Weaponized Vice

How often have you heard people say that all sins are equal?

If that’s the case, committing genocide is the moral equivalent of copying your friend’s homework in fifth grade. Yes, both are sins. Yes, both can be mortal sins if one doesn’t repent. Yes, both break the commandments (the former the fifth, the latter the seventh) - and yes, someone is going to point out that other commandments are involved here too.

But even the most dogmatic Lutheran will be forced to admit that there are indeed worse sins than others.

There is a category of sin that is known as “vice.” Vices are sinful personal failings that are not acts of aggression against someone else. One could call them “victimless” crimes. And yes, I realize that there are unintended “victims” of vices (such as family members of a father with a gambling addiction) - but there is a categorical difference between a man who physically rapes a woman vs. a passing lustful thought. Even the most doctrinaire Lutheran would probably not want people jailed or sent to the gallows for gossip or for coveting thy neighbor’s Mercedes.

There is a danger that Pharisaic people make a big deal out of vices for the purpose of pointing to their own self-righteousness. A teetotaler may enjoy gossiping about the crowd gathered in the bar for happy hour. Someone with no interest in gambling may scowl at the betting going on at horse races. The war on vices has led to blue laws and even national alcohol prohibition, not to mention the horrific unintended consequences of the War on Drugs. Censorship has now come full circle and is being used to stifle the free speech of conservatives and Christians.

Examples of vice abound. Every family and every community have examples of those who go a little overboard with the drinking. Aunt Sally may not be face down in the ditch, but maybe she has one or two too many and begins to embarrass herself. Your brother in law Bill may foolishly blow his tax refund at the casino, but he’s a young single guy with a lot of money, so it’s not that big a deal. Nobody is calling for his excommunication or for a police investigation.

And in days past, everyone had an uncle who was unmarried, who always seemed to have a close male friend hanging around, who went out to bars on the weekend. Everybody knew that he had same-sex attraction issues, but nobody berated him for it, but neither did anyone condone it. So, he wasn’t ostracized from the family - he was your uncle after all - but neither did he bring up sodomy at the Thanksgiving table. There was a social arrangement. And as long as he stayed away from underage young men, there was a sense of tolerance toward his vice. The pastor may have even given him communion because his sexual proclivities were so well hidden that he genuinely didn’t know. Or maybe your gay uncle knew that this was a sinful lifestyle. Maybe he even confessed to the pastor and struggled against this sin - you wouldn’t know because it’s none of your business, and the pastor probably knows more than you think he does.

But we live in a different era. It is as if everything before 2015 was the age of black and white television and Marcus Welby doling out paternal advice on “Father Knows Best.” Today, homosexuality is no longer considered by society as a whole to be a vice, but a virtue. It is a point of pride. It is socially celebrated without exception in movies, TV, music, and every aspect of popular culture. There are local holidays and lurid celebratory parades. It is venerated by mental health professionals and politicians, and now the celebrated category even includes people with sexual fetishes, gender dysphoria, and a host of subjective sexual issues. But nearly every sexual vice has been metamorphized into being the the moral equivalent of, if not the superior to, heterosexuality. At this point, even pedophilia and bestiality are losing their stigma. And there is a concerted effort to normalize sexual deviancy even to pre-school children.

I recently saw a back-and-forth on social media between a rostered LCMS male teacher at a Lutheran high school whose FB profile includes a pro-LGBT statement and the six-color rainbow. He also happens to champion Critical Race Theory. When he was challenged on it, he did not address the questions, but simply retorted that “there are gay members of the LCMS” and that people “seem awfully hung up on one sin out of millions.” He never answered the question about whether this view of sexuality was congruent with the Scriptures. He ended up just deleting the thread.

In this day and age when Critical Theory and the endorsement and celebration of violations of the Sixth Commandment have become the norm in the secular world, parents who don’t want their children “educated” in this manner either homeschool or put their children in Christian schools. They especially turn to LCMS institutions, given our confession of the infallibility of Scripture and the role of the Word of God as the “norming norm” to which we unconditionally submit. For this is not the case with denomination after denomination that has surrendered to the world.

So why do we have a rostered teacher who is openly flouting and celebrating adultery?

That’s what homosexuality and other sexual proclivities celebrated by the secular culture are according to our Small Catechism. Sexuality is a matter of holy matrimony - between one man and one woman for life. In the church, we don’t wave flags celebrating divorce. We don’t throw a party when a man is unfaithful to his wife. We don’t tell an unrepentant woman that she is “courageous” for admitting that she cheats on her husband and has no intention of stopping. We don’t have a parade to laud people for looking at pornography.

But the vice is now a virtue. It is no longer a vice. This alternative morality, this rejection of Scripture, is being normalized even in our churches. We had at least one Concordia in our university system that had a student club dedicated to the breaking of the Sixth Commandment: an adultery club that met with the blessing of the former university president. Why not a pro-abortion club? Why not a club dedicated to profaning the name of God? Why not a club dedicated to character assassination? Why not a club mocking the idea of church attendance?

This teacher’s line of reasoning that the Sixth Commandment is being treated differently than all the others is actually true. One could not imagine him promoting Atheism or lusting after his neighbor’s wife or committing acts of aggression against other people or even killing them - without incurring the ire of the school’s administration or the District President. But this teacher’s advocacy of adultery - specifically the socially acceptable variation of sexual inclinations and behaviors that are not heterosexual - seems to be just fine.

What we are seeing all around us is weaponized vice.

The old social contract of not persecuting your “happy” uncle so long as he was not making it public and keeping his activities between consenting adults has been torn up. Now, your uncle is on a rampage. He will compel business owners to violate their consciences. He will sue them and harass them. He will show up at your church with his friends and protest outside. He will call you names and make you out to be the moral reprobate. He will dox you at your job and try to render you impoverished and socially ostracized. Some of his friends will insist on their right to expose their genitals to women and girls in a spa. He will argue in court for the right of school children to use whatever bathrooms and dressing rooms that they like, and will argue that you parents have no say in the matter. He will make sure that the virtue of violating the Sixth Commandment makes its way to children’s TV shows, cereal boxes, and even on the flagpole at the hospital where Christian families may be dealing with illness in the family. He will make sure that his flag flies alongside of national and historical flags - even at American embassies. He will successfully agitate so that federal government jobs include a day set apart to honor the violation of the Sixth Commandment and that all employees will take part. Any Christian who so much as winces will be written up or fired.

And now, he will also insist that rostered LCMS teachers celebrate the breaking of the Sixth Commandment, and the school administration and the District President will either pretend not to see it or openly support it.

In time, we will get new pastors and seminary professors who will read the Sixth Commandment - and all of the Bible - with a different hermeneutic, one befitting of a hashtag campaign. In time, our churches will redefine marriage to conform to the state and to the New Orthodoxy. And whatever pockets of resistance that are left will just be marginalized and bulldozed over. And who’s to say the Nine Commandments in our catechism won’t become the Eight Commandments, or the Two Commandments, or the Zero Commandments?

We either hold to our confession, or we change it. He either hold our RSOs and DP’s accountable, or we will not. We either believe the Holy Scriptures and submit to them, or we don’t.