Tony Woodlief | Author

Speak Truth in Love, and Carry a Big Ole Whooping Stick

My last two essays at World on the Web have concerned wisdom offered by Dorothy Sayers and Henri Nouwen. In each instance commenters raised the rumor that the writers were gay. It’s disappointing that we continue, in the Christian community, to have this outsized, paranoid obsession with homosexuality. It’s also fascinating that so many Christians will take a statement like the foregoing sentence and spin it into the belief that I am somehow departing from Christian dogma on homosexuality. I was surprised to learn that some readers, having read months ago my (unoriginal) claim that many Christians respond to homosexuals in an unchristian manner, thereby concluded that I am heretical on the topic. Find me the passage, you fussy Pharisees, where Jesus instructs you to hate homosexuals.

Warning: this will necessitate your setting down those stones and picking up your Bibles.

And speaking of disappointment, if Christian Republicans won’t trouble themselves to read an economics book before opining on immigration, they might bloody well consider the Bible. If I hear one more of them trot out the obfuscation about legality, I’m going to scream. Find me one Christian using this excuse to support mass deportation of illegals — just one — who honestly supports legally opening our borders to considerably greater inflows of immigrants, and I’ll eat my shoe. They claim they are up in arms because these people are coming across the border illegally, but the truth is that not a one of them supports any significant increase in legalized immigration. So this “they’re breaking the law, which a Christian can’t support” talking point is just a self-righteous cover-up of the unflattering truth, which is that they don’t want those different-talking brown people here at all.

And aside from the neo-Nazis, World Net Daily is maybe the most shameful of the bunch, with its thoughtless fusion of pseudo-Christianity and pseudo-conservatism, replete with snake-oil banner ads, “Invasion America” headlines, and panegyrics to Tom Tancredo.

(New readers firing up their commenting pen might first consider my loving salvo at American Family Radio on this topic, along with a Thanksgiving-oriented response to many readers who disagreed.)

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