The holy month of Pride, as it has been called, gave us plenty of lowlights during its 30-day run of infamy. There were the Bud Light, Target, and Kohl’s fiascoes, on the secular side, not to mention the Pride flag flying triumphantly at the White House, displacing from centrality the American flag, while topless trans women showed off their newly implanted equipment on the lawn below.
But religion did not disappoint in providing disappointment as well. Catholics gave us Pride Masses, and anti-Catholics gave us Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Mainline Presbyterianism was awash in Pride celebrations, some prefaced by the obligatory land acknowledgments. A United Church of Christ congregation featured a “Queer Pulpit Takeover for Pride Month.” A New York Episcopal church hosted a “queer prom,” while a big downtown church in Louisville turned its 150-year-old sanctuary over to drag queens for “Drag Me to Church: A Gospel Drag Show.” Plenty of churches featured gay choirs to enhance their celebrations. And Methodists boasted “family-friendly” drag shows and a looming church split hinging on congregations’ up or down votes on same-sex marriage. (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: On Drag Queens and the Methodist Breakup)
Those were all big bites out of the heretical apple, but compared to what went down in a Lutheran church in Minnesota, they were just nibbles.
While many across Christendom recited the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed a couple of Sundays ago, at Edina Community Lutheran Church, the community proclaimed “the Sparkle Creed.”
“Let us confess our faith today in the words of the Sparkle Creed” pic.twitter.com/CXeQQZvhbC
— Woke Preacher Clips (@WokePreacherTV) June 27, 2023
Here’s how that one goes:
I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural.
I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads, and who saw everyone as a sibling child of God.
I believe in the rainbow Spirit, who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity.
I believe in the church of everyday saints, as numerous, creative, and resilient as patches on the AIDS quilt, whose feet are grounded in mud and whose eyes gaze at the stars in Wonder.
I believe in the calling to each of us, that love is love is love, so beloved, let us love.
I believe, glorious God, help my unbelief.
Amen.
The heresies jump off the page — Jesus having “two dads”; a polytheistic God with plural pronouns; the “rainbow Spirit”; Jesus’ fabulous tunic (not exactly sure what that signifies, but probably gay related).
But what is not on the page is just as glaring — no mention of God the Father, “Creator of heaven and earth,” or that his Son, Jesus, was crucified, rose, and is coming again “to judge the living and the dead.” Nor does it go into “the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Essential elements all in the historic Christian faith.
Heresy, in our day, is not in short supply. Most of the time, though, churches don’t write it into their confessions of faith. The ancient ecumenical creeds (the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian) were handed down nearly two millennia ago and served the purpose of uniting the church. They were, in the words of Vincent of Lérins, “that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.” They encapsulate Christian belief and unite the people of faith in that belief.
People writing their own creeds — in addition to frequently injecting heterodox, if not heretical, thinking into them — contribute to fracturing the church. They frequently think they’re expanding the creed’s scope, putting ancient thoughts into new, relevant language, but they only sew doubt — or, at the least, questioning.
As creeds go, the Sparkle Creed is heretical. It’s not a mere paraphrase of the ancient creeds meant to bring historic doctrines into modern language; it propounds a new theology, a queer theology that remakes God in a queer image.
And it seems to be of a piece with other events bedeviling the country’s largest Lutheran denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
The denomination boasted the country’s first trans bishop, who, shortly after installation last year, resigned under a cloud of alleged racism. Its clergy have been known to wear Planned Parenthood insignias on their vestments. One pastor’s ordination service was attended by the High Priests of Pride, the infamous Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and the Scripture readers included a “pagan wiccan priest who loves Jesus,” an agnostic, and a gay pastor, according to Protestia, a news site devoted to “Cataloging Theological Mischief-Makers Since 2012.”
Another ELCA pastor leaves behind her a trail of stunning social media posts in which she calls Jesus “Queer, anti-establishment, pro-heaux, [who] rejected heteronormative relationship models.” Yet another pastor says, “God is trans,” according to a different ELCA heresy-hunting website, Exposing the ELCA.
Jesus was Queer, anti-establishment, pro-heaux, and rejected heteronormative relationship models. https://t.co/L3er24ndL3
— Lura Groen (@lura_groen) April 30, 2020
Generally, the ELCA has gone all in on pride, and it celebrated the past Pride Month with what looks like universal denominational approval; nary an official social media post bothered to cite biblical words about homosexuality. A writer at Exposing the ELCA, above a lengthy compilation of Pride messages from individual bishops and other clerics, congregations, church colleges, and synods (that is, church districts), said he “did not come across any segment of the denomination stating the Biblical position on homosexuality, that it is a sin.”
It’s not that the ELCA doesn’t see sin. It just sees it in all the wrong places. Some in the denomination are more than eager to confess the “harm” the church has inflicted by teaching for so long that homosexuality is wrong; and, of course, they do love their land acknowledgments (see here and here and here).
It’s probably not a coincidence that the ELCA is hemorrhaging churches and members. While it is true that we live in a secular age and that Americans in record numbers are either leaving organized religion or never getting into it, the ELCA trails only the United Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ in the percentage of members shed. From 5.1 million members at its inception in 1988 as the great new thing in liberal Lutheranism, it now numbers 3.3 million. Ryan Burge, religious statistician extraordinaire, estimates that had the denomination merely grown proportionately with the population over the past 30 years, it would now boast over 7 million members.
The exodus began in 2009 when the denomination voted to allow clergy in committed same-sex relationships. That act spawned two new denominations, as ELCA congregations fled the mothership in the hundreds. Also, since its inception, the ELCA has entered into fellowship with nearly every other mainline group; indeed, it’s easier naming the denominations it has not linked up with in doctrine and practice than those it has. This leveling of doctrinal distinctives has rendered the label “Lutheran” meaningless.
They’re loud and proud, though, as demonstrated in their enthusiastic approval of the gay agenda.
It’s just that they’re dying.
