Everybody's Getting Religion
by Gary DeMar
7/16/2007

With the best-seller status of books supporting atheism and attacking religion in the news, it’s remarkable to see so much talk about religion by the presidential candidates and liberals in general. Can you identify who said this?: “Science is a gift of God to all of us, and science has taken us to a place that is biblical in its power to cure.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this during a debate on increased embryo-research funding. I thought religion was an impediment to scientific discovery?
           
In the Time magazine article “How the Democrats Got Religion,” Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy state: “The Democrats are so fired up, you could call them the new Moral Majority.” Is a “moral majority” a good thing now that Democrats are pushing for their version of morality? What happened to the often heard argument that you can’t impose your morality on other people? Where are the cries for separating church and state? I thought Jesus didn’t get mixed up in politics. Of course He does when the cause seems to support some liberal cause.
            
Michael Moore finds Jesus to be a good moral standard to follow when dealing with controversial issues like homosexuality. That’s why he wants to produce a film on the subject. His target is “right wing” Christians:

There is nowhere in the four Gospels where Jesus uses the word homosexual. The right wing has appropriated this guy … and they have used him to attack gays and lesbians, when he never said a single word against people who are homosexual. Anyone who professes to be a Christian and does that is certainly not following the teachings of Jesus Christ.

This is a standard misinformed argument. First, Jesus is fashionable and an acceptable moral voice when He can be used to support a liberal cause. Second, Jesus didn’t say anything against rape, bestiality, pedophilia, tripping blind people or cursing deaf people (Lev. 19:14). “Anyone who professes to be a Christian,” following Moore’s logic, “and does allow for people to rape, have sex with children and animals, and trip blind people certainly not following the teachings of Jesus Christ.” Third, sexual sins like homosexuality, bestiality, and pedophilia are covered under the prohibition against porneia (“fornication”) (e.g., Matt. 5:32; 19:9). Fourth, Jesus defines the only proper sexual relationship.

“[Michael Moore] have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE, and said, ‘FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate” (Matt. 19:4–5).

Fifth, prohibitions against homosexuality can be found in other places in the Old Testament that Jesus quoted approvingly (e.g., Gen. 19:1–29; Lev. 18:22; 20:13; Deut. 23:17) and the New Testament says is “God breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16–17). Sixth, beyond the comments of Jesus, the New Testament has some definitive things to say about homosexuality (Rom. 1:26–27, 1 Cor. 6:9; 1 Tim. 1:10).
           

These new religionists are “always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7).