Why American Christians Have Lost Their Power

In many ways, America is leaps and bounds ahead of my home country of Zimbabwe. Like the rest of the world, Zimbabweans want to live, eat, speak and dress like Americans. One reason we couldn’t and don’t was the corrupt regime of Robert Mugabe. However, our perhaps singularly collective source of pride in his leadership was his refusal to compromise with the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer-questioning-intersex-asexual-two-spirit-plus agenda. Most of Africa is the same.

To cheers and applause in its parliament, Uganda kicked off “Pride Month” in June by passing a historic anti-lgbtq law. According to this law, the penalty for having same-sex relations is a 10-year prison sentence. Promoting homosexuality results in a $260,000 fine or 20-year imprisonment. Any homosexual who commits statutory rape while hiv-positive is subject to death.

“This Uganda law is horrific and wrong … grotesque and an abomination,” according to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, an avowed Christian. Premier Christianity wrote that we should “offer unconditional compassionate support to lgbt people in your own community and networks.” Christianity Today said we can’t “pretend the Ugandan homosexuality law is Christian.”

Why is Senator Cruz defending homosexuality? Why is mainstream Christianity increasingly pro-homosexuality?

Many Christians are joining forces with “conservative” homosexuals to fight against what they consider the greater evils of transgenderism and pedophilia. Meanwhile, other churches are wholeheartedly proclaiming a false gospel of queerness. The Presbyterian church is making prayers to the “god of pronouns” while the United Methodist Church is about to ordain a drag queen. The Harvard Divinity School is offering a course on “Queering Congregations: Contextual Approaches for Dismantling Heteronormativity.” According to a transgender professor at Yale Divinity School, “Christianity, rightly understood, is about the transgression of boundaries. Christians believe in a God whose love undoes every binary. All the laws are negated, including the law of contractual sexuality, that is, marriage.”

This is far from the Christianity of the Bible. The Bible says sin is the transgression of God’s law (1 John 3:4). Yet many “Christian” leaders today agree more with the transgender professor than with the Bible. They teach that Jesus Christ Himself abolished God’s law! Through human reasoning, they compromise with and even reject the laws of the very God they claim to worship.

This is why many churches have reasoned that homosexuality should be tolerated or even celebrated. Christians today are so powerless in the face of such open, egregious evil because they fundamentally disagree with God’s law.

They believe that God’s law is bad and complicated. God says the law is good (Romans 7:12). They believe the law was done away with. Jesus Christ said, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matthew 5:17). They think the law is a litany of impossible, restrictive ordinances. God says it defines His way of life, which is love (Romans 13:8-10; Galatians 5:14).

Jesus Christ Himself confirmed and summarized God’s entire spiritual law as love toward God and love toward neighbor (Matthew 22:37-39). He kept that law and never abolished it.

The early apostles fought those who wanted to counterfeit Christ’s message of forgiveness and salvation and blend it with lawlessness (Jude 3-4). Two thousand years later, “Christians” claim that Christ nailed the law to the cross. They have accepted the very lie the early apostles were fighting. They have invalidated laws like the Sabbath and tithing. They have blended the Bible with tradition and human reasoning to decide their own rules. They are compromising with sin because they have rejected the law. They cling to the belief that Jesus was the Christ—and ignore His command to keep the law! Now they find themselves unequipped and underpowered in a fight against sin.

This is why Christians have lost their power and are compromising with homosexuality. Compromise is contagious. When we tolerate and commit sins, we weaken our own standing. Our guilt presses us to tolerate what we otherwise wouldn’t. That is why the last few decades have seen an explosion in divorce, fornication, adultery, pornography, homosexuality, and now children’s drag shows, puberty blockers, genital mutilation and more horrors.

Mainstream Christianity ignores the crucial point Jesus made whenever he interacted with sinners: “[G]o, and sin no more” (John 8:11).

Christ knew that He would die for our sins. Why then bother telling us to stop sinning? Why tell us to change our behavior if His brutal death would erase the sin anyway?

Because God hates every instance of law-breaking (Proverbs 8:13). He wants us to become perfect as He is, the very purpose for which we were created (Matthew 5:48). Going and sinning more makes us more guilty, makes us less like Him, renders us unable to be born into His Family.

That is why God wants us to stop sinning. He wants us to keep His laws. That is why the brutal beating and death of His Son was the steep price that had to be paid for transgressed law.

Homosexuality is wrong. Breaking the Sabbath is wrong. Failing to tithe is wrong. That’s the law. Disbelieving it won’t change it, no more than disbelieving the law of gravity will make you fly. God’s law is reality, and compromising with it will break your power.