Tim Wildmon

AFA president

October 2013 – I was interviewing Christian author Os Guinness on American Family Radio recently when I had to disagree him on the air. It is not often I find myself doing this, since most folks we interview share the same beliefs and worldview. And Os and I do share the same faith in Jesus Christ, but he has bought into what I believe to be a false premise that many other Christians have also bought into.

He said that Christian young people are leaving the faith because of the “ugliness of Christian activism.” I asked him for an example of what he was talking about, and he cited a video that went around the Internet a couple of years ago that included clips from President Obama’s comments which would lead the viewer to believe Obama is a Muslim. Os said basically that this video was slanderous. 

I told him I believed his example to be weak because that video was not produced by any mainstream pro-family or Christian group. My personal opinion is it is Obama himself who has created the suspicion among one out of four Americans that he is a secret Muslim. I have no idea if he is or not. I just know that many of his statements and actions have been extremely positive and sympathetic toward Islam. 

But that is not really the point here. The point here is that there is nothing ugly about the Christian activism that American Family Association engages in. And if some young Christians are leaving the church because of the “ugliness of Christian activism” (which I seriously doubt), then it seems to me they had a really shallow faith to begin with.

To be fair to Os, his main point in our conversation was that as Christians we should being doing “the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way.” Meaning, we need to be honest and treat our philosophical and political detractors as the Bible commands us to treat any other person – with love and respect.

I agree with that.

But what we often see going on even inside the evangelical church in America today is backing down from biblical morality and adopting the politically correct view as promoted in popular culture, especially as it relates to sexual politics. I am referring to the cultural agenda of the GLBTQ movement. That stands for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer/Questioning. 

I could name names and have in some cases, but these are well known people and well known organizations within the Christian community. They are backing down because they don’t have the courage to stand up to the onslaught of criticism that the secular media and the GLBTQ groups will bring to bear. It’s easier to retreat into silence or “neutrality.” I have seen this happen with people I respect time and again just this last year. It’s very disheartening.

But then you get folks like evangelist Greg Laurie. When GLBTQ activists learned he was going to be speaking at a National Day of Prayer event at the Pentagon in May, they went on a campaign to get him to cancel or have the military brass force him off the program. 

They had been successful in a similar case just a few months earlier, getting Christian youth speaker Louie Giglio to withdraw from the presidential inauguration ceremony because of a sermon he preached against homosexuality 20 years ago. But Laurie decided to stand up to these cultural bullies and said this publicly:

They do not want me to pray. They describe me as ‘homophobic’ and so forth. How can you deal with such a situation? We’re in a time in our country now where I’m attacked because I believe what the Bible teaches. If people want to make it all about that I’m not going to back down. In the immortal words of the great theologian Tom Petty, “I won’t back down.” I won’t. I’m not going to apologize.

Praise God for your courageous stand for righteousness, Brother Laurie! May your tribe increase!