On Tuesday, I had the displeasure of attending the Christmas Eve service at Pastor Chuck Swindoll’s gigantic Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, Texas, an extremely affluent northern suburb of Dallas.  It’s within easy driving distance, and they have an incredible pipe organ, choir, and instrumentalists, so I thought it would be an evening of beautiful music for my family.  Unfortunately, the string quartet felt a little threadbare in such a massive space, and the choir was on vacation, for which the passionless voices of over 3000 mumbling yuppies was no substitute.

But the main disappointment wasn’t that the church was basically phoning it in, but that Pastor Swindoll, known for decades and by millions of evangelicals for his Insight for Living radio ministry, took the opportunity to compromise with the sodomite revolution.  Despite a standing room-only crowd in a 3000 seat auditorium full of Christians and non-Christians alike, Swindoll not only choose to pray a prayer that substituted mawkish treacle for the Gospel, but also, in carefully chosen words, sought worldly praise by lowering the social cost of sodomy:

Our Father, we are grateful for peace within our hearts that comes through a relationship with You because of Jesus.  And this evening I pray for those whose hearts are heavy, for whatever reason.  I pray that they may be encouraged and strengthened from these few minutes we’ve had together.  Thank You for the beauty of tomorrow, and all that it brings to our lives; all the memories it brings back to our minds, all the hopes and dreams for tomorrow.  Thank You Father than since childhood this has been the day of the year that You have especially blessed.  Make it special, we pray, as we gather with family and friends, or perhaps, even as those who gather with just another friend or their partner in life.  I pray that You would make the day very special.  We commit to You the new year and all that it holds.  But first, we commit ourselves to You as our Savior and Lord, in the name of Your son Jesus we all pray.  And everyone said…Amen!

Praying that God would make Christmas “very special” for you and your “partner in life” is clearly Tim Keller-level reptilian double-speak for “we still accept you even if you’re an active, non-repentant sodomite.”

Of course, conservative evangelicals will all protest that, “No, surely our hero Swindoll didn’t mean that!  There are multiple ways to interpret his words.”  But he could have just let his sentence end at “Make it special, we pray, as we gather with family and friends.”  Alternately, he could have substituted “spouse” in place of “partner in life” if that’s what he actually meant, but since your spouse is your family, the sentence would have then become senselessly redundant:  “…family and friends, or perhaps, friends and family.”  No, one’s “partner in life” is decidedly something more than a friend that Swindoll’s not quite yet prepared to call family, but he does want God to give them a “very special” Christmas.  Pointing out that this was no slip of the tongue, as Swindoll was clearly reading his prayer from prepared remarks (see the video starting at 1:02:15), will not change their minds.  Some will argue that this is an instance of “hate the sin but love the sinner.”  But such is a ludicrous divorce of actor and action.  There is no sodomy without a sodomite.  Can one hate an abstraction but love that which causes concrete actualization of the abstraction in the realm of human experience, or is that just pious sounding foolishness?  Even granting that such is possible, why not wish a “very special” Christmas to sinners who are guilty of other capital crimes, like murder and Satan-worship?  Or do we only wish a “very special” Christmas for those who are guilty of socially acceptable capital crimes?  This is why conservatives perennially wake up in the ruins of their old civilization, walking around like a befuddled goose in a new world, saying, “I just don’t understand what happened?!”

Here at Tribal Theocrat, we pray that God will make every day for sodomites “very special” by drawing them out of the sodomite revolution and bringing them to lasting repentance over their horrible sins.  And we pray that Swindoll will either repent of his words or be deplatformed.  And we further pray that the Lord will give conservatives discernment, and a worldview based on the unchanging Word of God instead of the daily-changing traditions of men.