Popular Christian TV show “The Chosen” came under fire this week after a viewer spotted an LGBT pride flag on the set of the Bible-based series, in a video “The Chosen” posted to its YouTube account.
It’s unclear who placed the flag on the camera equipment or why it was allowed to stay there during shoots. What is perfectly clear is that “The Chosen” isn’t bothered by its presence.
“Just like with our hundreds of cast and crew who have different beliefs (or no belief at all) than we do, we will work with anyone on our show who helps us portray or honor the authentic Jesus,” the show’s official Twitter account replied after a viewer asked them about the flag. “We ask that audiences let the show speak for itself and focus on the message, not the messenger, because we’ll always let you down.”
For faithful Christians who are constantly assailed by radical LGBT propaganda every summer from every angle, “The Chosen’s” decision to defend the icon that brags of sins like sexual immorality and pride is a betrayal far bigger than “we’ll always let you down.”
It’s not even June yet and already, followers of Christ are hard-pressed to drink a beer or coffee, buy clothes, consume media, send our kids to schools, or cheer on baseball teams that haven’t explicitly allied themselves with a movement that blasphemes our creator and savior.
Now, even one of the few refuges Christians like me have from the world, a TV show about Jesus and his short time on Earth, chose to tacitly endorse LGBT propaganda.
Maybe a miniature pride flag on camera equipment shouldn’t discount the incredible work “The Chosen” team is doing in bringing the Gospel to life. The show’s unwillingness to do anything but endorse the flag on set, however, does.
In this day and age, there’s no such thing as moral neutrality. Unfortunately, the decision by “The Chosen” and its openly Christian creators not to stand with its audience against the aggressive agenda of rainbow activists means, in a way, it has taken a stand against them.
The statement from “The Chosen” appears to buy into the lie that the only way you can love others is to endorse their beliefs and behavior. In the eyes of faithful, biblical Christians, defending a flag that undermines the very heart of what God desires for his children isn’t loving. It’s a clear rejection of the life God calls us to live.
What “The Chosen” seems to forget is that the “authentic Jesus” they seek to portray in every episode of their show spoke up about the perversion of his Father’s world. In fact, he cleared a temple’s courts after he discovered that people had turned a sacred space into a place to make money.
“Stop turning my Father’s house into a market,” Jesus said after he disrupted the temple courts in John 2:16.
You don’t have to have perfect vision to see that corporations, especially during the summer, corrupt our world with their sinful goals. The last thing we need is for Christians — the salt of the Earth and the light of the world — to join them in giving up on preserving the truth in exchange for profit or faux peace.
Unfortunately, that’s already happening.
Chip and Joanna Gaines, the couple who built their brand around their identity as Christians, have stayed silent on their product partner Target’s decision to sell LGBT attire designed by a Satanist. Clayton Kershaw, pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, also tried to excuse his team’s embrace of a semen-slinging sacrilegious group by highlighting a Dodgers-hosted “Christian Faith and Family Day,” only to offer delayed criticism of the pole dancing “nuns” later.
It’s deeply disheartening for Christians to see their once-faithful allies, like “The Chosen,” wobble in the face of conflict.
It’s unrealistic to expect “The Chosen” to only hire biblical Christian camera crews in an industry dominated by the godless, and it’s unrealistic to expect an all-out boycott on a show known for advancing the Gospel.
What’s not unrealistic is asking “The Chosen” to say they should have never allowed the LGBT flag, which has become a powerful symbol of the war on reality, on their Bible-based set in the first place. If the Christians writing, directing, and producing the show did that, they would have successfully stood by the millions of Christ-followers in the show’s audience by publicly rejecting an agenda that’s completely at odds with their purported message.
Instead, “The Chosen” opted for a vaguely worded statement that strongly implied they don’t have a problem with the LGBT agenda.
Renouncing the LGBT movement’s creeping hold on American institutions is certainly a risk for a business but it’s one that, for Christians especially, is worth taking. Christ-followers shouldn’t have to pretend a pride flag feet away from a scene with Jesus’s disciples is unproblematic just because “The Chosen” says it is. Faithful Christians should and must voice their concerns whenever their city on the hill — churches, Christian influencers, and Christian media — crumbles every June.
If they don’t, they have also fallen into the trap of believing they can avoid taking sides in what has quickly become a religious war for souls.