When a person “identifies as” something he isn’t, what he’s doing is telling reality he’s in charge instead. That’s not just foolish, it’s unspeakably arrogant. I’ve written before of transgender bullying. Then it was a man bullying women by claiming he was one. This bullying is different is different: It’s just as real, but more foolish by far. “Identifying as” the other sex means nothing less than telling reality itself, “Sit down. Shut up. I’ll do the deciding from now on.”

I refuse to say I “identify as.” Period. I won’t “identify as” anything. If I’ve said it in the past, I repent of it. If you ask me what I identify as, I’ll give you an answer shows what’s wrong with it, and the best way I know is by playing stupid on you. Like this:
“So Tom, tell, me. What do you identify as?”
“Usually I use my driver’s license for identification.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. What gender and sexuality do you identify as?”
“My name’s Tom Gilson. Didn’t you know that already?”
“Oh, come on, Tom. You know what I’m asking for. I’ll say it again: What gender and sexuality do you identify as?”
“Serious? You mean you can’t tell those things just by looking? I’m standing right in front of you. I have a light complexion, wide shoulders, an Adam’s apple, a beard, a low voice, and a distinct lack of curves. You can see that, right?”
“Yes, of course I can see that. I can also hear you saying you’re not going to answer my question.”
“Exactly. How perceptive of you!”
“It’s okay, though. I’ve got you figured anyway. You’ve told me your choice as clear as if you said it out loud: Cisgender male, straight.”
“Choice? Did you say ‘choice’? Where in the world did you get that from?”
It’s In the “Choosing”
Choice: That’s exactly where “identify as” goes wrong. Virtually every time people say “I identify as,” it’s short for, “I choose to identify as … .” And their choice is either to “be” something they aren’t, or else they’ve chosen to be what they already were, as if their choice explains how they got that way.
Hence my supposed “choice” to be “cisgender” and male. If you’re born male and identify as female, that’s by choice. If you’re born male and identify as male, that’s by choice, too. Everything’s by choice.
Sometimes — though rarely — it’s legitimate to choose. I could choose to identify myself either as an author, a writer, or both. The truth of it depends on whether my work consists more in books I write, or in columns such as this one. In this case I actually do have a choice about it. I really do write books and articles, there really is a fine distinction between “author” and “writer,” and my work lands me somewhere near that line. So it’s a coin toss. Or a choice.
So yes, we have choices. We can choose evangelical Christian belief, or conservative politics, or (shudder!) to be a Yankees fan. And if I’m saying “choice” is the problem with “identify as,” wouldn’t it be okay to “identify as evangelical”?
I think not. Not these days, especially. There are still problems with it, even where choice is real. I’d group those problems under identity politics, language, and reality.
Identity Politics
Identity politics is a toxic mode of civil discourse that squashes complex realities into tiny little categories and calls those categories ultimate. The effects are ruinous.
Take racial politics, for example. The problem with it isn’t that racial issues aren’t real. They are. But identity politics treats race as if that’s virtually all that’s real. Relationships, geography, education, family circumstances, physical and mental health, spiritual beliefs and maturity, and all the other complexities of life may get a head-nod, but no real attention. “Yes, yes, we know about that. Can we get back to the racial question now, please?”
“Identifying as” has a totalizing effect, as if race is all that really matters. The same goes for sexual preference and “gender identity,” both of which have been lifted to near-absolute importance.
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The task of Moses was to bring the whole nation to stand at the foot of the mountain, like a bride prepared for the coming of the bridegroom. They were to meet with this great God…Moses ascended to the top of the mountain, while God descended upon the top of the mountain. This is the meeting of heaven and earth.

In their album based on the epistle of Hebrews, Psallos has a song about the tabernacle and the old covenant that was made with Israel at Sinai. In that song, they call it a come-but-stay-away covenant, and our present text will display how true that description is. At the very heart of our passage is the reality that Israel was coming “to meet God” (v. 17); however, that is flanked by repeated warnings of the deadly consequences of coming too close. Come, but stay away.
Consecrate Them Today—Verses 9-15
Our text picks up where we previously left off. The Israelites are now encamped in the wilderness all around Mount Sinai, and God summoned Moses up to receive words for all the people. Yahweh then gave Israel a three-verse summary of the covenant that He was making with them, and all the people of Israel responded that they would be faithful to do all that God commanded them. After this, we read:
And the LORD said to Moses, “Behold, I am coming to you in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with you, and may also believe you forever.”
When Moses told the words of the people to the LORD, the LORD said to Moses, “Go to the people, and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments and be ready for the third day. For the LORD will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. And you shall set limits for the people all around, saying, “Take care not to go up into the mountain or touch the edge of it. Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death. No hand shall touch him, but he shall be stoned or shot, whether beast or man, he shall not live.’ When the trumpet sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain.” So Moses went down from the mountain to the people and consecrated the people; and they washed their garments. And he said to the people, “Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman.”
Verse 9 is the context for the remainder of this chapter. Although Moses has already spoken a summary of the covenant to Israel on God’s behalf, Yahweh was going to descend upon the mountain in an especially glorious manner so that the people of Israel would hear Him speaking audibly to Moses. Of course, Moses would continue to be the mediator between them and God; the LORD was only going to pull back the veil of His glory that they may see the outward manifestations of God’s glory with their own eyes and hear God’s voice with their own ears and then believe Moses as God’s prophet forever.
The words that God would actually speak for all of Israel to hear are the Ten Commandments in 20:1-17, and after hearing the voice of Yahweh and seeing the storm of His glory, the people cried out to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die” (20:19). Thus, they ended up begging for Moses to be their mediator permanently.
In preparation for the LORD’s mighty descent, He commanded Moses to consecrate the people for two days, and He was speak to them on the third day. Notice that the counting of days is like Christ’s resurrection on the third day. We would probably tend today not to include today if we made plans three days out. Our thinking would be tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that is the third day. Yet God told Moses to “consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments and be ready for the third day.” Again, the counting is like the three days that Christ spent in the grave being the very end of Friday, all of Saturday, and the beginning of Sunday.
Regarding consecration, we should remember that it means to set apart someone or something for God, to make it holy. After the Passover, God gave Israel a perpetual command to consecrate their firstborn sons to Him, which was a symbol of His possession of each household in Israel. This, however, was a special consecration of the entire nation. Indeed, just as God told them that they would be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, these two days of consecrating themselves for that role.
The text gives three main actions that Israel needed to take: wash their garments, set a limit around the mountain, and abstain from sexual relations. The washing of their garments was a physical picture of their need to be cleansed of their sin before encountering the presence of the Holy One.
The command “do not go near a woman” does not mean that women are themselves unclean and men could not be in their presence for three days. No, this was a command to abstain from marital relations. Of course, this was not God condemning sex as sinful; it was His design, after all. Instead, this was essentially a corporate fast in which the entire nation set aside otherwise proper earthly pleasures in order to set their minds and hearts upon God.
Finally, the boundary that was to be set around the mountain was for the purpose of preventing the people from touching the mountain, in which case they would need to be put to death. Here is that come-but-stay-away element. The LORD was coming down to speak to Israel; however, they still needed to keep their distance from Him. Anyone who went past the designated limit would be guilty of trespassing against God’s holiness and would be sentenced to death. In order to distance themselves from the offender, no one would be allowed to touch the condemned man or animal; rather, the execution would need to be carried out by stoning or by bow and arrow.
If our response to all of this is to ask why such a big deal, then we reveal both the callousness of our own hearts as well as our ignorance of God. Back in 2015, President Obama came to give a speech in our town, and though our city is very solidly conservative and most of its residents fundamentally disagreed with every one of his policies, his visit was still a big deal. For a few hours surrounding his speech, main roads were blocked off and traffic of about half the city was rerouted. And that was all for a president, not a king, in a town where he had few active supporters.
Now consider the weight of coming into the presence of a king in the ancient world. One of the most suspenseful moments in the book of Esther is when she must go into the king’s presence unrequested. As she tells Mordecai:
All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s providences know that if any man or woman goes to the inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law–to be put to death, except the one to whom the king holds out the golden scepter so that he may live. But as for me, I have not been called to come in to the king these thirty days.Esther 4:11
If entering a king’s presence was a fearful thing, how much more the presence of the King of kings, the Maker of heaven and earth? Establishing the reality of God’s awesome presence is precisely the point of the next few verses.
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The resistance to socialist ideology remains powerful in the West, ironically,  especially among the “Proletariat,” the working class. Roughly half the electorate in the US is anti-socialist or “reactionary.” Some recent European elections appear to be in part a repudiation of internationalism, if not socialism per se, though the two go hand-in-hand.And the most powerful voting bloc opposed to socialism, at least in the US, is indeed the Church. This is because the natural law moral commitments of the Church are opposed to socialist ideology.

As it supplants Revelation [Revolution] acquires the influence of a new Religion of Humanity, kindling in the hearts of its confessors a fanaticism that acknowledges no distinction of means in order to attain its ends.
Groen van Prinsterer, Unbelief and Revolution, 1847
The Christian…imagines the better future of the human species…in the image of heavenly joy…We, on the other hand, will this heaven on earth.
Moses Hess, A Communist Confession of Faith, 1846
Why is This Happening?
Polling indicates that currently, only 18% of Americans are “satisfied,” with the way things are going in the US, with 81% believing that our democracy is “threatened.” Politically-alert Americans hardly need reminding that our political division is disturbing, with both major parties threatening that if the other is elected, this could mean the end of our country. Indeed, we seem to be coming apart. The cause of the polarization is far more than discrete policy disagreements over defense or taxation, or mere regional factionalism. Rather the cause is an ideological crisis. In fact, it is the culmination of a centuries-old religious war.
An impressive number of books, including by Evangelicals, sounds a deafening alarm that variations of “critical theory” or “identity politics” are taking over our republican form of government, the news media, education, corporations, charitable foundations, and even churches — placing our society and even our civilization at risk.[1] Some trace the ideology to the early 20th century, to the Frankfurt School, or limit it to the rise of “identity politics,” denying that it has anything to do with classical Marxism.
What then we are dealing with? While the Church must recognize a dangerous trend, we can’t address it adequately unless we understand its origins. This will help us detect it, and also resist it when it has begun to influence the Church itself. We cannot afford to be “…the incompetent physician who fights the symptoms but does not know the cause of the disease.”[2]
Natural Law, Humanism, and Socialism 
My thesis is as follows: Just as natural law is the moral theory of Christendom prior to modernity, socialism is the moral theory of modern atheistic Humanism. Because modern socialism is born of another religion, Humanism, it is hostile to Christianity-based natural law; indeed, it seeks to destroy it.[3] Its hostility to Christendom and to natural law is analogous to Baal or Moloch worship in the Old Testament, the practice of which continually threatened the worship of Yahweh. And just as ancient Israel had to resist pagan idolatry, the Church must resist the siren’s song of socialist ideology.[4]
The extreme dangers of socialism should be well-known, but in a kind of collective amnesia, no doubt intended by some, these dangers are often ignored or explained away. As Milan Kundera said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Joshua Muravchic estimates that since 1917, 100 million people have died under socialist regimes, including the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot.[5] In addition, severe prohibitions on freedom of speech, secret police, the arrest, persecution, and assassination of political opponents, forced labor camps, wiretapping and other forms of surveillance, and religious discrimination are typically constitutive of socialist regimes. The detection of socialist ideology should be met with the same alarm as calls for the reintroduction of chattel slavery or concentration camps. Tragically, for reasons I will explore below, this is not happening.
Part of the reason for our forgetting is that as a cultural phenomenon, socialism is not necessarily linked to theory — socialist convictions can develop without direct exposure to socialist theory proper, sometimes through a naive desire for a perfect world free of inequality, but also through guilt for one’s advantages, or the incentivizing of envy. Guilt manipulation goes hand in hand with the vice of envy, wherein those with advantages, whether earned or not, are resented by those who see themselves as inferior, the “superiors” then responding with guilt and seeking atonement through compliance with their demands.[6] This is of course the strategic genius of the Oppressor/Oppressed distinction, i.e., that envy, a violation of the 10th Commandment, can be weaponized to produce guilt, one of, if not the most powerful incentive in the human psyche.
If a political candidate or party is socialistic, the Church must oppose that candidate or party by uniformly voting against them at the very least, if not pursuing all legitimate political means to defeat them. In our American political context, there are two dominant parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. As is well-recognized, the Democratic Party has been trending steadily toward socialism at least since the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Despite its manifest flaws, the Republican Party offers the only political instrument the Church has to resist our nation’s further slide into socialist policies and practices.
Natural Law and the State
The witness of nature together with Scripture affirms three institutions ordained by and under the sovereignty of God, each independent and possessing its own authority, yet deeply interrelated: the church, the family, and the state. When the integrity of these three are violated, e.g., when the state demands reverence and loyalty due God alone, or violates the sanctity of the family by hiding gender confusion from parents, or requires that Christians remain silent to accommodate modern ideology, the result is not only idolatrous, but calamitous for all three institutions.
A key element in maintaining the integrity of the three institutions is private property. The integrity of private property is recognized by Scripture in the 8th and 10th Commandments, “You shall not steal” and “You shall not covet,” as well as numerous additional verses and passages (e.g., Deut. 19:14; Prov. 23:10; Rom. 13:9). Private property defines and restricts the boundaries of each institution and is thus a buttress against the depredations of innate depravity. National borders function similarly to prevent the absorption of one state by another, or indeed, all of humanity under one tyrannical state. National borders also provide persecuted peoples with the opportunity to escape discrimination and persecution, as we see historically with the Moravians, the Huguenots, and the Puritans.
Whereas socialism assumes the cause of human evil lies in how society is organized, and believes the transformation of society will liberate people to express their inherent goodness, Christian natural law assumes the opposite, that the cause of evil lies in the human heart.[7]  Neither the state nor the church may demand that Christians hand over their property (1 Kings 21:1-23). Private property thus justifies efforts to resist the tyrannical absorption of family and church by the state.
According to the fifth commandment, certain forms of inequality are “natural.” The man is the natural and biblical head of the family, and men are to lead the church. All must respect persons in authority, whether they are teachers, employers, or political leaders (1 Pet. 2:13; Titus 3:1).
Ultimately, all authority is given by God in Christ (Rom. 13:1; Matt. 28:18). Thus, mere government by consent of the governed is not enough without recognizing the authority of God because all authority is given by God, and he demands worship. Government by consent of the governed in a republic, with strong checks and balances to prevent tyranny by any one branch, is arguably the best form of government ever devised by man, yet for government by consent of the governed to function properly, the voters, or a critical mass of them, must recognize God as sovereign and vote according to the creation order he designed for our well-being, as the Founders recognized. When the voters reject this, or begin voting against the natural order, God allows a society to become degenerate and self-destructive (Rom. 1:18-32).
Depending on how far along a society is in becoming depraved, honest, candid discussion in mutual respect between Christians and non-Christians will become increasingly difficult, such that “finding a middle way” will require moral compromise. Consequently, there will be increasing conflict between those who fear God and those who reject him.
Socialism: A Very, Very Short History
In confronting socialism, the first thing the Church must realize is that socialism is less an ideology than a phenomenon.[8] It is akin to a virus that can affect a society’s thinking such that the state begins attacking or undermining other institutions God has established, especially, the church and the family. Thus, socialism is hardly new. Secondly, we must realize is that it is one of the most powerful forces in human history. A popular misconception is that socialism began during the French Revolution. In fact, socialism predates Christianity by several centuries. It has a long history across disparate cultures. Ancient Egypt and the Inca Empire employed elements of collective control that resemble modern versions of socialism. In Assemblywomen, Aristophanes depicts a feminist-socialist coup d’etat in which private property is banned, children are raised “in common,” and full sexual equality is demanded by law, along with “free love,” the rejection of monogamy. Plato recommends a socialist state in his Republic which institutes collective ownership, and replaces the family with common parenting and state assignments for procreative coupling. Thomas More’s Utopiaabolishes private property and legalizes euthanasia, though he retains the sexual morality of traditional Christianity. In the era of Christendom, splinter groups led by Anabaptists sought to create socialist societies, often with horrific results.
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