Meet Vinny Ohh. This twenty-two-year-old California make-up artist believes that he is neither male nor female. He has had over 110 medical procedures to transition into a “genderless” extraterrestrial. Among them: twelve cheek fillers, two brow fillers, fifteen lip fillers, five Botox sessions, five nose procedures, and twenty cryo facial freezings.
He is set to appear on The Plastics of Hollywood, a television show that will house real-life plastic surgery addicts together. The show’s producer says, “In 15 years, hundreds of people will want to look like him. We’re in an era where there’s people who want to look like lizards, those who implant horns into their skulls and people with full-face tattoos . . . We want to be the first agency who will treat these human dolls, alien dolls and cartoons as a normal part of the society that we’re living in now.”
When there’s no such thing as “normal,” the term applies to everyone.
In his dissent after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, Chief Justice John Roberts noted: “It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.” In other words, the decision to redefine marriage need not end with same-sex marriage. Polygamists are already hard at work using the ruling to advance their agenda. Once the moral train leaves the station, it’s difficult to say where it will stop.
In We Cannot Be Silent, Albert Mohler asserts that “we are facing nothing less than a comprehensive redefinition of life, love, liberty, and the very meaning of right and wrong.” He cites British theologian Theo Hobson, who argues that the moral revolution of our day is unprecedented in Christian history. Hobson notes two factors behind the challenges we face.
First, the “new morality” is either-or. Either churches will affirm the legitimacy of same-sex marriage and other unbiblical behavior or they will not. There is no middle ground.
Second, the new morality has replaced traditional morality on the moral high ground of our culture. There was a time, for instance, when homosexual behavior was thought immoral. Now opposition to it is considered immoral, homophobic, repressive, and dangerous. The church was once seen as the guardian of what was right and righteous in society. Now those who declare and defend biblical morality are on the wrong side of morality in the eyes of their culture.
For example, I believe that Vinny Ohh is misusing the body God gave him. That sentence is enough for defenders of the new morality to consider me dangerously prejudiced. The fact that I base my opinion on the Bible—”God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27)—makes me a Bible-bashing, fundamentalist hater in their eyes.
What are defenders of biblical morality to do?
We can try to catch the “train of tolerance” before it’s too late. We can stay at home and deride those who have boarded that train. Or we can go to the station and seek to persuade everyone we meet to refuse what God forbids and choose what he blesses.
What would you want someone to do for you?
NOTE: I invite you to join me for a seminar I am teaching on how to engage the culture for Christ. You can register here for the four-week course. The class meets from March 30 to April 20, 6:30 to 8:30 PM on Thursday nights at Dallas Baptist University. We will develop a Christian worldview, understand trends in the culture, and learn how to speak the truth in love on topics from medical ethics to the LGBTQ movement. Please join us.
Jim Denison, Ph.D., speaks and writes on cultural and contemporary issues. He produces a daily column which is distributed to more than 113,000 subscribers in 203 countries. He also writes for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Post, Common Call, and other publications.
