Why Christians enabling Milo are actually denying him grace & healing he needs

Source: Steve Deace's Facebook | February 20, 2017 | Steve Deace

I believe in political activism. I’ve devoted my adult life up to this point to it. It’s even how I feed my family.

As believers, I believe the Scriptures command us to take the Word of God to the ends of the earth, which means the place where public policy is made isn’t exempted. I don’t believe in fighting a culture war per say, but I certainly think the culture God has placed me in is my mission field. And just as Boniface chopped down an Odin tree being falsely worshiped in his day, because it was a cultural norm that stood in the way of the Gospel permeating his mission field, this is how I approach my political activism.

For it’s difficult to advance the Gospel when idolatry/paganism is institutionalized. Paul discovers this on one of his mission trips, when he encounters a culture so entrenched in these fake religions it was the basis for the local economy. Threatening this zeitgeist with the Gospel lands him in hot water, as it does us today. For the system says “It’s better for one man to die than for our whole nation (i.e. system, accommodation, compromise, idolatry, etc.) to perish.”

Yet we see Paul, a rarity in the first century as both a respected Jewish leader and a Roman citizen, which allowed him to be welcomed in every synagogue as well as territory of the empire, use his citizenship as a platform to advance the Gospel. Even to the point of asserting his civil rights, and using his own trial to contend for the faith. I believe we should emulate that with our American citizenship today.

However, there must be limits, lest we become disqualified for the prize. Some of those limits are easy to see, if not obey, such as when our activism compels us to dishonesty. But there are limits that are not so easy to see, and what’s happening right now is a prime example.

I thought Milo was a lost soul/moral reprobate even before the video of him promoting pederasty surfaced, and have said so repeatedly. That said, I’m also an advocate for free speech, because what I believe as a Christian can be deemed too offensive for public consumption as well. Many times in history it has. Today is the anniversary of one of the worst persecutions in the church’s history, in fact.

But there’s a vast chasm from saying Milo has a First Amendment right to be as nasty as he wants to be, to making such a lost soul/moral reprobate your icon — which was steadily building until the crescendo it reached with CPAC making him its keynote speaker.

I’ve had several believers defend Milo’s comments and hijinks, and herein lies the trap. For if an open homosexual was caught on camera arguing for pederasty, and keynoting a progressive political event, every single conservative group in the country would be outraged and raising money off it in our inboxes. Many of the same people advocating to me for Milo now would be decrying the godless Left instead.

Which is brings us to the cruelest irony we often miss in situations like this.

My understanding is Milo claims he was sexually abused by a priest as a boy, and that’s heartbreaking. As a child, I was probably abused every way other than sexually. I know from firsthand experience hurting people hurt people. The stepdad who did this to me also had it done to him. Most of my life that hurt was there at the surface, just itching to come out.

So I would self-medicate by bullying bullies to justify my anger. Preying on girls with daddy issues or pornography. Manipulating people to my own advantage, etc. After Christ saved me, he made me confront the fact that I was still guilty of those sins despite the sins done to me. That I had to accept responsibility for the wrong I’ve done, rather than claim victimhood. See, if I had done nothing wrong myself, why did I need forgiveness?

Therefore, by elevating a lost soul such as Milo in his reprobate status, you are actually standing in the way of the Godly healing and discipline he obviously needs desperately. You’re telling him he’s just fine as he is, all because the same people offended by him are offended by you. That’s political expedience — that is not the Gospel. How dare any of us claim the right to refashion the Gospel. It was not our blood that was spilled to pay for it, but Christ’s. So it’s his way or the highway.

In the end, Milo alone is responsible for accepting God’s free gift of grace, as we all are. But those of us who give up being watchmen on the wall for God’s Word to join the partisan political mob are responsible for that, too. We are not shepherds but idolaters. We are not world-changers but conformers. We are not in free in Christ, but in bondage to the world.

We become exactly what God sent us to oppose. Just like the progressive Christians we criticize for normalizing the sin of their partisan fake victim groups, too.

And lost souls like Milo, whom we comfort and profit in their sin rather than gently and persistently confront, are eternally worse off in the end. Their souls pay the biggest price for our being fanboys instead of disciples.

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