Who were the high priests running this inquisition? Leaders in corporate America. The education establishment. The media. Professional and amateur sports. Silicon Valley. Wall Street. And of course, politicians.

What did Jesus believe, and teach, if anything, about homosexuality and transgenderism?

Pride month, and its commercial sponsors, is an appropriate key to understanding the priorities of the modern West. It celebrates hedonistic self-assertion. It mocks the values of the past. It uses the language of inclusion to exclude anybody who will not wholeheartedly affirm its ambitions. It strikes a posture of iconoclastic rebellion and liberation while actually being an imperious assertion of conformity to the social elite's moral order.

The subjective nature of postmodernism leads to its biggest problem -- the denial of reality in favour of whatever you choose to believe. A colleague of mine used to say that you can disagree with scientific positivism as much as you like, but when the doc says you have liver cancer, you have liver cancer. Disagree all you like, pal. It's still there. The problem is, that when everything is reduced to values and feelings, we have to ask, whose values are the best?

Both Jews and Christians for most of their histories have believed that God deals with whole societies and not only individuals, and this belief has helped them respond to crises. We are in such a crisis in our own nation today, and this "national covenant" tradition gives us rich resources for learning from our crisis and getting beyond it. We need healing, but we also need the national covenant and its concept of exile to help us do what is needed for healing.