I used to witness from time to time to a friend in high school who grew up in a broken home. Unlike most children of divorce, Alex was raised by his dad, by all accounts a successful doctor and loving father who gave his son everything the world tells us we need. Alex always had plenty of money to spend on movies and clothes, and his father even volunteered as a parent chaperone on overnight school field trips.

And yet, despite Alex’s many blessings, he could never quite grasp God’s unconditional love or His infinite forgiveness. He just couldn’t understand how broken relationships could be healed, how rebellious men could enrapture a holy God.

Unfortunately, I lost touch with Alex a few years back, but last I heard he was a practicing homosexual, completely absorbed in the gay culture and lifestyle. I can’t help but fear that he has forever closed himself off to God’s redeeming grace because he found a group of people who told him what he wanted to hear and accepted him like the Christian community never did.

The news was a wake-up call that taught me two lessons: one, that the church has a lot of work to do in demonstrating Christ’s love to all people, not just heterosexuals. And two, that family breakdown is the primary reason many people can’t imagine Christ’s grace.

Images of the family are the metaphors of the Kingdom. God is our Heavenly Father, Christ is the obedient Son. Jesus is the gallant bridegroom and the church is His beautiful bride. Believers are children of God. We are brothers and sisters in Christ.

As our culture increasingly rejects divinely-ordained institutions, the message of salvation becomes increasingly foreign to an already hostile world. Marriage and family are earthly representations of God’s nature. Without an accurate taste of these biblical metaphors, many people may never be awakened to the truth of the gospel.

It happened with Alex. He didn’t understand God’s love for him because his parents’ marriage never reflected Christ’s love for the church. This is the toll of divorce. Now we’re asked to even more radically redefine the family by accepting same-sex marriages. Compared to Alex, how much more difficult will it for a teenage girl raised by two moms to conceive of a father’s loving discipline, or for a child with two fathers to see the complementary and perfect unity of the Trinity reflected only in husband and wife?

Children like Alex are the best we can hope for with same-sex marriage. His father was indeed loving, had plenty of money, and gave his son every opportunity to succeed. And yet, even then, the message of Christ was lost in translation.

Reality is far less ideal. Studies indicate that same-sex marriage will have detrimental effects on children and society that will replicate tenfold the effects of other liberal family experiments. What little research has been done on children of same-sex couples shows that men and women raised by homosexuals are gender-confused versions of children of divorce -- more likely to drop out of school, live in poverty, or turn to crime. Since every same-sex household intentionally denies children either a mother or a father, we shouldn’t be surprised at the correlation.

The moral and social acceptance of same-sex marriage will injure all children, not just the children of homosexuals. Schoolchildren will be taught that gender doesn’t matter, that parenting is nothing more than a pair of unisex bodies bringing home money and pitching in with the housework. They’ll learn from television and movies that marriage is about fulfilling adult sexual and emotional desires, that committed relationships do not demand sexual fidelity, and that the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ are essentially meaningless.

Worst of all, the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage will teach our children that the natural differences between the genders are artificial and that the metaphors used in the Bible to describe divinely-established relationships are culturally relative. In their eyes, the gospel will become nothing more than a curious and subjective fairy tale, perhaps relevant 2,000 years ago but certainly not today.

I used to pray daily for Alex, a habit I must confess has waned over the past few years. God can surely transform his life, renew his mind, and bring him to a saving knowledge of Christ the Redeemer. There’s no question of that. His tainted worldview must first be overcome, however, a task easier said than done and one that could have been largely avoided had his parents’ marriage only reflected God’s character more purely.

Christians have stood as watchmen on the walls dozens of times over the past century, warning against subtly redefining the family in terms of adult desires rather than children’s best interests. The liberal attitudes preceding and accompanying birth control, abortion, no-fault divorce, cohabitation and pre-marital sex have proved devastating to individuals and communities, but are too firmly ingrained in the modern psyche to realistically reverse.

Same-sex marriage is just the latest redefinition of the family, though surely far less subtle and far more devastating. We’re again asked to initiate a vast, risky experiment with children, only this time we know what happens when children grow up without a mother or a father. Perhaps Judith Wallerstein, the pre-eminent researcher on children of divorce for nearly half a century, put it best when she lamented:

In order to rush to improve the lives of adults….we made radical changes in the family without realizing how it would change the experience of growing up. We embarked on a gigantic social experiment without any idea of how the next generation would be affected. If the truth be told, and if we are able to face it, the history of divorce in our society is replete with unwarranted assumptions that adults have made about children simply because such assumptions are congenial to adult needs and wishes.

How many lives will be ruined if we succumb to the cultural and political tides of the moment? How can Christians reconcile their support of same-sex marriage with Christ’s commands to love our neighbors, reduce suffering, and meet physical and spiritual needs, knowing how earlier experiments have turned out?

Our job is not to stop the world from sinning. It is to win the world to Christ. If same-sex marriage becomes culturally acceptable, the next generation may no longer understand the character of God, which is described in the Bible using images of family. Their entire worldviews will rest on distorted, secular lies which proclaim that gender doesn’t matter, that sex is merely biological, and that marriage and childbearing are somehow unrelated.

As Christians we must be salt in the world, that is, we must preserve divinely-ordained institutions such as marriage and family. We must also be light in the world, meaning we must shine God’s truth in the dark areas of the culture. The battle against same-sex marriage is a magnificent opportunity for us to obey our Creator, to preserve biblical metaphors for future generations of believers, and to see people like Alex come to know Christ.

This article originally appeared in Heartcry Magazine.