Boycotting a pro-life state and gay aardvarks: How to love our lost culture

After Georgia’s governor signed legislation banning abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, more than one hundred actors pledged to boycott productions in the state. Five film production companies announced they would no longer work in the state as well.

In other news, the Times Literary Supplement recently profiled “new fiction for children and young adults on an LGBTQ theme.” One tells the story of a boy who decides he is a mermaid. Another tells the “gay love story” of two aardvarks. Another is much more explicit than I am willing to describe.

Meanwhile, The Atlantic is promoting a documentary on its platform that claims to describe “both sides of the ‘heartbeat’ bills.” But note the now-familiar options: “Pro-Choice and Anti-Abortion.”

For years, the left side of the culture wars has been astute in describing the other side as “anti,” knowing the psychological advantage of such branding. We’re “anti-abortion” rather than “pro-life,” “anti-LGBTQ” rather than “pro-biblical sexuality,” “anti-marriage equality” rather than “pro-traditional marriage,” and so on.

Any time I can describe you as what you’re not more than what you are, I gain a significant rhetorical and persuasive advantage.

How should we respond to a culture that seems so antagonistic to biblical values?

“We are not our own. We belong to him.”

One of the most important lessons I have learned in recent years is this: God wants us to love the world without needing the world to love us in return.

Jesus clearly taught us to love even our enemies and “pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). We are to offer the world the kind of love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7).