Christianity, politics and the sudden shift in LGBT trends
After D. Trump's victory in the US elections, the LGBT agenda is rapidly winding down. Yet, recently, it has been steadily progressing. What conclusions can be drawn from this?
On 5 November 2024, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. His electoral program included a clear rejection of the promotion of LGBT ideology, in contrast to the programs of the Democratic Party candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Specifically, Trump has promised the following:
- to enact a federal law banning gender reassignment surgeries for minors;
- to initiate legislation in Congress to prohibit the use of federal taxpayer funds for promoting or paying for gender reassignment surgeries;
- to submit a bill establishing that only two genders are recognized in the United States – male and female – and that these are determined at birth;
- to exclude cases where transgender men compete as women in sports events;
- to prohibit suggestions from psychologists, teachers, and others that a child was born in the wrong gender;
- to ban LGBT individuals from serving in the military.
This is by no means a complete list of what Trump intends to do in this field, but it clearly demonstrates the radical and decisive stance taken by the newly elected President of the United States.
Even before Trump has taken office and begun to implement his electoral promises, reports have already emerged from all directions indicating a desire to follow Trump’s agenda.
Just a week after the election, the largest retail companies in the US announced they would cease supporting gender and LGBT programs. This includes the country’s largest retail organization, Walmart, as well as Amazon, Tractor Supply, Lowe’s, Ford and Molson Coors.
On 7 January 2025, Meta, the company that owns the social networks Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced that it would allow users to label LGBT individuals as mentally abnormal on its platforms. Until recently, such statements were unthinkable. Any posts on Facebook that even remotely criticized LGBT issues were immediately removed. However, Meta has now declared that it will allow “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality”.
Moreover, Meta acknowledged that its previous content moderation policy was wrong and led to the “too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been”. Mark Zuckerberg actually admitted that the individuals whose posts and accounts were deleted by Meta were unfairly treated. He also ordered the removal of tampons for “non-binary persons” and transgender people from men’s restrooms in the company’s offices and the removal of LGBT-themed decorations from internal chats.
In addition, Meta cancelled quotas for LGBT workers and disbanded teams focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. This too is a sensation, as many states in the US, and other Western countries, have legislation requiring a certain number of women, African Americans, and gay or lesbian individuals to be hired. Employers who fail to comply with these quotas face fines and other legal consequences.
Another example: On 9 January 2025, a US district court judge, Danny, overturned rules protecting LGBT students, which had been introduced under the Biden administration. These rules, by the way, spanned 1,500 pages and regulated every aspect of LGBT student life.
In Ukraine, certain politicians hastened to embrace the new American trend. For instance, MP from the "Servant of the People" faction, Maryana Bezuhla, declared that she considered LGBT a pathological deviation, akin to obesity, psoriasis or allergies. Some of her statements include:
- “Sticking out deviations as norms and replacing concepts is unacceptable”;
- “Being an LGBT representative is not the norm but a psychophysiological deviation”;
- “Hiring someone solely because of their LGBT affiliation is also wrong.”
This all seems correct, but why has it not been said earlier, several years or even months ago, when Joe Biden was in power in the US and everyone obediently followed his gender agenda?
His victory in the 2020 election gave a green light to the LGBT agenda in virtually all spheres. It’s not to say that this agenda was not promoted earlier—it was, and quite powerfully. Even Trump, during his first term from 2016 to 2020, was unable to reverse it, despite his efforts. Back then, many thought his rise to power was an unfortunate fluke, something to simply wait out for four years, after which everything would return to normal. In many ways, this is what happened.
In 2020, Joe Biden returned to power and began promoting the LGBT agenda with even greater force. Protestants of various denominations, and even Catholics, increasingly found themselves supporting LGBT causes. But what is even more concerning, some Orthodox hierarchs joined in.
For example, in 2022, the head of the American Archdiocese of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople performed a baptism for children adopted by a homosexual couple. In response to the criticism he faced, Archbishop Elpidophoros explained his decision: "From a church perspective, it is essential to have a godparent who is Orthodox and serves as the guarantor for the child’s Orthodox upbringing. Parents cannot subject their own Orthodox devotion to evaluation and then decide whether the child should or should not be baptized. That’s the godparent’s task. Hence, if these two conditions are fulfilled, there is neither an ecclesiastical nor a legal obstacle to the baptism of a child."
In other words, parents can engage in sodomy and set an example for their child, but if the godparents are Orthodox, there are no obstacles to baptism. Whether such a child has the right to be baptised is a matter for debate, but what is crucial here is that the baptism was widely publicised in the media and social networks, presented as a significant achievement in the promotion of the LGBT agenda. In other words, Elpidophoros’ action is a way of conditioning people to accept that LGBT is not a sin, that one can be gay and still participate in Orthodox sacraments and rituals.
One might recall how in 2018, after the creation of his religious organisation, Serhiy (Epifaniy) Dumenko, head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), spoke on the phone with pranksters posing as European Council member David McAllister. In response to McAllister's call to soften the Church’s stance on the LGBT community and support Ukrainian gays, Dumenko said: "This is a complex issue that we should not raise at the beginning of our journey because, as you know, Ukrainian society perceives this issue in a certain way. For now, we need to work on it so that Ukrainian society can accept it." Thus, he actually admitted that the LGBT agenda needs to be promoted but cautiously.
It seems that this work was carried out by Serhiy Dmitriev, a priest and chaplain of the OCU, who also serves as Deputy Head of the OCU’s Social Services Department and Secretary of the Social Services Commission of the Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organisations (UCCRO). In 2023, he was accused of promoting the LGBT agenda within the Ukrainian Armed Forces and beyond.
In 2022, educational institutions and bishops of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), at the behest of Sviatoslav Shevchuk, distributed a guide on gender programmes titled “Created and Loved”.
These examples, both for and against the promotion of the LGBT agenda, illustrate how quickly and easily people change their views and beliefs in response to shifts in the public and political climate. This is especially evident in how former supporters of LGBT issues, upon Trump’s rise to power, instantly began to change their stances to align with the new regime. But in essence, what were they afraid of? This is not Stalin, nor the repressions of the 1930s.
During Trump’s first presidency (2016–2020), things were not so clear-cut, and many thought the conservative agenda was only temporary, that it wasn’t worth investing in a new asset right away. But now, the situation is quite different. Trump won not only the majority of electoral votes from each state but also the majority of American citizens. He triumphed in all the swing states. Moreover, in Europe, right-wing parties that declare conservative ideologies are gaining more and more votes with each election. In Austria, France, Italy, and other countries, right-wing forces are winning parliamentary elections. It is likely that this trend will continue in Germany during the elections later this year. The trend towards the strengthening of conservative ideologies can no longer be considered an accidental or short-term occurrence. It seems likely that it will dominate in the coming years. And now, not only businessmen like Zuckerberg but also politicians, judges, and religious and public leaders are changing their principles and beliefs in line with the shifting “party line”.
And one might wonder, what is wrong with moving away from the clearly unnatural and destructive LGBT agenda and returning to a more traditional understanding of gender and other issues? Of course, there is nothing wrong with that.
But the fact is that:
our principles and beliefs, our understanding of fundamental questions of existence, should be based on the Holy Scriptures, not on who happens to preside in the Oval Office at the White House.
And this is exactly what we do not see, at least in modern social, political and even some religious leaders. Everyone knows that the Bible doesn’t just call LGBT ideology a sin; it calls it an abomination: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination" (Leviticus 18:22). Both the Old and New Testaments repeatedly affirm that homosexuality is a sin, and it cannot be considered normal. But while Joe Biden was in the White House, this clear biblical testimony was conveniently ignored, and there was no reminder to either society or the powers that be about what God says. Now that Trump is in the White House, everyone is suddenly willing to acknowledge the obvious: LGBT is abnormal, it is pathology, and it should not be imposed on society, even if some individuals consider themselves to be such.
But this means that if power changes again, if liberals win some election, everyone will once again begin to change their colors to the preferred rainbow hues. And God and His revelation about the world and humanity will be forgotten once more. However, this sudden and remarkable shift in views on LGBT ideology is just part of an even greater problem. Should we follow the desires of society or the will of God? What should we focus on? What should we obey? Let’s recall the following seemingly unrelated facts:
- the flirtation of Catholics with pagans, where the mass is combined with pagan rituals;
- support for Black Lives Matter, where the personality of the deceased George Floyd was elevated to the rank of a near deity and an “icon” of a new religious cult;
- the closure of churches by some denominations to protect against the coronavirus;
- the closure of churches by some denominations to support the climate agenda;
- nationalism in the OCU and UGCC, where “Ukraine above all” means that Christ and the Gospel can only exist if they don’t contradict this narrative;
- the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
At first glance, these might seem like unrelated phenomena. But if we dig a little deeper, we can see that they are all closely related. What unites them is one thing: the attempt to please the authorities and society, to fit into the “trends”. And in each of these attempts, Christ is betrayed. Sometimes more obviously, sometimes less. But it is a betrayal just the same, just like supporting the sin of Sodom. And yet, Christian leaders today face no threat of death or unbearable suffering, as the early Christian martyrs did, who refused to offer sacrifices to pagan gods. Today, they might face only the loss of funding, disapproval from the authorities, and public vilification. All as Christ warned: “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.”
And furthermore, any of the trends for which Christ is now being betrayed may suddenly disappear, simply because one powerful figure has replaced another. Just as in Chukovsky’s "The Cockroach": “A sparrow flies in. Jumpity-jump! And chirp-chirp, it pecks the cockroach – and the giant is gone. Serves the giant right, and no moustache left on him.” The “coronavirus cockroach” has now vanished, the “gender” one is rapidly losing its grip, and sooner or later, others will fall into the same pattern. Therefore, the fear of them today looks shameful.
After all, is this the kind of faith the Savior expects of Christians?
