It’s Not Personal, But It’s Personal
Many years ago, I worked in property management. I was an assistant manager of a high-end apartment complex. It was election season, and the state legislators passed a controversial measure. The legislators wanted to enshrine into the state constitution that marriage is between a man and a woman. Leading up to November, opinions ran hot. Opinion ran especially hot among people in this high-end downtown complex, evident by the political signs in the windows. One morning, the manager of the complex asked me to make a few calls to residents who were visibly expressing their opinions with a political sign. All the residents expressing themselves were not for the proposed measure. I made a few calls and explained that the management company’s policy is not to allow political signs to be on display. Period. It is a policy that applies to all political parties and their causes. Most residents obliged, but one resident came to my office and said with pride, “This is not a political issue!” I rebuffed him and said, “The issue of marriage, no matter what side you are on, is a political issue because it is up for a vote.” The resident disagreed but understood the general policy of the management company. After several more warnings, he reluctantly took down the sign.
For years, I have reflected on that exchange. Was he right? Is marriage a political issue? What if the state legislator wanted to ban Christianity or straight marriage? Would I see beyond the politics? In retrospect, I agree with what he was saying. The man was gay, and to codify straight marriage in the state constitution would have been a direct attack on his ideology. While I did not agree with his position on marriage, and I did vote to make marriage between a man and woman in the state constitution, I do understand why he felt how his ideology or faith is deeply personal and transcends politics.
I am attempting to illustrate the difficulty of having a cultural conversation without offending someone. If I say “abortion is murder,” all of a sudden, I have to contend with people who have committed an abortion, and I just told them they are murderers.
So, before I get into the substance of this article, it needs to be acknowledged that having a cultural conversation can be done without becoming personal. We have to be able to say, “Hey man, can you take down the sign? It’s simply our policy,” without having a single person in mind that we are intentionally offending. When the atheist blogger says, “All Christians are morons,” I do not need to take offense. The blogger does not know me, and I do not know him. If a healthy conversation is going to occur, there must be a clear separation between ideas and a person.
The Triumph of the “T”
All of this leads me to the cultural conversation about transgenderism. Every cultural moment has a book, and the book for this moment is The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman. Trueman details how we arrived at the moment when a biological male calls himself a girl and a biological female calls herself a man. I won’t retrace his argument, but it is telling that the last chapter of his 400+ page book is entitled “The Triumph of the T.” The ideology and the people that have fed feminist and LGBTQ+ ideology have led us to massive sexual confusion. Trueman begins with the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but for our purposes, we can look to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In the 1960s, a bunch of straight people were sleeping around, doing drugs, and unshackling themselves from the cultural norms largely shaped by Juedo-Christian ethics. Sex was to take place in the context of marriage between a man and a woman. The man and woman had kids and created a little platoon called “the family.” Because of radical individualism, these restraints needed to be removed. Working concurrently with the sexual revolution is feminism. Women needed to be set free from the patriarchy. Bearing children was a burden that should only take place on the terms of the woman. Hence the rise of birth control. Granted, more factors have led to the triumph of transgenderism in the 21st century, but one factor rises above the rest. Every Judeo-Christian ethic needs to be removed so that a person can express themselves however they want. The natural family? Torn down. Sex within the confines of marriage? No more. A binary choice of sex/gender? Dismantled. Now that gender is a “constructed idea,” a biological male can say he is a female.
Title IX
Perhaps the gender revolution and confusion can be identified in the latest update to Title IX. Title IX is the federal civil rights law in the United States enacted as part of the Education Amendments in 1972. It prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government. In other words, regarding educational institutions, men and women must have the same rights and opportunities. If a public high school or a college receives federal grants and loans and they have men’s basketball, there must be women’s basketball.
Fast-forward to April 19, 2024. Title IX was quietly updated by the Biden administration’s Department of Education. Sexual harassment is now banned under Title IX, which seems great until you ask, what are the parameters of sexual harassment? According to the update, it means if you do not use a person’s preferred pronouns, then an institution could risk losing federal funding because not using a person’s preferred pronouns is now considered sexual harassment. In essence, the federal government is compelling speech by catering to the sexual revolution.
The update also answers the question of whether a transgender woman (a biological man) can play sports with biological women. According to the update of Title IX, the answer is yes. A biological man can use the same locker room and competitively compete against a woman.
There is more to the update, and a lot of Orwellian language is used to explain away “protections” under the guise of “harassment.” However, the update is another example of how the “T” is currently triumphing in Western culture.
A Reckoning Will Come
If you are a Christian, everything seems like doom and gloom. However, I do not think that secular and humanistic ideology can last. A reckoning will come. Eventually, the absurdities will become too obvious and the destruction too much. Yes, the house might burn in order to be rebuilt, but the house will burn. Here is how the house will burn. The next step in the sexual revolution is to take gender, which is currently malleable, and eliminate it so that radical individualism can be fully expressed. In the book Our Bodies, Ourselves, Trueman quotes,
An increasing number of feminists and other activists are advocating for the expansion or elimination of either-or gender norms, in order to allow for a full range of human behavior and expression. Knowing that gender is separate from sexual anatomy enables us to express ourselves in ways that may conflict with how society dictates we should look and act. – Our Bodies, Ourselves
We have already seen this move, hence the + in the LGBTQ+. Trueman continues to explain,
This is a quite superb example of the central contention of [my] book: that the issues we face today in terms of sexual politics are a symptom or manifestation of the deeper revolution in selfhood that the rise and triumph of expressive individualism represents. – Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
At some point, biology and nature will win out. The flattening of sex and gender will lead to increased chaos, and chaos always destabilizes and combusts. Since the dawn of time, biology and nature have always won. I do not know what the reckoning will look like, but my guess is that it will involve a lot of broken people who have deep pain and regrets. The question that Christians need to ask is, how will we respond?
A Christian Response at the Ready
The current response from the Christian church is anything but deafening. Christians and Christian leaders are tip-toeing around hot-button issues because they do not want to offend anyone. Meanwhile, Christian parents are watching their children become persuaded by secularism and, more specifically, the LGBTQ+ ideology. Christian leaders must have the courage to speak the truth in love and do so without compromise.
First, local churches need to teach the beauty of God’s design for man. God created man, male and female. There are two sexes, and both image God to creation. Before Christians say what they are against, they must proclaim what they are for. Christians are for upholding God’s design of man, marriage, and family.
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
– Genesis 1:26-26
Christians do not run from God’s design but celebrate God’s design.
Second, church leaders need to warn and help church members make sense of the cultural chaos brought on by the sexual revolution.
In the short book Does God Care About Gender Identity?, the author recounts a conversation with a person talking to him about the ongoing sexual revolution of the 21st century. This person, Marie, gave some pastoral advice.
Marie told me that her children were learning about gender everywhere except from church. Topics involving the LGBT+ community are sensitive, complex, and controversial, making them difficult for pastors to address. But when churches are silent on these issues, we hand our people over to be formed by other voices. Church leaders must develop a plan to teach about God’s design for sex and gender.
– Samuel Ferguson, Does God Care about Gender Identity?
Third, the church needs to preach a hot gospel. Christians need to be unashamed of the life, death, resurrection, and the physical and current reign of Jesus Christ over his creation. Only the gospel of Jesus Christ can take the sinking Titanic that is American society and pull people from the water and safely onto a lifeboat. Politics cannot fix the brokenness and confusion we see every day. If anything, politics is exacerbating the brokenness and confusion. Only the faithful preaching of the gospel can fix what is broken.
And when deeply broken people realize the folly of the sexual revolution, the church needs to be ready to receive broken image-bearers of God. The church needs to be prepared to receive the biological woman who had a double mastectomy and now wants to de-transition. The church needs to be ready to shepherd the two married gay men into faithfulness to Jesus Christ. It won’t be easy, and local churches will be uncomfortable, but the LGBTQ+ movement is the burden of the Christian church in this generation and generations to come. And only Christ can save and cause a broken person to walk in obedience to the glory of God.
– Edmund Burke
