Love me, love my fentanyl habit.

If you’re really a Christian, you’ll accept and embrace my lifestyle, which includes playing Russian roulette.

If your church really wants to reach out and offer the Gospel to white racialists, you ought to allow us to wear our Klan hoods and serve as greeters at your church.

Do any of those claims rankle with you? Good. They’re meant to.

But now I can make it all better. For all those unfashionable, socially unpopular sins above, plug in “gay” or “transgender” sins and their outward trappings.

We Have No King But Caesar!

Suddenly you have the official policy of most Mainline Protestant churches. And today’s Vatican. And a growing number of evangelical churches.

Why? Because such policies are not about reaching out to people with the Gospel at all. They’re not aimed at tenderly helping the sinner to escape from his soul-destroying lifestyle, as Jesus did with tax collectors and prostitutes. Such outreaches may have started out that way, with some of the churchmen involved. Possibly, though I’m dubious. If a pastor in 1950s Alabama had allowed men to wear their Klan hoods at Sunday services, what would you assume his motivation was … a humble outreach to sinners? Or something darker?

Now plug in the sins that today, in our place and time, are linked with powerful elites, and applauded by the culture. Why treat church officials who collaborate with Caesar and Mammon today any differently from those who colluded 70 years ago?

Those who surrender timeless, apostolic, biblical moral teachings in order to “get along” with the Zeitgeist aren’t acting like Jesus at all. Not in any way. We might call their behavior “biblical,” insofar as they are imitating Caiaphas, and affirming along with him and the other Sadducees (collaborators with Pilate): “We have no king but Caesar!”

That’s what God thinks of your rainbow-flag church … that it’s no better than a segregation chapel in the 1950s South. Or one of the “German Christian” churches that the Third Reich encouraged.

The Sound of Eyes Slowly Rolling

I think more people should make this argument inside their churches. Not that it will do any good, at first. Instead what they’ll hear back from the “affirm and welcome” crowd will be the sound of eyes slowly rolling. Then patronizing replies like this: “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no comparison between people’s sexual orientation and racism. That’s absurd.”

Don’t cave in, shut up, or back down. Stay calm, and keep asking, “Why?” Press the person you’re arguing with hard enough, and eventually he’ll admit that he believes same-sex intercourse, sex change operations, and hormonal sterilization for temporarily confused kids … aren’t wrong. At least, not wrong in the icky, tacky, ugly and universally condemned way that racist actions are.

Keep pressing to find out in what way these new, fashionable sex sins are wrong, and eventually your “affirming” friend will admit that he doesn’t really condemn them. The actions, I mean. But if he’s clever, he’ll switch gears and start muttering proof texts such as “Judge not, lest you be judged.”

You should respond, “Does that apply to racists, too? To Nazis?”

“No, of course not!” will be the answer. Because those people really are sinners, and their actions are really wrong. But sexual sins are complicated and nuanced, because … reasons.

Dead Churches Are Whited Sepulchers

That is the sound of a salmon ceasing to swim upstream against the culture, and instead floating dead to the sea. The churches that affirm or embrace our new pansexual culture are every bit as dead as those that preached the virtue of slavery in 1850, or segregation in 1950. Every bit as false.

But these churches have their script nailed down. They’re good at what they do. Because “the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.” (Luke 16:8)

So we must be wise as serpents when dealing with such people. And that’s why I find myself writing more and more about Satan and his fallen minions. We’re called on to “hate the sin, but love the sinner.” Satan does the opposite, hating the sinner but loving the sin. He can’t always con human beings into adopting his infernal posture, so he will settle for this: Insisting that in order to love the sinner, you must love the sin. You must in fact deny that it’s a sin, or else you’re “judging” people, and you’ll be judged yourself.

Whereas, if you refuse to judge anyone at all, you secretly believe that you’re preventing God from judging you. The Enemy whispered that loophole into your ear, and you’re saving it like a “Get Out of Jail, Free!” card for Judgment Day. But you don’t think about it too hard, to avoid how absurd it is.

Love the Sin, Hate the Sinner

Let’s look at that classic Christian formula: Hate the sin, love the sinner. Which half is less important? Which half can we throw away? The answer, of course, is neither. If we merely hate the sin, we’re simply accusers, perhaps even messengers of despair. If we only love the sinner, but don’t hate his sin … then we don’t really love him at all. (“Love me, love my fentanyl addiction!”) We’re just patronizing him, like a dog owner who gives his pooch too many treats, then chuckles about how fat the dog becomes.

We must keep our hatred of sin, of objective evil, fanned to a white-hot flame. And our love of sinners as cool and gentle as the “still waters” the Good Shepherd offers His wayward sheep.

The One We Are Called to Hate

And that’s why we must talk about the Devil. That’s why I keep writing about the demonic intelligences behind the abortion industry, the transgender frenzy, the Woke cult and its new gospel of the antichrist. We must rage against such evils, and their real authors. We must not, and dare not, demonize the victims of these evils.

Our Enemy is not the woman aborting her baby, and not even (finally) the profiteer who scrapes out her child. It’s not the confused “transgender” person who’s poisoning and mutilating his body, or even finally the big Pharma executive getting rich from it.

[W]e are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Eph. 6:12)

And they alone deserve our implacable, bottomless hatred, which will outlast the end of the world.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”