All around the country throughout June big commercial concerns, including major retailers, have been promoting Pride month. In my local town the main shopping mall is called the Eden Centre. Along one of the thoroughfares of the mall there is a specially erected photo station. It has steps up to a platform to stand on, along with rainbow-coloured surroundings, to enable shoppers to take selfies. The construction carries the words ‘Pride 2023’ and the hashtag #Edenjoy. The Eden Centre management have thereby assumed that shoppers are joyful about the very concept of a Pride month, and by doing so they are also demonstrating to the world their impeccably woke credentials.
In the local Tesco supermarket shoppers are greeted by a large Pride flag and a poster which tells us, “Standing Proud Together … We stand together and make everyone feel welcome, every day”. This is a somewhat inaccurate statement, because Tesco executives obviously do not have any concern about the sensitivities of their customers who are Christians and who believe the Bible’s plain teaching that homosexuality is sinful.
At a nearby retail park shoppers at M&S Food have to walk by a noticeboard which announces, “We’ll double your donation to celebrate Pride”, the reference being to an LGBT charity. The presumption behind this notice is that the customers at M&S, being decent upright citizens, will of course wish to celebrate Pride. This presumption, however, is totally dismissive of those who adhere to a Christian worldview.
At my local Waitrose store there is a sign by the entrance declaring, “Proud to be ourselves – celebrating Pride together”. This highly trendy rejoicing in being ‘inclusive’ is, however, strangely exclusive of those who choose not to follow the new national religion of promoting all things LGBT. May I courteously ask the John Lewis Partnership, What about those customers who are Christians and who want to “be themselves” without having to endure the virtue-signalling of supermarkets intent on rubbishing Biblical morality.
Many will doubtless claim that these comments are ‘homophobic’, but the concept of homophobia has simply been invented to smear anyone who dares to disagree with the LGBT agenda. It is a device to shut down civilised debate and to silence all opposition. However, is is the duty of a Christian minister to point out the seriousness of sin, and it is in fact an act of love to one’s neighbour to do so.
The endless propaganda by government, big business and the media in promoting the LGBT cause is also encouraging many young people to reject the Christian faith in their desire to be fashionable. The situation is made worse by many compromised churches which are willing to abandon the Bible’s authority in order to swim with the tide.
What the executives at Waitrose, M&S and Tesco and various other major commercial concerns are publicly saying in their endorsement of Pride is quite simply this : The Bible is wrong and we, in our 21st century enlightenment, know better than God.
So this is where we are now at in modern Britain : one of big business’s most desired marketing techniques is to publicly trash the word of God and effectively to tell Christians that they are bigoted people, because they believe in keeping the commandments of God.
Pastor Peter Simpson, Penn Free Methodist Church