2 Dangerous Arguments Christians Are Buying Into

“I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me, God. Amen.” —Martin Luther

I lean libertarian politically. I’m not sure why the government has any say in marriage—that which was founded as a religious institution for thousands of years. I don’t believe you can legislate morality, but at the same time, laws are needed to protect a country’s citizens.

Today, Christians who won’t budge on the major issues are being branded as bigoted religious haters. This exact strategy was outlined in the landmark book After the Ball: How Americans Will Overcome Their Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s.

In this book, the authors, Kirk and Madsen, suggest isolating conservative Christians by presenting them as “hysterical backwoods preachers, drooling with hate to a degree that looks both comical and deranged.” They offered a vivid proposition of how this strategy could be used in the media:

“For example, for several seconds an unctuous, beady-eyed Southern preacher is shown pounding the pulpit in rage against ‘those perverted, abominable creatures.'” While his tirade continues over the soundtrack, the picture switches to heart-rending photos of badly beaten persons, or of gays who look decent, harmless and likable; and then we cut back to the poisonous face of the preacher. The contrast speaks for itself. The effect is devastating.”

In just one short year between 2011 and 2012, this issue went from having minority to majority support. And this victory for the homosexual marriage movement certainly has in large part had to do with painting Christians as outlandish outsiders who “drool with deranged hate”—the very same individuals who start charities, fight for the oppressed and rescue the helpless.

These are the most common arguments for Christians to just “get over their deeply held religious convictions”:

1. If you’re going to take a stance on homosexual marriage, you’d have to take the same stance on divorce.

This is true. However, I would say that one sin does not cancel out the other. Divorce is sin, the practice of homosexuality is sin, just like lying, cheating, infidelity and adultery.

2. If we’re talking about sin, being judgmental is a sin, and your judgment of other people’s sin is sin, (referencing Romans 2).

This argument has three different points.

Point #1: No, it isn’t right to judge the world, as in looking down on people and hating them for their behavior. However, it isn’t wrong to assess the behavior and avoid the behavior ourselves if we believe with our own conscience it’s wrong. In this case, we discern the difference between right and wrong in our own lives. This isn’t judging someone else—it’s making our own choice.

Point #2: This argument on judging homosexuals goes so far as to say that in order to not judge someone we need to be accepting, active participants of the behavior, or in other words, perform a gay wedding ceremony or agree to be a servicer of a homosexual wedding.

Let me ask you something. If another sin, such as theft or human trafficking or murder, happens to be legal, how is it in anyone’s best interest to be an accomplice of sorts in that sin? Perhaps people don’t view this as the same thing as actually performing any sin themselves, but if you hand someone a knife to kill someone with, aren’t your fingerprints on the handle? Many Christians, afraid of being framed as unloving and hateful, now say we should accept and even participate in something the Bible says is a sin. Sin is sin, and the moment we dull our conscience to any sin in our lives, we enter dangerous territory.

“… who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, while their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them” (Rom. 2:15).

Point #3: It’s true the Bible says not to judge outsiders, but in tandem it actually tells us to judge our brothers and sisters within the body of Christ who are unrepentantly sinning and to “remove the evil person from among you.”

“I wrote to you in my letter not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I did not mean the sexually immoral people of this world, or the covetous and extortioners, or the idolaters, since you would then need to go out of the world. But I have written to you not to keep company with any man who is called a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner. Do not even eat with such a person. For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But God judges those who are outside. Therefore ‘put away from among yourselves that wicked person'”  (1 Cor. 5:9-13).

If loving people involves being an active part of sin and violating one’s conscience, that doesn’t sound like love to me. It sounds like mind control wrapped in flowery words such as love, acceptance and tolerance.  

This issue is concerning because of all the moral revisionism that leads to easy brainwashing and adopting a state-directed conscience that suits those in power. Don’t think I’m being outlandish here—history tells us quite the opposite.

Hilmar Von Campe, a former Nazi solider in World War II, explains how so many people were robbed of their conscience in order to create the groundwork for mind control from the Nazi state.

“I thought I was defending my country, and it was a terrible awakening, after the war when I came home, that I had not defended my fatherland, but I had done the dirty job which Hitler and the Nazis had selected for us.

“One has to remember that everything that happens is about power—the power of God against the power of man. God wants us to be free; man wants to control each other … it is good vs. evil, God against godlessness. And since I have experienced godlessness in Germany and seen the destruction of my family, the destruction of the nation, and then I see the same forces at work here, I shudder.

“Wrong is being promoted as a virtue. But that is the road to a totalitarian system because a totalitarian system is abandonment of God’s commandments where man can only rule if they control everybody. And in that case, there are no moral standards.”

The more and more legislation desensitizes everyone’s conscience and removes the freedom of religion, the more we create the groundwork for collective brainwashing.

Once you desensitize a nation’s conscience, you can do just about anything.

The tricky part is that Jesus never said anything directly about homosexuality. But He did speak to sexual sin.

Consider the woman at the well who had five husbands. Jesus didn’t condemn her; He forgave her. He also kept the Pharisees from stoning another woman who was caught in adultery. However, and this is a key point here, He put the fear of God into this adulterous woman by prophesying to her and at the end saying, “Go and sin no more.”

Going back to the first example, if we replace the women’s sin of fornication and adultery and say that they were sleeping with women instead, we can understand a bit of what Jesus’ perspective might have been. If sin is sin, and homosexual acts are no different than fornication, lust or adultery, we have a fair replacement. If the argument many people are making is true, “Just facilitate the gay wedding out of your love for people!” then Jesus would have had quite a different response for the women then He actually did in the Scriptures. If this reasoning were true, He would have said, “Come, let Me officiate your wedding!” instead of what He did say: “Go and sin no more.”

People’s deeply held religious convictions are the reasons why they do inconvenient and selfless things, such as feeding the hungry, fighting against injustice and setting the captives free. The moment you begin picking away at people’s conscience is the moment those “deeply held religious convictions,” which are the basis for all those other good things, begin to disappear.

Let’s recap:

1. When people are forced to violate their conscience by the powers that are in charge of our nation, the result is a calloused conscience. At this juncture, confusion sets in about what is right and wrong.

2. When the powers that force law-abiding citizens to violate their conscience, (and their free will), we no longer have liberty, but tyranny.

3. People’s “deeply held religious convictions” are not only the reasons they refuse to participate in things they believe are wrong, like gay marriage, but also why they do inconvenient and selfless things, without which, the world would suffer.

God help us if we ever find ourselves in the same place as pre-Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, I really believe we are already there.

“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.” —George Washington

Charis Hillman Brown is the marketing and communications director at Marketplace Leaders Ministries, an organization founded by her dad with a vision to equip men and women to fulfill their calling in and through the workplace. Charis is is author of TGIF, Today God Is First Daily Devotional for Next Gen and has been published in TwoTen Magazine, The Christian Post and Charisma News.