If you are even semi-biblically literate you will know where my title comes from. It is from the story of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. Luke 19:35-40 puts it this way:
They brought it to Jesus, threw their cloaks on the colt and put Jesus on it. As he went along, people spread their cloaks on the road. When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”
All truth is God’s truth, and if God’s people will not proclaim it, then God is quite able to use non-Christians to speak truth. This is part of what we call the doctrine of common grace: God shares general grace on all of us, and a non-Christian can be used to share truth.
We often find this happening in the culture wars for example. The churches should be speaking out boldly on all the hot potato moral, cultural and social issues of the day, but sadly far too often they are not. They prefer to remain silent. They refuse to act as salt and light to a needy world as Jesus commanded us to be.
There would be a number of non-Christian conservative commentators, thinkers, politicians, etc., who often speak truth, and speak it boldly. These would include people like Andrew Bolt, Mark Latham, Brendan O’Neill, Geert Wilders to name but a few.
I of course hope and pray that all these secular truth-speakers come to know the one who is truth. Just think what some of these folks would be like if they had a life-changing encounter with the risen Christ. But as I say, all truth is God’s truth, and even those who do not know Christ can speak truth, at least to some extent.
I say all this because another case of a non-Christian saying what needs to be said has just appeared in the media. Camille Paglia is a 70-year-old academic and intellectual who is certainly not a Christian. Although a radical lesbian feminist, she has often been an outspoken critic of both.
She has just done a lengthy interview with the conservative Weekly Standard. The whole piece is well worth reading. It covers a wide range of topics, including Trump, the Left, Islam, and sexuality. While I want to focus on her thoughts about homosexuality and transgenderism, let me briefly quote from what she said about Islam and the Left:
Liberalism of the 1950s and ’60s exalted civil liberties, individualism, and dissident thought and speech. “Question authority” was our generational rubric when I was in college. But today’s liberalism has become grotesquely mechanistic and authoritarian: It’s all about reducing individuals to a group identity, defining that group in permanent victim terms, and denying others their democratic right to challenge that group and its ideology. Political correctness represents the fossilized institutionalization of once-vital revolutionary ideas, which have become mere rote formulas. It is repressively Stalinist, dependent on a labyrinthine, parasitic bureaucracy to enforce its empty dictates.
The reluctance or inability of Western liberals to candidly confront jihadism has been catastrophically counterproductive insofar as it has inspired an ongoing upsurge in right-wing politics in Europe and the United States. Citizens have an absolute right to demand basic security from their government. The contortions to which so many liberals resort to avoid connecting bombings, massacres, persecutions, and cultural vandalism to Islamic jihadism is remarkable, given their usual animosity to religion, above all Christianity. Some commentators have suggested a link to racial preconceptions: that is, Islam remains beyond criticism because it is largely a religion of non-whites whose two holy cities occupy territory once oppressed by Western imperialism….
Right now, too many secular Western liberals treat Islam with paternalistic condescension—waving at it vaguely from a benevolent distance but making no effort to engage with it….
But her thoughts on the gender bender agenda is something I want to highlight. I have shared her thoughts on these issues before, and I am pleased to share more of them today. She begins with the feminist-transgender conflicts:
Feminists have clashed with transgender activists much more publicly in the United Kingdom than here. For example, two years ago there was an acrimonious organized campaign, including a petition with 3,000 claimed signatures, to cancel a lecture by Germaine Greer at Cardiff University because of her “offensive” views of transgenderism. Greer, a literary scholar who was one of the great pioneers of second-wave feminism, has always denied that men who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery are actually “women.” Her Cardiff lecture (on “Women and Power” in the twentieth century) eventually went forward, under heavy security.
And in 2014, Gender Hurts, a book by radical Australian feminist Sheila Jeffreys, created a heated controversy in the United Kingdom. Jeffreys identifies transsexualism with misogyny and describes it as a form of “mutilation.” She and her feminist allies encountered prolonged difficulties in securing a London speaking venue because of threats and agitation by transgender activists. Finally, Conway Hall was made available: Jeffrey’s forceful, detailed lecture there in July of last year is fully available on YouTube. In it she argues among other things, that the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for life.
And her comments are all the more remarkable given her own lifestyle:
Although I describe myself as transgender (I was donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on), I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows. Furthermore, I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children. I regard this practice as a criminal violation of human rights.
It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women’s studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.
The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.
In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity. The categories “trans-man” and “trans-woman” are highly accurate and deserving of respect. But like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys, I reject state-sponsored coercion to call someone a “woman” or a “man” simply on the basis of his or her subjective feeling about it. We may well take the path of good will and defer to courtesy on such occasions, but it is our choice alone.
As I say, read the whole interview. And as I also said, if we can’t get Christians with enough guts and intelligence and non-PC views to stand up in the public square and declare truth, then I will happily take non-Christians who will. If the church is failing in its duties, then God can raise up stones to speak truth.
Give us some bold Christian truth–proclaimers Lord, or give us more stones.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/camille-paglia-on-trump-democrats-transgenderism-and-islamist-terror/article/2008464
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