Please Choose Your Comparisons Carefully

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Please Choose Your Comparisons Carefully

By Tim Etherington | January 1, 2010

Something I read in two articles recently bothered me some. The first was a report on the next Chronicles of Narnia movie, “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. The reporter was bothered that the Christian message of the book is being toned down in the movie. She mentioned that one of the producers was gay and pointed out how there would have never been an evangelical Christian in that position on “Milk”.

The other article was in the recent Christianity Today, a bio piece on Leslie Newbigin. The author pointed out the decline in people’s perception of evangelical Christians. The numbers are unimportant but it was something like only 3% of young people think positively of evangelicals as opposed to 33% who think that way of gays.

Here’s the problem. The opposite of evangelical Christian is not gay. The authors of these articles probably don’t mean it that way but that is how it comes across in the comparisons. It sets homosexuality as the opposite of being a Christian. I realize that homosexuality is the hot button issue these days and there is a battle over the definition of marriage. But by pitching the comparison this way a wall is created between gays and Christianity.

I’m not advocating homosexuality as an acceptable life style or anything. It is a sinful behavior but it is not the unpardonable sin that would exclude a person from the kingdom of Christ. By quickly picking our comparisons we may actually be creating a chasm between people who need Jesus and people who are charged to tell them about him.

So let’s be careful in our language. It really does mean something.

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