Pride Month is difficult to avoid.
Whether you are logging onto your Hulu account, listening to the radio, or shopping online, it seems that many organizations support June’s dedication to same-sex marriage and transgenderism.
Navigating the cultural support of this issue as a Christian can be complex and practically challenging. It is important to understand why Christians cannot support Pride Month, and to be able to explain the reasons charitably and logically. To do this, we must use language precisely to speak about true love.
The Christian understanding of marriage is rooted in Biblical clarity. God created everything. God created human beings in his image and likeness. We are made for communion, and we are given the capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In these ways, we can see that we are made like God.
God created human beings as male and female. Human sexuality is reciprocal—the male body only makes sense within the context of the female body and vice versa. Man can give his entire body to woman, and woman can receive him completely. Man receives by giving, and woman gives by receiving.
When husband and wife join together in this way, new life can emerge. The love between a husband and wife is so great that it can result in other human beings—completely new persons made in the image and likeness of God.
While most people understand these realities intuitively, few have ever reflected on them deeply and lack language to explain them. The Catholic Church uses the language of the “unitive” and “procreative” aspects of marriage. Marriage must be between a man and a woman because only two members of the opposite sex can truly unite with one another physically for the sexual act. Marriage is built on the unitive nature of the human body, which is divided into male and female.
Marriage is also founded upon a couple’s distinctive embrace, which has the unique capacity for procreation. A simple understanding of the human reproductive organs reveals that it is only possible for a man and a woman to have a sexual embrace. Two men or two women cannot. For this reason, two men or two women cannot have children together. Procreation is impossible between two people of the same sex.
This evidence is based on biology, not bigotry.
Such a distinction is critical in today’s world, where any opposition to a person’s feelings is met with great disdain.
The human person is male and female. Male and female come together to form new life, and marriage is the God-authored way new life is meant to be created and cared for. Speaking these truths helps people better understand their identities and what fulfills them.
One of the most famous articulations of the Christian view of sexuality is that of Pope St. John Paul II in his groundbreaking “Theology of the Body.”
In it he says, we “can deduce that man became the image of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons, which man and woman form from the very beginning. The function of the image is that of mirroring the one who is the model, of reproducing its own prototype. Man becomes an image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion.”
This “constitutes, perhaps, the deepest theological aspect of everything one can say about man. … On all this, right from the beginning, the blessing of fruitfulness descended.”
Nothing about the Christian view of sexuality is intended to offend those who experience same-sex attraction or know and love someone who is civilly “married” to someone of the same sex.
A Christian response to Pride Month must be concerned with speaking the truth in love. Truth is the mind’s conformity to reality. Love is willing the good of the other. Living in accordance with the reality of our bodies can cultivate a healthier nation full of healthier marriages.
The healthiest and truest context for the family is reliance on God, who is truth and love. When we ask God for the strength to love those closest to us, He will empower us to impact their lives and spread His love—no matter what month it is.
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