Three Lies of Pride Month

We’re now in the final week of ‘Pride Month’ — a growing shibboleth of our secular age. Corporate firms are one-upping each another to virtue signal how woke and inclusive they are. Retail stores are parading the rainbow flag to boost sales.

From a Biblical perspective, there are remarkable parallels between Pride Month and idol worship under King Nebuchadnezzar II. Just as the Babylonians were mandated to worship the golden image, LGBT activists demand that we pledge allegiance to the rainbow flag. While the stakes aren’t as high as they were under Nebuchadnezzar, there are real risks involved in refusing to bow the knee.

If my suspicion is correct, most Australians are not particularly concerned about Pride Month. In fact, many are beginning to feel uncomfortable with how politicised and intolerant the LGBT movement has become. In response, many people have flocked to culture warriors like Jordan Peterson for answers.

While figures like Peterson are insightful and worth listening to, their answers are ultimately psychological rather than spiritual. They don’t acknowledge that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only truth that sets people free. It is only the grace of God in the person and work of Jesus that gives answers and hope to a world lost in sexual confusion.

What follows are three of the lies paraded during Pride Month, along with the gospel answers Jesus provides.

1. Sexuality = Identity

Pride Month declares that you can find your identity by looking inward. It is proclaimed that you can discover your identity by exploring your sexuality. The modern self is defined by sexuality. This explains the insistence within the LGBT movement of identifying people as ‘gay,’ ‘trans,’ ‘lesbian,’ and so on.

The great tragedy in such thinking is its reductionism. It shrinks a person from being an intelligently designed, unique, and beautiful image-bearer of God to the mere product of sexual instincts (cf. Gen. 1:17). Is there anything more animalistic than reducing a person to the sum of their sexual desires?

Contrary to Pride Month, our identity is not self-generated; it is given to us by our Maker. The Bible makes clear that humans were created to magnify the glory, beauty, and majesty of our Creator. Indeed, there is no other creation in the universe that was made imago dei. Furthermore, the good news of the gospel liberates us to find our identity in Jesus Christ.

As the Westminster Confession of Faith 15.5 states, Biblical repentance is for specific sins. In an age when national repentance is used as a smokescreen for our own guilt, we must face the reality of our rebellion against the Creator. We must name our sins, yet not be named by them. This is especially relevant in a time when identifying some believers as ‘gay Christians’ has become commonplace.

There is nothing more enslaving to a child of God than to identify them by their sin. Any adjective placed before ‘Christian’ — whether it be ‘same-sex attracted,’ ‘anxious,’ or ‘adulterous’ — enslaves a believer and legitimises their sin. It denies their identity as a child of God, freed from the bondage of passions.

There is nothing more liberating than for a Christian to know their sin has been dealt with fully and completely. To be a Christian is to have one’s life hidden with Christ in God, and to be defined not by our sin, but by His perfection and glory (Col. 3:3).

2. Pride = Virtue

Arguably the chief lie of Pride Month is that pride is something to be celebrated. According to God, pride is a vice to be restrained. Pride is not something to be paraded; it’s the parent of all other sins. It’s the cesspool from which all other wickedness flows (Gen. 3:6). Pride not only destroys a person’s relationship with God; it ultimately consumes the person themselves (Prov. 16:18).

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis wrote this of pride:

“It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the completely anti-God state of mind” (Book III, 8.)

Puritan Jonathan Edwards spoke of pride in these terms:

“Pride is a person having too high an opinion of himself. Pride is the first sin that ever entered into the universe, and the last sin that is rooted out. Pride is the worst sin. It is the most secret of all sins. There is no other matter in which the heart is more deceitful and unsearchable. Alas, how much pride the best have in their hearts! Pride is God’s most stubborn enemy! There is no sin so much like the devil as pride. It is a secret and subtle sin and appears in a great many shapes which are undetected and unsuspected.”

To be sure, pride is the enemy of all mankind, not just those who parade it during Pride Month. At its heart, Pride is self-righteousness — the belief we know better than God. A refusal to take God’s diagnosis of our lives. Thus, pride can manifest itself in licentiousness just as much as the person who professes no need for the forgiveness offered by Christ.

The greatest danger of pride is how it prevents us from embracing the grace of God in Jesus Christ. He declared: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).

Pride Month denies the truth that sexual sinners need saving. By making sexual sin an indispensable part of identity and practice, LGBT activists are preaching a false gospel that prevents people from finding freedom in the salvation offered by Jesus Christ.

After all, it is not the haughty who accept the gospel, but the humble. Not those who are self-sufficient, but those who are hopelessly lost in their sin. It is a beautiful thing when a man realizes he cannot save himself. For it is at this moment that he helplessly reaches out to the God who made him for salvation.

3. Pride Month = Family-Friendly

Following the legalization of so-called same-sex marriage, the LGBT agenda has been advancing at an unprecedented speed. One such advancement has been the push to involve children in the celebrations of Pride Month.

Carl Trueman reflects on why this is the case:

“In theory, any sexual or gender identity one chooses or ‘feels’ is to be protected. In practice, of course, this infinite plasticity is not a viable option, and the range of sexual and gender identities to be protected is going to be that shaped by the dispositions of cultural taste. The trans man or the lesbian enjoys protection; the pedophile (as yet) does not.”

Carl R. Trueman, Strange New World (Wheaton: Crossway, 2022), 142

A few recent examples testify to the shift taking place when it comes to children and sexuality:

• In 2018, Tedx Speaker Heine spoke of pedophilia with affirmation. She argued, “According to current research, pedophilia is an unchangeable sexual orientation just like, for example, heterosexuality. No one chooses to be a pedophile, no one can cease being one.”

• Last year, Balenciaga offered a disingenuous apology after producing an advertisement in which a child was holding a bear dressed in bondage gear.

• ‘Drag Queen Story Time’ is being offered at many public libraries. These involve a transvestite — generally dressed in sexually provocatively manner — reading stories and dancing for young children.

• In February 2023, a large mural was painted in the Sydney CBD featuring a man in bondage gear with a teddy-bear face.

If Pride Month were only about ‘love’ and ‘tolerance,’ it makes little sense why kids need to be involved. Unless, of course, the legalization of pedophilia is on the cards for activists.

As Doug Wilson articulates:

“…let us continue with our quest of finding out what the + sign means. The smart money is on what happens after a family friendly drag show.”

While I suspect many will scoff at this claim, it’s important to recognise that sexual deviation knows know no end. Once one abandons God’s design for sex, there are no limits to the depravity of man. Moreover, the sexualisation of children is not simply a 21st-century phenomenon.

For instance, Pederasty was commonly practised in the Roman Empire. A modern form of this practice called Bacha bazi still occurs in Afghanistan. According to one United Nations report, 20 per cent of all human trafficking victims today are children.

The reason our nation has historically rejected the sexual exploitation of children is because of our Christian heritage. Kevin DeYoung comments on the transformative effect of Christianity on sexual mores in the Roman Empire:

“If there were “winners” and “losers” in the Christian transformation of sexual morality, you could say that gay men and promiscuous Roman males were the losers, while women, slaves, prostitutes, and young boys were the big winners.”

There is nothing more loving than to protect our most vulnerable (children) whilst proclaiming to our nation their need for Jesus Christ. Therefore, it is the duty of Australian Christians to refuse to take part in Pride Month, and to expose the evil that is happening (cf. Eph. 5:11). We proclaim the message of Jesus:

“And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God” (John 3:19-21)

The Bottom Line

At its heart, Pride Month is a month of deception. LGBT activists are deceiving people into believing pride is a virtue, that sexuality determines identity, and that LGBT activities are family-friendly. There is nothing further from the truth.

Only Jesus can give identity, direction, and purpose to a world of sexual confusion. While pride was the catalyst for the corruption of sexuality, the humility of Christ in his life and death offers hope to the sexually broken and lost. He does this not by celebrating our sin, but by extending hope to those of us who are lost in it (Luke 5:31-32).

Rather than exploiting the most vulnerable in society, Jesus Christ welcomed children, declaring that they were citizens of the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 19:13-15). They are not to be exploited sexually but treasured and cared for as God’s children.

When we shift our gaze towards Jesus Christ, we see not only the lies of Pride Month, but a gracious Saviour who offers salvation and hope to those enslaved to sin. Jesus’ promises forgiveness, substantial healing, and restoration to sexually confused sinners.