The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims

by Rebecca McLaughlin

The frequent failure of Christians to meet biblical ideals of fellowship across racial difference, equal valuing of men and women, welcome for outcasts, love for those with unfulfilled desire, and care for the most marginalized has allowed this mixture of ideas to coalesce under the banner of diversity.

To our 21st-century, Western ears, love across racial and cultural difference, the equality of men and women, and the idea that the poor, oppressed, and marginalized can make moral claims on the strong, rich, and powerful sound like basic moral common sense. But they are not. These truths have come to us from Christianity. Rip that foundation out, and you won’t uncover a better basis for human equality and rights. You’ll uncover an abyss that cannot even tell you what a human being is.

Without Christian beliefs about humanity, the yard sign’s claims aren’t worth the cardboard on which they are written.

Christianity is the most racially, culturally, and geographically diverse belief system in the world.

When we hear about violence against someone from a group we suspect, we look for evidence that they deserved it. When we see violence from a group we trust, we look for evidence that it was justified.

Interracial love is part of our inheritance in Christ.

But dismissing Christianity because of the failure of white Christians means silencing the voices of black believers and acting like only white voices matter in considering Christ.

Living as a disciple of Jesus includes preaching the gospel (Matt. 28:19), pursuing justice for the poor, oppressed and marginalized (Matt. 25:31–46), and practicing love across racial and cultural difference (Luke 10:25–37).

In a world without God, I may hate race-based slavery in the same sense that I hate olives.

Without Christianity, belief in human rights, in racial equality, and in the responsibility of the powerful toward the victimized becomes blind faith. The claim that black lives matter is at heart a Christian claim.

we must also recognize that from a consistently atheistic perspective, no lives ultimately matter.

God designed us so that new humans come to be when men and women come together. This is the original diversity. Creation of new life comes through love across this difference.

Human marriage at its very best is a little, monochrome negative of a massive wall print. Wives are not told to submit to their husbands because women are worse at leading than men, but because the church submits to Christ. Husbands are not told to give themselves up for their wives because men are less valuable than women, but because Jesus gave his life for us. Husbands are told to love their wives as their own bodies, because the church is Jesus’s body on earth.

Most Christians struggle at times with attractions that, if followed, would lead them into sexual sin. In this respect, we’re all in the same boat. But if the faithful one-flesh union of a man and a woman pictures Christ’s marriage to his church, any sexual relationship outside that model pictures idolatry. Without boundary lines, there is no image.

every time Paul writes about same-sex sexual sin, he reminds his readers they are sinners too.

Nero, who ruled Rome at the time when Paul was writing, married other men on two separate occasions.

And while the boundaries on sexual touching are clear, the Bible calls Christians to physical expressions of mutual affection in Christ: the command “Greet one another with a holy kiss” appears five times (Rom. 16:16; 1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1 Thess. 5:26; 1 Pet. 5:14).

It’s not that the Bible doesn’t celebrate same-sex love. It does. But rather than pointing us toward exclusive, sexual relationships, these scriptural tracks lead to non-erotic, non-exclusive bonds between believers. Correctly followed, these tracks lead to a waterhole of love-filled life in Christ. But turned to sexual sin, they lead to death.

For far too long, we’ve bought the lie that marriage is the ultimate good. For far too long, we’ve bought the lie that singleness is second-best. For far too long we’ve undervalued same-sex love and bought the lie that the nuclear family is more important than the church.

The reasoning runs like this: just as Christians have oppressed and terrorized African Americans, so Christians have oppressed and terrorized gay and lesbian people. Just as we are now ashamed of 1960s segregationists, so one day our descendants will be ashamed of us, if we continue to oppose gay marriage.

The very idea of human rights is, as Harari argues, a Christian invention. So we need Christianity to be right for human-rights abuses to be wrong.

If there is no justice-loving God who made the world, there’s no reason to believe the world will finally be just.

Repenting of racial injustice means turning back to the Bible. Affirming gay marriage for believers means turning away.

In many people’s minds, the fact that gay marriage was legalized across all states under America’s first black president solidified the idea that the gay-rights movement is the natural heir of the civil-rights movement.

The case of same-sex marriage is different. There are significant biological differences between men and women.

while my same-sex attraction is as unchosen as the color of my skin, if I left my husband for another woman and then said I had no choice but to do so, I’d be denying a basic fact of my humanity: that I’m a human who makes moral decisions, not an animal who simply responds to her drives. When you think about it, it’s dehumanizing not to distinguish between someone’s attractions and actions.

None of this means we choose our attractions, or that everyone who experiences same-sex attraction is also capable of heterosexual desire. But it does mean that sexual orientation is not like race.

We might have a gay friend who is faithful to his husband and a straight friend who is not faithful to his wife. If this surprises us, we might need to repent of our prejudice. But we shouldn’t repent of our theology.

Christian sin has allowed the gay-rights movement to trade on the moral capital of the civil-rights movement. “Black lives matter” got tied in people’s minds to “love is love” not just because of sin in the world, but because of sin in the church.

To be a woman, first and foremost, is to be made in the image of God.

as close as we may be to our pets, and as much as we may identify with baby iguanas, if we are going to lay claim to women’s rights, we need a reason why we are not just animals.

And if our only purpose is to propagate our DNA, we have no grounds for saying rape is wrong. Feminists rightly object to women being treated like wombs on legs, valued only for our reproductive power. But if evolution is our only origin story, that is precisely what we women are.

multiple studies have shown that for women in particular, increasing our number of sexual partners correlates with worse mental health, including higher levels of sadness, suicidal ideation, depression, and drug abuse.

Christian marriage has long been seen by secular liberals as a repressive institution designed to hold women down. But in 2016, a study of women in America found that highly religious women married to highly religious men who agreed with the statement, “It is usually better for everyone involved if the father takes the lead in working outside the home and the mother takes the lead in caring for the home and family” are the happiest wives: 73 percent say the relationship quality of their marriage is above average. The next happiest were religious women married to religious men who disagreed with that statement—60 percent reported above-average satisfaction. Both groups were happier than women in secular marriages.

At the time of Jesus’ life . . . child abuse, as noted by one historian, was “the crying vice of the Roman Empire.” Infanticide was common. Abandonment was common . . . children were property, no different than slaves. But Jesus stood up for children, cared about them, when those around him typically didn’t.25 Taking their cues from Jesus, the early Christians collected the babies abandoned by others. And when (to everyone’s surprise) the Roman emperor Constantine became a Christian, legal protections for women and children started to come into place.

In our culture, pro-lifers are often accused of not caring about vulnerable mothers and children after birth. But the first Christ-motivated pro-life legislation in the world followed laws protecting women from abandonment and providing for poor families.

What if the scenario wasn’t so simple? What if you’d slipped over the edge of a cliff, and the only thing keeping you from falling to your death was me holding your hand? What if my arm was in serious pain, and my shoulder was dislocated by your weight? What if I’d been forced by someone else to hold your hand before you slipped? Would I have the right to choose to let go? No. I’d need to hold on as long as possible, until some other help could come. My body matters. But your body matters too.

If transgender women are women, there’s no such thing as a woman either.