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After fifty years of leftist dominance and indoctrination in the schools, this really doesn’t come as a surprise, but it’s a good indication of where we are as a culture: it is now more socially acceptable and easier overall for students to declare that they are homosexual than it is for them to reveal that they’re Christian.

This news comes from Northern Ireland, but it doesn’t take more than a nanosecond or two of observation to realize that this is by no means a Northern Irish problem: the results would be the same all over the Western world, including, or maybe especially, in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

The Christian Post reported Monday that “in schools across Northern Ireland, students are finding it more challenging to reveal their Christian faith than their sexual orientation, according to testimony provided during an ongoing inquiry into Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) at Stormont.”

Providing that testimony was David Smyth, “a representative of the Evangelical Alliance Northern Ireland.” He said that some schoolchildren find it “much more difficult now to come out as an Evangelical Christian in school than it is to come out as LGBT,” and that’s perfectly understandable.

After all, Northern Ireland has Pride Month as much as we do here in the United States. The Belfast Pride Festival announces proudly (could it possibly have done so any other way?) that it is “one of the biggest festivals in Belfast with over 150 events across 10 days….In 2023, we had over 75,000 people attend.” Now: when is Christian Month in Northern Ireland? How many people attend that? It’s clear which one is celebrated in contemporary Western popular culture, and which is not.

The Belfast Pride Festival’s home page includes a photo of a couple of young boys with rainbow flags tied around their shoulders and rainbow paint on their faces. Neither of them looks all that gay, as in happy, but the purple-haired woman, or whatever, standing behind them (their mother?) smirks defiantly at the camera as she clutches her “I Am Who I Say I Am” sign, which Amnesty International helpfully supplied.

If that woman (or whatever she may inform us that she is) is indeed the mother of these boys, there is little doubt that she received nothing but positive feedback at the pride event she was attending where this picture was taken. She is swimming with the tide of the culture, and is likely to have been showered with plaudits and congratulations for her “courage” in decking her wee lads (this is Belfast, after all) out in gay garb and parading them around to show her pride in being whatever she thinks she is.

Imagine, on the other hand, if a Christian mother of two young boys had taken her sons out to a Christian procession, crosses or icons in hand. While Western society hasn’t (yet?) degenerated to the point that she could expect mockery, abuse, and threats, there is no doubt whatsoever that she certainly wouldn’t get the applause that her gay counterpart would likely get for going to the Pride event.

Go to any public high school anywhere in America these days, and you’re likely to see a notice for an LGBT club, and at those club meetings, the students who attend are constantly told how “courageous” and “brave” they are, when all they really are is confused young people who are responding to the near-universal respect and deference given to the “gay community.” In other words, it’s cool to be gay. There is nothing remotely “brave” about it in the Western world today; young Pride parade attendees would have to go to Iran or Saudi Arabia for that.

It is, meanwhile, supremely uncool to be Christian, which is as it should be, as Jesus Himself said: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:18-19). Yet there have been times when being a public Christian didn’t carry the all-encompassing social stigma that it does today, and those were times when our nation enjoyed significantly greater societal health than it does today.

In the final analysis, the West has exchanged one religion for another. David Smyth was asked if he thought teachers were trying to “effectively change children’s minds to push an agenda of some sort.” Smyth answered by noting that leftism is the new religion of the dominant culture today, asking: “Is it secular blasphemy to believe that a man cannot biologically become a woman?” Why, yes. Yes, it is. And how many children, just as they are learning to make their way in this unforgiving world, wish to become known as blasphemers?