Pick Your Poison

Which is worse: homosexual marriage or heterosexual divorce?

If we were to judge by the furor that has arisen in recent months among evangelical churches, it is clear that the answer would be the former. I'm not convinced.

Divorce has largely been accepted in evangelical churches. It is accommodated, not confronted. Few churches even in the most fundamental circles practice church discipline when members divorce. Far more typically, they merely drift away, cease to attend, and are quietly relegated to the "inactive" roll. Churches admit divorced individuals into membership with little consideration for whether they have repented of personal sin that led to the divorce or fulfilled their responsibility to seek reconciliation with their former spouses.

Professing Christians have paved the way for the breakdown of the biblical view of marriage by their cavalier participation in or acceptance of divorce in "Christian" church culture.

Still, somehow, churches and even denominations that could not be bothered during the past century to fight for the inerrancy of Scripture, the deity of Christ, or any of a plethora of other core doctrines of the faith, now rise up in horror to combat homosexual marriage.

Forgive me if I conclude that their disgust is based more on the "yuck factor" than on any shred of loyalty to God and His Word.

I must concede that I do know divorced individuals whom I would consider to have been the "innocent party," at the very least in the sense that they attempted to resolve marriage problems biblically. I cannot conceive of an innocent party in a homosexual marriage.

Still, let's not pretend that the battle over homosexual marriage is the place to take our stand. Our walls were breached long ago. The battle that still rages in American culture is over which defender of the Alamo will be the last to die.

The bright side is that Christians do not battle for "American culture." That is not our aim. Our objective is more like purity and godliness. Any hope for change must begin with a radical transformation of our churches. Physician, stop trusting in the next great political candidate or Supreme Court Justice, and heal thyself.