Frank Wolf is stirring up the anti-gay base. On June 5, he and Democrat Tony Hall co-authored a letter to pastors that appeared on the Manhattan Declaration blog. The letter is a response to the President’s announcement that after listening to his children and consulting the Bible, he now supports marriage for all people. Wolf and Hall asked some pastors to construct a cultural anti-marriage narrative and to agitate their congregations to “act”. I’ve quoted portions of the letter, and added emphasis.
Talking heads and strategists in Washington are busy analyzing what constituencies have been mobilized, energized, secured or alienated by the timing of the president’s announcement. But the implications of this shift are more far-reaching than November’s electoral outcome. We believe that the president’s position, which he sought to justify by citing Scripture, necessitates a response. Not only a political response – but a reasoned, winsome, faithful interpretation of what Scripture actually has to say about God’s intent for the sacred institution of marriage. As is befitting those who identify themselves as followers of Jesus, this apologetic for marriage must be seasoned with grace, kindness and love while also being grounded in truth.
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where are the Christian apologists who will sound the clarion call for Biblical orthodoxy on the institution of marriage? Where are the William Wilberforce’s and the Mother Theresa’s and the C. S. Lewis’ for our day? Who will stand in the gap?
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The apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “Again, if the trumpet does not sound a clear call. who will get ready for battle?” We fear that the trumpet’s call is muffled – that there is uncertainty and confusion among people of faith in part because many of our religious leaders have not yet stepped into the void.
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We write to you not as a Republican and a Democrat, which we are, but as men of faith who take seriously the teaching of Scripture – as do you. German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” In that spirit, we implore you, with an urgency that the situation demands, to boldly lend your voice to the public square on this defining issue – for such a time as this.
The underlying message to the pastors is “train the dog to bite when the master says ‘stay!’.” “Clarion call,” “stand in the gap,” “get ready for battle,” “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” seriously, does Congressman Wolf not know Godwin’s law? Do historians need to remind him that Nazi Germany was a “Christian Nation”; 65% protestant, 30% Catholic, and that Pope Benedict was a member of the Hitler youth? Hitler quoted Martin Luther’s most anti-Semitic writings and he attended his Catholic church throughout the war. Hitler was a master propagandist who constructed a new racist Jew-hating narrative, but that narrative wouldn’t have taken root if it weren’t for Europe’s fertile soil of cultural, Christian, anti-semitism.
How can Wolf call for “grace, kindness and love” and then invoke Bonhoeffer to “stand in the gap” against “this defining issue – for such a time as this?” What time is it, a time when same-sex couples are living their marriages openly, and people honoring them in spite of 29 state constitutional amendments? That *is* what time it is, and our congressman, who supposedly represents all of us, equally, is comparing our marriages to cold, calculated mass-murder. Marriage and mass-murder, they are sooo-much-the-same-thing.
The letter is “monstrous“, and Frank Wolf is unhinged, and dangerous.
