The Dangerous Affirmation of “Gay Christianity” – Part 1

The Dangerous Affirmation of Gay Christianity.

M.D. Perkins joins us today for that topic right here on the Christian Worldview Radio Program where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I'm David Wheaton, the Host. The Christian Worldview is a non-profit, listener-supported radio ministry. We are able to reach believers and non-believers with that mission through the radio station, website or app on which you are listening today because of the support of listeners like you.

So thank you for your prayer, encouragement and support. You can connect with us by visiting our website, thechristianworldview.org, calling our toll-free number, 1-888-646-2233 or writing to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. That our country devotes the entire month of June to take, quote, pride in what the Bible calls, quote, degrading passions of homosexuality along with other sexual and gender perversions says everything about the depravity to which our society has fallen. Instead of helping those enslaved to sin to overcome it through salvation and sanctification, the opposite takes place, affirmation and celebration of the sin and the sinner. Now, it is predictable that the God-rejecting do this, but it is an even greater affront to God when professing Christians assert that one can be a homosexual, whether in practice or desire, and be a Christ follower. Gay Christian ideology entered the liberal mainline denominations long ago, but now it has gained entry into the evangelical church as well. How is this possible when the Bible is so clear that homosexuality is a sin and that God calls for our actions and desires to be right before him?

M.D. Perkins, Research Fellow of Church and Culture for American Family Association and the producer of the award-winning documentary films we have previously featured on The Christian Worldview, such as In His Image and The God Who Speaks, joins us today to discuss the thread of, quote, gay Christianity in light of his new book, Dangerous Affirmation. M.D., I really like the quote you have at the beginning of the book from none other than Francis Schaeffer, just a really well-known Christian apologist, worldview man, popular back in the 70s and 80s and 90s, I believe, even in the 90s. But he said this, make no mistake, we as Bible-believing evangelical Christians are locked in a battle.

This is not a friendly gentleman's discussion. It is a life-and-death conflict between the spiritual house of wickedness and those who claim the name of Christ. There is a conflict in the level of ideas, between two fundamentally opposed views of truth and reality.

There is a conflict in the level of actions between a complete moral perversion and chaos in God's absolutes. But do we really believe that we are in a life-and-death battle? That's from Francis Schaeffer. And boy, I bet you he made that quote. I don't even know when, but I bet you that was 50 years ago. Maybe he made that quote and how much more true it is today when we see what's going on all around us. We consider what's taking place right now in the month of June, Pride Month. Really better named Depravity Month. Pride in what God calls sin or depravity.

Romans 1. Every element of society is pushing this MD. Corporations. You've seen Bud Light recently trying to push the transgender movement and Target and drag queen story hour and library schools, restaurants everywhere, hospitals doing so-called gender-affirming care.

It's just everywhere. The list would be 100 long if we listed all the different points of pressure this issue is getting in our society. The LGBTQ push. So the question, MD, is before we get into how it's entered the church, how did we get to a point in a once Christian-influenced society or Christian-based country to the point now where I would consider that the United States is at the tip of the spear in promoting this, not only nationally at home, but also abroad all over the world? I think Christians in particular need to recognize that we've been pretty naive when it's come to not only the threat of the issues, as Shaffer there is alluding to, do we really believe that we're in a life and death battle here? Do we really believe it's as serious and as urgent as some people are claiming? So Christians have been pretty naive in terms of responding to it, but we've also been naive in terms of assessing and diagnosing what the issues are. See, for so long I think we've often just thought that this was just the natural decline of society. That this is just, as people have drifted away from God and society has slowly become more secular, that these things have just risen up almost organically from the mire there.

And there is an element of truth there, right? And as you remove Christian influence from society, as you push secularism, these kinds of things will grow. But there is a very concerted political and social effort to normalize everything under the LGBTQ plus moniker.

And that has been going on for a long time. I mean, you could go back to many different points. Prior to what we think of as the full blossoming of the sexual revolution in the late 60s, you still have Alfred Kinsey and his quote unquote research regarding sexuality and sexual behavior in the human male and in the human female, and these things that really shocked people and made them reassess, well, what is even a quote sexual norm? What is normal in the world of sexuality? If we're all just human animals who are just kind of going around acting however we feel our desires are inclining us towards, then everything is pretty much normal under that kind of framework because you've removed morality, you've removed a creator, you know, putting a moral order over everything.

But you can go back even further to some of the other efforts. But really, there is a concerted political effort that has risen up more and more within society. And I think it's important for Christians to recognize that, that this isn't just the steady decline of things. Within that decline, there's also a concerted effort to normalize, to push and not just normalize and push, but to celebrate, to where if you aren't celebrating this, then you are the bigot, then you are the homophobe, then you are the person who has the problem and everyone else is fine and good and normal. Why can't you just get on board? Why can't you just join in line at the pride parade at your local city? Why can't you wear the pride flag on your Facebook picture or your Twitter handle or all these kinds of things? There's more and more push to accept it and normalize it. And that's a concerted effort. I mean, I think there are specific entities that are at work, such as the Human Rights Campaign, that have been trying to work kind of nefariously behind the scenes and then it's now becoming more and more open as it becomes more normalized.

But the question is why? I'm just going to estimate here and just correct me if I'm wrong. Let's just say the percentage of the population that is either homosexual professed to be quote unquote transgender, although that's not even a real thing.

You can't change your gender, any of these things. The percentage of those who would identify or be practicing these sins, I don't know, 3%, 5%, 7% of society at most, why would people who aren't even involved in this kind of perversion and sin, why are they sort of all out and all on the same side and pushing it so hard? Well, it's a hatred of God and a hatred of Christianity and the Christian foundation of our nation and our Western society. Underneath all of this is a spiritual war and a spiritual battle underneath that's raging on. And that's the thing that's, I think, surprising for people to hear and to consider because we just think in terms of people doing things according to their best interest or whatever.

And it's like, why would, if there's only such a small minority of the population who even is, you know, describing themselves in this way, then why is there such this over corrective push to try and normalize it? Well, it's because Christianity and homosexuality are fundamentally opposed worldview positions. They're basically competing religions at this point. And so each of those are big multifaceted categories, but there's so much opposition that's built between them because it's opposed to God. It's opposed to God's created order.

It's obvious on its face. That's why Paul even references it in Romans 1. It's kind of this obvious, you know, this is what happens when the creature rejects the creator and starts worshiping the creation.

It even can express themselves in men rejecting women and going after men and women rejecting men and going after women. That is Paul using an illustration to shock kind of the reader of the day about how far humanity could decline in its pursuit of itself over and against God. So you have to see it with a spiritual component to it.

I don't see how you, how you don't. M.D. Perkins with us today here on the Christian Real View Radio program. We're talking about the dangerous affirmation of gay Christianity. We're going to get into how it's infiltrated and being affirmed in the church today. He's the author of the book Dangerous Affirmation. It's our new featured resource that you can get for a donation of any amount to the Christian Real View.

We'll tell you how you can get it today coming up on the program. You mentioned something about the political realm and how the government is pushing it so much, politicians pushing it on social media and in government schools and the military and everywhere else that they have control, they're pushing it. The rainbow flag over our foreign embassies and so forth. Christians, at least conservative biblical Christians, try to elect representatives that have a moral grounding that would not be in favor of expanding this, not because we hate anyone, but because we know that sin puts people at odds, at enmity with God. It leads people down a road away from their creator. It leads people to an eternity in hell if they don't repent and believe the gospel. And so ultimately Christians care about people and we try to elect representatives, even if they're not per se Christians, at least those who will stand for what government should do, praise good and punish evil, but not the opposite which takes place today. There's a praising of what is sinful and evil, like this issue, and a punishing of those who would stand against it, just flipped opposite the way God intended. We try to elect people and they either don't get elected, a majority elects someone who's in favor of all this perversity, or if we do get people elected that we think share our worldview on this issue, they often compromise when they are there.

Now, it's not just the Democrat Party who's totally given over, to use that term from Romans 1, to this issue, but the Republican Party is better, but there's many, many Republicans who are affirming of homosexuality, transgenderism, and everything else. We as Christians can just sit back and think, what on earth are we supposed to do at this point with this tidal wave? It's like a tidal wave that's just washing over the country.

It is a feeling of being overwhelmed. So in terms of what do we do? Well, I mean, Christians personally, individually have to be sober-minded and watchful, right? 1 Peter 5a, be sober-minded and watchful. Your adversary, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. So you recognize the spiritual threat that's out there, that this is a spiritual war, and there are spiritual casualties in this war.

As you were saying, this isn't just about us kind of locking in on a position. This is actually caring about people because we see that sin locks people in bondage. It leads them away from God. It leads them towards hell.

It shackles them to things that are not only harmful to them, but ultimately eternally detrimental. To continue to stand firm, to speak the truth, to be rooted in the truth, to be discerning about what we hear and how we hear it, to look in ourselves, are we ashamed of the truth of Scripture? And are we faithful where the Lord has put us?

Or do we have hidden sin within ourselves? And are we depending on God to empower our witness? Those are things I always tell Christians when I speak to groups about this.

You know, that's how the Christian individually can ensure that their witness is clear and solid. In terms of being active, I mean, be aware of what's going on. Don't be naive. Don't act like these things aren't happening or that they aren't dangerous. And more and more Christians, I think, are beginning to speak up because with the overwhelming push from the left on these things, there are many people who are starting to be involved at their local school boards, at their library board meetings, to make a stand even within the corporate workplace. I mean, I think that's where it's going to get a lot of people is within their specific jobs where they have pressure to capitulate. You know, we want you to celebrate Pride Month with us or we want you to put your own pronouns in your email signature.

We want you to go to sensitivity training and part of our equality inclusive division, you know, to examine you and take a test and see how you measure up. Well, Christians have to get used to the idea of being marginalized within the culture. And we just have to buck up and be a little bit more courageous and say, I'm going to speak out on these things as long as I still have the ability to do so, because that ability may not be there for that many more years ahead.

One more question just on the general movement of our society towards homosexuality, rejection of the way God made us gender-wise and so forth. Can a society continue on the trajectory that we're on and remain a functional, stable society and actually defend itself? Or is this sort of the race to, it's going downhill, we're developing like a critical mass, and this is going to get very, very bad and then society just breaks apart? This is kind of a race toward extinction kind of thing of at least America as we've known it as, you know, a democratic republic and with some sort of Judeo-Christian underpinnings to its laws and its thinking and its moral philosophy and all of that. And then these things are dismantling.

And that's the point of it really is it is, like I alluded to earlier, there's this concerted effort to dismantle and discredit the Christian witness that even exists within our law and policy. So it's not going to go quietly. And we've kind of been acquiescent to a lot of this and very passive, just assuming that things like capitalism might kind of hold a check on it. But then you see all these corporations bowing to corporate sponsors. You mentioned the Bud Light thing, which makes no sense from an economics perspective because it's completely against the target market of that particular product for them to embrace the transgender ideology.

But it's part of this larger corporate agenda to try and normalize that kind of diversity, equity, inclusion model within the corporate workplace to where the cost of doing business is doing things like that. And so it is the last gasps of a dying society, I think. And Christians also should realize that this isn't going to send God's judgment. This is part of God's judgment. He is removing his hand of protection from us. And as he's doing that, then these forces of wickedness are rising up more and more and it's becoming more and more normal. And so it's all the more reason to cry out for God to revive his church, first of all, but then to revive the witness of the church within the society.

Our guest today is M.D. Perkins, the author of Dangerous Affirmation, The Threat of Gay Christianity. It's our new featured resource. The book will help you understand, quote, the way gay Christian activists are rethinking theology, biblical interpretation, and the nature and purpose of the church.

Dangerous Affirmation is 239 pages, softcover, and retails for $24.99. For a limited time, you can order for a donation of any amount to The Christian Real View. Just go to thechristianrealview.org, call us toll-free, 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. We have much more coming up.

Stay tuned. You are listening to The Christian Real View radio program. I'm David Wheaton. David Wheaton here inviting you to The Christian Real View golf event on Monday, September 18th at Woodhill Country Club in Wysetta, Minnesota. This is a rare opportunity to experience a classic course in immaculate condition with challenging greens in a beautiful setting, all in support of The Christian Real View radio program. Golfer registration includes lunch on the lawn, practice range, player gift, and 18 holes with cart, followed by appetizers and awards.

Bring a foursome, or we can fit you into a group. Also, contact us about sponsor opportunities, whether or not you are attending or local to Minnesota. We hope to see you Monday, September 18th.

Registration deadline is Labor Day. To find out more and to register, visit thechristianrealview.org or call 1-888-646-2233. That's 1-888-646-2233 or thechristianrealview.org. What is The Christian Real View radio program really about? Fundamentally, it's about impacting people, families, churches with the life and eternity-changing truth of God's Word. We know the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only message that saves us from God's wrath, by God's grace, for God's glory.

And we know the Bible is the inspired Word of God, providing the only way to think and live to the glory of God. We are a non-profit, listener-supported ministry. If you would like to help us impact listeners with the biblical worldview and the gospel, consider becoming a Christian worldview partner who regularly give a specified amount to the ministry. As a thank you, Christian worldview partners automatically receive many of the resources featured on the program throughout the year. To become a Christian worldview partner, call us toll-free 1-888-646-2233 or visit thechristianrealview.org. Welcome back to The Christian Real View.

I'm David Wheaton. Be sure to visit our website, thechristianrealview.org, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email and annual print letter, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. Our topic today is The Dangerous Affirmation of Gay Christianity, and MD Perkins, the author of Dangerous Affirmation, is our guest. MD, let's talk about the Church. God didn't promise to bless society, so to speak, but there is one institution that He did promise to that He loves and He will protect, and that is the true Church. And yet that true Church is under assault.

And I want to start off by reading a quote from your book just early on throughout 2,000 years of Church history. Christians have understood and Christian churches have taught that homosexuality is a sin. It is, quote, against nature, Romans 1. It is a, quote, abomination, Leviticus 18, 22. It can be described as, quote, vile affections or, quote, dishonorable passions, again, Romans 1.

It is not God's design for marriage or family, as described in Genesis 2. It is something that God does not bless, nor can He because it is defiantly against His revealed will, 1 Corinthians 6, 9-10. And because it is against God's will and design to embrace and celebrate homosexuality, or also add to that, transgenderism, or really gender appropriation is what it is, is to evoke God's judgment as an individual, Church, or nation, Genesis 19. Since Christianity first took root in the West, the Bible's teaching against homosexuality has defined public policy and social attitudes in Europe and America. And then you say, but things have changed.

And boy, is that an understatement. You've talked about how it's infiltrated broader society, but talk about the monumental effort, the process that has taken place, what has been clearly understood in the Church for centuries, and how remarkable it is that this issue is actually being even considered. You can be a, quote, gay Christian, that that's somehow reconcilable within the Church. The roots of this are both older than people realize and younger, in the sense that the history of, quote, unquote, gay Christianity is really not that long.

I mean, it's within my parents' lifetimes. You know, 1955, as far as I can tell, was the first time that a book was published that dealt with changing the Church's thinking on the received traditional interpretation of Scripture on this. And it was an ethicist in the Church of England named Derek Sherwin Bailey.

He wrote a book called Homosexuality in the Western Christian Tradition that was basically assessing the way that the Church's thinking had influenced Western society and thought, especially on legal matters and how it outlawed sodomy, you know, the sexual action between two males or two women, and how that was just all based on some wrong thinking about the Bible and stuff. So you have an ethicist in the Church of England in 1955 who introduces doubt into the established, well-received interpretation of what the Scripture teaches about this, which is clear. When we talk about interpretation, it's not like people were just grabbing random ideas out of thin air.

I mean, that's the postmodern approach to it. But the way that people have always done interpretive responses is to what is the author intending to say based on the syntax and the grammar and the words and the language that's being used here was trying to be communicated, understanding that there is a clear communication that's trying to take place there. And so that's how people understood the Scripture. But once you introduce doubt, and once you do it through an established leader within the Church, now you always have someone you can point to and say, oh, but there's this guy over here who says this, and then that guy becomes two guys, becomes five guys, becomes a hundred different scholars. There's no longer this established position.

Now there's doubt that's been introduced within this whole order. When you think about how the first questions of sexuality were first approached within the Church context, within the mainline denominations, it was under the question of ordination and whether someone could be ordained as a gay minister or not. And it kind of took the roundabout backdoor way in to even talking about it because you're talking about, oh, now you're talking about a person and this guy's a nice guy and why can't he be a minister in our church and are you saying he's bad because he feels this way about himself or he wants to have these kinds of relationships with other men or whatever. And so then it kind of blossomed from there and you have all kinds of things that have come in through this whole kind of ideology as different people have approached it to try and both either justify themselves or justify other people and then use it as kind of a way to enact political change within the church itself because there's still ultimately a political goal behind gay Christianity within the church. It isn't just about changing the church's position. It's about getting the church to act as a political entity of the larger LGBTQ plus movement. Playing off the emotions, the affections of Christians and the call to be compassionate and this interpretation of what it means to don't judge someone else, I think those have been leveraged or used very much against those who are conservative biblically to get the camel's nose in the door here.

And once that's in there, it just it comes in and comes in stronger than ever. MD Perkins with us today here on the Christian Real View radio program talking about his book, Dangerous Affirmation, The Threat of Gay Christianity. It's our new featured resource here on the Christian Real View. We'll tell you how you can get it for a donation of any amount to the Christian Real View coming up here in the program.

We just highly recommend it. You talk about in the book, early on, matter of fact, you devote a chapter to each one, the three main threads of quote, gay Christianity. There's an oxymoron if you ever heard one, and why it's important to make distinctions between these three threads and the threads are these. Number one, there's affirming theology. Number two, there's queer theology. And number three, there's gay celibate theology, or you talk about re-voice theology, that's that conference. If you follow current events and what's going on in the church, you'll either heard these or you'll heard how those are articulated.

But it's very interesting the way that you separate them into saying there's actually distinctions to be made there. Talk us through each of those three distinctions of quote, gay Christianity, affirming theology, queer theology, and gay celibate theology. Yeah, I think most people, when they think about gay Christianity, they just think about affirming theology, right?

Pride flags in front of the church, welcoming and affirming, that sort of thing. When I talk about gay Christianity as an overall category, I'm just talking about the attempt to reconcile the Christian faith with homosexuality. And then these three different categories are the different approaches that are taken in appealing to certain groups and are more popular within certain denominational contexts. But they're the ways in which this works itself out, theologically speaking.

So affirming theology is kind of the mainstream one. It's just the idea that homosexuals are created that way by God, that orientation is just the way that you're born. It's God's design and intention.

He wants you to live out to that orientation to its fullest. And it's just a reflection of God's diverse creation. And so homosexual behavior is seen as normal and it's blessed by God. There's nothing sinful about it.

There's nothing to be ashamed of. And so Christians just must accept, affirm, celebrate LGBT as good and reject anything that's non-affirming or that's not fully on board with it as being wicked and bigoted and judgmental. And so these would be expressed through things like Matthew Vines, who is a very popular speaker and author. He wrote God and the Gay Christian. And his whole book is kind of about how you can affirm the total authority of scripture while at the same time affirming monogamous same-sex relationships.

He does give that caveat of committed monogamous same-sex relationships. But at the same time, he's still promoting the basic affirming movement and there's lots of variations within that. So it's an assault on the authority of scripture. It reframes the Bible. It reinterprets the Bible. It casts doubt on established meanings and ultimately believes that the Bible is not authoritative or that the Bible doesn't matter and different theologians have taken different tacks.

Some have said that it's not authoritative or some have just dismissed it as not really important to the conversation because science and experience gives us so much more information. So then the queer theology question is something that's a lot more assaultive. You know, it seeks to dismantle Christian thinking through radical readings and shocking displays. So it's not fully mainstream, although it's becoming more mainstream with like drag queens appearing in churches. That's a queering of the church. It's the idea of trying to disrupt and resist and transgress what's called heteronormativity, which is the view that heterosexuality is normal and good.

It's basically what people have thought forever. But that is seen as something that has to be assaulted, something that has to be dismantled. And the way that you do that is through these queer readings, kind of shocking displays. There's literary deconstruction as a major point of it.

Standpoint theory is a lot behind it. It ties in with feminist theory and liberation theology and a lot of different things are there in that mix. So basically it's just a way to kind of shock Christians to not believe the things that they've heard.

It's really appealing on social media and kind of these pithy statements that you can make there. And then there's a more conservative form of gay Christianity, which is what I call the gay celibate theology or side B theology. It's epitomized by the revoice movement or the revoice conference. And basically this is something that's happening within more conservative churches.

So people who would read the Gospel Coalition or would be part of the Southern Baptist Convention, Church of the Nazarene or the Presbyterian Church in America, the PCA, as opposed to the PCUSA, the more liberal or mainline denomination of the Presbyterians, and then many others. But basically the idea is that orientation isn't innate and immutable, that you're born that way and you can't change. And that same sex attraction is itself morally neutral and that someone who sees that they're gay and a Christian, they're basically coexisting identities. And so someone can call themselves a gay Christian because it's just recognizing two different identities within the same person.

You're just trying to be honest about your pattern of attractions. And so taking on the language of sexual minorities and talking about how you've been victimized by the conservative Christian church or even the evangelical church. And so it's really a practical theology. Sometimes it emphasizes celibacy, but really oftentimes it more emphasizes friendship and kind of blurring the lines and how far can you go before it's really sin. And so they say that healing from your homosexuality isn't possible, so you just must steward your sexuality, which I don't know where in the Bible it talks about stewarding temptations towards sin. The Bible never speaks that way about temptations. It's always about putting sin to death, overcoming temptation, that kind of thing.

But they put it in this category of stewardship. And so basically they're supposed to stand as witness to the Christian church's homophobia and bigotry. So it accommodates these secular views of gay identity and emphasizes personal experience of saying, well, I prayed and God never changed me, therefore God can't change anybody, therefore you have to accept me as I am, even though I'm giving up a lot to follow Jesus because I'm not pursuing a gay relationship because I still believe that that's wrong, but I still can hold onto my identity as a homosexual or as a bisexual or as a transgender and say that that's fine.

It's just going to be a harder path for me and you just have to recognize that and not say anything against me. So that's where the gay celibate theology fits into this whole paradigm. But I would say that it's still part of this gay Christian movement, even though there's parts of it that sound orthodox, because it is still attempting to reconcile the Christian faith and homosexuality.

It just kind of does it from a way that sounds like it's more biblically orthodox and sound. Dr. Justin Marchegiani MD Perkins with us today on the Christian worldview talking about his book Dangerous Affirmation and that is a perfect segue into a sound bite that I would like to play for you by a woman named Rachel Gilson. She works for CREW, formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ. She's also pursuing her PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, part of the Southern Baptist Convention. She's being featured in a couple different sessions at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting this June as well.

And she is in that third category of the gay celibate theology movement. And so I'd like to play a sound bite where she was speaking and she was actually answering a question from someone in the audience, a man who has parents who are homosexuals, and they're quote unquote married, and the man was asking how he should deal with his parents of the same sex. So I'm going to go through this sound bite. And as you just mentioned that last answer, you'll hear some things that sort of sound orthodox and sort of sound correct and you hear the compassion and it's the sort of human reasoning here. But I want you to point out the underlying flaws in the things she's saying in this sound bite.

So let's start out with a question from the audience, the man in the audience, and then I'll just stop it along the way and ask a question of you, MD, and you can pull out here what is actually being said. I have gay married parents because gay marriage is legal in all 50 states now. So I guess my question is where should I be in terms of my support of that marriage since it is the covenant of marriage? Should I be looking for, like, should I be supporting a divorce even though God said he hates that as well or should I be looking for them to kind of, I don't know, I don't know? No, I think it's a great question, right? Like we know that the laws of our country don't match what God's laws say.

That's fine. We don't live in ancient Israel, we don't live in the New Jerusalem, we live in America. So we respect the laws of the land. So we have the question, he says, I have, you know, my parents of the same sex are quote unquote married, that is the law of the land.

And so that's a assumption being made here. That's a covenant relationship, I think he said. And then how does Rachel Gilson start answering this saying, well, we don't live in covenant Israel and so forth.

So we respect the laws of our land. What is being assumed in that particular part of the sound bite? The assumption there is that the covenant between these two homosexual parents is the same as the covenant bond between a man and a woman. That's the assumption that God sees it the same way because our nation sees it the same way. That's the fundamental, because he uses the word covenant there and talks about how God hates divorce. So he doesn't want to support divorce. And so there's this underlying assumption that the way that the government in our country sees it is the same as the way that God would see it. So we kind of have to approach it with this real careful thing when it should be an obvious thing. That would be my immediate response to this is not to talk about like we live in America as opposed to ancient Israel.

But you should be praying for the salvation of these two individuals and then expecting as that salvation is worked out in their lives and sanctification that there is this rejection of this faulty partnership that is taking place there. M.D. Perkins is our guest today. He's the author of Dangerous Affirmation, The Threat of Gay Christianity. This book is our new featured resource.

It is 239 pages, soft cover and retails for $24.99. And for a limited time, you can order for a donation of any amount to the Christian Real View. Just get in contact with us the usual ways and you'll find out how you can do that during this short break. Stay tuned because we have much more coming up. You are listening to the Christian Real View radio program. I'm David Wheaton.

David Wheaton here. For a limited time, we are offering My Boy Ben for a donation of any amount to the Christian Real View. The book is the true story of a yellow lab that I had back when I was competing on the professional tennis tour. It's about relationships with Ben, my parents, with a childhood friend I would eventually marry, but ultimately with God, who causes all things, even the hard things, to work together for good. You can order a signed and personalized copy for yourself or for your friend who enjoys a good story, loves dogs, sports or the outdoors, and most of all, needs to hear about God's grace and the gospel. My Boy Ben is owned by the Christian Real View.

It's 264 pages, hard cover and retails for $24.95. To order, go to thechristianrealview.org or call 1-888-646-2233 or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. Have faith in God. Don't be intimidated by lies. If the world says, back down, don't do this, fling open your windows. Pray openly, so to speak. That's what Daniel did. Don't be ashamed.

Don't be intimidated. A blind anemic we need flee on crutches has more chance of defeating a herd of a thousand wild, stampeding elephants than this world has of stopping the will of God. There's nothing they can do to stop God's will.

And if you're a Christian, you've aligned yourself with God's will. That was evangelist Ray Comfort exhorting believers to stand firm and speak boldly, just like Daniel. Ray's new book, So Many Lions, So Few Daniels, is 192 pages, soft cover and retails for $16.99. You can order the book for a donation of any amount to the Christian Real View. Go to thechristianrealview.org or call 1-888-646-2233 or write to Box 401, Excelsior Minnesota, 55331. Welcome back to the Christian Real View. I'm David Wheaton. Be sure to visit our website, thechristianrealview.org, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email and annual print letter.

Order resources for adults and children and support the ministry. Our topic today is The Dangerous Affirmation of Gay Christianity, and MD Perkins, the author of Dangerous Affirmation, is our guest. MD, the woman we're hearing this soundbite from, Rachel Gilson, it is said that she is attracted to women, but she's married to a man.

Here's what she said next. As we think about the question of people in a same-sex marriage who may become to know the Lord, this is a real situation that I've encountered in my life. I met a woman recently in St. Louis who was actually in a marriage to a woman and was processing what to do because she had come to the Lord, but her wife hadn't. We need to recognize in this situation that these are some very tender things, and if we just walk around being like, I've got some great ideas, you don't know anything. You don't know anything about what this relationship has been like, the joys that it's provided, the heaviness it's provided.

We never approach these situations with swagger. If we've got a relationship where they're trusting us to speak in and trusting us to draw near, we want to listen really carefully. Like with any person, discipleship is going to be a process. I'd say if someone in a same-sex marriage comes to know the Lord, it's not like, okay, what we've got to deal with first is your same-sex marriage. Our discipleship is our whole person. When we come to Christ, there are a lot of things that need attention, that need forgiveness, that need healing, that need adjusting. But I do hope that over the course of discipleship for someone in that position, they're going to have a chance to examine what the Bible says about sexuality, and they're going to have a trustworthy person to walk through with them, what that means for their life.

Okay, I'm going to stop it there again. Now, there was a lot of things said there as well. There's personal stories, and the language of compassion, and the fact that calling a so-called partnering of two people to same-sex a marriage, like a woman can have a wife, not in God's eyes, a woman can have a wife, a man can't have a husband in God's eyes, in his eyes are the only ones that matter. But she's a particularly, Rachel Gilson is a particularly effective underminer of this category, as you say, of gay celibate theology. What was your takeaway from that particular portion of the soundbite? My takeaway is that she doesn't at all want to answer this question, because she knows that it's going to sound harsh if she has the biblically orthodox position clearly displayed.

So she has to lean very hard on the, we need to listen, we need to come alongside, we need to be there, you know, we don't understand all the things that have happened and how joyful this relationship may have been, blah, blah, blah, blah, like all that stuff is hedging, having to say that, no, they shouldn't be married. And that's really what the gay celibate theology tends to do. It wants to say that I hold to a biblically orthodox position, I never really express it in any way that's direct or clear. I always have to come to it from the side or from some angle or in a really soft and very minimal position so that it's just the smallest push toward righteousness and truth, but nothing that would upset anybody's apple cart because we really don't know the situation. Well, we know that this is going to be an idol in somebody's life when they come to Christ because they've committed themselves to the point of going through the marriage vows together.

So there's some recognition that this is very important to this person, obviously, or they wouldn't have gone through all of this action together. So within discipleship, yeah, is that the first thing that you touch on? I mean, discipleship is always such a personal thing anyway, and it's so individualized and specific in some sense, but at the end of the day, you know, you're going to have to deal with this elephant in the room and that's the elephant in the room that the person probably doesn't want to deal with. And so you're going to have to know as a Christian, whether that's the first conversation or the 15th conversation, that this is going to be there. And so you have to be able to address it, and that's what this person is asking for advice on. And frankly, she's not giving discipleship here.

She's giving caveats and kind of obfuscating answers. It seems like it's the highest virtue in evangelicalism is to appear to be kind and compassionate, even at the expense of not expressing truth, which is what is able to really truly help someone be reconciled to God. Let's just be reminded of what Jesus said in Matthew chapter 19. Here's Jesus himself. The Pharisees came to Jesus, testing him and asking, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all? And Jesus answered and said, Have you not read that he who created them, God, from the beginning made them male and female? So you get really a twofer here. You get Jesus defining that there's only men and women.

You can't change it. He made them male and female, verse five, and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh, but therefore God is joined together. Let no man separate. Jesus defines very clearly what marriage is right there. One man and one woman, and defines what gender is.

God makes them male and female. And if that weren't enough in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter five, he said, You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So Jesus takes it from not just the action of sexual immorality, adultery with someone, not your wife, if you're a man, or someone, not your husband, if you're a woman, but he brings it down to the mode of the desire inside of your heart. If you lust for someone in your heart, you've committed adultery, you're sinning. And this goes straight in the face of the same sex attracted gay Christianity movement, because they're saying you can be a same sex attracted Christian. You can harbor and live with and keep these sinful desires, even if you're not acting on them.

And so let's go to the next portion of that soundbite with Rachel Gilson, because I'd like to see what your takeaways are from the last minute or so here. When you're a child, especially during that weird stage where you're like, for the first time an adult child relating to adult parents, that's weird, right? It's just weird. You used to be five and they were old and now you're like old but not as old.

You just don't. If you're a parent relating to someone in that situation, you've already got that strange dynamic on top of something that is theologically and emotionally really heavy. So I would say as their son, you love them and help them in whatever way, right?

You love them as you try to follow the Lord, as they try to follow the Lord, to come around the scriptures together and figure out what's going on. I do think that it's pretty normal for someone who comes to Christ to see, oh, this isn't the way God designed to use my sexuality. They don't have to negate all the good things that they've experienced with the person that they've been in a relationship with to recognize that God says something else about sexuality.

They might end up making a very big cost. I've known some people who decide to stay in that relationship legally but to live celibately, to break off having sex. That has happened with some couples who both come to Christ. I've known some couples where one person came to Christ and decided that in order to honor the Lord, he needed to be celibate and his partner decided, his husband, to be celibate.