[Reprinted from Virtueonline.com]
“Earlier liberals cut off the branch on which they themselves were sitting; today’s liberal clerics cut off the branch on which almost everyone is sitting.”
On any reading, the sexual revolution, begun in the 60s, has morphed into the most powerful moral force upending 4,000 years of sexual teaching, overturning the ancient binary tradition of male and female.
But as Os Guinness, in his new book, Our Civilizational Moment, the Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds notes, “this smashing of the categories is not the ultimate goal of the sexual revolution. Its spiritual elite have a higher goal in mind: to strive towards ultimate harmony beyond all categories. In aiming for this state, the elite revolutionaries are attempting to return both paganism and sexual androgyny to their primitive pedestal and to license every possible type of sexuality as an expression of freedom—with polyamory now half in the door and pedophilia and zoophilia (or bestiality) well on their way.”
The sexual revolutionaries are out to subvert thousands of years of “patriarchal” societies (including the four thousand years of both the Jewish roots and the Christian flowering).
As Guinness observes; “at its deepest, this vision is religious and not secular, as many gurus have made clear. It looks far beyond immediate sexual freedom. Its supreme goal is to erase all distinction and fuse all opposites, especially between male and female, in order to attain the primordial cosmic wholeness and unity that has long been sought by pagan priests and shamans. Sexual androgyny is the key to this quest for both the religious and the secular.”
The revolutionaries knew, of course, that to win, they would have to win by overcoming all who prized the differences between male and female—above all, three major enemies: the patriarchal family and the Jewish and Christian faiths—and therefore enforced the rigid straightjacket of sexual stereotypes (“gender fundamentalism”). The revolutionaries would sideline parents, for instance, by introducing sex education, drag queen shows, a general sexualization of women, and sexual grooming of children at the earliest age, making an end run around parents and parental responsibilities. “We’re coming for your children,” as the drag queen shows now boast. And in more and more areas, the idea grew that the state, not parents, should be the authority over children, with schools now hiding critical information from parents.
Guinness, an Anglican and social critic, blasts both the Episcopal Church and the Church of England. “Much of the Christian church did not need to be overcome. Significant branches, such as the Episcopal Church, now closely followed by a large wing of the Church of England led by their progressive bishops and archbishops, rushed forward to embrace the sexual revolution, and enlist on “the right side of history.” Simultaneously, they cut themselves off from their own tradition and from the majority of their fellow believers around the world, and they suicidally emptied their own pews.
“Just as the rainbow as the symbol of human Pride overcame the rainbow as the symbol of divine Promise, so the Anglican House of Bishops turned the teaching of the Bible and Christian tradition upside down in blessing homosexual couples. What was once pronounced to be deviance and sin is now pronounced to be the church’s failure to relate to faithful marginalized people, because through being marginalized, their voices were unacknowledged, ignored, and silenced, and the church colluded in this sin.”
“Liberation” instead of condemnation, or condemnation of the former judgement, now turned into the new liberation. Such a clear inversion of Christian truth as an abject surrender to the spirit of the age will be obvious to future ages, for as Dean Inge remarked in a lecture in 1911, “Whoever marries the spirit of the age will find himself a widower in the next.”
Earlier liberals cut off the branch on which they themselves were sitting; today’s liberal clerics cut off the branch on which almost everyone is sitting.
Today, there are Church of England parishes with the Pride symbol on their altar cloths. This is to pour blasphemy upon blasphemy.
The end result is social chaos such as we are seeing in transgenderism and sexual anarchy today.
The Episcopal Church is rapidly heading downhill, (and, as it appears so is the Church of England), not just because the demographic figures demonstrate it, and evangelism is all but dead; it is the attempt to reverse the God-given moral order that most clearly touches and angers the heart of God.
God will not withhold his hand of judgement forever. The church and its leaders will one day have to give an account, and the “doctrine” of niceness won’t cut it.
Reaping what we sow is as timeless as the seasons, and so is the finality of God’s mercy.
1 comment
The decline of the ECUSA over the past two decades is staggering. The elevation of a homosexual to the level of bishop in 2003 led to the rise of the American Anglican Church, folks and families that could not accept a radical doctrinal shift. The cOVId shutdown further undermined the Episcopal church. Probably the most relevant part of the decline is that families with young children are avoiding the ECUSA because of its embrace of LGBTQ ideas.