We Canadians who stand in defense of the Judeo-Christian moral and social principles that have built and sustained western culture over 2000 years had better be girding up for the fight of our lives. Confronted by the prospect of a man who unapologetically affirms traditional Christian ideas becoming leader of the opposition, and perhaps even Prime Minister, the forces of secular paganism (including the seditious fifth column that operates from within the churches) are unleashing the most furious anti-Christian blitzkrieg this country has ever seen.
In a June 26 National Post column analyzing Stockwell Day’s electoral prospects, Michael Bliss writes: “We’ve had an enormous revolution in our times. Most Canadians now, and especially the young, would no more think of discriminating on the grounds of sexual orientation than they would on race. Homophobic views are becoming like racist views, outside the boundaries of civilized discourse …. A Canadian politician in the year 2000 can’t have homophobic associates any more than he can have anti-Semite or anti-black followers.”
A novel interpretation of “civilized,” and I encourage Christians not to be intimidated by Prof. Bliss’s attempt to smear principled objection to the homosexualist political agenda by association with racism. However, I would like to thank Prof. Bliss for his clear articulation of what’s really at stake. He’s saying that Christians and orthodox Christian principles have no legitimate place in the public square. That is nothing really new, but Prof. Bliss goes a step farther by insinuating that the unequivocal condemnation of homosexual behaviour that resonates consistently from both biblical Testaments, as well as from doctrinal statements as diverse as the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Atlantic Baptist Convention’s policy paper on homosexuality – is evil and equivalent to racism.
This battle is not just about homosexualism of course. As Pat Allan, a Christian former lesbian who now heads a healing ministry to gays has observed: “In many ways homosexuality should not be the pivotal issue it is. It directly concerns only two or three percent of our people. It has to do with one aspect of our lives – our sexuality. But it is pivotal. Perhaps in every age there is a battlefield on which the defenders of the faith must stand for truth and Christian orthodoxy. In this age, all of the forces have come together in the battle over homosexuality. This is where we must take our stand.”
Prof. Bliss believes that what he sees as a paradigm-shift in social morality is inexorable and irreversible, noting that “the young” especially, have bought into the notion that opposition to the gay rights agenda is morally repugnant. What Prof. Bliss does not acknowledge is that this moral revisionism is the result of a concentrated campaign of propagandization and indoctrination by a determined political coalition.
The notion of “neutral ground” on these issues is nonsensical. Christ said, “He who is not with me is against me.” The problem up to now has been that it is all too easy to pretend that one can sit on the fence. The culture wars represent a head-on collision of two incompatible and contradictory visions of truth and reality that cannot peacefully coexist. Sixty years ago, historian and Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc wrote: “We must attempt to destroy [the modern attack on Christianity] as being the fully equipped and ardent enemy of the Faith by which man lives. The duel is to the death.”
More recently, James Nuechterlein, editor of the Judeo-Christian intellectual journal, First Things, noted that: “We make no claim concerning the motives of our radical adversaries, but we do not hesitate to insist that their ideas range from the merely silly to the deeply pernicious. We take no particular pleasure in engaging the militant feminists and homosexual activists, the Nietzschean deconstructionists and relativists, the enemies of traditional morality and religious faith; indeed the ongoing conflict with our various utopians and Gnostics is a dirty business from which no one emerges with entirely clean hands or uncoarsened sensibilities. But we persist in our struggle because we think it is our simple duty to do so ….”
When I was confirmed in the Anglican Catholic Church, I made a solemn vow “manfully to fight under the banner of Christ crucified, against sin, the world, and the devil.” I take that promise seriously. Christians must never apologize for defending our rightful claim to this culture. We built it; we sustained it; and in truth it cannot long survive without us. The west was barbarian before Christianity civilized it, and barbarian it will soon become again if secularists succeed in purging Christianity from the public square. It would be a ignoble and cowardly to shrink
