How Should Christians Respond to the Transgender Phenomenon?
Written by Robert A. J. Gagnon |
Friday, August 26, 2022
Although Yarhouse refers obliquely to wise counsel from church leaders, he allows the offender to call the shots. Paul rather recommends temporary remedial discipline for the persistently impenitent in order to minimize the harm done both to the offender and to the church (vv. 4-5, 9-13). The church’s complicity in sexual delusion benefits no one, least of all the offender. How far should Christians following Yarhouse’s suggestions go?
In June, Christianity Today published an article by Mark Yarhouse, a professor of psychology at Regent University in Virginia, on “gender dysphoria.” Gender dysphoria is the APA’s current description of the condition whereby someone perceives one’s “gender” to be other than one’s birth or biological sex. The previous designation in the APA’s diagnostic manual (and in my view still preferable) is “gender identity disorder” (GID).
Yarhouse contends:
1. Church members should address a man who thinks he is a woman by her chosen female name and use feminine pronouns, and a woman who thinks she is a man by her chosen male name and use masculine pronouns.
2. The church should not “treat as synonymous management of gender dysphoria and faithfulness” to Christ. The church should allow those with transgender desires “to identify with aspects of the opposite sex, as a way to manage extreme discomfort.”
3. For the most part, the church should give up on the “culture war” battle on this and other issues. “The church is called to rise above [culture] wars and present a witness to redemption.”
Yarhouse refers to three different lenses for interpreting the issue: Integrity (Yarhouse cites me as a proponent; go here for an online discussion), Disability, and Diversity (full affirmation of transgenderism). Although Yarhouse states that he believes “there are strengths in all three lenses,” he clearly operates with a descending scale with Disability at the top and Diversity at the bottom: “Because I am a psychologist…, I see value in a disability lens.”
Yarhouse doesn’t dump the Integrity lens entirely. “Even as Christians affirm the disability lens, we should also let the integrity lens inform our pastoral care.” He rather sees the disability lens as embracing the Integrity lens but going beyond it and even correcting it, at least at two points. First, “the disability lens also makes room for supportive care and interventions that allow for cross-gender identification in a way the integrity lens does not” (it is this allowance that is the main problem in my view). Second, it “rejects the teaching that gender identity conflicts are the result of willful disobedience or sinful choice.”
This last claim is curious. I for one do not view the mere experience of gender dysphoria as necessarily resulting from active efforts to rebel against God. My approach is not far from Yarhouse on this score: “A person may have choices to make in response to the condition, and those choices have moral and ethical dimensions. But the person is not culpable for having the condition as such.” Where I would qualify Yarhouse is in noting a more complex interplay of nature, nurture, environment, and choices. Incremental choices made in response to impulses may strengthen the same impulses.
Another problem with his “Disability” view is that for the most part people don’t associate a disability with sinful conduct. When people think of disabilities they typically think of such things as physical impairments of mobility, hearing, or sight; intellectual disability or other learning impairments; or health impairments like asthma, epilepsy, or attention deficit disorder. Such non-moral disabilities can be accommodated in all sorts of ways without violating any divine standards.
Even depression and anxiety (cited as parallels to gender dysphoria by Yarhouse) are not as directly or severely related to the desire to sin as a desire to pursue a gender identity at odds with one’s biological sex.
-
Immediate Gain, Great Gain, Everlasting Gain
We shall gain holiness, for then we shall be with Christ and be like him. We shall gain honour, for then white robes shall be given us, and we shall be acknowledged as victorious over Satan, the world, and sin. We shall sit down with Jesus on his throne. Death to every believer is gain.
I heard from a friend this week who is on his way to heaven. He has days left, the doctors say, or maybe even a few weeks. But either way, his body has endured almost as much as it can take and his time is now short. Thankfully, he is ready to depart. And as I consider his departure, I recall this reflection from the old devotional writer James Smith which speaks of the great gain that comes to those who die in the Lord. I share it to encourage him and to encourage us.
If we look at death as creatures, we shall fear it; but if we look at it as Christians, we shall not. It was once a curse, it is now a blessing. It was a loss, it is now a gain.
Read More -
Rest Upon the Pillow of God’s Promises
When our hearts and minds are restless and raging, we need help. It’s challenging to reason with ourselves when the boat of our mind is taking in the water of our emotions. Like the storm in the Sea of Galilee, we can only see the storm in front of us. The omnipotent Savior resting is eclipsed by our clear and present danger. We need to hear the words of the one who can calm the raging sea within us (Mark 4:35–41). Our access to this transforming power is the Word of God. More specifically, the promises of God in his Word. We need to hear, believe, cling to, and rest upon God’s promises.
Life has no shortage of problems. Jesus reminds his disciples to expect trouble (Jn. 16:33) and that each day has enough trouble of its own (Matt. 6:34). During these times, rest seems like the furthest thing from our minds. However, suggesting it sounds almost as foolish as curling up for a nap while a tornado siren goes off.
But this is precisely what we need to do.
How? Here’s a brief encouragement: a picture, a story, and a memory device.
A Picture: Rest on the Pillow of God’s Promises
When our hearts and minds are restless and raging, we need help. It’s challenging to reason with ourselves when the boat of our mind is taking in the water of our emotions. Like the storm in the Sea of Galilee, we can only see the storm in front of us. The omnipotent Savior resting is eclipsed by our clear and present danger. We need to hear the words of the one who can calm the raging sea within us (Mark 4:35–41). Our access to this transforming power is the Word of God. More specifically, the promises of God in his Word. We need to hear, believe, cling to, and rest upon God’s promises. He is faithful, trustworthy, and unchanging. When the storm is flooding in and threatening to capsize you, rest your weary head upon the pillow of God’s promises. It’s your only hope, and it’s your best option.
When the storm is flooding in and threatening to capsize you, rest your weary head upon the pillow of God’s promises.
A Story: Jacob
In Genesis 35:1, God instructs Jacob to go to Bethel. Why? He’s lingering in Shechem because he’s afraid after the Dinah incident (Gen. 34:30). More specifically, God promised to bring him back to Bethel (Gen. 28:15) and Jacob himself vowed to go (Gen. 28:19–22). God is telling him to live in faith because God is faithful. So Jacob goes back to Bethel and sets up an altar to God. But then, God appears to him again and reminds Jacob of two significant events in his life (Gen. 35:9–15).
Read More -
Other Billy Graham “Rules”?
The resolutions about money, sex, and power aren’t all that surprising, or even probing. This deadly trio, while ruinous, does not represent the deepest sins of the heart. They are manifestations of unbelief and rebellion, but they grow in the soil of “the great evil,” as C.S. Lewis calls it: pride. So, it’s actually this third resolution — the one that many eyes might overlook — that may be the most preceptive and profound, the most searching, the most unexpected and significant of the four: to not talk down churches and pastors.
Ever heard of Elmer Gantry?
If not — or if the name only vaguely rings a bell — then you might, like many today, lack an important bit of context for understanding the origins of the so-called “Billy Graham Rule.”
The choice of the singular “Rule” also may represent two additional misunderstandings. Graham and his three closest ministry associates made four resolutions, not one — and importantly, they did not call them rules (to enforce on others) but resolutions (embraced for their own lives). Graham says it was an “informal understanding among ourselves.”
Just as He Was
In his autobiography, Just as I Am, published in 1997, Graham himself tells the story of the beginning of the now (in)famous “Rule” that bears his name. During a two-week crusade in Modesto, California, in October of 1948, the 29-year-old Graham found himself at a critical juncture.
He had been working as an evangelist for a large and long-established ministry called Youth for Christ. Now, he was beginning to launch out on his own, to begin a new work as an independent evangelist, and he and his team felt the weight of the public scrutiny they’d be under. And they longed not to become, or even appear to be, what characterized some evangelists in the first half of the twentieth century. They heard their share of stories, and personally knew evangelists whose “success” became devastating. Such men slid from one small degree of compromise to the next in their desires for money, power, and illicit sex, all under the cloak of Christian ministry and seeming fruitfulness.
Graham and his team were not the only ones aware of such stories. Twenty years before, in 1927, author Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) — the “red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds,” as H.L. Mencken called him — published the satirical novel Elmer Gantry, dedicated to Mencken, his fellow satirist. The title character was a narcissistic, womanizing evangelist. And the book was as a sensation.
On the one hand, it was banned in Boston and denounced by evangelist Billy Sunday, Graham’s forerunner, as “Satan’s cohort.” On the other, it became the bestselling fiction work of 1927. And this just two years after the 1925 “Scopes monkey trial,” reported on by Mencken, as part of the growing social critique of “fundamentalist” Christianity. (The fictional Gantry would make another pop culture appearance in the 1960 summer film bearing his name, introducing the character, and his notorious lack of character, to yet another generation.)
Hallmark of Integrity
In the fall of 1948, as Graham contemplated leaving the security of a respected and rooted ministry to found his own evangelistic association, he saw an imposing obstacle on the horizon: “the recurring problems many evangelists seemed to have, and . . . the poor image so-called mass evangelism had in the eyes of many people.” Then he adds, “Sinclair Lewis’s fictional character Elmer Gantry unquestionably had given traveling evangelists a bad name” (127).
Importantly, Graham says these resolutions among the four founders “did not mark a radical departure for us; we had always held these principles.” Yet the act of resolving, and doing so together, had purpose and effect. “It did,” he says, “settle in our hearts and minds, once and for all, the determination that integrity would be the hallmark of both our lives and our ministry” (129). (The 500-word section in Graham’s autobiography on the four resolutions is available online at billygraham.org.)
First Up: Money
What, then, were these four resolutions (rather than one rule) that made up the “Modesto Manifesto,” as Graham and his team came to call it?
First, they renounced “the temptation to wring as much money as possible out of an audience.” I’m not aware of any public outcry then or today against this first resolve. Traveling evangelists had little accountability in those days.
Read More
Related Posts:
