The task before us is to shine the light of God’s glory into a fallen world. How people react to our testimony is virtually out of our control, but having a testimony is well within our grasp. Our frame of reference for this is mission and calling; it’s all about our convictions.
Within that frame of reference, most of us need to pay attention to how persecution works. Just what is it we testify against? What element of holiness do we project into a given context? So it’s a valid task to understand the dynamics of persecution arising against our testimonies. We should seek to understand the source and methods. It’s not enough to dismiss it all as the work of the Devil. A critical part of understanding the current tribulation is to recognize the trends.
For example, one of the things we learn from the Covenant of Moses is that God does not tolerate gender fluidity. Very specifically the Law says to keep the distinction between male and female obvious. Don’t dress ambiguously and don’t act outside your God appointed gender. It’s one thing to discuss and debate the boundaries; it’s another to explore ways to ignore them. Scripture uniformly declares fuzzing the distinction as foul and defiling.
Do I have to explain how the standards of what defines socially the boundaries of male and female is variable between cultures? We need not adhere to the ancient Hebrew packaging particulars for what defines male and female; we need to pay attention to the fundamentals by reading between the lines and applying it to our context.
This is the issue before us as Western society plunges down the slope of gender fluidity into Hell. This is not just an SJW thing; there is a fundamental social shift toward outright ignoring gender in the quest for sexual release, as if that release itself is a god. And it really is nothing more than simply the thrills without any real sense of attachment. There may some thin window dressing of romance, but it avoids any real sense of bonding. And in God’s Word, appropriate bonding is the whole point.
Our insistence on the biblical model makes us enemies of society. It’s not enough for them that we teach staying out of their way. We must present ourselves for their pleasure use, as a resource on which they pretend to have some claim. Merely holding to a personal standard makes us a threat to their idolatry.
So the trend is through homosexuality to pansexuality. I’ve seen lots of stats on this, and what seems close to the truth is that, among those who claim to be LGBTQ, something like half of Millennials and about 70% of GenZ consider themselves bisexual. There’s an increase in seeking pleasure in all directions. Granted, that’s a matter of self-reporting and virtue signaling, but that simply points out how the definition of “virtue” has shifted.
As a proportion of their age cohorts, the numbers of people identifying with LGBTQ is growing, of course. It used to be something like 2% of Boomers and is running nearly 5% for GenZ. Bear in mind that propaganda pushes a much higher percentage. However, the social acceptance for LGBTQ is approaching unanimity with the current generation. In short, women never call themselves “lesbian” any more; it’s now “queer” or “bisexual.” Meanwhile, far fewer kids these days can even comprehend the notion that a boy being gay is worthy of rough joking.
On the one hand, I never saw any purpose in the silly revulsion to homosexuality common in my youth. I came to faith as a child; very early I saw my faith as making me an alien within the ambient society. I had a tendency to feel some compassion for those abused by the majority, because when I revealed my own personal compass, I got the same harassment. I was always an outsider, so it didn’t much matter what it was that pushed anyone else outside.
However, now that accepting queers is official policy, I’m still on the outside as a man of faith. As a Christian Mystic, I have no interest in changing the world, but that’s not good enough for the world. I should not be allowed to exist, according to the raging orthodoxy of today. On a personal level, the queers I know have no complaint with me at all. They know that I’m not a religious head-hunter. Here in Oklahoma, harassing people of faith is not just illegal, but enforced. Meanwhile, I am not working for some big company that has to worry about obeying the rules of the marketplace. My private testimony is still effective; I’m under no significant personal physical threat.
It’s the public testimony where persecution is certain. In particular, Big Tech is now allied with a uniformly leftist government to silence such public testimony. The majority of my hassles are online. This is also very specifically a part of my mission and calling: an online presence with the gospel message. Knowing that the shift in social consciousness is with a generation that lives online makes this all very clear that for me, persecution will be mostly a matter of my online activities.
It’s not a question of promoting this or that technology for the sake of technology itself, but as the method and means of the mission.
It seems the acceleration of alienation gets more faster with every generation that comes into adulthood.