Can Evangelicals Ever Tolerate Gay Marriage?

By Rob Asghar

What do astrology, watching movies, charging interest, alcohol, gambling, dancing and divorce have in common?

All have been taboo at some point in Christianity-dominated societies of the past two millennia, but all are accommodated or even celebrated by American Christians today. And there is no philosophical or moral reason that gay marriage will not join their ranks within the next 20 years.

Culturally conservative American Christians are more freewheeling than they may seem to outsiders. Fareed Zakaria, in insightful commentaries in recent years on the rise of give-the-people-what-they want democracy, observed that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson gained great fame not by demanding that Christians live their lives differently, but by sanctifying the lives they were already inclined to live.

Yet such leaders simultaneously cultivated a sense of cultural superiority within their all-too-comfortable flocks by finding other easy targets to censure, be they hippies or drug users or welfare mothers. Zakaria predicted that gays and Muslims would increasingly be the demons of the post-9/11 era among evangelicals, and damned if he wasn't right.

Read more at The Huffington Post...