Shaping American Minds

October 1, 2025

Photo by Martin Joos on Unsplash

By Sofia Manina

In today’s culture, love is often confused with agreement. If you don’t affirm someone’s choices, you’re labeled hateful. As a Christian, I believe you should love everyone regardless of what they do, but I think some Christians confuse that with loving the sin along with the person. When it comes to the LGBTQ Community, I believe you should be kind and loving towards them as Christ showed his love to others. But just because you love the individual doesn’t mean you should agree with their lifestyle and support it. People today are so afraid to disagree with each other when it comes to the LGBTQ Community, because if you do, you get labeled a fascist, homophobic, a terrorist, a bigot, and a dangerous, hateful person, and that’s only a few examples of different names we are called. I seriously cannot understand how we’ve gotten to this as a society; we can no longer have a difference of opinion without it turning into hateful and crude behavior towards each other. It’s so sad to me that I have even lost friendships over this. Growing up in a public school, you are around LGBTQ people a lot, and I did form friendships with them, which did cause me to lose some of my Christian friends because I was being nice to them. This genuinely shocked me because, as a Christian, we are supposed to embody Christ’s values, and Jesus himself ate with sinners. “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Luke Ch. 5, Verse. 31-32). I think we as Christians forget about this and tend to judge the sinners instead of befriending them and leading them towards God. Which is why I think we need to love the LGBTQ Community more rather than hate them. The hard thing about that, though, is that we can’t be silent on our opinion towards the sin. Love without truth isn’t love at all. If we claim to care about someone’s soul, we can no longer stay silent when our culture is trying to redefine sin as an identity and praising them for their sin. Jesus never strayed away from the hard discussions but rather sat down with them, talked it out with them, and showed them nothing but kindness. That is the type of person we should strive to be as Christians, one who sees the person, speaks truth, and walks with them toward healing. We were never promised popularity in this world; in fact, it’s the opposite. This world is supposed to hate us and be against us. We shouldn’t try to please this world and be silent on what’s important; if anything, we should be loud in our beliefs and shout it from the rooftops. We need to remember that the goal isn’t to win arguments—it’s to win hearts. That starts with humility. We don’t have all the answers, but we do have the truth of God’s Word, and that truth is meant to heal, not harm. Loving someone doesn’t mean staying silent while they walk toward destruction. It means walking beside them, even when they reject you, even when it costs you friendships, popularity, or comfort. That’s the kind of love Jesus modeled—and it’s the kind of love we’re called to live out.  So yes, I will continue to love my LGBTQ friends. I will continue to speak truth, even when it’s unpopular. And I will continue to believe that God’s design for identity, sexuality, and redemption is not just right—it’s good. I hope that more Christians will rise up with bold compassion, refusing to be bullied into silence or bitterness. We don’t need more outrage. We need more courage. More clarity. More Christ.