Church and Chicken

As pretty much everyone in the country knows by now, the president of Chick-Fil-A had an interview with a Baptist organization in which he stated support for the "the biblical definition of the family unit" and made other statements essentially rejecting the notion of same-sex marriages. Apparently the LGBT rights lobby, with the help of those friendly to them in the media, decided to make a test case out of this, to the point of getting a few big city mayors to make rash statements about how they would try to keep CFA out of their cities. So someone (it might have been Mike Huckabee, but he certainly played a key role in organizing it) decided to respond with an Appreciation Day: basically an eat-in. Well, CFA was swamped, and media from all over reported on the crush of people, albeit often grudgingly. A LGBT "kiss-in" protest, by comparison, made little impact.

So what does it all mean for us in the church?

Matthew Paul Turner, I think somewhat inadvisedly, titled his analysis "5 Reasons Why the Church Failed Yesterday. I think perhaps it would be more accurate to talk about how the churches failed, given that different churches reacted in contradiction to each other. I do think that Turner is partly right in his third point: this was not about people, but about issues. But beyond that, it's also about the institutions which exemplify these issues, and here is where I think it is more profitable to focus. It is the done thing, from the liberal side, to throw around the word "hate" a lot, the better to identify the opposition with those who tied Matthew Shepard to a fence (and yes, it was only a day or so before I saw that connection made). It seems to me to be more about anger than hate, and I think the target isn't so much homosexuals as it is the liberal establishment that's pushing this cause. Which isn't to say that there weren't a lot of people in this who, put on the spot, would not have strong negative reaction to homosexuals as a class.

But the thing that really lit this off was how the MSM and the mayors jumped behind a boycott. That set off American antiestablishment reactions in a big way. The message that should be taken away from this is how intense the resentment is against being lectured over this issue, not about how much America hates homosexuals. The liberal establishment put their influence on the line, and failed spectacularly.

Obviously the Episcopal Church ended up on the losing side of this. Oh sure, we got to indulge in our feelings or righteous persecution, but we had no effect on the course of the event. The usual Episcopal liberal voices said the usual things about how hate-filled the sandwich eaters were, and maybe it's just me, be there was at least as much anger expressed there as in a thousand chicken sandwich lunches. Outside of our own little world, nobody cared. We got dismissed as just another bunch of liberals, subspecies a bunch of heretics who've pretty much forsaken the faith.