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John Piper and Satan: Equating Homosexuality with Enslaving and Raping Girls

satan

The supernatural monster who orchestrates the kidnapping, enslaving, and thousand-fold drugging, selling, raping, and killing of girls around the globe, is the same one who has masterminded the murderous cultural delusion — from the highest court to the lowest porn-flick — that the practice of sodomy is delightful, not deadly. John Piper, August 3, 2015

Charismatic Calvinist and Christian hedonist John Piper believes Satan, a fictional being from the Christian Bible, is out to deceive and destroy the masses. But praise be to Jesus, we have Piper, former pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, watching out for us and ever ready to let us know what this fictional Satan is up to.

Like many fundamentalists, Piper was enraged over the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage. What this decision did was flush out the homophobes and bigots for all to see. Unable to contain their outrage, preachers such as Piper expose for all the world to see the hate that lies underneath their theological beliefs:

Lie: “. . . the practice of sodomy is delightful, not deadly.” Behind all the relational descriptions of so-called same-sex marriage is the unspoken fact of “anal or oral copulation,” and in particular, “copulation with a member of the same sex.” That’s the dictionary.com definition of sodomy.

Someone will say: Choosing that word signifies your belligerence toward people with same-sex attraction. No, it signifies my hatred for what can destroy people with same-sex attraction. What destroys people is not same-sex attraction, but the lie that same-sex copulation is delightful, and not deadly.

What is truly belligerent is the promotion of shameful acts as beautiful acts. Belligerent is the right word, because the Bible says that you should “abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11). So those who encourage the indulgence of these passions (whatever they are) are making war on souls — they are literally belligerent.

The word sodomy has two advantages: it refers to the act of same-sex copulation, not same-sex orientation; and it still carries the stigma of shamefulness. Those who love people with same-sex attraction should want to preserve the stigma of shameful practices which destroy them — just as we should try to preserve the stigma of stealing and perjury and kidnapping, and fornication, and adultery. It is a gracious thing when a culture puts signs in front of destructive behaviors that read: Don’t go there; it is shameful.

…Lie: “. . . the practice of sodomy is delightful, not deadly.” The second word in this sentence that may be twisted is “practice.” When the Bible links “men who practice homosexuality” with “thieves,” and says that neither will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9–10), it is important to note two crucial things.

One is that the warning is not sounded against those who are tempted to steal, but who practice stealing — thieves. Similarly the warning is sounded not against those who are tempted to practice homosexuality, but against those who actually do practice it. To be sure, there are all kinds of inward heart-lusts that are sinful, but the focus here is on the practice…

…Lie: “. . . the practice of sodomy is delightful, not deadly.” The third word in this sentence that may be twisted is “deadly.” I am not referring to AIDS or to hate-crimes against people with same-sex attraction. I hate hate-crimes, and I would love to see a cure for AIDS. I am not talking about the painful fallout of sodomy in this world — as real as that is (Romans 1:27).

I am talking about “the second death.” All unforgiven and unforsaken sin is deadly in this sense. It leads to the second death. “As for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death” (Revelation 21:8)…

While Piper would like to be thought of as a man who desires to love homosexuals all the way to Jesus, his insistence on using the word “sodomy” reveals what he really thinks about homosexuals. He knows this word is patently offensive, yet he uses it anyway. How then is John Piper any different from the Phelps clan and Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas? Just because Piper doesn’t stand on a street corner with a sign that says God Hates Fags doesn’t mean he disagrees with the sentiment.

Piper is a Calvinist. The Calvinist God has the world divided into two categories: elect and non-elect, saved and lost. Since Romans 1 states that homosexual behavior is a sign of a reprobate mind, why not just come out and say God Hates Fags? Instead, Piper pretends to have love for sodomite souls, deeply desiring to see them come to Jesus:

…In other words, not all practice of sin excludes from the kingdom of God. “All sins will be forgiven the children of man” (Mark 3:28). The sins that exclude from heaven are the sins we keep on pursuing without regarding them as God-dishonoring, and without seeking forgiveness through Jesus, and without making war on them as the enemies of our souls….

…For all those who trust in Christ, Satan is disarmed (Colossians 2:15), because the only thing that condemns us in God’s court is unforgiven sin. And in Christ, sins are forgiven (Acts 10:43). Satan’s accusations against Christians come to nothing. “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect?” (Romans 8:33).

Therefore, we have the happiest and most horrible news in the world. In Christ there is light and freedom and life. Outside there is darkness and bondage and death. Failure to name the beauty of the light and the dreadfulness of the darkness is an abdication of truth and love…

According to Piper, there will be no homosexuals in Heaven. Since our eternal destiny is predestined by God and no homosexual shall inherit the kingdom of God, doesn’t this mean God predetermined that the homosexual would have same-sex attraction?

Piper may say he loves the sodomite, but his theology tells a different story. Surely Piper would agree that the Christian should love what God loves and hate what God hates. Does God hate homosexuals? Does God hate same-sex anal sex but not heterosexual anal sex? Does God hate same-sex oral sex but not heterosexual oral sex? Why does God hate the one and not the other?

Here’s what I think. John Piper is a 77-year-old man who can’t wrap his fundamentalist mind around two men (or women) loving each other and desiring to have sex. Like many men of his generation, the very thought of homosexual sex repulses him, and since it does this means God also must be repulsed by it too. The Bible gives Piper cover for hating what he cannot or will not understand.

Like others of his ilk, Piper thinks “sodomy” is akin to “kidnapping, enslaving, and thousand-fold drugging, selling, raping, and killing of girls.” Here’s an educated man who can’t qualitatively tell the difference between two people of the same sex loving each other and enslaving and raping girls. I am at a loss as to how to respond to such stupidity.

Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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13 Comments

  1. Avatar
    amimental

    The more distance I get from crazy religious people like this guy, the more disgusted I am by their obsessions.
    Why does he care what’s in your pants or my pants or everyone else’s pants and who gets to touch it?

    Why does he worry about what’s going on in the bedrooms/back seats/back doors (LOL) of fellow humans? What a bizarre fixation.

  2. Avatar
    GeoffT

    The problem with Piper and his ilk is lack of empathy. If he can’t personally feel something, or engage with it, then he distances himself from it. I can’t feel what homosexual people feel, anymore than I can properly understand how a woman can be attracted to a man, but I accept its reality and embrace it. It’s part of our existence, of what makes us human. People like Piper are, actually, a subset of humanity.

    • Avatar
      Kel

      I think you are onto something here, Geoff.

      I once followed an online row on a “gay Christian” blog. Some of the “same-sex-atrracted” Christians realised, through personal experience, that their homosexuality is so much larger than the mere act of sodomy/anal sex. It is a pattern of (romantic) attraction. Therefore they admit that some long term gay relationships do exhibit the virtue of love, loyalty, and sacrifice. Even though they still can’t have it. But they are asking their fellow Christians to acknowledge love whenever they find it.

      And of course, this doesn’t fly well with many other Christian combox commenters. These Christians – mostly heterosexual – are adamant that there is no such thing as love in a homosexual relationship. Why? Because it must all be about lust! The Bible – “my interpretation of course” – says it, I believe it, that settles it.

      Don’t you know, a heterosexual Christian with a Bible has a more accurate knowledge of the inner life of a homosexual than the deluded homosexual themself?

      I think the world might be a better place if there are more people like you and Bruce and the commenters on this site. Those with more imagination and empathy.

  3. Avatar
    Sage

    Bruce may be at a lost as to how to respond, but it probably comes as no surprise to anyone here that I am not.

    Piper is a bigoted, hateful, judgemental, pompous, small-minded man who uses religion to mask himself from accountability. After all, god says, all he is doing is repeating the message. He is the living, breathing, talking example of the white washed tomb that his own religious text calls out, all in nice, bright letters for all to see and read.

    The sad thing is that here, in his own writings, he admits that his god makes some men gay, because Piper says its OK to be gay, just don’t act on it… whatever that means. He is so hung up on sex that he thinks a gay relationship is only about where a cock is inserted. How can someone be so sexually focused and brainless as to think the ONLY thing that makes a person gay is who and how they fuck? If I am wrong and god is real, then god must be repeatedly banging their head on their golden desk every time Piper says something this stupid.

    It just amazes me that he tries to compromise on this point, saying yeah, god can’t or won’t make the newly saved gay man into a heterosexual. No, all god can do is ask the guy not to fuck anyone. Piper compromises because he knows people are born gay, and since he cannot deny this fact, he has to find a way to make it match his particular religious belief, so that he can still help the gay man get “saved’. Otherwise, there is no hope for the gay people.

    Never mind that once people like him get their hooks into a gay man and drag him deep into the darkness of their church, they will turn on the never ending judgement, guilt, and manipulation to destroy the mans self worth and leave them quivering in the corner of the church, begging to be relieved of abomination of sexual deviance and hating their own very essence.

    I also want to know why he is so hyper-focused on gay men. All of this hate filled diatribe is against homosexuals who, it appears in his mind, are men. His focus on anal sex just emphasizes this point. I suspect he finds the whole concept of the intimacy of gay men as repulsive. I suspect he feels the same even if it is as innocent as kissing or touching. He obviously has a problem with male intimacy, which I found to be very common in the misogynistic part of fundamentalist christian belief.

    Also, apparently lesbianism is ok? At no point does he make this same hateful attack on gay women. Does god view them differently? Oh wait.. maybe two women being intimate is less disgusting? Is using a strap on or similar devices ok because no anal sex is involved? Apparently god does not have similar hatred for lesbian relationships, so Piper just gives them a pass.

    AND – AIDs is a STD. We all know, or should know, that there are many ways that AIDS spreads. It does not require two or more gay men. In fact, it doesn’t even require intimate contact. But here we are in 2023, with this bigoted nitwit still inferring that this is the “gay mans disease”. I heard that from so many pulpits that I lost count, but this troglodyte religious nut is still trotting out the old, tired, judgey, hateful lies.

    What a neanderthal.

    • Avatar
      MJ Lisbeth

      Sage—I think the reason why folks like Piper are so focused on male homosexuality is that they read Leviticus 20:13 in a completely literal way. They seem to believe that because women lying with women isn’t mentioned, it isn’t really a sin or doesn’t rise to the level of “abomination “ as gay male sex or that women just aren’t important enough (except as incubators) to make examples of.

      Interestingly, I have heard clergy members and scholars use essentially this line of reasoning to say that being transgender isn’t actually a sin because, contrary to common beliefs, a trans woman is actually a woman and, therefore not a man in an article of women’s clothing, as per Deuteronomy 22:5.

      (An imam who advised Ayatollah Khomieni said basically the same thing about the Qu’ran: It condemns same-sex relationships but says nothing about transgenders. This, ironically, has led to more gender-reassignment surgeries being performed in Iran than in any other country except Thailand! Some claim that gays are forced into the procedure “for their own good: Homosexuality is punishable by death.)

  4. Avatar
    Kel

    Piper, as many other Evangelicals who are now forced to accept that “same-sex-attraction” is not a choice, tries to focus on “the act of sodomy” in order to sound kinder to those inside his circle with this “temptation”. It is as if he wanted to say, “I am tempted by different things than you are, and I am not allowed to do sinful things I desire to either, so it is not a discrimination if I tell you that you can’t act on your same sex desire.”

    And yet, this very same man once said that the more prominent a male leader is – always a man in his theology – the more “heterosexuality” is expected of him. So he is trying to say that a gay man is still somehow socially, if not spiritually, inferior. Just look at the most prominent “same-sex-attracted-but-not-gay” people in the American Evangelical circle, like Christopher Yuan, Sam Alberry, and Wesley Hill, and you’ll see that they are always quick to confess their “brokeness”. I don’t think heterosexual pastors (always men of course) are ever required to be self-effacing. If any they love to act as God’s representatives – “touch not Mine annointed”.

  5. Avatar
    Dave

    Piper is revulsed by the mere notion of gay sex but a lake of fire and eternal torture for the non elect is perfectly justified. What kind of sick mind thinks this way? And he has thousands of adherents who nod and say amen.

  6. Avatar
    Darcy

    “The Bible gives Piper cover for hating what he cannot or will not understand.” Maybe that’s one reason to learn to quote a “holy” book. We all need ways to handle what we can’t understand. Refer up one level and claim that Father or the boss doesn’t like it?

  7. Avatar
    Quoheleth

    “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.”

    Ezekiel 16:49-50.

    Maybe Piper reads a different Bible than I do, but I don’t see anything there about oral or anal sex. In fact, it sounds more like Republicans and white Evangelicals. Maybe they’re the sodomites.

  8. Avatar
    MJ Lisbeth

    Piper is just employing more mental gymnastics to rationalize “love the sin, hate the sinner”—which, of course, is just a way of not admitting his hate.

  9. Avatar
    ObstacleChick

    For Piper and a lot of other right-wing religious people, the cruelty is part of the point. Of course, they don’t perceive it as cruelty, they perceive it as loving correction of sin.

    I have a hard time understanding why right-wing religious people are so obsessed with people’s personal consensual sex lives and their gender identity. Literally, if I am not trying to have sex with or reproduce with a particular person, NONE of that is my business nor does it affect me. My father-in-law can’t seem to ever have a nice call or visit with us without bringing up gender culture war bullshit, which we quickly and effectively shut down in various ways (science and data based with a bit of humanity thrown in). It happened again Saturday when he came to visit to attend a soccer game. He brought it up twice, and my husband shut him down with data to which FIL had no response. The month before FIL tried to bring up trans athletes, and I told him that as an athlete myself who competes at a fairly decent age group level that it’s a complex scientific subject that shouldn’t be reduced to outrage blanket statements.

    A lot of commenter have made some great points here, thank you!

  10. Avatar
    Reverend Al Turner

    Editor’s note: I am going to approve this miscreant’s comment so readers can see how vile some Christians can be. This so-called Christian has left dozens of comments, using numerous fake names and email addresses. With rare exception, I delete his comments. Not only is he a homophobe, he is a racist and biogot. He loves writing prison rape stories.

    Jamal owned a filling station outside Boonflap county one day the grand wizard came by and kept looking at Jamal and Jamal finally said “leave on outta here you hateful bigot!”

    GW: give me that gas nozzle then he sprayed Jamal down

    JAMAL: (GASPS )

    Then he set Jamal on fire….. 😭

    JAMAL: AHHHHH!!!! PUT ME OUT! PUT ME OUT!!!!! AHHHHH! (Collapses)

    A week later….

    PASTOR BRIGGS: (crying) did anyone know what Jamal believed?

    DEACON: Catholic I think. Turned atheist homosexual….

    PASTOR BRIGGS: OH NO! (SOBS) 😭

    • Avatar
      Kel

      Such a nasty comment. Even as a non-American, I could tell how this is blatantly racist. (“White”=good, “black”=bad).

      Funnily enough, on my phone, I keep (an apparently famous) picture of KKK members standing in front of a church whilst a huge “Jesus Saves” banner flies over them. Some conservative (Calvinist) Christians from my country love Trump. I wish these people would realise that the most devout of the so-called white Evangelicals are not a fan of racial outsiders either.

      “The Church’s one foundation” is honoured in its exception. I nearly laughed when I first discovered that some Christians hold a prayer week for Christian unity. They can’t even agree on the right way to pray or worship.

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