Taking Love Hostage
A Hostage Analogy
I recently rewatched the 1994 hit film Speed. It’s all about hostage situations. The drama of the film focuses on a bus full of people being held hostage by an extortionist bomber demanding millions of dollars. In the film, the ransom must be paid by a certain time, the passengers must remain on the bus, and the bus must maintain a speed over 50, otherwise the bus will blow up. As I watched the movie, I considered the dynamics of hostage situations and how they can be leveraged by criminals to make even the most absurd demands. Because the good desire we have to protect people can be taken advantage of, hostage situations “work.” Because society values the lives of innocent people, those who take them hostage have the leverage to extort and manipulate to meet their demands.
This is a good analogy for what has happened over the last several years with the demands of the LGBTQ+ movement and pride month. At the heart of the LGBTQ+ movement is the revolutionary mission to take control of the dictionary and promote the sovereignty of the expressive individual. This is why the very concept of free speech is under fire. Today, asserting the definitions of words that have enjoyed wide consensus for millennia is now considered “hate speech.”
Why control the dictionary? Why these new criteria for modern-day “blasphemy laws,” more commonly known as “hate speech?” Well, underneath this emphasis upon words and the dictionary is the desire to control reality. It is the desire to usurp God’s world-making word power to redefine reality to their liking. This is why so many words have now been popularly redefined or have become undefinable. What is a “woman?” What is a “mother?” What is “marriage?” What is “gender?” What are “pronouns?”
For the most part, the LGBTQ+ movement has been successful in their revolutionary takeover of the dictionary, but how? How did we get to the place where people are actually demanding they be referred to by “ze/zir” pronouns? How did we get to the place where we are inventing new terms like “birthing-people” because we are afraid to say “mother?” How did we get to the place where queer theorists can suggest that a more progressive society would normalize pedophilia and rebrand pedophiles as “minor-attracted persons?” I suggest that we’ve gotten here because the LGBTQ+ movement has taken hostage the meaning of “love.”
Manipulating Our Desire to be “Loving”
Like we value human lives, we similarly value “love.” Christians remember that Jesus puts a strong call upon his disciples to be loving even to our enemies (Luke 6:27–31), and Paul wrote that of the Christian virtues “the greatest…is love.” (1 Cor 13:13) Even most unbelievers agree that love is the greatest virtue to which humans aspire.
This high emphasis upon love can be taken advantage of and manipulated. To avoid the appearance of being “unloving,”—or worse, “hateful”—we can easily be made willing to meet the demands of our friends, co-workers, or the mob. This is precisely why the creed of the LGBTQ+ movement is “love is love.” The point of this statement is not to help describe what love actually is; it is more like a creed designed to excommunicate any who disagree with their assertion of “love.” “Love is love” really means, “Love is whatever our movement says it is,” and thus anyone who goes against “love” is a “hater” and a “bigot.”
This strategy of the LGBTQ+ movement is effective on many adults, and is especially effective upon impressionable young students, who have a strong desire to be liked by their friends. Consider how different it must be to experience adolescence as a young Christian now than in previous decades. Back when I was in high school, I might have had to fight off slight feelings of embarrassment for being thought “dumb” or “foolish” because I denied the doctrine of evolution. Nowadays, imagine what battles a high schooler has to face if he believes God created us to be either male or female in his image and thus doesn’t believe a boy can become a girl. He won’t just be considered “dumb” by those who disagree with him; he will be considered a hater of the worst kind, a participant in “trans-genocide.” If he wears a shirt that asserts the general fact, agreed upon for centuries, that there are only two genders, as several students at Klahowya Secondary School did, he will be excluded from school for breaking their “blasphemy laws.” Consider the irony: He’ll be physically excluded from a school because he wore a shirt deemed “not inclusive.”
The desire to “love” and not hurt anyone’s feelings is being used to enforce the new dictionary definition in many ways:
"If you don’t bake the cake, you’re a hater."
"If you don’t use someone’s pronouns, you hate that person and deny their existence."
"If you won’t hang the pride flag in your business, you aren’t 'inclusive' or 'safe.'"
"If you use facts that hurt someone’s feelings, you are “literally killing people.”
These are just some of the disturbing ways youths and adults are being manipulated by those who have taken “love” hostage to make their ideological demands. A powerful ploy designed by those who want to promote the LGBTQ+ movement.
The Hostage Situation is a Bluff
Christians can be easily manipulated by this ploy if they don’t have a robust and biblical understanding of love. The way for Christians to avoid this manipulation is understanding that this hostage situation is a bluff and it always has been. The LGBTQ+ movement doesn’t get to define what love is, God does. But if you don’t see that it’s a bluff, and you believe in their redefinition of love, you’ve allowed the first domino to fall…and all the others fall after it.
Key to why I believe so many Christians are falling for the bluff is the misinterpretation and misapplication of Jesus’ command to love our neighbors. Doug Ponder diagnoses this problem in his recent article when he says, “To these misguided minds, when Christ said, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ he actually meant, ‘Make sure your neighbor feels loved by you.’ The difference between those statements can be a matter of (eternal) life and death.”
It’s an eternal matter because if we believe the command to love requires that our neighbor "feels loved” by us, we necessarily elevate the expressive individual to the place of god—a god that cannot save them from their sins. It is a matter of eternal life and death because the version of love that affirms sin in order to make someone “feel loved” actually abandons that person to their sin rather than pointing them to Christ. Bowing to this pseudo version of “love” becomes a form of slavery leading to deep realms of absurdity—kids are, in all seriousness, identifying as cats.
But there is hope. Remember, the hostage taker loses all of his power as soon as the hostages are free. That's how the bomber in Speed was defeated. I won't spoil for you how it was accomplished, but once all the passengers were snuck off of the bus, the bomber was foiled. Similarly, as soon as we realize that "love" is not what the LGBTQ+ movement defines it to be, they lose their manipulative power over our desire to love. We need to commit to love as Jesus loved and steel ourselves, refusing to negotiate with those who threaten us with their false, redefined love. We must call their bluff.
How do we do that? The key is remembering and treasuring how God’s Word defines love. God’s love does not bow to our feelings but confronts our sins to provide salvation from them. “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:10) Likewise, we need to remember that God’s Word provides the standard for what love looks like in action, “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.” (1 John 5:3) God’s commands and his law are the standard of love.
When we deviate from his commands, when we assert ourselves as greater than them, or when we disregard his commands and revelation in order to make someone “feel good”, we are not loving. In fact, this is not only a denial of love, it is a denial of God; his commands reflect his character and his righteousness. To hate God's commands is to refuse to love, and to refuse to love reveals that we do not know God, for “anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:8) And so, when God’s commands make someone feel bad because they contradict that person’s life choices by revealing their sin, they need to hear the Gospel! The love of God was revealed through Christ coming to save us from our sins by bearing them on the cross! If we redefine sin to meet the demands of those who claim the biblical definition of sin is unloving, we also lose the love of God revealed in the Gospel.
Sharing the Gospel with a world that desperately needs it requires that Christians recover our confidence in the Word of God and how it defines love. It requires that we remember that we too, were saved from our sin by the love of God. It requires that we love God and trust his Word above all else. Jesus taught his disciples that love for him must be supreme over all other relationships in life, even our closest. “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37) This means people will, at times, think we are hateful because our love for them flows out of bowing to Christ first. In fact, Jesus teaches his disciples this very thing when he said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26) Here, Jesus is not teaching us to hate, he's teaching us that, compared to our love for Jesus and his commands, all other human relationships must be so secondary that we will deny all other allegiances in order to follow Christ.
Christians need to know and believe deep in their bones that God’s standards of love are the only way of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Christians need to desire to see their neighbors saved from their sin by the love of God revealed in Christ. Only then will we be equipped to love our neighbors.