“There’s no one as illiberal as a liberal.” This saying could come to mind with one of the latest cancel-cultist campaigns: getting Marvel Studios to replace actor Chris Pratt over views on homosexuality.
But not Pratt’s own views. The performer has never publicly expressed his positions on sexuality, period. The issue is that he attends a church that, its pastor once told The New York Times, patterned itself after a different church whose major figures have expressed disapproval of homosexual behavior, according to DeseretNews.
Put differently, he knows a church that knew a church that the sexual devolutionaries wish was unknown.
That is, if Deseret is correct. NBC claims that Pratt attends that patterned-after institution, Hillsong Church in Australia, though NBC isn’t exactly known for reportage rectitude (see George Zimmerman, et al.).
Regardless, the message is clear: Even a tangential association with Judeo-Christian tenets that have been held for thousands of years — and which are dogma in many churches today (e.g., Catholicism) — and which reflect the beliefs of billions of people worldwide, is supposed to disqualify you from success and polite society, according to the wokesters.
How this gels with liberals’ longtime appeals for “tolerance” was not reported.
Pratt, a former Parks and Recreation and Lego Movie 2 star, had, Buzzfeed informed late last year, already been “called out” 13 times for being “problematic.” And on Monday, Newsweek covered number 14 and the debate it sparked, writing, “The discussion appeared to stem from the release of a clip from the upcoming movie Thor: Love and Thunder on 18 April, which showed Pratt’s character Star-Lord, also known as Peter Quill, giving his team a pep talk.”
“He was then seen telling them that if ever they felt lost, they should ‘look into the eyes of the people that you love,’ at which point titular character Thor, portrayed by Chris Hemsworth, stares intensely into Star-Lord’s eyes,” Newsweek continues (clip below).
“The clip sparked a strong reaction among fans, some of whom pointed out that Star-Lord had been portrayed as bisexual in a 2020 edition of the Guardians of the Galaxy comic book series,” Newsweek also tells us.
In reality, Pratt attends Zoe Church in Los Angeles, which appears cut from Joel Osteen cloth (aka designer religion). The actor also has made the requisite boilerplate comments about how his church “opens their doors to absolutely everyone,” how he’s “a man who believes that everyone is entitled to love who they want free from the judgement of their fellow man,” and that hate “has no place in my or this world.”
But it may have a place in his critics’ world. As one Twitter “tolerantati” tweeted (below), with the message that Pratt should be replaced with Aquaman star Patrick Wilson (on right):
Another critic complained that Pratt’s church believes in “conversion therapy.”
Fortunately for the actor, both fans and colleagues rallied to his defense. One tweeter wrote, “I’m so lost. Everyone loved him a few years ago then you guys found out he went to church and that’s it?” Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn fired off the following:
So it appears that Pratt won’t be canceled, at least for now. But what about Christianity — over the long term? (Note: “Long” isn’t synonymous with “eternal.”) Plotting our cultural trajectory, as scientists would an asteroid’s to estimate its future locations, paints a grim picture.
In 2015, liberal Damon Linker, befuddled, plaintively asked, “Why do so many [fellow] liberals despise Christianity?” Linker cited two telling examples. One concerned how some liberals were unhappy about “the prevalence of missionary doctors and nurses in Africa and their crucial role in treating those suffering from Ebola” — even when they vow not to proselytize. Linker cited one leftist who actually wanted to institute “a separation of ‘religion and health care.’”
The other involved a small Christian school north of Boston named Gordon College, which faced the possibility of having its accreditation revoked, a possible death sentence for an educational institution. And why?
Because it had “chosen to enforce a ‘life and conduct statement’ that forbids ‘homosexual practice’ on campus,” explained Linker. It didn’t matter that Gordon’s standards also prohibited fornication and other types of sexual immorality; that it didn’t provide a special homosexuality carve-out and recognize “LGBTQ” privilege made it cancellation-worthy (as if it would even be possible to say “Homosexual behavior is peachy-keen. But fornication? You’d better not do that!”)
But now, seven years further down the woke rabbit hole, it’s not just orthodox-like (and sometimes “lite”) Christian orders and institutions in the crosshairs, but also anyone who ever dared have an association with them.
As for Linker, he lamented the loss of a “liberalism of pluralism” and said that we should accept all “human good rooted in traditions and experiences that transcend liberal modernity — provided they don’t clash in a fundamental way with liberal ideals and institutions.” But there’s the rub.
What are “liberal ideals” (or conservative ones, for that matter)?
Many liberals today — or leftists, as some prefer calling them — claim to believe that even just opposing homosexual behavior, or spreading a religion that historically has, hurts people and society. In other words, current “liberal” ideals, insofar as they can be called ideals as opposed to provisional preferences, are different from Linker’s “liberal” ideals.
In contrast, there are those who believe that encouraging sexual immorality, or supporting institutions that do, hurts people and society. And insofar as one of these sides wins the culture, it will stigmatize the loser via social laws (and perhaps governmental ones). This is because stigmas are the corollaries of values; to the extent that something is valued as a positive, what contradicts it will be devalued as a negative.
The moral of this story is that taking a “live and let live” philosophy to an extreme where one disengages from the social battles (“Just focus on taxes and the economy!”) ensures you’ll lose the culture. And if you don’t control the culture, the culture will control you.
Also assured is that the Left won’t stop attacking what “is” (Christianity, tradition, etc.) until what “can’t go on” no longer does. This is because, not believing in Truth and thus detached from its guidance, liberals are in thrall to their animal nature, their passions and appetites. And this is why they ever attack Christianity:
Its very purpose is to constrain animal passions and appetites.
In truth, liberalism is not an ideology, but a process: movement toward moral disorder. And just as with gangrene, it can’t be met halfway. Excision is necessary.
