Gender, the Gospel and a Modern Tower of Babel

There was a time when humanity thought it could be God, and sought to build a tower up to heaven.  Modern humanity is trying to remake itself in its own self-image…the inevitable confusion that follows is happening before our very eyes.  As my latest Christian Today Article – explains.

The Eve of Destruction – ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad’ – if that old saying is true then the ‘gods’ seem to be preparing Western society for real destruction! The advocates of ‘Queer theory’, having achieved one of their main aims on their goal to destroy ‘patriarchal marriage’ and create a ‘gender fluid’ society, through the introduction of same sex marriage, are now watching as we descend into the chaos they have created.

Queer Theory – Having moved from Lady Gaga’s ‘Born this way’, we are now in an era of total sexual confusion. The Daily Telegraph reported that women are either bisexual or lesbian, but never straight. Being LGBT is so yesterday, there are at least another 22 ‘sexualities’ now, according to that font of all knowledge, Facebook. LGBPTTQQIIAA+ is what any self-respecting politician should use today – (in case you wondered this stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Pansexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Intergender, Asexual, Ally, plus).

Gender Confusion – Closely allied with this confusion of sexualities, just when we thought we were getting the gender balance right, we now have gender confusion. Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, declared this week “Scotland is potentially at a tipping point in relation to gender equality. Social attitudes have progressed significantly here, as they are doing in many countries around the world. We currently have a Scottish parliament where the presiding officers, and the leaders of the three largest parties, are all female. We also have a gender balanced Cabinet.”

Happily forgetting that having 75 per cent of your party leaders is not exactly gender balance (and therefore one of them has to go in order to achieve the desired equilibrium), she went on to declare that if elected in 2016 she would ensure that all public sector boards would be compelled by law to have 50/50 gender balance. While some might see this as a great victory for women, others are not so sure. The trouble is that this is so cisgender and binary-gender. What is cisgender? The term cisgender refers to when “someone’s gender matches their birth assigned sex and, by extension, when a person’s gender matches the gender others perceive them as.”

Green Confusion – Enter the Scottish Greens, who amply illustrate the kind of confusion that all this now creates. The Greens traditionally have two leaders, one male and one female. But a recent report argued “The party constitution specifies two genders: a man and a woman. And this simply doesn’t reflect reality. Because while most people are happy to be labelled men or women, there are significant numbers for whom neither of these words apply.” The author went on to say that 43 per cent of non-binary gender people attempt suicide in the US and that there are significant mental health issues for non-binary people in the UK. Because of this we all need to be guilted into accepting that there are not just two genders (black and white), but that there is a whole rainbow of genders.

Greers Binary Heresy – One of the unforeseen consequences of this gender fluid approach is how it has troubled the feminist/women’s movement. That is why Germaine Greer got in so much difficulty for saying that post-operative transgender men are not women. Her binary gender approach was bitterly condemned and she has in effect been banned from Cardiff University for daring to suggest that feeling like a woman and having an operation does not make you a woman.

Stonewall’s Trojan Horse – Stonewall hoover up lots of taxpayer’s money to ‘train’ people in the workplace and educational settings to prevent ‘bullying’. It is indeed a worthy aim, but it is not their only aim. They also seek to indoctrinate a particular philosophy of sexuality and gender. At a recent training event they presented this definition: “The terms transgender people and trans people are both ‘umbrella’ terms. Include all those whose gender identity and/or gender expression differ from the sex they were labelled at birth. Gender Identity = an individual’s internal self-perception of their own gender. Gender Expression = an individual’s external gender-related physical appearance and behaviour.”

You Are What You Feel – The problem here is that identity is tied only to internal feeling. And feeling of course trumps everything – including inconvenient things like facts, evidence, truth and reality. Being male and female is only what we were ‘labelled’ at birth, and we are thereafter free to be whatever we want to be. It is revealing that the autobiography of one of America’s most famous transgender people, Janet Mock, is called Redefining Realness. Because that is what we are trying to do – create our own reality. It is the ultimate in human autonomy – we are so ‘god’ that we can control our sexuality, gender and be anything we want to be. This week a man wrote in response to remarks I made about the ‘freedom to live’, that ‘the greater freedom was to die’. Modern man/woman/cis/bi/whatever wants to control everything – including our own deaths. We would be as God. As a result we are heading to hell.

Confused Tongues in the Church – In the midst of all this the Christian Church shares in the same confusion. Some speak with the tongues of cultural psychobabble, with a few ‘amens’ and other religious phrases thrown in; some murmur pious pleasantries as they tell each other how much God loves them; others yell at the darkness and rejoice they are light, while refusing to recognise their own brokenness; still others say nothing at all. But the Church of Christ cannot afford to be part of this particular Tower of Babel. She needs to wake up, recover her prophetic voice and boldly proclaim to kings and rulers, rich and poor, the lost, the broken, male and female, the gender and sexually confused, the whole message of the Kingdom of God. In other words, we need to remember it is about Him and His glory, not about us and our distortions.

The Glory of God and the Salvation of Humanity  –God is God. We are not. He will not give his glory over to His disobedient and destructive creation – not when his creation is supposed to reveal that glory. Paradise will not be lost. We may choose to create 26 genders; he created us male and female – in His image. We know that that image is broken and that that brokenness is at least expressed in, among other things, sexual confusion, oppression and abuse. But he sent his Son Jesus Christ, as a man, to live, die, be resurrected and return for us. As a result of his atoning sacrifice for our sins, he is able to make us new human beings – male and female. Rather than the confused shattering of humanity into a myriad of sexualities and genders, we are all one in Christ. That is our new identity. In Christ. Not in the pit of 100 different genders, or 1,000 different desires which can never be fulfilled, but rather in the love and will of a God whose love goes beyond anything that we can think or dream of. Isn’t it about time we stopped trying to create a god in our own image and instead followed the one who created us in his? The Good News is not ‘be anything you want to be’, but rather ‘I am a new creation in Christ’. How we need that!