Why Pride Month is Dangerous

Pride month is truly dangerous, just like everything connected to the LGBTQ agenda. But its moral hazards shouldn’t be obvious only to traditional Christians. Understanding that pride is a vice isn’t unique to Christianity, and the way that the fight for divergent sexuality has transformed from decriminalizing sodomy to publicly attempting to queer (and ultimately annihilate) marriage is increasingly cause for concern, but not necessarily for the reasons we think of first.

I was one of those naive happy few who truly thought Obergafel wasn’t really going to change anything. As stupid as that sounds, I wasn’t alone. Distinguished Conservatives like David French and Al Mohler tried to quell fears that 2015 was a genuine revolution. We said things like this is a good reminder that the church and the state aren’t the same thing, and for good reason.

But as has been the case with essentially every slippery slope argument Conservatives have been derided for making over the previous decades, the slope got real slippery real fast. This is mostly a matter of history at this point, history we’re all still living through. History that has overtaken the lives of people like Riley Gaines, the US women’s almost gold medalist who was assaulted and essentially kidnapped by trans activists in San Francisco a month ago.

But the moral hazard is more disturbing at the individual level than the societal. Western culture will eventually outgrow this era, and women like JK Rowling and Riley Gaines will eventually be seen as heroes. But the individuals that are lost to this ideology can never be recovered. And they’re being lost to what the late Reverend Keller referred to as the deadliest sin: Pride.

A recent example from my social media should suffice to make the point. Someone posted a meme that said “don’t be your child’s first bully.” The accompanying illustration was of a child with rainbow colored butterfly wings, followed by two very 1950s looking parents. They had giant scissors and were about to cut the wings.

If irony could kill, the designer of this bit of propaganda would be dead by suicide. The snipping of body parts is not what parents who won’t go along with the trans agenda are doing, the bullying is not coming from the anti trans side. The question naturally arises: why can’t they see it? Why are the contradictions invisible to them?

Because no one can see past their biases without great effort. No one can see past their pride. That’s why it’s so deadly. That’s why Christ primarily calls his disciples to humility. It’s why Conservative principles tell us to go with Chesterton’s fence. It’s much easier to destroy something than it is to build.

In response to this anti “bullying” meme I posted a talk from Greg Johnson. He is a celibate homosexual pastor who has always maintained the orthodox Christian position on sexual ethics. He’s also rightly fought against the idea that homosexuality can be cured. By any reasonable definition Johnson is not a homophobe, which is why I post resources from people like him instead of arguing anymore. He is a living apologetic, as the Apostle Paul said a eunuch for the Kingdom. The response I got back was telling:

I don’t think God is like this, and if he was I wouldn’t want anything to do with him.

The second part is where the real danger lies, and this should be clear to anyone.

It’s one thing to disagree about ethics and metaphysics, that happens all the time. It’s another thing entirely to decide that they do not matter, that the only thing that matters is my expressive individualism. That is the real danger of pride month. And yet that is clearly the whole point of pride month! Expressive individualism that requires no justification. There is no caution, no humility, and no wisdom. Even the ancient pagans supposedly so revered by contemporary expressive individualists would have seen this as folly.

The film Patton, about the WW2 exploits of General George S Patton, ends with this:

“For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laid with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: That all glory is fleeting.”

The parades so deeply associated with Pride month contain no reminders that all glory is fleeting, or that pride comes before a fall. The whole point is anti wisdom, no restraint and no fear of the repercussions. They are sexual pioneers fearlessly diving into the depths of depravity.

To quote another Hollywood film from a radically different era:

“What is so great about discovery? It is a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.”

This is what the trans agenda in particular has done, and continues to do. What it calls discovery is actually destruction.

Christians like Greg Johnson have demonstrated conclusively that the church has not always gotten it right when it comes to homosexuality. He argues powerfully that the trend of so-called conversion therapy that began in the 70s has been almost completely, and rather quietly, abandoned over the last decade because it simply did not work. Admitting this requires humility and repentance. We must do better to care for homosexuals, and I think we are. That’s one of the few good outcomes from the liberalizing trends of the last several decades.

Wisdom requires the ability to revise, do better, and try again. It means going slow when we want to go fast. It requires that we combat pride not celebrate it. The pagan processions of old required the words of a slave reminding the conquerors that their glory was fleeting because those parades were full of congratulatory overindulgence. And the reason the LGBTQ agenda is in such conflict with Christianity is that our most important procession requires no warnings against pride. When our King entered Jerusalem he did so on a donkey. When he was crowned it was with thorns. He died the death of a slave at the hands of a foreign colonial force. His life was marked by extreme humility, not pride.

And the solution to defeating this month is not by attacking it head on, but simply recognizing what it represents and then looking back to the way of humility. The most radical thing we can do to combat the trans ideology is to go about living our lives as normal people. That doesn’t mean never speaking up, or never fighting. Sometimes it means exactly that. But it does mean our primary mode focuses on the difficult task of cultivating humility in ourselves first. Of making sure we aren’t being swept along on a wave of nationalist pride, triumphalist religiosity, or personal arrogance.

The contemporary leftist agenda seeks to have society serve its needs, to make everything about the self. To combat this we need to cultivate lives of service. This is how we win, not by focusing on the left, but by focusing on defeating that most dangerous of enemies: our own pride.