What follows is a point that will have to be made again and again in the coming years, but that is no reason not to make it now, right?
The reason evangelicals have been outmaneuvered on the politics of same-sex marriage is because modern evangelicalism is now structurally liberal, and they are structurally liberal because of their epistemology.
If you lose what Francis Schaeffer called “true truth,” you have lost everything — except what officials let you keep inside of your “faith community.” The abandonment of the correspondence view of truth, and the acceptance of the coherence approach to truth, has detached us all from the world around us, and off we float, like a child’s lost balloon.
Inside your lame faith community you can strike all kinds of poses. But if you believe in objective truth — which every healthy Christian does — then this means that you are not striking poses, but rather saying things about the lordship of Jesus that apply to everyone in the world. Jesus is Lord of Heaven and earth — He is not simply Lord of your story, or your personal narrative, or your heart, or your First Memorial Faith Community, or going with a more trendy kind of name, Living Well Faith Community. He is the Lord of those who want Him to be, and He is the Lord of those who don’t want Him to be.
Sickly Christians do not believe in objective truth. Another way of describing this is as a tragic slide into liberalism. There is a difference between an evangelical grasp of the world with evangelical content, and a liberal grasp of the world, with some evangelical vestiges. News comes today that Jim Wallis has now come out in favor of same-sex marriages. Was anybody really surprised? He kissed Caesar’s ass decades ago.
Remember — we aren’t going to fix this until evangelicals return to a robust understanding of true truth, until they embrace again the Christ-honoring dogma of objective truth, acknowledging that it is a dogma that is altogether lovely, and are willing to say, straight into the microphone, that Jesus is Lord of the whole shebang. In short, this isn’t going to get better until evangelical become evangelicals again.