Yesterday's Fringe is Today's Mainstream

Why you should pay attention to the insane

Drag queen and United Methodist Church ministry candidate Isaac Simmons

AT a time when insanity is increasingly normalised, it’s smart to pay attention to the insane.

I used to dismiss acts of insanity as “freakish” and “fringe”. Not anymore.

If you give it a week, the oddity you dismissed as fringe will become mainstream, and the person you knew to be a freak will be making policy at your kid’s school.

And so rather than immediately flicking past this Christian Post article on churches celebrating Gay Pride week, I paid attention. I think you should too.

The story focuses on a New York church that invited two drag queens to help “celebrate Pentecost, kick-off LGBTQ+ Pride Month, and come to Christ’s Table of Love.”

(It’s alright, I’ll pause while you pick yourself up off the floor)

Now, I am not suggesting drag queens in church are common. Nor am I suggesting they are coming to a church near you the Sunday after next. (I can’t guarantee anything beyond that)

Yes, these are fringe churches run by freaks in clerical frocks, but the language they use is a sly mix of Bible, gender theory, critical race theory and virtue signalling.

United Church of Christ pastor, Rev. J. Gary Brinn, defended the move this way:

“Just as there have always been queers, and [there] has always been diversity in gender expression and affectional orientation, so there has always been diversity within Christianity.”

(I might add that just as there have always been cannibals, and there has always been diversity in dietary requirements and taste bud orientation, so there has always been diversity within Christianity. Don’t miss our special Eat Thy Neighbour service next month!)

Ah yes, diversity. We must have diversity and inclusion. Diversity is in and of itself an inherent, inarguable good.

To argue against drag queen’s leading worship is to argue against diversity and you’re not against diversity or inclusion, are you?

Well are you?

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the woke animals the popular culture had made. He said to the woman, “Did the Patriarchy really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’? That doesn’t sound very inclusive to me.” (Genesis 3v1-2)

My concern is that whilst Rev Brinn’s argument is ridiculous we have barely equipped this generation to recognise ridiculous, let alone to counter it.

Warming to his theme, Brinn goes on to dismiss the idea of God as a “white male”, contending that …

“(In a) church where older white men had absolute power, God acted like ... an older white man with absolute power and a shocking fragility, for despite God’s supposed omnipotence, he was constantly offended that humans were not properly stroking his ego or following the rules he had implemented to micro-manage our lives.”

“The culmination of his rage was the ultimate act of domestic violence, conspiracy to murder his only child.

“Now if that version works for you, that god that small men created in their own image, great. Though if that version does work for you, I’m probably not the right pastor for you, for I find that God, angry and violent, disgusting and unworthy of my adoration and praise. That God is a monster, one that I abandoned long ago.”

Old white males. White fragility. Micro-management. Domestic violence. Conspiracy to murder. Stroking of egos. Anger. Violence. Of course, if the evil patriarchy and domestic violence is your thing, well, continue on as per normal, bigot.

Brinn’s method of argument is to arrange trigger words in sentences that our young adults - fresh out of university or fresh off of TikTok (but let’s face it, what’s the difference these days) - will have half swallowed before even thinking about it.

Rev J. Gary Brinn

That Brinn’s argument makes no sense doesn’t matter. Sense was cancelled a long time ago.

This generation thinks with it’s feelings and reasons with its emotions. An emotive word salad is a sufficient argument these days to ban fossil fuels, pump children full of puberty blockers, legalise late term abortions and, if you want, have drag queens lead worship.

Rev Binn described his “Worship is a Drag” service as

“An extravagant welcome to the LGBTQ+ community, not tolerance but celebration.”

Let’s not just be welcoming (who doesn’t want to be welcoming?), let’s be extravagantly welcoming. Grace, after all, is extravagant.

And we’re not talking about individuals here. We’re talk about community. God is into community. We don’t want to exclude an entire community, do we?

And let’s be tolerant, but let’s be more than tolerant. Even sinners are tolerant. Let’s celebrate difference. Because the church should be a place of joy and love and celebration of people made in God’s image.

You get the idea.

It’s all silly, but only if you think.

Predictably, Brinn went on to speak about fighting racism, because everyone loves an anti-racist.

And finally he asserted:

“Our sin is not just in what we have done but also in what we have failed to do, and we are determined to sin no more.”

The woke share our vocabulary but use a completely different dictionary.

Tolerate means celebrate.

Accept means agree.

Inclusive means excluding objective truth

Diversity means different looking people who all uniformly think like woke progressive dolts.

You get the idea.

If we don’t start talking about this and boldly explaining truth, Grace Church in downtown Manhattan, where they recently held a special Pride Chapel for cheering Christian young adults, won’t be a freakish outpost on the fringe of the asylum. It’ll be mainstream.

According to The Christian Post, Trinity Lutheran Church in Greenville, South Carolina hosted an event called "Drag me to Church” on May 12. The event featured a drag performer known as "The Lady Douche.” Well of course.

And this too is fringe, of course.

But if the past decade has taught us anything it is that fringe ideas not contested because they seem too freakish to worry about quickly become difficult to contest because they have become so mainstream.

When the progressive woke left, who own the language, are talking to Christians wearing little more than a fig leaf of theology, the ridiculous sounds right, the insane sounds sensible and the blasphemous sounds almost Biblical.

We need to reclaim language by clearly defining terms. And we need to replace sermonettes for Christianetters with sound theology.

The alternative does not bear thinking about.