Civil Commotion

Evangelicals being ‘forced out’ of Church of England for being gay

Church of England evangelicals are claiming that they being “forced out” for being gay.

Jayne Ozanne, an influential Church of England evangelical who is gay, has promised to raise the issue at the General Synod next month and ask whether churches are breaching the official guidelines of the House of Bishops.

Speaking to The Sunday Times, she had “learnt of dozens of cases recently” and said she expected a #MeToo” moment for the Church to be stirred up.

Nobody should be surprised by this, I suppose. In an age when virtually every biologist on the planet accepts that sexual orientation is innate, however, it points to how out-of-touch with reality the Pious actually are.

Uh-huh.

This is beyond nuts. It’s time to ask, I think, if Donald Trump is a traitor serving Putin’s aim of splitting the historic Western alliances.

There are all kinds of sound reasons to dislike Russell Moore — his degrading death-wish theology, for instance. But as the 2018 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention approaches, it develops that …

• His fellow Baptists haven’t really forgiven him for his frank dislike of Donald Trump, and …

• They really don’t like Moore’s dislike of Paige Patterson’s well-documented thuggishness and misogyny.

Moore is a man with decent instincts held captive by the degrading ideology he was force-fed as a child. Someday, one hopes, he will see his ridiculous club as the rest of the world does, and move along.

It’s going to be a great meeting.

Yet another Holy Man is peeved that fewer couples want to get married in church or, even, want a pastor present to solemnize the marriage. Unusually, he is frank about the reason:

Since the 1960s, social expectations concerning sex, cohabitation, childbearing and marriage have quietly undergone profound changes.

Religion is the great loser in that revolution, not only ceding its cultural influence, but also struggling to govern the lifestyle choices of its own adherents.

Clergy and churches, once gatekeepers to the social respectability that marriage afforded, are now often reduced to paid extras and photo ops.

As I’ve said in the past, marriage is a vehicle for church control and power:

Like the cult-like Christian teachings about marriage itself, it’s all about control — and the pastor’s peevishness is about the loss of control.

It is not a coincidence that evangelicals have the highest divorce rate in society. How else could it be when the church’s teaching is that they — Oh, wait, I mean Our Invisible Friend! — have first dibs on your life, and your family gets no more than the leftovers?

Bruce Gerencser, a pastor turned atheist, has written extensively and with rare honesty about the malignant effect of this teaching upon his own marriage; he’s well worth paying attention to.

My children and Polly have long since forgiven me for not giving them the time they deserved. They understand why I worked like I did, but I have a hard time forgiving myself for putting God, Jesus, the church, preaching, and winning souls before my family. No matter how often I talk about this with my counselor, the guilt and sense of loss remain.

When taken seriously, Christian teaching makes marriage no more than an exercise in animal husbandry, an institution for procreation and growing the cult; it is not — Repeat, NOT — about mutual loyalty, shared ambitions, building satisfying lives together. Any preacher will tell you: Those things are presumptions upon the absolutely sovereignty of The Creator Of The Whole Big Universe, who alone is worthy of your loyalty, and who will tell you what are your ambitions.

So it pleases me to encounter yet another preacher who is complaining about his loss of influence, his struggles to control the lifestyle choices of young members of his congregation, that he is no longer a gatekeeper; those complaints are a waypoint on our cultural trip out of decadence. Good for us, then.