblically speaking, I’m not. Here’s why: we are all born with a spiritual disease called sin. No one has ever been exempt from this desease except for Jesus. And it was only the unblemished lamb of God that could make the way for the rest of us to escape the stranglehold of this disease upon our lives.

And God loved us so much that he gave us his standards of holiness and righteousness in writing. He also gave us not only those standards, he knew that there was no way we could climb out of sin on our own. And so, he gave us a way out. But it requires humility, not pride.

So are we upset at Pride Month? Yes, but a better term might be righteously indignant. We are righteously angry at how we got here; the spiritual pride that started with the Scopes Monkey Trial and snowballed here with no end in sight. We are righteously angry at the Father of Lies who deceives the world; and angry that so many people are willing to follow his lies rather than turn to God’s actual love for the LGBTQ+ community. God’s love is not that he lets us be “who we are,” but instead saves us from “who we are.”

This means that our righteous indignation against LGBTQ+ pride is not anger or hatred toward LGBTQ+ individuals. In fact, like discipline, it’s a form of love. Like I said, we are all sinners and have fallen short of the glory of God. We are all in the same boat. We are all born with the same sin cancer, but infected with differnet types of cancer (and pride is at the root of them all). The same indignation would be in effect if there were such efforts as “Porn Pride” or other heterosexual sins being proudly paraded everywhere from our schools, corporations, entertainment and sports industries, and even churches. Many men are greatly drawn to these sins as a magnet, and the greatest sin currently pervading our churches is online porn. So sexual sin is a large problem, and if we read the Bible from the very beginning, we will see that humanity has really not changed all that much.

However, thanks to The Spotless Lamb, we can all be forgiven; and thanks to The Holy Spirit, we can all be transformed. And that is what they call, “the good news of the gospel.” Wait…that’s redundant…

…and as Inspector Columbo would say, “Just one more thing…”

I understand that there is an argument that says homosexuality in The New Testament is mistranslated. Perhaps another time with more research, but to find a good discussion on that, click here.