Glenn Chatfield of The Watchman’s Bagpipes takes on Christian author, blogger, and speaker Rachel Held Evans for her unbiblical response to the recent terrorist attack in Orlando. Outraged by the event, and rightly so, Evans posted a commentary on Facebook to show her support for homosexuals. In doing so, she chastised Christians who come out and say what the scriptures clearly teach regarding sexual sin. Held, who is emergent, doesn’t like it because, in her view, those who hold that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God “hurt LGBT people every day.
Chatfield does a stellar job dissecting Evans’ commentary. He writes:
On 13 June 2016, 7:51PM, Rachel Held Evans posted on Facebook a commentary about the Orlando murders committed by a Muslim. The following in blue [bold] is her commentary, with my comments below each section.
Orlando. There isn’t a tweet, a prayer, a sentiment in the world that can adequately express the heartache so many of us feel today. As the names and pictures of the victims begin to emerge, we find ourselves oscillating between sadness and anger, between calls to prayerfully grieve and calls to get busy enacting change.
Homophobia,
“Homophobia” is a word made up by homosexualists* to marginalize the debate against homosexual behavior. Etymologically the word simply means a fear of sameness, which really makes the application to homosexuals inane. I’ve never known anyone, nor have I read about anyone, who is afraid of homosexuality. However, the point of the word is to attack people who say that homosexual behavior is wrong, perverted, against God, and that we should not be forced to give it sanction in any way. Yet here is a woman who claims to be a Christian using the word which was designed to attack Christian beliefs.
religious extremism,
Another nebulous term. How can one be “extreme” in their religion? I’m an “extremist” Christian in that I fully believe what the Bible says and strongly adhere to the Christian faith. What Evans and her ilk attempt to do here is to claim the attacks such as the one in Orlando are perpetrated by only “extremists” of the Muslim faith, but in reality these people are only “extreme” in the sense that they choose to live by the real teachings of Islam.
unfettered access to weapons of war,
Like the majority of liberals, Evans seems to consider anything other than a hunting shotgun as a weapon of war. What the Orlando shooter used was not a “weapon of war” — it was simply a rifle which was used to murder. This incident has led to attacks on the whole idea of civilians owning weapons like the AR-15 (which was not, contrary to media claims, used in this attack), which is the most popular rifle in America. You might say it is the replacement of the old Winchester lever-action rifle of the old days as far as popularity and utility of purpose. It is used for hunting, target shooting, and self-defense. It may look like a “weapon of war,” but looks don’t make it so.
and perhaps some untreated anger and mental health challenges all appear to have contributed to the deadliest mass shooting in recent U.S. history,
This false narrative has been developed by the media and the politicians so as to blame everything but the murderer’s motive — killing in the name of Islam. And Evans propagates the lie.
and I believe it is right and good to name those things even as we pause to “weep with those who weep” and even as we caution against simplistic answers that only serve to further ostracize already marginalized groups, like our Muslim neighbors or those who struggle with mental illness.
She speaks against “simplistic answers” all the while promoting her own! No one is ostracizing anyone in regard to this attack. But making people “victims” of evil Christians is the LEFTIST narrative, which is promoted by Evans.
That said, I want to try to articulate something I’ve been hearing from my LGBT friends.
As a “Christian” Evans should know there is no such thing as “LGBT.” People are NOT their sexual behaviors; they are people who practice sexual behaviors. Sexual desires are not a person’s identity and the reason they became so was to promote the idea of “minority rights.” Looking at the individual letters gives more clarification:
L = Lesbian, G = Gay. Both these mean the same thing – persons who practice homosexual behavior. God calls it an abomination.
B = Bisexual, meaning persons who have sexual relations with either sex. Since sexual relations with an opposite sex partner is normal biologically (yet outside of marriage it is a sin), these people should really be in the homosexual behavior group but want the societal recognition by riding the coat-tails as a distinct identity.
T = “Transgender.” This made-up term is for people who “feel” like they are members of the opposite sex. No amount of self-mutilation or hormones will change what the person really is — what they were born as. The use of this term only enables such people in their psychologically unhealthy self-delusion.
Christians should not use any of these terms, but rather identify the practitioners simply as people who are sinning grievously.
as they’ve been processing the responses of Christian leaders over the last 24-hours: Many of these leaders have publicly grieved the massacre and called for Christians to “simply love” the LGBT community in this hour of need…which is good; that’s the right thing to do.
The “love” to be extended is just the love of God for humanity in general. Nothing more, nothing less.
But what I’m hearing from my Christian LGBT friends in particular is that these calls to grieve and love ring a bit hollow when coming from pastors and church leaders who have never spoken out about hate and violence directed against LGBT people before or who have spent years perpetuating the very misinformation, stereotypes, and theology that hurt LGBT people every day.
What Evans seeks here is that to have real “love” for people practicing self-destructive lifestyles is to not mention that they are living in abject sin and rebellion against God. Christian leaders speak out against “hate and violence” directed at ALL people, so there is no need to single out one group just because of their sexual behaviors. I’ve yet to meet or read any Christian who perpetuates “misinformation, stereotypes” about such practitioners, rather they speak the truth about what the lifestyle does to them physically, medically, emotionally and spiritually. And the theology preached against such behavior is the truth of God. If “LGBT” people are “hurt” by the truth, then that is their problem and not the problem of the theology. Evans’ idea of theology is to sanction homosexual behavior and the self-delusion of sexual “identity.”
Oh, and she has no “Christian LGBT” friends. They may claim to be Christian, but their actions show otherwise. Scripture say that those who love Christ will obey his commands and not self-justify behaving in a way which God calls an abomination. These people worship another Jesus and not the one of the Bible.
At first blush… Continue reading
She’s deluded, she ignores the bible and has fallen for the feel-good-sentimental clap trap of Chrurchianity! Why just not say 49 people were murdered? Why bring in the sexual orientation? To make herself more relevant to this ungodly culture? And please, someone clue her in, there are hundreds perhaps thousands being killed for standing up for Jesus Christ! How does she feel about that? Where’s the outrage? Why doesn’t she march up and down in front of the state department demanding they be granted religious protection? The hypocrisy knows no bounds! Surely, great is the apostasy raging all around us, it will get worse! I wonder if the outrage would have been as pronounced if those murdered were a group of Christians in an event?
Righto Manny! When Isis was out butchering all the Christians in the Middle East, where were these lgbt communities? Were they offering sympathy and ‘love’? Ah, let me recall…. oh yeah. No. In fact, you hardly heard a peep from anyone! They wept more tears over the lion and the gorilla.
I get so tired of this opposite spin fest. To tell the truth is to love. To not is to hate. The bible says it is a sin, and it is. That is not hate speech, that is love speech.
It’s like a friend comes to you with an illness and you see the obvious signs. Another friend comes over too. Yet, you don’t point out the ill, nor any possible remedies or treatments. You just smile. You just “love” them. Maybe you give them a hug, say something like “I’m with you, pal!” Make them some herbal tea, and talk like nothing is wrong. Maybe you even say “hey, you’re all right, nothing’s wrong with you!” When it clearly is. The other friend pulls you aside and asks why you didn’t tell him the truth or offer any medicine to save him. To this, you say; “Oh, but that would not be loving! I don’t want to be a “hater.” I would only be judging him, and not accepting him, for who he is.” The friend says “Fool! He could die! You are being unloving by not telling him the truth and sharing remedies with him!”
It is like that, and the illness, besides sin, is also aids. No one should be calling out bad names as some infiltrated churches are doing, and it is fine to offer condolences, but to refrain from stating that sodomy is a sin is not done out of love. We state that fact out of love and cannot refrain from stating that sodomy is a sin.
But those sort of posts mentioned are all fitting into the narrative script. I saw this coming long ago.
1. Anyone who holds to what the Bible clearly teaches (a Christian) on anything will be called a “hater”, “extremist” and a host of other names to villify us. Folks, the holocaust started the same way! They demonize the target victim group. They make it “okay” to persecute them, for society at large to accept it without protest. Once adequately demonized, the persecution begins and we know how it ends. There are stages to this cycle, you can google for it and see how far we are now already.
2. They will use that script to cajole and prod everyone (except the resistors) into all their goals, accepting sin, (sodomy is their big rallying banner), the one world religion (ecumenism & interfaith), one world government (dominionism), ecomony (mark of beast), under antichrist with the full ‘revival’ party. They just pick a term like “islam” or “homo” or whatever they want you to accept, and add the term “phobic” at the end to slander and shame others into accepting what they want them to. It is called social engineering, propaganda, and bullying. They will call us bullies when it is them, and the shame is only on them too. Then it will be “markofbeastophobe”! We take the stand we do not out of fear or lack of knowledge, but because of knowledge. Yet they are “truthophobes”!
3. Those of us who remain true and loyal and do not deny the Lord who bought us can never unite with them or condone any of that (in #2). We are separate from the world and apostasy, we are not in unity with sin, we are not ‘all the same’ or ‘all one’. We hold to the bible, that sodomy is a sin, that Jesus is the only way to salvation (because of the cross, etc.), and all the rest of Biblical Christianity. Because of this we will be villified, ostracized, ridiculed, persecuted, and martyred.
4. They have been in the process of villifying the term “extremist” expressly for the purposes of #2 above. They want everyone together into a conglomerated mush stew melting pot. Thus, they must first villify the outliers. And exactly as stated, those ‘extremist’ muslims were not the exception, but the norm as they were fulfilling exactly what their quran tells them to do. The exceptional extremists are the peaceful ones. It is not a religion of peace, the quran tells people to kill in the name of allah. And when it comes to Christianity, we are just following the narrow truth of it to the letter, so we are not extremists either but the orthodox norm, even though most don’t and we are the exception numerically. But in the sense of their melting pot, I’m the most extreme outlying extremist. I love Jesus extremely, follow His Word extremely, I’m an extreme biblical Christian in a landscape of most who have fallen away into the sin and apostasy of the day. I’m definitely among their blacklist of those considered ‘dangerous, bible wielding passionate disciples’ as mentioned earlier. (And, there is a list. Did you know that bible believing Evangelical Christians who hold to things like pro life fall under their definition of terrorist? More homework cut out for you.) It’s all about how things are defined. Extremist? By whose definition? Of course it is an honor to be on that watch list, that means we are the disciples who are doing something right!
We live in the day when EVIL IS CALLED GOOD AND GOOD EVIL, all we can do is pray, for our children, families and those few pastors still preaching the word of God carefully and in truth, God knows the numbers are small. Pray for the bride, the true invisible church, pray even for those in power, that our God may check their evil, so that we might have respite in the coming persecution, some brothers and sisters are already with the Lord for standing up for His Name!
Pray that we still can name the name of Christ without being persecuted, that might change soon enough. I wonder if Rick Warren would deny Jesus if he found himself in the hands of ISIS?