Not long ago a Christian mom told me her daughter had come home from Bible study feeling terribly relieved, having learned that “the Bible says nothing negative about gay marriage.” The mom “freaked,” she told me; she “didn’t know what to say.”

The Bible clearly and repeatedly identifies homosexual relationships as sinful, and Christian kids all over the country don’t like that it says so. It’s hard to blame them. As long as we Christians stick with our faith’s historic stand on sexual morality, the word on the street — and in social media, in school, in music, on film and TV — is that Christianity is morally bankrupt; disastrously wrong; evil, even. Christians who won’t swing with the mood of the times are labeled homophobic, intolerant, bigoted, anti-equality, anti-civil rights, haters, stuck on the wrong side of history, and are accused of harming gays and lesbians by our disapproval, supposedly twisting Christ’s call to love all humanity to suit our prejudices and bask in the judgmental shine of our own hypocritical self-righteousness.

And I’m only getting started.

We’re said to be confused about God’s approval 0f all committed loving relationships, and the goodness of same-sex parenting. Worse, we actually like the idea of discriminating against people who didn’t even choose to be gay. And besides, “God made me this way so how could it be wrong?” We’re imposing our beliefs on them when we ought to just keep out of their bedrooms.

That’s the all-too-common spin. Intimidated yet?

These messages don’t usually come at us all at once the way I’ve listed them here. They’re more insidious than that. They pop up here, there and everywhere, peppering the air, instructing us in every way possible to believe that historic Bible-believing Christianity is backwards and immoral. The response from Christians too often has been to duck or run.

Some of us hide by enclosing ourselves in a self-contained Christian media culture. Others, unable to escape so easily, decide to run from the faith instead. This is particularly true of young people, whose world is never well sealed off from this kind of influence.

Don’t Be Bluffed. Don’t Be Cowed

Duck or run: either response is misinformed, because the whole thing is nothing but a barrage of blanks! Or, to switch the metaphor, it’s like a brood of snakes attacking you out of a 3-D movie screen: terrifying until you take off the 3-D glasses and see that the snakes are really stuck on the two-dimensional canvas of the silver screen.

Sure, it seems like something. That’s because the other side hasn’t been stupid (wrong, yes, stupid, no). I have done a fair amount of work as a ministry strategist; and speaking strictly as a strategist I look at the pro-gay plan and I’m impressed at its brilliance. There’s no denying how skillfully they have bluffed us into retreat.

Here’s a sample of what I mean.They say we’re mean to identify the homosexual lifestyle as sinful and damaging, because tolerating everybody’s lifestyle choices is the way to be nice and tolerant. But would it be mean to urge a person not to cross the street on red light at a Manhattan intersection crazy with rush hour traffic? Of course not. If you are convinced something is spiritually and even physically harmful, the nice thing to do, the loving thing, is to clearly identify the harmful behavior and warn anyone willing to listen. So the bullet claiming it isn’t “nice” to identify homosexuality as sinful and destructive turns out to be a blank.

The line of attack has another basic problem. Christians are supposedly haters for not supporting the gay and lesbian agenda, and “Hate is not a family value,” right?

But think about that for a moment. The claim seems to be that we’re haters because we disagree with others’ moral opinions and their chosen identity. But they disagree just as strongly with our moral opinions and our chosen identity as Christians. If that kind of disagreement were really hatred, then there would be no difference: It would mean they hate us as much as we do them.

Now, I don’t think most of the people who disagree with us hate us. That’s not my point. My point is that they’re calling us haters based on logic that would mean they themselves are “haters,” a conclusion they would never agree to. When your own logic takes you to a place you know to be false, it’s time to reexamine the logical track directing your train of logic. Something’s been mislaid.

Now, it’s still possible that some people bearing the name “Christian” could be hateful, but to tar us all with that label is nothing but stereotyping; and last I checked, most pro-gay and lesbian people say they don’t believe in stereotyping.

As for “hate is not a family value,” well, hating destructive behavior that our loving Creator condemns, actually that’s as much a family value as hating to see your kid reaching to put his palm down on a hot burner. Loving our fellow sinners but hating sin is a “family value” because it’s very difficult to hold families together without it

So again, the hate charge is empty — a blank.

I could go on. I cover a couple dozen more of these empty attacks in my book Critical Conversations: A Christian Parents’ Guide to Discussing Homosexuality With Teens. Are we against civil rights? No. Are we imposing our religious beliefs on others? Hardly! We’re exercising our rights to free speech in a democracy, just the same as everyone else.

Every single gay-activist charge against Christianity is empty. Yes, the shots make a loud bang and can easily start a stampede, but only as long as we process them strictly on an emotional level like so many unthinking cattle. They’re aimed at the feeling gut, not the thinking mind.

Stand Your Ground

Our best strategy, then, is to pause long enough to reflect calmly and objectively on these charges. In some cases it helps to search out some background information; for example, what does the research really say about the effects of gay parenting? (Answer: practically nothing so far. Any supposed positive finding is being reported almost a whole generation too soon into this grand social “experiment” called same-sex parenting. Meanwhile there are reams of solid research supporting parenting by a mom and a dad.)

Parents and youth ministers in particular need to pay attention to all this. Calm, objective reflection isn’t the strong suit of youth. Christian kids are being picked off everywhere by this assault, just because they don’t know how to defend against it. They need your help.

Now, maybe the idea of talking with kids about this seems uncomfortable. It might look like a “perfect storm” of awkward parent-child (or pastor-youth) discussion topics. But if you don’t have these conversations, you can be sure somebody else will, and they won’t be speaking words of wisdom and truth.

It doesn’t have to be that hard anyway. When I wrote Critical Conversations it wasn’t just to deflect the baseless barrage. It was to give adults the tools they need to have positive, productive conversations with kids about these things. I’m confident that most parents’ relationships with their kids can be strengthened through these important conversations.