Can Christians Attend Fake Weddings?

What we do in public matters. What we gather around in public tells the world something about us. Assemblies are groups of people forming a body of many bodies in support of an idea that is manifesting in front of them. When we attend birthday parties, we celebrate the life of a person. When we attend abortion rallies, we celebrate the murder of a person. When we attend a marriage, we celebrate a love so real it produces new life. A woman is saved through childbearing, a man is made protector of woman and child. When we attend a pseudo wedding, we affirm that which has no substance. By participating in the formality of the wedding, even if we were to speak up during the request for objectors, we would be elevating the fake ceremony to the level of a true ceremony; the marriage ceremony is reserved for men and women alone. So what we do and what we say matters, especially in public. After all, if Christ had stayed behind closed doors and spoken the Gospel in hushed tones, he might have never been killed.

This week highlighted the Christian cultural divide. At an Anglican event,

Fr Calvin Robinson

was cancelled for discussing feminism and marxism as antithetical to the Gospel. Shortly after this cancellation, evangelical pastor Alistair Begg went viral due to an old podcast clip from 2023, in which he says Christians can attend gay weddings, specifically a wedding in which one of the partners is transgender. It’s unclear to me whether that means the grandson was marrying a girl who wants to be a man, or a man who wants to be a girl. Either way, Alistair Begg did what many Christians, regardless of denomination, do: he took the “compassionate” approach. He informed the Christian grandmother that she can attend a ceremony in which Marriage, a sacrament that is meant to mirror Christ’s love for the Church, is blasphemed. Begg qualified his statements by asking the grandmother if her grandson knew that she believed what he was doing was wrong and that she “can’t countenance in any affirming way the choices that he has made in life?” To which she responded, “Yes.” To which Begg responded, “…then I think you should go.”

When Christian leaders, protestant or Catholic, tell Christians to accommodate the world in their sin, they are inevitably inverting Christ’s summary of the law. Instead of loving God with all their being, and their neighbor as themselves, they flip it: “This is the first and greatest commandment, love your neighbor with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind; the second is like it, love God as yourself.” This is obviously a perversion of what it means. As James says, “Therefore, whoever wants to be a lover of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” (Jm. 4:4 NARBE).

Christians are then quick to highlight a series of verses that say “You shouldn’t judge,” which the Bible doesn’t say. It says to be careful with how you judge, because you will be judged by the same standard. Furthermore, when you say “You’re being judgmental,” you too are being judgmental. You are judging those who criticize pastors for tolerating sin and condemning those who speak the truth.

Secondly, do you not care for these teachers? Jesus himself says that they will have a harsher judgement. That those who mislead the little ones will be thrown into the sea with a millstone around their neck; that doesn’t sound like heaven. Maybe it’s a bad purgatory, but purgatory is considered a mercy. Being dragged down into the abyss by a stone as heavy as the souls you mislead is anything but heavenly. In that spirit, we can lovingly say, “You were wrong and you need to repent.”

Giving the benefit of the doubt, Begg might have a different approach today. We can say that it’s possible that he’s recognized the error of his ways. In this sense, we should not be too hard on the guy because we all know that we can be in his shoes very quickly on something that doesn’t seem clear to us but is very clear to someone else. Furthermore, to his credit he understands that the ceremony is not valid. This doesn’t mean that we should be silent about his public advice telling Christians to sin. It’s the moral obligation of a Christians to correct errors, especially when they violate divine teaching.

So who was right? On the one hand Fr. Robinson took a stand and spoke a truth that many will find difficult to hear, but was completely within the bounds of his tradition and doctrines: feminism is marxist. If there was a bit they should have taken issue with, it should have been that Fr. Robinson said that the Reformation was a catalyst for Marxist thought to enter the church. Christ is prophet, priest, and king, but he is a prophet whose voice means whatever you want it to mean, a priest whose altar is merely symbolic and substantially present, a kingdom in which every man makes up his own mind about the moral and divine law. These statements cannot all be true. Christ either established One Church, or he did not. Doctrine, moral and theological, matters because it is the identity of the assembly. An individual can have his own doctrines, but then he will walk around telling everyone to submit those because he’s the only one who has the truth.

Christians are torn. On the one hand they don’t want to judge. But reality forces them to, and Christ commands them to “judge rightly.” He says that you must do so carefully, lest you also be judged. Further, we must not believe that we are better because we have not fallen into the same sinful pits. The Bible also says, “If we say we have not sinned” we make Jesus a liar. So what are we to do?

A Dash of Hope

First, we must learn from the survivors of Marxism and Communism. I do not mean their political philosophy and lessons. The demons are on the prowl, and they are hungry. We must be prepared to suffer and ask other Christians to suffer too. As one of my favorite Catholic priests says, “We must hold the line.” We cannot do this by attending fake weddings and immoral gatherings. We must instead recognize that God has called us to this moment. He has fashioned crosses for each one of us, but it is our choice whether we will take up the cross he has prepared for us, knowing that though it crush us we are not alone. Will God abandon us to carry our cross alone? Certainly not! Christ himself had a man from the crowd, a man found by providence, help carry the Cross the final steps to Golgotha. How much more will we, frail as we are, have the help of angels, saints, brothers, and sisters in our gift that is our cross?

Sometimes I despair about the times we are in and this is wrong. We must instead take hope in the truth that suffering is a gift for the Christian. It produces in him perseverance and perseverance is necessary for salvation (Mt. 24:13). We must not live by lies. Christians must understand that the devil does not desire your belief, he desires your will. He does not care what you do in private, he cares what you do in public. In fact, it is the public battle ground in which we either deny God or submit to God. As our Savior said, “Those who deny me before men, I will deny before the Father.”

Suffering is a gift, and it is inevitable for all of those who are taking stands in their schools, work, and churches. When we tolerate sin we insult those who are holding fast, making sacrifices, asking their families to sacrifice for the truth. Instead we must find hope in the moment, knowing that through suffering God can make us the worthy of his presence.

St. Maximillian Kolbe, pray for us.

The following is a song from one of my favorite choir composers, Ola Gjeilo.

Feel the falling air,
The light becoming golden;
Trees their colors wear,
Deep and all-enfolding.

The autumn leaves embracing;
But soon they all must fall,
The summer green erasing,
To answer winter’s call.

And here once again
Familiar paths I wander;
Through the westmark wend
The living earth I ponder.

Though fading days are colder,
And soon the darkness long,
My spirit-fire grows bolder,
And in my heart a song.

Even when shadows lengthen,
I’m here where I belong.