(AgapePress) - An official with the Alliance Defense Fund says if Christians continue to ignore the threat posed by homosexual activists, the Church in America will eventually be silenced on the issue.

The ADF's president Alan Sears and vice president of creative services Craig Osten have written a new book titled The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principle Threat to Religious Freedom (Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2003). The book looks at advances homosexual activists have made over the past ten years while the Church has been virtually silent. Osten believes this silence, if it continues, will lead to disaster for the Church and for society.

The ADF executive points out that the founder of Freedom to Marry and former head of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund -- the nation's preeminent homosexual legal advocacy group -- has confidently predicted that the homosexual community's legal victories in Canada will eventually be duplicated in the United States. Osten agrees that this outcome is likely, with worse consequences to follow.

"In the next ten years, we will have same-sex marriage -- and I think we will start to have the criminalization of religious speech," he says.

The authors believe that the Church in America is at a crucial point. While their book examines several goals of the homosexual agenda, Osten says the Church should be most concerned about the movement's ultimate goal.

"You could give the homosexual activists whatever they want today -- marriage, all the benefits, everything -- but they will not be satisfied until the Church is absolutely silenced on this issue," he says. "The bottom line is that as long as the Church says that homosexual behavior is sinful, they feel stigmatized."

Osten warns that those in the Church who want to ignore this issue may eventually find their children being taught by open homosexuals and their churches being forced by the courts to hire and ordain homosexuals. He asserts that the gospel is confrontational and needs to be proclaimed in this age of political correctness if the Church is to continue to have a voice at all.

© 2003 AgapePress all rights reserved.

E-mail this page to a friend Printer-Friendly Version