Progressive Policies Are Not Compassionate
March 13, 2023
Greg Demme
Pastor Grace Baptist Pastor
Current District 3 Chair and Former District 3 Secretary
In this letter, I am responding to the series of letters that began with “Support legislation that reflects North Dakota values,” published on February 18, 2023. In recent years, the perception has taken over our society that progressive social policies, in both the political and religious arenas, have cornered the market on love and compassion. Our society is inundated with such expressions as “Love is love is love,” as if that is supposed to carry profound meaning. Unfortunately a person can make such an expression mean whatever one wants.
Religious people can do this twisting with Scripture as well, but you might be surprised to find out that progressive religious people twist Scripture with astounding frequency. Elia Jay Scott, in a letter titled, “Falsehood to preach that love is sin,” published on March 4, 2023, equated any attempt to hold people accountable to God’s Word, “prejudice, a violation of God’s Law of Love.”
But what is God’s Law of Love? According to Matthew 22:36-40, God’s law of love encompasses two over-arching commands. It’s popular today to quote only the second of those: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But that command is secondary to and contingent upon the first command: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
It is God who gets to define love, rather than people, including progressive political and religious leaders. And Jesus explained, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments”(John 14:15). He also asked, pointedly, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?'” (Luke 6:46).
No, it is not loving to affirm whatever anyone wants to do with their lives. It is not compassionate to tell boys and girls they should permanently harm themselves, chemically and/or surgically, by trying to become something they can never become (i.e., the opposite sex) by using fancy but ultimately meaningless terms like “gender dysphoria,” when all of Scripture and their chromosomal records scream that they were made either male or female. This is not love, and it is not compassionate. It is harmful and prevents them from getting the actual help they desperately need. And it is most certainly not loving or compassionate to force other boys and girls to participate in this rejection of reality by demanding they address people with false pronouns, and share bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams with those of the opposite sex.
Elia Jay Scott is also concerned that no English version of the Bible published prior to 1940 translated the Greek word arsenokoitai as “homosexuals.” This argument is a red herring, meant only to confuse people. Would Scott prefer to see the term translated more literally: “men who lie with men sexually”? What matters is not how it was translated at any particular point in time but how it has been understood, and for all of church history that term has been understood to mean exactly what that literal translation means.
It is not compassionate to encourage people, any people, that their sins are not sins. It is not compassionate to encourage people that defying their creator God is the very definition of love. Rather, in encouraging and affirming sin, one sets up himself or herself as an enemy of God.
