Why Does Charisma Magazine Hate Christians?

The socially conservative tabloid Charisma Magazine asked Why Gays Hate Christians in an article by David Aikman last week.

Gays don’t hate Christians, of course; approximately one-third of U.S. Roman Catholic priests are gay, and one finds similarly disproportionate numbers of gay clergy and staff in other denominations.

But Aikman, a history professor at the evangelical Patrick Henry College, doesn’t let simple facts get in the way of his argument. First, Aikman equates antigay evangelical Christians with the entire body of global Christians — leaving no room for Christians to disagree with Aikman. Then Aikman plays a second rhetorical trick: He distances himself from the “God hates fags” crowd of faux researcher Paul Cameron and Kansas home-church preacher Fred Phelps — and then Aikman repeats the “God hates fags” crowd’s widely ridiculed falsehoods as if they were established facts:

The fact is, the gay lifestyle can be physically very dangerous. Medical studies galore have confirmed this. Life expectancy can be up to 20 years shorter than for the heterosexual population, almost entirely as a result of sexually transmitted diseases. Depression, attempted suicide and drug abuse are significantly higher among gays and lesbians. This is true even in the Netherlands, where 77 percent of the population fully accepts homosexual behavior, and so it cannot be attributed to traditional “homophobia.”

None of this is substantiated with, you know, actual medical studies — because the actual studies disprove Cameron and Aikman — and Charisma Magazine.

This recycled hate propaganda has undermined the conservative evangelical movement for decades, as religious families come to know their sexual-minority family members. More and more, families side with their family members against an evangelical movement that has been overtaken by false gossip, self-pride and bigotry.

Aikman’s article is just one of many published by Charisma that employ similar tactics of defamation dressed in false piety. Such evangelical misconduct has threatened the integrity of global Christendom, insofar as evangelicals claim to speak for all Christians and then misrepresent a majority of Christians who are not evangelical.