Ten Feet High and Risin'
Douglas WilsonBlog&Mablog
Lord willing, and if the crik don’t rise, I want to write a short series of posts to help Christians understand the nature of the bigotry-avalanche coming our way. Not only so, but I want to explain how the success of the bigotry depends upon us sharing certain key assumptions with our confused masters of bastinado. They wield the stick, but we hold our feet up for them.
Not to be coy, I am writing about the impossibility of genuine secularism. Secularism only works as a veneer on a Christian culture. In short, “secularism” is fully capable of taking credit for the magnanimity shown by a Christian people, but when those Christians and their root assumptions are successfully herded into their assigned ghetto, and the central altar in the high cathedral really is an altar to that trousered ape called man, it is then that we discover how mean and petty and nasty the jackbooted totalitolerant actually are.
First, so that we have a little grist for our mill, let us take a look at what Airbnb is now doing. Excuse me—I meant to say the Airbnb community. Suppose you want to go stay somewhere, and you log on to their most welcoming website in order to make some reservations somewhere. You will now run into this.
Before you continueIf you click on decline, you should be aware that you are not making reservations anywhere. If you click on decline, any previous reservations you had made will be canceled for you. You pathetic waste of skin.
Whether it’s your first time using Airbnb or you’re one of our original travelers, please commit to respecting and including everyone in the Airbnb community.
I agree to treat everyone in the Airbnb community—regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age—with respect, and without judgment or bias”
Accept button Decline button
Just in case the ironies were lost on you, they go on to explain how nice they are being . . .
Why did Airbnb create this commitment?The italics are mine. The bold is also mine, and is meant to indicate a knowing chortle.
This commitment is an important step towards creating a global community where everyone can truly belong. Discrimination prevents hosts, guests, and their families from feeling included and welcomed, and we have no tolerance for it . . .
It continues on, into the fog. We must at least consider the possibility that you might not know what they meant by “regardless of . . . religion.” When they eventually publish a long list of religions that you may not discriminate against, you will find that your religion is not on that list. Why would it be? You troglodyte.
So then, I would now like to invite you to please notice what a screaming howler this is. A confession of faith is being required of all their customers.
At this juncture we will be reminded by our libertarian brethren that if Airbnb is a private business, then they should have the right to be as bigoted as they want to be. This is exactly correct. Airbnb has every right to refuse service to icky people, as they define icky people. The problem is our previous battles. Our problem is that they are doing this in a climate which simultaneously prohibits Christians from setting up a competitive business to theirs, one which would allow bed and breakfast operators to decline service to those who were going to engage in fornication. They have freedom of association, and we do not.
“And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name” (Rev. 13:17).
You may not do business on your own, in other words, and you must do business here with us, in additional other words, and you must sign this confession of faith before you continue.
Our previous battles involved evangelicals who were being pressured to perform services that went against their consciences. I have written about those issues elsewhere. But now a place of business is refusing to provide services to people on account of opinions that they were keeping entirely to themselves. Those views are being challenged at the door. An artificial situation is being created in order to flush out retrograde Christian conviction. We cannot tell by looking at you whether or not you have pure thoughts, and so every customer will now have to fill out the pure thoughts questionnaire.
If you flipped this around, the scenario would have to be something like an evangelical baker who refused to make a birthday cake for an agnostic because the agnostic would not sign a statement indicating his full-throated agreement with Leviticus 20:13.
And so here it is. We are not dealing with the sinfulness of neutrality, or the tawdriness of neutrality, or the immorality of neutrality. We are up against the impossibility of neutrality. We have gotten to the point where solemn judges are making you draw circles with five corners, and since you cannot do this anymore than they can, you are being required to confess to the desk clerk, at the top of your voice, “Lo! Look upon the pentagramic circle I have drawn? Look and adore!” He is required to agree with you that those are the finest corners he ever saw. You both nod solemnly for the surveillance cameras. “Thank you. Here is your key. We hope you enjoy your stay.”
As we consider the impossibility of neutrality, we should redirect a comment that C.S. Lewis made about a very similar kind of error.
The fact that some people of scientific education cannot by any effort to be taught to see the difficulty, confirms one’s suspicion that we here touch a radical disease in their whole style of thought.That sums it up exactly. “A radical disease in their whole style of thought.” In our next installment, we need to consider how evangelicals are also afflicted with this same radical disease. The disease makes them behave this way, and the disease prevents us from answering it with the horse laugh it deserves.
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