NEW YORK, April 7, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A New York
Timescolumnist and a corporate leader have agreed that Christian churches
“must” be convinced, or coerced, to change their teachings on sexual morality
and abandon an “ossified” doctrinal teaching that sex outside heterosexual
marriage is immoral.
Frank
Bruni wrote that traditional Christianity – whether among evangelicals,
Catholics, or Orthodox – provides the greatest resistance to normalizing
homosexuality in the United States in a recent column in the New York Times.
“Homosexuality
and Christianity don’t have to be in conflict in any church anywhere,” Bruni
insisted. “The continued view of gays, lesbians and bisexuals as sinners is a
decision. It’s a choice. It prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts
over all that has been learned since — as if time had stood still, as if the
advances of science and knowledge meant nothing.”
Bruni
quoted furniture tycoon Mitchell Gold, who has used his millions to found a liberal
pressure group Faith in America, writing that Gold believes Christian churches
“must be made 'to take homosexuality off the sin list.'”
“His
commandment is worthy — and warranted,” Bruni added.
The
column sparked outrage at the notion that a successful businessman and an op-ed
writer could induce the Christian Church to ignore a 2,000-year-old dogma.
Noting
Bruni's column at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher wrote that
he would find a conservative columnist lecturing liberal denominations that they
“must” change their moral theology equally “appalling” as an act of imposition.
“But of
course nobody on that side seems to have the slightest doubt about their cause,
their motives, or their methods. None,” he wrote. “In a holy war, there is no
room for doubt.”
A number
of mainline Protestant churches have, in effect, taken Gold's advice, condoning
– if not celebrating – homosexuality and allowing sexually active homosexuals
to be ordained as pastors.
The
Episcopal Church saw its membership decline by half-a-million people between
2002 and 2012. After changing its views of homosexuals, the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) lost more than 600,000 people – in excess of
12 percent of its total members – in just three years. The first mainline
church to allow for homosexual ordination, the United Church of Christ (UCC),
lost 350 congregations within three years of its 2004 decision.
But even
refraining from calling same-sex relations a sin – or, in the words of the
Catechism of the Catholic Church, “intrinsically disordered” – is not enough
for the modern LGBT movement.
“The
LGBT militants are not asking to be left alone,” said former Reagan
administration adviser Pat Buchanan, a co-founder of The American
Conservative. “They are demanding that we accept the morality of
homosexuality and same-sex marriages, and manifest that acceptance, under pain
of law and sanctions, in our daily lives.”
Buchanan
said during an interview with WND.com that orthodox Christian churches must
have one response to demands that they alter their teachings to fit the modern zeitgeist:
“The answer is no. If it comes to civil disobedience, so be it.”
Buchanan's
statement came as a number of prominent evangelical Christian leaders have
called for open acts of nonviolent resistance if the Supreme Court forces
states to accept homosexual “marriages” this summer.
Image: Shutterstock.com
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