Why Pride Can and Should Be Opposed

Christian Morality and the Consequences of Normativity

Every time Pride Month comes around, it becomes evermore significant that even if some believe the tide is turning on public LGBT+ solidarity, it still remains very much “in power”, and is arguably still the most significant front-line issue both within and beyond the Church, at least for now.

For Christians, this sheds further light on the wider significance of our convictions. It also offers a very live and pressing context in which to recover the importance of a more combative Christian approach to challenging ideologies which directly oppose Christian convictions, especially those which carry deeper implications. For a long time we have not wanted to look like ungracious Pharisees, and so we have almost acted as though it is societally immaterial whether or not somebody embraces LGBT+ ideology because, either way, we all rely upon the grace of God. Whilst this is definitely the case, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23) this does not mean the toleration of all sins and all lifestyles is irrelevant, not least in its consequent effects upon wider society.

I have spoken before of why it is especially important to challenge LGBT+ ideology within the Church rather than in society. This remains the priority for Christians. However, sometimes ideologies need to be challenged in society because our toleration of them there leads to their toleration within the Church too. There is also the case of our basic love of neighbour, and how willing we are to support ideas which will ultimately have negative effects on a great many people.

Jim Caviezel, the Hollywood actor who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, a committed Catholic, appears to have become more animated in speaking out against Pride along these lines.

As many are observing in our time, more ground is being forfeited each year as a result of the behemoth that is #Pride. One of the consequences of this is the assault upon the concept of the heterosexual family as the normative basis for societal flourishing, alongside the protection of children and parental rights. I doubt most LGBT+ people are actually “coming for your children” but the toleration of the concept of widespread LGBT+ affirmation will have longer term negative consequences for the positive conception of the family. We have long taken this for granted in western society. We have not needed to argue for it; we have not needed to think about it. It just was the case.

No one can deny that over recent years #Pride got increasingly weird, more aggressive, more intolerant and - magically - more overtly anti-religious. Given the Christendom paradigm Pride is explicitly rejecting, even if those of other religions (e.g. Islam) feel opposed by Pride, it should be noted that Pride is a specifically anti-Christian initiative, an anti-Christian concept. This is because Pride is an explicit rejection of norms which were established within explicitly Christian societies.

At large, it did not gain traction within pagan or other-religious nations; it flourished in Christian societies and was welcomed by the rebels from within who had long become bored with Christianity and despised its goodness. Pride is, at root, the very embodiment of revolt against God, and against the concept of the family which God invented for human flourishing. Pride is, at root, the very embodiment of revolt against this norm. Its claim is that this norm was not a “good” thing but directly led to the hurt many in the “LGBT+ community” have felt over a great number of years.

The “Myth” of Family Values

While many Pride apologists like to say how the majority of Pride events are “family-friendly”, far too many remain literal safeguarding issues. The exposure to children of “queered” sexualisation does not confine itself to a one-off parade, or an annual festival, but finds its way into wider culture, including the tolerance of increasingly disturbing relationships and sex education in schools. Pride has become far more than the active celebration of freedom from discrimination. It is a revolution in what constitutes morality: it is more than merely eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it is the uprooting of the tree itself, and the fashioning of an idol out of the wood.

Children are exposed to content within the context of sex education or Pride events which would be considered arrestable offences in other contexts. The parents who allow their children to be exposed to such things perhaps believe they are giving their child an “open mind”, helping them to learn to be “inclusive”, helping them to denounce “hate” and “discrimination”. That is probably how they justify it, as performative political angst, which helps us understand the plight of the oppressed. But they may not realise they are indoctrinating their children with something far more troubling than what they may take to be the indoctrination of “traditional” family values.

Is Pride “Family-Friendly”?

Even if many Pride events attended by children might be less overtly sexualised than others, they are still part of the overarching telos of Pride: to destroy sexual normativity whilst simultaneously insisting that the affirmation of LGBT+ should be normative.

Indeed, there was an intriguing opinion piece in USA Today last year pushing back against the critique that Pride even “should” be family-friendly:

But the correct answer to that perennial question ("Should Pride events be family friendly?") is not "yes." Those who answer in the affirmative are saying Pride should strive to be palatable to anyone and everyone. Yikes. That normative demand for respectability fails to respect the queerness of LGBTQ communities. And it smells hauntingly reminiscent of the fearmongering tactics bigots have used to claim that LGBTQ people pose an exceptional threat to women, children and the concept of family itself.

Pride by definition is not “family-friendly”. How could it be? It rejects what most people believe to be the ideal and norm for a family. It seeks to undermine it. That is literally a major aspect of what Pride is about.

So when someone says Pride should be family friendly, they often are trying to sanitize queer spaces without recognizing that their sanitizer was formulated by the very same heteronormativity that Pride exists to reject.

A Shift in Normativity

It has taken many quietly non-affirming people a long time to realise that this attack on heteronormativity really will have consequences on the public conception of morality. Whilst heteronormativity was normative, many did not feel the need to challenge those who opposed it because it seemed like a marginal issue. Now that normativity is directly undermined, people are realising just how much may be lost by questioning what constitutes “normality” in sexuality and gender, and all else that might flow from it.

Perhaps a number of Pride advocates might not even be conscious of it, but at the heart of Pride is an assault on the traditional heterosexual family itself. This is often admitted openly, as one pro-LGBT+ Vogue article from a couple of years ago argued, reflecting upon the same issue of why the notion of “family friendly” should not be a welcome concept for LGBT+:

part of the LGBTQ experience, historically and to this day, has been inventing new social relations that provide the collective mutual aid that every individual needs for survival — a concept it only feels natural to call family. Importantly, these new concepts of familial relations were an alternative to contemporaneous definitions of what family meant in the middle of the 20th century, when the patriarchal-male- breadwinner-plus-female-housekeeper dynamic was starting to come under scrutiny.

As with many elements of the progressive agenda, there is a caricature of what is being rejected in order to accentuate the alternative as a more liberating solution. But the central concept of the father and mother as the lynchpin of the family was not invented in the 1950s in order to keep women at home, or to keep men in control. It is far more basic to human civilization than any one mere epoch. Every human civilization has always known what a father and a mother is, and most have known that their roles needed to be different, and that the difference was good.

We, on the other hand, may well be the first ever human society that does not know what a woman even is. We must bear our own blind spots in mind when we seek to correct previous understandings of the family. 21st-century society does not have a good CV on family flourishing. We are in no place to sneer at the imperfect instantiations of family life in previous epochs. I dread to think what the historians may say of us one day. Hopefully they will see our attitudes with the appropriate criticism we rarely reserve for ourselves.

The Inevitability of a Worldview

As Richard Weaver’s famous 1948 book title highlighted, Ideas Have Consequences. Conspiracy theories may well abound which promote unevidenced or unfair critique of particular ideas. But it is possible to see where some ideas lead in an inevitable sense. That is, when you accept “a.” you will need to accept “b.” and when you accept “b.” you will need to accept “c.”. Another way of putting it might be: when you accept LGB, you will need to accept T; and when you accept T, you will need to accept Q+, and once you accept that + there is little to stop the most currently unimaginable desires and self-projections from being sacralised and even legislated.

When people speak of an LGBT+ “agenda” this often raises the alarm against alarm-raising; many stand aghast as though you are imagining a host of gay people sitting around a conference table plotting the end of human civilisation. The point is rather that the ideas being affirmed and accepted against family normativity - whether the adherents are conscious of it or not - will lead to civilizational decay because “traditional” families as the norm have always been essential to human societal flourishing, a concept now deemed “offensive” (particularly by those with less “normal” approaches to family fidelity). This is one reason why more people seem to be coming out of the closet to speak out against Pride, because of the gradual realisation about its wider impact upon society. Even so, very often the most prominent critiques in the public sphere tend to critique Pride in relation to the T, and not the LGB.

The challenge of Pride to the normativity of the family may seem, to some, like an irrational nightmare in the imagination of the fearful, invented to stoke up anxiety about anti-heterosexual discrimination. This is itself an irrational reading of the concerns of those who reject Pride. The issue with Pride resides at the ideological level: the sacralisation of self-projections of sexuality immorality and gender malformation. Over recent years these ideas sought to become the new moral norm, supplanting the old. These “new norms” were themselves subject to ever-oscillating moral parameters, of course, always in convenient accord with the latest interpretation of ever-unfolding secular values. This is why Pride is not something for a society to celebrate but something to lament and oppose.

There is no divinely given prescription for how to challenge such ideas consistently at a societal level (rather than just at an ecclesial level). But if such ideas are not challenged by those who see the long-term problems, then we should not be surprised at the erosive consequences for the societal conception and influence of the family, which is the cornerstone of healthy societies. In recent decades many Christians have been desperately busy trying to not come across like the judgemental Westboro Baptists of Louis Theroux’ infamous documentary, and so have almost entirely ceded the societal ground to “the LGBT+ community”. This was so very foolish, and yet another example of where the Church has put reputation before its prophetic call to bring salt and light to a decaying culture.

Christians have a unique contribution to the societal opposition to Pride. The God of the Bible not only invented humans, but he invented male and female, and the very idea of family itself as the optimum for societal human flourishing. Once a society decides that the family is not necessarily a good basis for society, or doesn’t bother thinking about supporting it, it has embarked upon the insane journey of digging up the very foundations on which it so ignorantly stands (for now).