Pride Month Wants Your Kids
As we witness pride month’s brazen public displays of cultural conquest, I’m reminded of a saying I recently encountered: “You might not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is interested in you.” Only, I would add to the end: and your kids. We are in the midst of a cultural and religious battlefield, and because our children are our most precious resource in the fight (Psalm 127:3–4), they are frequently a primary target. For example, in our own backyard, the Central Kitsap and North Kitsap school districts have made announcements that they will be celebrating pride month this year. We must see this for what it is. The subjection of children to these celebrations is an act of religious conquest. Such a situation calls for Christian parents to soberly assess their surroundings and take proper biblical steps to prepare their children to fight the spiritual battles they will inevitably face.
A Brief Overview of the Landscape
Key to understanding pride month is understanding that it is a religious celebration. In the LGBTQ+ movement, we encounter creedal formulations like “love is love,” criteria for blasphemy (they label any opposition to their view as “hate speech”), anthropology (many “genders”), and a god to worship, in this case, the sovereignty of the expressive individual. The LGBTQ+ movement’s religious nature is important to recognize because Christians must declare the Gospel of Christ to save sinners—all kinds of sinners—from their sin, while also opposing the LGBTQ+ religion, repudiating its false teaching as a form of captivating spiritual deception.
Like all religious holidays, pride month is all about making disciples by forming affections, imagination, and worldview. As Carl Trueman noted in his article “Welcome to Pride Month, Christian”, the religious impulse of pride month is to enforce the comprehensive lordship of the LGBTQ+ worldview over our society. He points out that the public celebrations, parades, symbols, and marketing campaigns of pride month are really about “ownership over space—public, commercial, virtual, and even—via yards signs and symbols on social media posts—personal and private.” And so, “June witnesses as comprehensive an attempt at cultural revolution as one is ever likely to see.” Pride month is all about praising the “assertion of human autonomy and the sovereignty of individual desire.”
Christian parents need to understand that, even beyond pride month, this conquest is strategic, well-funded, goal-oriented, effective, and largely focused on targeting youth and children. Organizations utilize entertainment and education to normalize the LGBTQ+ worldview. Various advocacy groups, such as GLAAD & GLSEN, have arisen over the years and function as “missions agencies” dedicated to reaching kids. Their goal? Normalizing and accelerating acceptance of LGBTQ+ ideology.
Beyond advocacy groups, commercial companies have also joined the fray in celebrating the LGBTQ+ religion among children. As you may know, Target recently made waves by prominently marketing pride onesies and kids’ clothing. Social media platforms also play a huge role in exposing the young to LGBTQ+ subject matter. These platforms prioritize LGBTQ+ content and, according to my own observation, youth social feeds include a high percentage of peer and advertiser LGBTQ+ messaging.
As far as I can tell, there are two primary appeals promoted to encourage the acceptance of the LGBTQ+ worldview. The first is the strong call to “be true to yourself” or to pursue “self-autonomy” and “self-definition.” The second is the appeal to appear compassionate by “allying with the marginalized” or negatively not wanting to be labeled as a "hateful bigot” for holding contrary views. I know many adults that are susceptible to such persuasions, so I can only imagine how much more difficult it is for
youth to resist them.
The LGBTQ+ strategy exposes children to content and situations that are hyper-sexualized and perverse.
When a movement is defined by trespassing boundaries and God-given sexual norms, we shouldn’t be surprised that they are also willing trespass boundaries meant to protect children from sexual exploitation. There are a growing number of instances where children are exposed to inappropriate sexual content and contact. Many parents have advocated for the removal of books like Gender Queer from school libraries. Why? Because it explicitly and graphically depicts various sexual encounters! And yet, LGBTQ+ advocates have sought to keep these explicit materials available for children. Likewise, children have been implicitly sexualized and groomed through the advent of drag shows for children. Drag Story Hour has become a common public event where grown men cross-dress as hyper-sexualized women and read stories to children in public libraries. Then there are the increasingly popular “family friendly” drag shows where kids are exposed provocative drag performances that often include lap dances for young children. It should be noted that this is not a fringe reality, as even Disney+ has promoted drag shows for kids. As an extreme—for now—example, a Dutch television show had several adults who had undergone “gender-reassignment” surgery strip naked in front of elementary-aged kids to teach them about “diversity.” The tragic irony of this is that the televised production blurred out the genitals of these adults for the viewing audience, but the experience was in no way “blurred” for the children present on the show.
The strategy being used upon children is shrewd, insidious, and effective.
We see that many younger generations have accepted today’s novel views of “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” and “personal pronouns” and are either adopting them for themselves or declaring themselves “allies” of the LGBTQ+ movement. A recent survey conducted by Statista in 2022 found that 7.2% of the adult population in America identified as LGBTQ+. Among these adults, the percentage is significantly higher with each successive generation. In fact, Gen Z, the youngest generation polled, reported that 19.7% identified as LGBTQ+. And while the survey didn’t account for generations born after 2004, the percentage is likely to be even higher.
We ought to be shocked by the brazen targeting of children and youth, but we need to understand that their strategy has been very effective. While we, as adults, might feel impervious to such influence, we must remember that our worldview was developed under very different cultural conditions than our children’s generation. As parents, it is our responsibility to ensure that our kids have been equipped to resist and fight the false religion being forced upon them.
Biblical Direction for Christian Parents
What follows are not comprehensive directions, but rather some brief ideas that I hope will be a helpful start in equipping our children.
1. Take responsibility and build up your household. When Jerusalem was corrupted by idolatry and various cultural sins leading up to the exile, the moral condition of the city was likened to a city whose crumbling wall had many breaches and gaps. Ezekiel records the words of the Lord about Jerusalem in this state, “And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none.” (Ezekiel 22:30) This describes our situation. The walls have crumbled. There are many breaches. Even once-faithful churches have fallen and are no longer standing in the gap.
The call upon the man of God is to build up the wall and stand in the breach. To do this, we must remember that God has given Christian parents, especially fathers, the responsibility and stewardship of teaching their children in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord.” (Ephesians 6:4) Parents need to take responsibility for protecting, equipping, and building up their children through the Word to understand what is going on in the world and how to walk faithfully with discernment. This requires Biblical training around the family dinner table and this requires that you are actively supervising their education and their growth in discernment. This might mean you need to homeschool or send your kids to a Christian school. (perhaps Coram Deo Academy)
2. Teach and model for your children that the Word of God is worthy of our love and trust. Pride month and the LGBTQ+ movement is about asserting ourselves above God’s Word. One of the primary ways that Satan deceives is through promoting distrust of the truth, goodness, and clarity of God’s Word: “Did God really say...?” (Genesis 3:1)
Read Psalm 19:7–11 and consider if this is the way you have been teaching and modeling for your kids how to approach God’s Word. Perhaps you need to repent of putting your trust in other words and consider afresh why “The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul,” and “The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart.” Only if we are treasuring God’s Word will we faithfully teach our children to treasure God’s Word.
3. Take your kids to a church where joyful submission to God and his Word is treasured. Part of our current battle is the persuasive weight of the community being built outside the Church. Participation in and belonging to a local church is not optional—our discipleship and the discipleship of our kids depend on it. If we are not participating as members of the body of Christ in a local church, our families will not be equipped to stand firm. We all need the weekly rhythm of seeing the many members gathered into one body to confess sins, hear from his Word, receive communion, and glorify his name in song. Worship is warfare. Weekly worship is where your kids learn to wear their spiritual armor and wield their spiritual weapon in the fight. (Ephesians 6:10–17)
4. Pray for kids—your own and the many in your community. This is a spiritual war, and prayer is a spiritual weapon. There is nothing more powerful than prayer because it is an appeal to God to act, and there is no one more powerful than God. Pray for the protection of your kids from the lies of the evil one. Pray that God would bring to nothing the attempts of the LGBTQ+ movement to influence kids. Pray that those in public offices who promote this conquest would be removed. Pray that local churches would stand united against this movement rather than embrace a softened version of it.
5. Teach your children to understand the LGBTQ+ movement as a religion. At appropriate age levels, you should explain to your children what the LGBTQ+ movement is. You should also show them how it is a cultural idol not unlike the other idols we meet in scripture. This is especially important because the religious nature of the LGBTQ+ movement means that our posture against it should be informed by the biblical direction to defend against false teachers. (Jude 1:3–4, 2 Peter 2:1–3) This false teaching is attempting to deceive a generation into believing that evil is good and good is evil. Because pride month and the LGBTQ+ movement is a false religion, Christians can never make peace with it.
6. Teach your children to understand that the grace of God saves all kinds of sinners. Christ came into the world to save sinners through his sacrificial death upon the cross and was raised to be their Lord and King. This is the glory of the Gospel. Pride month denies the Gospel because it denies the reality of the sin from which Christ came to save us! Christ came to save sinners out of “the domain of darkness” and bring them into “the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Colossians 1:13–14) Help your kids understand that there is an ongoing spiritual war against the domain of darkness; the Christian should, in love, care for those captive to that domain and desire to see them repent and come to Christ for deliverance and the forgiveness of sins.
As we walk through this month, let us remember that June, like every month of every year, belongs to our Lord and is full of opportunities to glorify him.