Life in a Foreign Country: Navigating Our Culture’s Change on Sexuality
by Ed Shaw, The Gospel Coalition:
L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between famously begins, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” But for many Western Christians today, it’s not the past that’s unfamiliar territory, but the present. Everything, it seems, has changed.
Our legal systems—once used to persecute the gay community—are now used to prosecute Christians who refuse services to gay customers. The fear of coming out as an evangelical Christian in the workplace today is perhaps similar to the fear of coming out as gay to colleagues a generation ago. Dictionaries are changing definitions of words like “marriage,” and schools are asking parents to indicate their child’s preferred gender identity. More and more young people talk of a fluidity in their experience of gender and sexuality.
It’s important for us to recognize and articulate that not all the changes have been bad. The past is not necessarily a better country. Yet we also must recognize that it’s not good that Scripture’s teaching on gender, sexuality, and marriage has been largely rejected by Western society—and by increasing numbers within the church. We desperately need to call people back to God’s life-giving Word.
For that call to be effective, however, it must come from those who can answer this crucial question: Where have the changes come from?
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