Part of the Problem

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President Bush was recently in Turkey, and while there he commended that nation for having secular laws and simultaneously being a people of faith. This kind of compartmentalization that we are exporting around the world (entrenched as a way of life here) is precisely the attitude that is crippling the American church. The fact that Islam is an idolatrous faith does not disguise the fact that secularists (devotees of another idolatrous faith) want to neutralize it, and take it out of the public square, and replace it with their own gods.

Now, it is important to not miss the point here. It is a good thing whenever Islam is removed from the public square; we should not lament when an idol falls. But if it is quickly replaced by another idol, what was the good of that? And why would Christians fight for one idol to replace another?

This is the problem that resides deep within most traditionalist opposition to homosexual marriage. We do not want homosexual marriage, but we want secular marriage to somehow come out magically the same as Christian marriage. In short, we want something that cannot be. Given the premises of secularism, there is absolutely no reason why a man cannot marry a man, why a man cannot marry three women, and why a woman cannot marry a woman. What standard are we appealing to when we say that marriage is one man, one woman, one time? The standard is what God established in the Garden, what Moses brought down from Sinai, and the pattern of Christ and the Church.

One man, one woman, one time is an explicitly Christian (and Judaic) pattern, grounded in Scripture. Other faiths have other marital patterns. And why shouldn’t they?

One of the things we have to learn how to do is how to follow an argument. This is what characterizes Christian intellectuals — they are the ones who finally grasp and follow an argument about a generation after the fundamentalists get it. The Islamist fundamentalists have very few things going for them, but they can follow an argument. If Allah is God, serve him, and serve him everywhere and in all things. The westernized Muslims (not Christianized) have adopted a compartmentalized approach — just like the westernized Christians have done.

And this is why two things are necessary for our testimony. We must declare in the public square that marriage consists of one man and one woman, and we must do so in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen. Anyone who agrees with the first part, but demures at the second, is not an ally or co-belligerent. He is part of the problem.

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