Ingvild Halderaker of the Christian Democratic Party (KrF) and Tonje-Martine Nerdal of the Progress Party (FrP) have written a joint opinion piece in which they criticise an organisation’s campaign to stop Pride flags from being flown at schools.
They condemn the Christian Resource Centre’s (Kristent Ressurssenter) fundraising campaign against Pride flags in schools in an article in Avisa Oslo. Halderaker represents a party that has “Christian” in its name.
It is a good opportunity to be reminded of what that actually means.
The two politicians argue that Pride is a celebration of community and diversity. They maintain that Christian organisations opposing flag-flying at schools are violating “Christian values such as love of neighbour and the inviolable dignity of the human person”. This is a reformulation of Christian doctrine that neither the Bible nor the apostolic tradition would recognise.
Let us begin with the obvious. The New Testament is crystal clear on this matter. Paul writes in Romans 1: “Therefore God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.”
In First Corinthians 6, homosexual acts are explicitly listed among those things that prevent people from inheriting the Kingdom of God. First Timothy 1 repeats this. Jesus himself defines marriage in Matthew 19 as the union between a man and a woman, as established from the beginning.
These are not marginal texts. They are the foundation of Christian sexual ethics for two thousand years. In the Catholic Church, in the Orthodox churches, and among the Reformers. Neither Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, nor Calvin would have had any difficulty placing the message of the Pride movement outside Christian doctrine.
Photo: Gorm Kallestad / NTB
What, then, does Halderaker mean by “Christian values”? She lists love of neighbour and human dignity. Both are biblical concepts. But love of neighbour is not the same thing as affirmation. Jesus met the sinner with love, but said: “Go, and sin no more.” Halderaker has reduced love of neighbour to a ritual of affirmation; the Christian Resource Centre has not.
The Christian Resource Centre has raised more than one million kroner to prevent Pride flags from being flown at public schools. Halderaker and Nerdal believe this is a misallocation of priorities “in a world marked by war and conflict”. They continue: “It is remarkable that some people mobilise for such a major public campaign when there are so many more important things on which to spend time and resources.”
It is far more remarkable that Halderaker and Nerdal so clearly do not understand the message of the Bible.
School is an arena for children. Children are not sexual beings. Pride is, whatever one may think of the movement, a sexual and political statement. The flying of rainbow flags above primary schools is not a cultural inevitability. It is a political act. Parents have the right to react.
Halderaker writes that Pride should be a month for “community and solidarity”. That is a troubling statement from a KrF politician.
The Church recognises one true fellowship, and it is found in Christ, not beneath the rainbow flag.
KrF has a name to defend. That entails more than agreeing with the Green Party wing of the Labour Party on symbolic issues. It entails holding fast to what is written in the book upon which the party says it bases its policies.
If that is too much to ask, then the party should consider changing its name.