If sex can be semi-sundered from childbearing, then sexual promiscuity can appear far less consequential.
The play all along was the so-called “liberation” of women, which was always code for slavery to corporate masters and sexual promiscuity. Ok, there’s more to it than that, and I grant that a purposefully childless heterosexual couple is in a lot less confusion than two dudes shacking up, but we gave a large portion of the farm away when we surrendered the normative expectation of children. The Christian Church largely embraced a completely pagan understanding of childbearing, as a “choice” or an “option.” And when we accepted children as an optional accessory or amenity to marriage, we accepted in principle homosexual unions. And the point here is particularly the gullibility and thoughtlessness. And it wasn’t long before, gullible Christians were popping birth control pills like the pagans. But it was not long before certain members of the radical left saw the potential in severing childrearing from sexual union. In the earliest days it was a straight up eugenics project, targeting unwanted populations in an often explicitly racist agenda. Meanwhile, Margaret Sanger came along with her chemical thugs and began popularizing birth control. They are a lot better at being feminine and relating to people and being winsome than men. And so it cannot have been that big of a surprise when American churches started actually ordaining women as a pastors. But of course what this has really meant is that we wanted feminine preachers, and while this is likely a hate crime in certain countries, I will go out on a limb and point out that women are better at being feminine than men.
And so it is that we’ve been collectively demanding Tim Kellers for going on two centuries, and that’s exactly what we’ve been given. They wanted men who used poetry and jokes and stories to disarm and persuade, rather than the blunt Pauline style of days of yore. In those days they didn’t use the word “winsome,” but they were after the same thing. Let me explain.Īs Ann Douglas has helpfully chronicled, starting sometime in the 19 th century, the American church decided that instead of militant, masculine men as preachers, it wanted cultured men of letters who were relatable, entertaining, and winsome. The foundational issue is our straightforward disobedience to God’s Word, but the proximate cause is our collective insistence that men be soft. In fact, the conservative church created this space where the gay-celibate Christians and technically-non-ordained women preachers have set up shop, and we are subsidizing the whole mess by our anemic view of masculinity. In the SBC we have women who identify as preachers but claim they are not actually pastors. In the PCA we have men who identify as gay but claim they are not actually sodomites. The same cultural current that keeps Beth Moore undisciplined in the SBC is the same that keeps Greg Johnson undisciplined in the PCA. But I’m simultaneously a critic of much of modern conservative evangelicalism. It’s no secret that I’m a critic of the whole gay-but-celibate Christian movement.