Brian Mattson on Rachel Held Evans

Brian Mattson has an a well-time post entitled The Perseverance of a Juvenile Generation in response to a post by Rachel Held Evans in which she is moaning over the passing of Amendment 1 in North Carolina.  Evans believes that the church has fundamentally mishandled the whole issue of homosexuality and the younger generation of Christians are ready to throw in the towel on this issue.

Mattson's piece effectively answers Evans sentimentalism with Scripture.  Here a just a few snippets:

The real root of Rachel's discontent reveals that she wants to quit the culture wars precisely because she's already a fatal casualty in the culture wars.  The architects of the GLBT cultural movement (yes, there is such a movement) purposely planned to shame Bible-believing Christians by relentlessly portraying the GLBT community as the persecuted victims, even while they were aggressively assaulting the broad moral consensus of the culture in media, entertainment, politics and (most importantly) law.  You can read all about it here.  This is the only mode of moral evaluation Rachel knows: GLBT are the persecuted minority and Christians are the bigoted oppressors.  Score one for the opposition.

And he concludes with this:

There really isn't much more to say.  I read Rachel's post with a great deal of sadness.  The dissonance between her sentimentalism and the claims of the gospel in the New Testament is extreme.  Listen: the early church grew in the midst of the Roman Empire.  Can we please stop this whole "things are so different now!" mentality?  Religious pluralism, sexual autonomy and license is nothing new.  The church has faced the situation before.  This is not some unprecedented turn of events.  

And many people were literally fed to lions because they refused to give up their "culture war," opposing things like worshiping the Emperor and gladiatorial contests and polygamy and homosexuality and infant exposure.

It is pathetic that merely being disliked is enough to get Rachel and her whole generation to shut up.

Mattson's piece is worth reading and pondering.  There is a serious compromise among many of the up and coming evangelicals regarding the issue of homosexuality.  It goes beyond the issue of sexuality and touches upon such central concerns as our view of God, the authority of his Word, the nature of sin, and our view of standing firm for the gospel in the midst of a culture that is despising what Christian heritage it had.