Compassion
Each June I see family and friends across the religious and political spectrum adopt rainbow avatars on social media and hang rainbow flags from their homes. Much like the black squares that were ubiquitous in honoring George Floyd, this stems, I believe, from a genuine desire to love and support groups who for centuries have been treated in ways ranging from insensitive to inhumane, including by some who claimed to follow a craftsman from Nazareth named Jesus. Jesus taught that "love thy neighbor as thyself" is the greatest commandment, second only to "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind."
The tension between these two great commandments means holding up God as the standard for ourselves and others - all while loving ourselves and others.
This is not easy and many of us fall short by favoring one and discounting the other.
Too often, we either exhibit our "love of God" by being judgmental and critical of those who we deem fall short of His standard - or we exhibit our "love of neighbor" by condoning and affirming behavior that runs counter to God's commandments.
Sadly, there are countless examples over the centuries of Christians doing poorly in the "love of neighbor" category, which I think gave fuel to movements like Pride.
It should give Christians everywhere pause that Christians and LGBTQIA+ persons are drawn to the Pride flag to meet the needs of the LGBTQIA+ rather than being drawn to people claiming the name or buildings adorned with the symbols of Christ.
Pride Month
Pride Month is appealing to Christians and other people of good faith because they see it as a way of showing charity, compassion, and Christ-like love.
Pride can appear to be a way of fulfilling the Second Great Commandment that everyone can rally around, transcending religious and ideological divides.
And insofar as we provide genuine love, respect, and help to individuals who are struggling to live up to the breathtakingly high standards of the First Great Commandment, as we all do in one way or another, those actions are necessary, beneficial, and to be commended.
But with Pride, these well-meaning actions are done under a false flag. When we fly that flag, we don the jersey of the opposing team.
Under the flag of Jehovah, the great I AM loves us where we are but summons us higher through self-denial and obedience to the ideal he embodies, our identity subsumed in His.
Under the flag of Pride, individuals are encouraged to become their own great I AM, gods unto themselves with their passions as their ideal and identity, before which every knee must bow and every tongue confess.
Wolves in Sheep's Clothing
Pride has parents and is not an only child.
Pride, Wokeism, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Black Lives Matter, Anti-Racism, Post-Modernism, Socialism, Communism, etc. are all descendants of a worldview that originated with G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx; species belonging to the same genus, if you will. It's a remarkable genealogy that takes a significant investment of time to understand. I recommend the work of Dr. James Lindsay and others have done excellent work illuminating and elucidating the sprawling and bewildering philosophical posterity of Hegel and Marx.
Skipping over that convoluted pedigree for the sake of brevity runs the risk of sounding like hyperbole, but these movements are Anti-Christ, in the very real sense of standing in direct opposition to everything Christ means for us to be and do. Christ seeks to change the individual, who is then free to change the state. Marx seeks to change the state, using individuals as coal for the inevitable fires necessary to reforge society.
As such, these movements are also Anti-West because Western Civilization was born of a marriage between Jerusalem and Athens - a history-pivoting combination of Judeo-Christian theology on the origin, nature, and worth of human beings and the brilliance of minds like Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and those that followed - that has resulted in the most free and prosperous epoch that planet Earth has ever seen. Hegel and Marx's offspring are also brilliant - in their deception - because they appear clothed in compassion, equality, and justice, which is why they have historically attracted so many followers. They too have been history-making, with untold buildings burned and bodies buried.
The Historical Materialism of Marx and Nietzsche gave birth to Nazism, Stalinism, Leninism, and Maoism resulting in some 100 million deaths in the 20th century, but they couldn't overcome the West. Frustrated, their philosophical heirs took a longer, more gradual approach, one that activist Rudi Dutscheke called "the long march through the institutions." That is, the institutions that had inoculated the West against Marxism; namely family, religion, academia, law, and capitalism - with the goal of either destroying them or commandeering them for utopian purposes.
The Long March
The universities were first, led by the fall of the humanities and social sciences with the STEM fields now giving way. Perhaps you've heard of feminist glaciology. which purports to "generate robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions." That's right; incorporating gender, power, justice, and equity in the study of ice.
Capitalism is being infiltrated via ESG and CEI scores or similar initiatives enforced by operatives within the companies themselves or at the levers of power in the 401ks and pension funds that own substantial shares in those companies - turning the retirement money of ordinary citizens against them. This is the reason behind the seemingly bizarre behavior of companies like Disney, Target, and Anheuser-Busch and their brand and market value self-destruction.
Corporations, academia, and government are being overtaken by Orwellian policies like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - all Motte-and-Bailey doublespeak terms that sound compassionate to the Western ear but have entirely different meanings within the Woke worldview.
Religion and the family are in precipitous decline for several reasons, but one of them is the hypersexualization of our culture. Under these philosophies, license and promiscuity are means, not ends. When sexual identity and pursuit become paramount religious and familial ties disintegrate - which was the stated objective of theorists like György Lukács, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Herbert Marcuse.
On their heals came Pride, the origin of which included activists like Martha Shelley who proclaimed they were "in revolt against the sex-role structure and nuclear family structure" and the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) whose statement of purpose included:
"We are a revolutionary group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society's attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature."
Each of these Marxist cousins seeks, at their base, the same objective - the repudiation and dismantling of Judeo-Christian and Western societal norms in order to bring about the "end of history", a utopian vision Marx believed would be realized if we could just remove the oppressive societal and institutional chains that bind and obscure it. Thus the push to ruthlessly criticize all aspects of Western society (i.e. Critical Theory).
This is, in fact, the stated objective of Queer Theory. It exists to antagonize norms, normativity, and the normal. Hence the overt celebration of everything that is non-normative. At last count, there were 95 pride flags, 130 colors in the "gay handkerchief code" (intuitively, brown represents a scat fetish), and over 260 LGBTQIA+ holidays.
The Trojan Herd
Pride, Woke, and their cousins are wolves in sheep's clothing. Not just one Trojan Horse, but an entire herd bent not on greater compassion and understanding, but on the literal overthrow of the West.
To anyone who thinks the overthrow of the West would be a good thing I would suggest that you don't know the water you swim in and should you successfully achieve that goal, you will find yourself suffocated and flopping desperately on the shores of individual and collective suffering of a magnitude known only to those who have lived through or deeply studied the histories of hell on earth.
It was from one of these hells that Aleksander Solzhenitsyn exposed the horrors of Marxist theory-put-into-practice and the fatal flaw at the center of that theory in his landmark work, The Gulag Archipelago. He famously said, “the line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” It's this correct understanding of human nature that explains why the Western tradition has succeeded so spectacularly where Marxist ideas have failed so horribly. To be clear, the Western tradition has its share of struggle and tragedy. There is no life free from suffering. It's a matter of choosing the type of suffering we will experience. Paraphrasing Dr. Jordan Peterson, you can either lift up a cross or have one dropped on you. There is no non-cross option in this life.
Aristotle called for a "godlike" standard of virtue and character that requires a lifelong exertion of hard work and discipline that he called "difficult in the extreme" but an essential component of our individual pursuit of happiness.
This is what Jefferson was talking about in the Declaration of Independence and was well understood for centuries up through the Enlightenment and Founding eras.
Similarly, the Judeo-Christian tradition refers to man's struggle with self as "those who wrestle with God and let God prevail", the meaning of the word "Israel".
And that's the Western tradition at its ideal. Reality is all the more challenging to the degree that non-virtuous behavior or vice exists within a society. Virtue or the law of God is the target and we cause pain and suffering when we "miss the mark", an archery term that is the literal meaning of the word "sin".
Where We Go From Here
My message to the West in general, and Christians in particular, is this: our culture and tradition have made greater progress against those corruptions than any other tradition in the history of the world. Tyranny, slavery, racism, misogyny, poverty, ignorance, and illiteracy are a shadow of their former selves in those parts of the world where the Western tradition has been practiced for a century or two or three.
Slavery, for example, was ubiquitous throughout human history for thousands of years. It was abolished within one single lifetime following the United States' founding. One lifetime. Do we have farther to go? Absolutely. Every generation must be taught these lessons and must be supported and encouraged in their own individual struggle to live a life of virtue, which creates a community of virtue. We are so used to rapid technological change that we expect similar rapidity in all areas of life. But mountains of rock are more easily moved than the mountains that exist in the hearts of men.
Going forward, that progress only happens as quickly as we individually and collectively consensually collaborate to become masters of our own house or self-mastery, and feed the hungry, clothe the naked, liberate the captive, house the homeless, educate the ignorant, mend the broken heart, lift up the downtrodden, mourn with those that mourn, turn the other cheek, and do good to those who spitefully use us.
The Judeo-Christian religion and the tradition of the West call individuals to action, not activism.
In the West, our ideals are clear. We the people do the work. We cooperate for the well-being of the different and downtrodden. We serve in churches. We form charities. We volunteer. We bridle our passions. We parent. We sacrifice. We create art, music, and sculpture that bring joy to the soul and peace to the heart. We pursue education and training. We study the greats and then seek to improve upon them. We invent and innovate. We spend decades working as professionals in diverse industries that raise the collective standard of living. We strive to be informed voters. We run for local office. We settle our differences through rigorous research, debate, and the ballot. We pursue merit, not power.
The atheistic, revolutionary denominations of the Marxist religion call for individuals to bitterly criticize, prevent speech, stifle debate, foment discontent and strife, riot and pillage, ostracize family, and compel others on the basis of radical individual sovereignty. They pursue power and reject merit as a tool of an oppressive patriarchy.
I am grateful for the men and women who have worked to shed light on the injustices perpetrated on LGBTQIA+ individuals while upholding the Western tradition as the model most conducive to human freedom, flourishing, and progress.
I am grateful for the individuals and institutions that have worked to both provide protections for LGBTQIA+ persons and religious freedom.
The rest of us are in their debt. We can be like them. We must be like them. And we should do so, however imperfectly, under the banner of Christ and through the traditions and institutions of Western classical liberalism - to love and lift others, as we have so often been lifted ourselves. And be wary of inadvertently promoting causes that are antithetical to the freedom and prosperity former generations have given us.