Two Sides of the Rainbow image

Two Sides of the Rainbow

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Pride month, and its commercial sponsors, is an appropriate key to understanding the priorities of the modern West. It celebrates hedonistic self-assertion. It mocks the values of the past. It uses the language of inclusion to exclude anybody who will not wholeheartedly affirm its ambitions. It strikes a posture of iconoclastic rebellion and liberation while actually being an imperious assertion of conformity to the social elite’s moral order. It has domesticated transgression by turning it into a marketable commodity. And it epitomizes a world where virtue is obtained by deploying nothing more than a hashtag, only to be lost by refusing to follow the herd ...

Pride and Christianity do, of course, share one sacrament—or at least one sacramental sign: the rainbow. For the LGBTQ+ community, it is ostensibly the symbol of inclusion, a multicoloured banner that, as Lego now promotes to children, means that everyone belongs. More than that, it asserts that everyone can be whoever they want to be (serial killers and religious conservatives excepted). For Christians (as for Jews), the rainbow is quite the opposite: not an assertion of human autonomy but of human dependence. It is a sign of the gracious promise and forbearance of God in the face of human self-gratification and rebellion. The rainbow is a reminder of God’s covenant with all living creatures. It points beyond itself to something magnificent: the graciousness of a holy God. In comparison the Pride rainbow of inclusion is trivial indeed and those churches that choose to display it have thereby trivialized their God.

- Carl Trueman, Pitiful Pride

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