Saturday, May 15, 2010

Slouching Toward Gommorrah, Part 1,890 - Lesbian Bishop Now Ordained And The Gay Rights Agenda Moves On

Homosexuality is a common human condition. It's same sex attraction, along with all of the culture that supports and condones it are impulses and social constructs that the Bible views as sinful conditions that people choose to embrace out of any one of a thousand reasons. There are those who argue that this is a genetic issue and that homosexuality is a genetic predisposition, and there are those who religiously argue that God made homosexuals to be homosexual, in complete contradiction to the plain Biblical view that God fashioned humanity to follow two sexes.

It took the fall of man in the Garden of Eden and the estrangement of humanity from His Lordship over them to ultimately result in the development of same-sex culture, in which men are attracted to men and women to women and who seek to create a distorted revisioning of what human relationships and sexuality should be.

It's taken the last two hundred years of secular humanism's uber-tolerance for any "alternative lifestyle" as equally valid to the other to fully blossom in human consciousness in the West and the last fifty to see homosexual culture come out of what it calls "the closet" and boldly, shamelessly claim to be just as normative as heterosexuality. Taking cues from the civil rights movement, gay rights activism now engages us with sophisticated, emotional and zealous challenges to view it as a condition that deserves the same kind of legal protection as the rights of women and minorities. Much of Western society has fully embraced this warped mindset that flies in the face of the Bible's teachings on homosexuality and now view narrowly those who feel otherwise as intolerant "homophobes."

Along with this cultural cooption of every known human institution to support and nourish the homosexual lifestyle came a full blown abandonment of Biblical fidelity by a variety of mainstream Protestant denominations, one being the Episcopal Church in America. It's just another sign of the end time apostacy, one that shouldn't surprise anyone, and something that no one today - except the gay friendly press and culture - will take any note of because it's now so common. Today, in Los Angeles, a female Episcopal bishop will ordain another female Episcopal priest to the bishopric, one who is openly gay and has had a partner since 1988. This is the same branch of the Episcopal Church in America whose first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, informed us that Paul's condemnation of homosexuality in Romans 1 was not directed at gays, of course. His discussion of this passage resonates with the gay religious agenda today:

We have to understand that the notion of a homosexual sexual orientation is a notion that’s only about 125 years old.“That is to say, St. Paul was talking about people that he understood to be heterosexual engaging in same-sex acts," said Bishop Robinson. "It never occurred to anyone in ancient times that a certain minority of us would be born being affectionally oriented to people of the same sex. So it did seem like against their nature to be doing so.”

With the plain thrust of the Bible thus brushed aside, it's no wonder that such advances that homosexuality has made in the world have achieved the change of public opinion as they have. Such a shift of Western culture wasn't lost on the founder of the largest gay church movement in the U.S., one time Pentecostal preacher Troy Perry. What Biblically-informed Christians would call his "fall" as he fully embraced homosexuality while pastoring a Pentecostal church is seen by him just a bit different than they do. Many Christians ask if he could have been "restored" if only something "different" had been done for him when he openly turned to homosexuality in 1963. Of course he could have .. but as far as Perry was concerned, there wasn't a problem to begin with. He'd embraced the view that God created him to be homosexual. How can you begin to bring restoration to anyone who hasn't even come to any perception of how fallen they are? How do you lift someone up who stands in the muck of their sin and narrowly looks back at you to say "God made me this way and God don't make junk!"

I own an unexpurgated copy of Perry's autobiography and after reading his account of those years, I wanted to take a shower afterwards. Without getting any more lurid than the truth already is, Perry defiantly relates to how he evangelized in Alabama as a Church of God preacher while simultaneously engaging in "pleasant sexual interludes" characterized as "tender exploration" without a glimmer of regret. He continued in his folly even while taking a piano playing wife and dutifully fathering two children. His only regrets seemed to be that he got caught and that he never was "true to himself" and separated from his wife by telling her "The time has come for me stand up and find me. I've got to know who I am." In fact, after drafted into the Army in 1965, the only "fear of God" you see in Perry was his terror that he might be struck dead on the spot in a gay bar in Hollywood for DRINKING BEER. That says much about where his skewed morality had gone.

I will be the first to admit that he very likely was treated like trash by the Church of God overseers who were supposed to help him and who instead gave him the right foot of fellowship. That was very definitely a profound and seriously flawed way to have addressed Perry's problem, but in light of his own self-justifying account, you can see where his heart was. Troy's lust and religiosity were, in his mind, perfectly balanced when he decided God "made him" that way and started to develop his gay theological monstrosity through the founding of the Metropolitan Community Church. I really don't believe he'd have done any differently regardless how the Church of God overseers approached him.

The controversy is endless, much of it generated by gay activists who passionately excoriate and condemn the attempts by the Church today to address the homosexual condition compassionately and Biblically, without immediately resorting to the ferocious hellfire and damnation posturing of past Christian positions. They draw no distinction between those who resist homosexuality on moral grounds and those who just are vicious and hateful people who would torment homosexuals as quickly as anyone else they could bully (painting both groups as "homophobes" guilty of spilling the blood of people like Matthew Shepard). This emotion laden argument easily drowns out those who would still affirm homosexuality to be a perversion of human nature, one no more evil than any other. Gay rights activists now routinely demand the identification and condemnation of these dissenters with a pogram of social, political and personal ostracization as intolerant as the "hating" they want to expose. By pointing out that any and every person with objections to homosexuality use "hate speech" betraying an antisocial "homophobia", the gay rights movement daily advances in culture with little to stop it. With the rise of another clumsily executed pro-gay Presidential agenda foisted upon us by the machinations of the Obama administration and the Democratic control of Washington, things don't appear to be getting any better.

And a Church that should know better slips further into the mud .. just as Jesus said it would.

Seeking to care for and understand homosexual people in a sincere attempt to bring them through reparative therapy is where the best hope for homosexuals lies. The Exodus International movement among others has sought to pioneer this approach, even as radical gay activists try to discredit it by infiltrating ex-gay support groups and programs to do so. They do this, I think, because it has genuinely helped many who sincerely want to know if they can change. Exodus' testimonials of change can't be denied, even if there are those who return to homosexuality itself. Homosexuals can be healed and can be transformed into a uniquely personal new creation, not denying who they themselves are, but by helping them rediscover the connections they need to find to reorienting their passions and drives that have been sexualized by same sex attraction. It's not a wiping out of who they are personally but a healing of the breach within their sexuality that colored their overall direction of life. That is what healing of the homosexual looks like, which Exodus advocates, so courageously champions in the face of an increasingly intolerant culture pro-gay hatred.

What has helped me the most in understanding and trying to deal with how to help homosexuals was the work of Christian therapist Elizabeth Moberly who wrote a great book called "Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic" that was eye opening. There were 2 talks she gave at the Church of God seminary back in the late 1980's during a conference on the family that I heard that provided profound insights into homosexuality that need to be heard by all Christians desiring to help them. It's changed my views on the subject and I believe her insights, controversial as some may find them, are consistent with Biblical teaching on homosexuality and human nature as well as sound, sensible psychological observation into human behavior. Her book is well worth the find and it is barely even 75 pages long, but outstanding, concise and easy to understand. In short, she advocates the position that "the homosexual condition involves legitimate developmental needs, the fulfillment of which has been blocked by an underlying ambivalence to members of the same sex."

There has been, in her assertion, a trauma or deficit in a homosexual's relationship to their same-sex parent (that can - but not always - involve sexual abuse, emotional distancing, family issues, etc.) that, in their years of puberty and psycho-sexual development, they somehow try to start to work out through sexual and social relationships with the same sex. It's a mind-kinking argument, but I believe it holds the key to helping these tormented men and women.

Sadly, for those who've abandoned whatever restraint they may have had, or who were taught that any concept of such a thing is unhealthy repression, the homosexual culture rolls onward. And the Troy Perrys, Gene Robinsons, Katherine Schoris and Mary Glasspools of the the apostate church of the last days are ready to invoke the Deity in their godspeeds.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Silence Is Golden ... For Cult Groups

The greatest ally of spiritual tyranny is no different then its secular variety - silence.

The spiritual holocaust of cultism that descends upon and consumes so many daily in societal circles is so mundane, so prevalent and so stitched into the fabric of human life that we've come to accept its uniquely authoritarian grip as just "the way it is." I can think of innumerable times throughout my life before, during and after I became a Christian in 1981 of how many times I've beheld some anonymous outrage, family dysfunction, or incident in the lives of people around me which could be directly attributed to some kind of doctrinal or social extremism that cultism itself has seamlessly blended into their life with. As the old commercial goes, it's as American as mom, apple pie and Chevrolet. No one remembers the tragic example of Kitty Genovese any more - it happens daily all over the nation. Does the name of Derrion Albert ring a bell, the boy beaten to death in Mr. Obama and Ms. Oprah's Chicago ring a bell, the boy whose attack was captured on cell phone video by teenagers who said nothing? Nahh, didn't think so. People nowadays, locked into their own little circles of concern, would rather just look the other way .. but take a picture or two on their Droids to email someone around the corner.

With something so common, you'd think American common sense and our commitment to freedom of conscience might have better equipped the body politic. Nahhh. When the kick to the side of one's spiritual head finally lands and rouses the average victim of cultism to a soul-withering perception of what it has cost them, and reaches out to seek solace, understanding, escape and perspective, they fail miserably. It's for this same reason - there's no help easily found because those who might, could and should help are clueless about what the problem even i. It's because those who could speak out, say something, contend with the horror and withstand it were silent.

Listen to a cult survivor, struggling to ground herself in a balanced reality outside the shadowlands of the cult she left, as they discuss what the consequences of this perpetual silence spell out in no uncertain terms for them:

Telling people that I once was in a cult is like telling people I was born with six fingers or I was abducted by aliens. The reaction is about the same. They look a little confused at first, like maybe they didn’t hear me correctly. Then the looks of disgust (at my being such a freak, I suppose), pity (at my probable insanity), and suspicion (that I have just inadvertently criticized their beliefs) flit across their face as they try to quickly put on their game faces. It is unnerving to say the least.

I probably should not bring the subject up. At all. Ever. But, I have not figured out how to avoid the topic yet. That could be because I am only 29 years old and a very large portion of my adult life (age 19-26) was monopolized by the event. So, there are not very many things to refer to in my adult life outside the circumstances of the cult.

It smarts when I see how people can be so blind to cultism's destructive legacy. But it aches worse when I realize that this is not the way it should be. In any one of a hundred different ways, the vicious twist of cultism that emerges from the warpings of the human spirit could have been unwound, corrected compassionately, smoothed out and made something uplifting. That's where it usually begins .. on the road of good intentions exhibited by people of passion, conviction and vision who became sidetracked onto a darker path. And in any one of an infinite number of ways, in too many places throughout the world, it was never addressed. Those who could have intervened, confronted, checked, influenced this misguided flow of human interaction did not do so. They remained silent. Therein lies the misery of human existence when it comes to cultism.

Those who could say something .. stayed silent.

And the progression of cultism through the most benign and noble of vocations like therapy, leadership and religion became a blitzkrieg of abuse with the nicest of intentions. It all reminds me of the famous poem written by a pastor whose opposition to the rise of Nazism in Germany resulted in his imprisonment in Dachau:

When They Came For Me

by Pastor Martin Niemoller

When the Nazis came for the communists
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
Then they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
I did not protest;
I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.

People are people .. if they could remain silent for a Hitler's Germany, they will readily keep muzzled for a Munz, a Shamblin, a Jeffs, a Koresh, a Manson or any other false teacher and leader everwhere else who are every inch, heart and soul, true cult leaders. Yahweh alone knows how many people had the opportunity to intervene and never did. Why, this is America, it is said .. everyone has a right to their opinion. Even if those opinions result in the tragic decimation of families, darkening of their souls and crushing of consciences for the sake of some "new truth" that decides everyone not adhering to it is of "Satan's world."
With such silence by those in the position to change for the good, cultism's bright future is assured as we stroll down the avenues of the end times toward an assured Judgment Day. As my old friend and mentor Paul Carden once said so well,

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for God's people to do nothing.

And we have done just that so well for too long.