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Why Church Fights over LGBTQ Issues and Same Sex Marriage Gets So Nasty So Fast

I wrote before why we need to have a confessional conversation rather than a fight over church polity.

Part of the difficulty we are having, and other churches also, is that without a differentiation of layers, a consciousness of the broad themes, the focus quickly turns to the motivation of the parties and their background experiences. Notice the two big attacks by liberationists in general.

1. “Those who don’t wish to evolve are bigots.” Republicans have long noted this is the one note Democrats will nearly always play at opposition. The second like it is “they don’t care about the weak, the poor, the needy.”

This gets into CS Lewis’ invention of “Bulverism“.”Because bigot hate gays, therefore anyone who resists a change that we believe benefits gays are bigots.”

The motivation explains the cause. Now an appeal to pride. “you don’t want to be a bigot do you? Join the movement!”

In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it Bulverism. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father—who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third—‘Oh you say that because you are a man.’ ‘At that moment’, E. Bulver assures us, ‘there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.’ That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

Lewis, C. S. (1994). God in the Dock. (W. Hooper, Ed.) (pp. 301–302). HarperOne.

This is working powerfully on people right now. People love to talk about silencing. Many many people are now being silent on anything that touches this because they are afraid of being labeled a bigot. The fact that only some of the most shrill voices remain just goes to prove their point. The masses are cowed and they follow sheepishly along reasonably anticipating the assault on their motives.

The traditionalists sometimes succumb to the same temptation and impugn the motives of the liberationists. This of course results in an impasse because the defects of your opposition are terminal making conversation pointless. You don’t convert demons from hell. You exorcise them and drown them with pigs.

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