Sunday, February 19, 2012

Speaking against Injustice and Hypocrisy: It isn’t an Option



Many Christians have accused me of erroneously portraying Christians as persecuted, marginalized and stigmatized victims.  Well, I don’t want to erroneously portray anything or anybody. However, I am deeply concerned about the dimming of the light of the church and of Christians. I think that some of the problem arises from the secularized media and schools that consistently portray Christians in a negative light and use this as an excuse to act in prejudicial ways towards the church and what it stands for.

There are so many examples of this hypocritical intolerance of the church. Here is just the latest:

  • Officials at Dixon High School in Dixon, Mo., took down posters advertising the "Pro-Life Day of Silent Solidarity," claiming that they were offensive to some at the school.
How long will it be that the Bible or the Christian faith is deemed “offensive?” Meanwhile, secularism ignores the fact that they too are offensive, and by their own standards, they should be silenced:

  • "Time and again students find themselves being censored … when speaking from a pro-life perspective," said [Matt] Sharp [of the Alliance Defense Fund]. "They have rights that should be protected, nourished." Sharp found it interesting that although the school took down the pro-life posters, posters not taken down include ones showcasing students as "bloody zombies" and the school's Gay-Straight Alliance's "Day of Silence." "Of all the posters, [the pro-life posters] are the only ones we know of that have been torn down," said Sharp, who considered the selective censorship to be a "dangerous thing." 
There are many parents and students who find the Gay-Straight Alliance and much of what passes muster in the schools as offensive. If everything that was deemed “offensive” was censored, we could no longer even conceive of a public domain. There couldn’t be such a domain at all.

However, our secular masters will not follow through with their logic. They would rather make false distinctions – secular vs. religious – so that they can discriminate against religion, erroneously appealing to the separation of church and state. In order to pull off this false dichotomy, they insist that they are not a religion. By doing this, they can then claim that their own values are not subject to censorship while “pro-life” is!

This means that a school can promote abortion and same-sex rights, while the anti-abortion or anti-Gay-Straight Alliance reasoning is prohibited. Oddly, the secularists even appeal to the 1st Amendment to support their hypocrisy.

A small minority of Christians will say, “If that’s their game, let them play it. We have more important things to do.” However, I can’t go along with this reasoning, even if there are more important things than this “game.” Here’s why:

  1. We have a responsibility to uphold society.
  2. We have a responsibility to defend the religious and free speech rights for everyone.
  3. We have a responsibility on behalf of these beleaguered Christians to speak up on their behalf, like the churches that now are being banished from the NYC schools or the Christian institutions, now being compelled to finance insurance that violates their faith.
  4. We have a responsibility to our youth to provide a more realistic portrait of the church. Many are leaving or wanting to change the church because they have been indoctrinated by society to think that the church has utterly failed.
  5. We also have a responsibility to he church and before God to be prophetic – to speak against the dangers of sin in all its forms.
Being prophetic in these matters isn’t an option:

  • Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins. (James 4:17)

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