During a conference call with Champion the Vote, the ostensibly non-partisan group that is working to increase the turnout among voters with a “biblical worldview,” Chuck Colson argued that Christians in America are a “sleeping giant” that has been beset by the domineering gay community. Colson cited the work of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a pioneer of public opinion polling who has been criticized for her work in Nazi Germany, who wrote about the “spiral of silence” in which minority opinions are marginalized quickly because people are afraid of alienation and punishment from the majority. Colson says that the gay rights advocates are now “controlling the conversation” even though they are a “tiny minority,” and said that it is time for Christians to “break the spiral of silence, to speak out, to point out unrighteousness.” “It hasn’t taken very many gays in our society to change this society’s attitudes towards something which we would have said is sexually deviant and is, but it doesn’t take much,” Colson said. “We’re the sleeping giant”:
We’ve fallen into the spiral of silence in which case the people who might be a tiny minority but are controlling the conversation intimidate the rest of us…. Now where have we seen that happen most vividly? We’ve seen it in the gay rights movement. The gay rights movement is a tiny minority in America, so what you get is a passionate movement of 10 percent of the people, 5 percent of the people maybe in the gay movement, maybe 4 percent, 3 percent, and they control what the rest of us think because the rest of us are intimidated into silence. Folks, brothers and sisters, I tell you I believe in the depths of my being that the most important thing we can do today in obedience to Christ is to break the spiral of silence, to speak out, to point out unrighteousness.
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If people really intensely believe and have a passion for something and if they are given some sense of direction and purpose, it doesn’t take a lot of people. I’m sorry to use this example but it hasn’t taken very many gays in our society to change this society’s attitudes towards something which we would have said is sexually deviant and is, but it doesn’t take much. We’re the sleeping giant. We have forty percent of the country saying they are born again, my goodness how is it that Christian values are in retreat everywhere? It’s because we’re not organizing ourselves properly into a movement. So I want nothing more, nothing that I want more fervently right now that I’m giving my life to morning, noon and night than building a movement across this country that will restore what we believe will be the sanity and reasonableness of the Christian worldview.
In a video for the Colson Center he warns of the dangerous spiral of silence. “What the gay lobby has done, they have 600,000 same-sex households in America the Census showed, that’s extraordinarily low, they also have only 100,000 couples who’ve gotten married in five years it’s been legal in five states,” Colson contended. “So the overwhelming majority of Americans do not accept this and yet everybody is afraid to speak, everybody is afraid if they speak they’ll be called bigots.”
