Mohler drones on about Issues of Doctrine and Homosexuality as a Danger to “Marriage in America”. In the process, he slips further and further into irrelevance, in this day when the number one pressing issues on the minds of many Christians have to do with the war on Iraq and the economy. Mohler solidifies the notion in many “liberals” minds that Christianity, for most people, is rendering them totially clueless about real life (and they are right , as long as they use the qualifier “most Christians”. But the fact that they ARE accurate in saying MOST is a source of great embarassment to me.

In talking about homeosexuality issues, Mohler sounds the warning of “the church changes its message meeting modern demands”, all the while, in his total avoidnace of war issues, he is a living illustration of how easily one (and large groups of Churches) can totally capitulate to the culture around them (and join in the mass deception about the effectiveness, morality, and ‘justness’ of war, while screaming about issues that are far less daunting, and as usual, having to do with some matter of deep “disgust” with some “depravity” or “liberal thought. The preoccupation with “sex sin” has already driven secular and non-obsessed Christians to disown the Religious Right. IN the best cases, Christians flee the oppressive spiritual environments where these emphases are inflicted, but usually due to matters totally unrelated to “prudism”, but due to a total irrelevance of that theology to everyday life.

Liberal churches have redefined compassion to mean that the church changes its message to meet modern demands. They argue that to tell a homosexual he is a sinner is uncompassionate and intolerant. This is like arguing that a physician is intolerant because he tells a patient she has cancer. But, in the culture of political correctness, this argument holds a powerful attraction.

Biblical Christians know that compassion requires telling the truth, and refusing to call sin something sinless. To hide or deny the sinfulness of sin is to lie, and there is no compassion in such a deadly deception. True compassion demands speaking the truth in love–and there is the problem. Far too often, our courage is more evident than our compassion.

Yeah, Al, and it is the duty of “Progressive Christians” to speak the truth to power, which includes leaders like you; leaders who think it fine to back a candidate solely on piety rather than actual policy; they back Republicans who “talk the talk” and yet the actual results are short of their expectations (or in many cases, the facts of failure are totally irrelvant to them; that abortion rates went DOWN under Clinton is NEVER heard in those circles. It’s the “words” thatcount; and this playes out in their theological talk as well. It’s the ideology that seems tobe the highest litmus test of the Religious Right; higer than alleginace to Christ (seen in how committed Christians can be demonized and “paganized” by the fact that they differ on key social issues from the “issues scorecards” that the Religious Right uses to manipulate their constituents.