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You may wonder what I refer to, or perhaps not, but I am actually writing in response to Doug Wilson’s, “No Forgiveness at All for the Pasty White Orcs of Northern European Descent.” It was some good preaching, some good venting. You can be wrong six ways past Sunday but if you’re at least being honest, speaking what’s on your heart, I tend to appreciate that sort of thing.

So what’s my beef? The post is completely devoid of empathy and too busy licking it’s own wounds to even consider the needs of others. Perish the thought of ever actually listening to anyone else. Like, in spite of all the politics and hysteria, racism is actually a real thing. People are sinners, the world is broken, and so logically one can conclude people are often going to be hurt by our poor behavior. Being victimized by others is a real thing.

There is this big, huge, difference between “count it all joy,” when we suffer for Christ’s sake, and a bully saying “you just need to shut up, consider it all joy, and be more forgiving.“

So the most recent problematic issue at Christ Church just hit the public record, “Christ Church deacon indicted for child porn.” This is the latest of a series of issues over the years involving the abuse of women and/or children. This particular church is not much different than any other, or our public schools, or our foster system for that matter. Once again, we live in a broken world full of broken people. Stuff happens. It’s ugly.

The problem being there is no accountability, and by accountability I mean “no caring.” There is no concern for the victims, no empathy for their suffering, no recognition that they even exist, only compassion about the embarrassment this man and his family might be suffering. Also, empathy around the potential legal implications he may now have to live with.

In fact, Wilson wrote a statement that says in part, “With regard to the other surrounding sins by which Alex disqualified himself, humiliated his family, and embarrassed his church, he has sought our forgiveness, and we have extended it. At the same time, there are terrible real world consequences for his family, as well as for him, and we regard this entire tragic episode as one more casualty in the unconscionable pornification of our culture.”

So once again we have a hapless casualty, an innocent victim of the pornification of our culture? The fact that real live children are the actual victims of child pornography, the fact that children have been commodified, exploited, and sexually abused, doesn’t even register. In fact, those victims don’t even exist. Out of sight, out of mind. We don’t care, because our loyalty, our priority is the suffering and restoration of this poor, sad, “casualty of the culture.”

I write of my thirst for justice sometimes, my desire for vengeance, and often people falsely assume that is somehow related to having the bad guys drawn and quartered or burnt at the stake, but that isn’t the secret desire of my heart at all. I just long for the invisible to be seen. I long for them to just exist. I want us to matter, I want our pain to be acknowledged. Just us, justice. Not sitting with the perp in court, not driving down to the jail to pick him up, not sending him off to treatment, not arranging a chaperone so he can go to church, but, just us. Justice.

I want the church at large to care about all these invisible victims of abuse, with the same enthusiasm and empathy we show around forgiving and restoring perpetrators. A sweet man once told me I should spit in one hand and wish in the other and just see which one fills up first. He wasn’t wrong.

That is what lurks at the heart of our cultural divide, a tone deaf church that just doesn’t care. It’s really not about abortion or skin color or wokeness, or whether we should believe all women. It’s about not even existing, not being seen, being rendered completely invisible. It’s really just about how all animals are equal except some are clearly more equal than others.

The thing is, if you genuinely want life to matter in this country, than the suffering of others has to matter, and it has to matter more than your hurt feelings or your status, or your alleged reputation.

So now if one those children producing the porn your deacon indulged in gets pregnant, let’s be sure to lecture them on the alleged sanctity of life. We can follow it all up with some passionate articles about the qualifications for male elders, while publicly referring to women on facebook and twitter as, “pushy broads, twinkies in tight tops, or waifs with manga eyes.”

Then maybe we can all laugh, have a beer, and lament the “unconscionable pornification of our culture.”