Where Peter Is and a great big lie

We all heard Pope Leo a few weeks back say he's not going to obsess about some minor issue like sexual sins because there are bigger fish to fry in the world.  That's like standing in Europe in 1944 and saying armed conflicts are not the big issue right now.  The death and suffering toll of the sexual revolution almost boggles the mind, if one is willing to step back and honestly assess what we've seen.  More than that, Pope Leo's statement seems in reaction to a popular narrative - a false caricature - that Christians ever and only care about sins below the waistline and not much else. 

One of my professors said that he was having dinner with Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  During their talk, Dr. Mohler expressed frustration that the only time CNN or other news outlets wanted to talk to him was about sexual issues like the Lewinski scandal or homosexual marriage.  As a brilliant theologian and scholar in his own right, Dr. Mohler happily would have spoken to other, larger issues.  But no, not for the press.  They wanted sex or move on to someone else.  

Which is why I always chafe at the mendacity of so much modern progressive activism and its media talking points.  Who is it that only wants to talk about sex?  It's an age old pop culture stereotype that it's only those fundamentalist Christian puritan types obsessed with sex.  Which is laughable, as one need only look at pop culture to see who obsesses about sex above almost anything else including food and oxygen.  

Nonetheless, it's standard liberal tactics 101.  For example, kick down doors, leap through windows, shove gay everything in our faces, demand conformity, plaster gay everywhere, make every social function an outlet for advancing gay anything, and the second someone says 'But I sort of disagree', the liberal activist feigns indignation over the individual obsessing about homosexuality. 

So when I see a Where Peter Is headline that sexuality is not the only moral issue, I have to agree and happily report that no Christian I've met in the three major traditions - Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox - would disagree.  They never say that. Ever.  Oh, it might be a constant point of discussion, but only because of the 24/7 saturation of the topic in our modern world. 

Nonetheless, what this misrepresentation does is twofold.  For the secular, godless Sodom and Gomorrah era activists, it's a way of shutting down opposition by shaming people into thinking the real problem is thinking about sex when the only thing we're told to think about is sex (unless it's racism).  

The other boon of this falsehood is that it allows an out for those Christians who don't want to get within a mile of calling out our modern secular leftwing orgy of debauchery and narcissism (ahem, Pope Leo).  You see, all people ever want to do is talk about sex, so I'm boldly going to go a different direction that won't put me in the crosshairs of modernity.  And this isn't some assumption of malice or ulterior motives on my part. It comes from watching and listening these last many decades of my Christian experience. 

Oh, and just one more thing.  Before people say that sexual sin, as catastrophic as it can be, is still rooted in deeper, spiritual problems and eternal considerations, let me say I fully agree. The problem is, those who rush out and say 'it's about more than sex' almost never go there either.  Instead, it's off to this or that socio-political problem or policy issue that aligns strangely enough with the side that has used sex to entice followers for generations to begin with. Irony alert.