How are evangelicals to navigate the current storms while remaining faithful to biblical truth and Christian compassion? How can we engage in true Christian dialogue without immediately pigeonholing our fellow evangelicals politically, or questioning their “true” motives, or holding them to a narrow litmus test of orthodoxy?

The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims, by Rebecca McLaughlin (103 pages, The Gospel Coalition, 2021)

I type these words in the shadow of the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention, a meeting that seems to have exacerbated rather than healed the wounds within the evangelical church. The issues of gay marriage, abortion, critical race theory, and transgenderism, enflamed by the COVID-19 quarantine and the political and sociological fallout from the death of George Floyd, the violent demonstrations that followed in its wake, the mainstreaming of the Black Lives Matter movement, the contested election of 2020, Donald Trump’s inflammatory reaction to it, and Biden’s Equality Act, have rocked the evangelical world to its core.

How are evangelicals to navigate these storms while remaining faithful to biblical truth and Christian compassion? How can we balance the sharing of the gospel with the call to promote justice for the widow and the orphan? How can we engage in true Christian dialogue without immediately pigeonholing our fellow evangelicals politically, or questioning their “true” motives, or holding them to a narrow litmus test of orthodoxy?

Thankfully, Rebecca McLaughlin, in cooperation with the publishing arm of The Gospel Coalition, has written a brief but incisive study of these hot button issues and how evangelicals can best respond to them. The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims takes a firm but irenic look at the five pillars of secular progressivism that often appear on house signs: Black Lives Matter, Love Is Love, The Gay-Rights Movement Is the New Civil-Rights Movement, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, and Transgender Women are Women.

Dr. McLaughlin is, in many ways, the ideal person to write this book. As a British immigrant to America, she, like the French Tocqueville, sees things about America that those who have grown up in this country are often blind to. As the holder of a PhD in Renaissance Literature from Cambridge and a degree in theological and pastoral studies from Oak Hill College in London, she brings a breadth of vision that is theologically informed but that injects a right-brained, humanistic sensibility into a field too often dominated by left-brained, statistics-driven social scientists. As a woman who struggles with same-sex attraction but has chosen to marry a man and raise a family, she understands and empathizes with the struggles of gay and transgender people from the inside.

The Vision

At the core of The Secular Creed lies a truth that is too often forgotten by secular progressives and evangelical Christians alike: any logically sound and consistent fight for civil rights and for the innate and essential dignity and worth of every human being regardless of race or ethnicity, sex or sexual preference, education or employment must ultimately rest on the biblical teaching that all people are created in the image of God. In an atheistic, purely Darwinian world, there can be no fixed standard of right and wrong to adjudicate the fair treatment of all people and no reason to resist the forces of natural selection that favor the strong and show no mercy for the weak.

Upon this core, Dr. McLaughlin establishes a number of clear biblical truths that no orthodox believer, evangelical or otherwise, should dispute. First, God is a God of justice who cares for all the nations and who will, in the end, draw all those nations together in worship (Revelation 7:9-10). The bloodline of Jesus was not “purely” Jewish, but included at least one Canaanite (Rahab) and one Moabite (Ruth). Jesus himself reached out to and spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) and angered his fellow Nazarenes by commending the faith of a Gentile widow and of Naaman the Syrian (Luke 4:24-30). Indeed, “again and again, he commends the faith of those outside the Jewish fold. He praises the faith of a Roman centurion (Matt. 8:5-13) and a Syrophoenician woman (Matt. 15:21-28)” (13).

Second, marriage between a man and a woman is meant to point to the marriage of Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:28-32). “This signpost to Christ is why marriage is male and female, and why husbands and wives are called to different roles. Like Christ and the church, it’s love across difference. Like Christ and the church, it’s love built on sacrifice. Like Christ and the church, it’s a flesh-uniting, life-creating, never-ending, exclusive love. Marriage is meant to point us to Christ” (31).

Third, although the New Testament treats homosexual practice as sinful, it does not condemn non-erotic same-sex love. Indeed, the Bible depicts and commends close relationships of love between Jesus and his disciples, male friends like David and Jonathan, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and brothers and sisters within the body of Christ. “Like sibling love and friend love, the love between same-sex believers is precious, deep, and intimate. But it’s not sexual, and it’s not exclusive” (38).

Fourth, in Matthew 19:4-6, “Jesus affirms both the binary of male and female in creation and the binding of male to female in marriage” (97). Although “Paul clearly affirms the spiritual equality of men and women in Galatians 3:28” (99), the sexes are not therefore interchangeable. According to Matthew 22:29-30, the “absence of sexual relationships in the New Creation will change one aspect of how many of us exist as male and female humans. But this does not mean male and female are erased. . . . The promised resurrection of our male and female bodies is the ultimate proof that they are truly good and that they embody our true selves” (100).

Strengthened and established by these biblical truths, Dr. McLaughlin is able to call out with equal force and compassion to her fellow evangelicals and to people outside the faith who are struggling with their identity but have found only judgmentalism and condemnation within the church. She makes it clear that gay rights and civil rights are not the same thing, that abortion is sinful, and that the claim that one’s gender has no relations to one’s sex is biblically and biologically false, but in such a way that fosters human dignity.

To conflate gay and civil rights is to obscure the fact that we are moral creatures whose behaviors and decisions, unlike those of animals, need not line up with our urges and desires. It is, in fact, “dehumanizing not to distinguish between someone’s attractions and actions” (53). To drive a wedge between the rights of a mother and that of her unborn child is to forget that, “if Christianity is true, then both mother and baby matter. And if there is no God, then ultimately neither do” (82). To erase the essential link between one’s body and one’s soul is to erase men and women as ontological beings. “[T]he slogan ‘Women’s rights are human rights’ is worthless if there are no human rights. . . . If transgender women are women, there’s no such thing as a woman either” (86).

Dr. McLaughlin’s vision is as biblically grounded as it is compassionately humane and has the potential to unite evangelicals. But I don’t think it will: not because of deficiencies in her argument, but because evangelicals on the right and the left have gotten so polarized that we have lost the ability to hear each other and dialogue across the table.

In hopes of remedying that breakdown in dialogue, I would like to end this review with something of a manifesto in which I call upon my fellow evangelicals to do the difficult groundwork that will allow for the kind of reasoned engagement that Dr. McLaughlin’s book deserves. I know that by making this call, I risk angering evangelicals on both sides of the aisle, but until we can make such concessions to each other, we will not be able to have the kind of biblical dialogue that will allow us to mutually affirm Dr. McLaughlin’s analysis.

The Concessions That Will Allow Us to Receive the Vision

Those on the right need to concede that the immoral behavior indulged in by Donald Trump before he became President would have disqualified him in their eyes just a few decades earlier; those on the left need to concede that there is no evidence that Trump is a racist and that his policies did, in fact, benefit many minorities.

Those on the right need to concede that racial profiling, on an individual basis, still occurs in America; those on the left need to concede that the actual statistics clearly disprove that police are targeting and killing black men in large numbers.

Those on the right need to own up to the church’s complicity in Jim Crow laws; those on the left need to acknowledge that racism is no longer imbedded in the laws and institutions of America.

Those on the right need to concede that we helped give birth to cancel culture by being too quick to boycott and demonize ideas and people we did not like; those on the left need to concede that progressive cancel culture has gone much too far and seriously threatens free speech.

Those on the right need to concede that they have put far too much trust in big business and capitalism; those on the left need to concede that they have put far too much trust in government bureaucracy and social engineering.

Those on the right need to concede that the wage disparity between the very rich and the poor and sinking middle class is not healthy or biblical; those on the left need to concede that socialism and income redistribution are not the answer.

Both sides need to concede that the extreme civil disobedience displayed during the summer of 2020 and on January 6, 2021 were illegal, unethical, and destructive forms of protest by groups of people who believed themselves disenfranchised by America.

Both sides need to agree that we are a nation of immigrants who welcomes strangers and refugees but that we are also a nation that upholds the rule of law.

Both sides need to fast from news channels and media sites that inflame our anger against the other side and cause unnecessary division in our ranks.

Both sides need to confess our complicity in allowing politicians and media people on both sides to politicize the COVID 19 crisis and use it for their own political ends.

Both sides need to stop falling for conspiracy theories and reaffirm the truth of Solzhenitsyn’s statement that the dividing line between good and evil does not run through nations or parties or ideologies but through the heart of every human being.

In closing, I would like to offer a simple personal litmus test for determining whether you are truly seeking unity with your evangelical brethren or perpetuating, in your heart, the divisions that are tearing us apart: “The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils” (Mere Christianity III.7).

Rebecca McLaughlin has offered us a way back to unity—but only if we can hear it, and only if we want to hear it.

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