The Must-See 12-Minute Documentary on the Transgender Movement
Transgenderism and Marxism are closely intertwined. Rufo highlights the work of Rosa Lee who saw trans people as “the new vanguard of the proletariat” who will help “abolish heteronormativity in the same way that orthodox Marxism promised to abolish capitalism”. In short, argues Rufo, “All of society must be reorganised to affirm their identities and more importantly, their politics.”
Transgender ideology is not going away. Understand the movement and how to respond by checking out this brand new documentary.
Transgenderism was a fringe idea just a few years ago. Now it is a booming industry.
It has been tempting — for Christians especially — to ignore the movement in hopes it will fade away like other fads.
Yet the ideology has only grown in strength, and now asserts itself in children’s classrooms, public libraries, sporting codes, TV, movies and politics.
A brand-new, 12-minute documentary has been released that explains transgenderism in clear terms and accounts for its wild popularity in Western nations.
How the Trans Movement Conquered American Life is the latest film by Christopher Rufo, a writer, political activist, investigative reporter, and contributing editor of City Journal.
Rufo’s previous documentaries have featured on PBS, Netflix, and international television. In prior years, the Daily Declaration has highlighted Rufo’s incisive commentary on Critical Race Theory and the poverty, homelessness, addiction and crime plaguing America.
How the Trans Movement Conquered American Life is possibly Rufo’s best film yet.
The Transgender Empire
Rufo begins his commentary by declaring, “the transgender movement has conquered American life”. He lays out his case:
Activist teachers have converted classrooms into propaganda. Influencers are driving billions of social media impressions. And doctors are cutting up kids in the name of ‘gender-affirming care’.
The story goes deeper than you might imagine, featuring rage-filled intellectuals, a trans billionaire benefactor, and large-scale medical experiments in a Detroit ghetto.
“This is the story of the transgender empire,” he summarises — “how it came into being and how it hopes to change the face of American society forever.
The Origins of Transgenderism
As with the same-sex marriage debate of yesteryear, the way many people encounter transgenderism today is through human stories. It is understandable that people feel sympathy when hearing about the experiences of people who identify as LGBT.
However, Christopher Rufo warns that behind the human face of transgenderism is a political ideology that was carefully designed to desecrate the traditional Western way of life. He explains:
In the late 1980s, a group of writers, including Judith Butler, Gail Rubin, Sandy Stone and Susan Stryker established the disciplines of queer theory and transgender studies. They argued that gender was a social construct, used to oppress racial and sexual minorities. They denounced the categories of man and woman as a false binary that upholds a system of heteronormativity, the “white-male-heterosexual power structure”.
Rufo adds that the aim of these writers was to reduce traditional views of gender to dust. “The most visceral, dramatic way to achieve this,” he narrates, “is transgenderism” — “If a man can become woman, if a woman can become man, they believed, the entire structure of creation could be toppled”.
Susan Stryker’s contribution is especially noteworthy:
Susan Stryker is one of the founding theorists of the trans movement. In her best-known essay on ‘Performing Transgender Rage’, Stryker argues that the transexual body is a technological construction that represents a war against Western society. “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” she wrote. “And this body is destined to channel its rage and revenge against the naturalized heterosexual order, against traditional family values, and against the hegemonic oppression of nature itself.”
-
Why I Changed My Mind about Deconstruction
I changed my mind about deconstruction. After researching this topic, I’ve come to see that deconstruction isn’t merely asking questions or a synonym for doubt. Rather, it’s a process with no correct destination, no ending, and no biblical authority. As a result, I don’t use words like “healthy deconstruction” or “good deconstruction” anymore. For me, that’s an oxymoron. Deconstruction is a fundamentally flawed process, and I don’t think that changes by placing a few positive adjectives in front of the word.
I changed my mind about deconstruction.
When I first began looking into deconstruction, I quickly discovered that people were using the term to mean different things. For instance, when someone says, “I’m deconstructing my faith,” they could mean anything from questioning a tertiary doctrine, like young-earth creation, to leaving the faith altogether.
Attempting to bring clarity to the conversation, I thought adding adjectives to the word deconstruction (like healthy versus unhealthy, or good versus bad) would help. So, for example, I would say that while unhealthy deconstruction rethinks faith without requiring Scripture as a standard, healthy deconstruction corrects mistaken beliefs to make them align with Scripture. Problem solved, I thought. However, this approach assumes deconstruction itself is a neutral process. I don’t believe that anymore.
While writing The Deconstruction of Christianity with Alisa Childers, we discovered some fundamental beliefs that undergird the deconstruction process. Moreover, these ideas are antithetical to the Christian worldview. This helps explain why so many who deconstruct their faith end up leaving the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). Here are three reasons why I changed my mind about deconstruction.
No Correct Destination
First, deconstruction has no correct destination.
A defining feature of deconstruction is that there’s no right way to do it and no right destination. For example, Jo Luehmann, author of Decolonizing Traditional Christianity, expounds on this idea in a video titled Our Journey of Faith Deconstruction:
This is the thing with deconstruction that I really think it’s important to understand. Everyone lands wherever they land. There is no right place to land with deconstruction. Some people land away from faith. Some people land in a different type of faith. Some people become agnostic. Some people become a different type of Christian. Some people become atheists. And all of those routes in deconstruction are valid and to be respected.
Luehmann is not alone. “NakedPastor” David Hayward, who regularly creates social media content on faith deconstruction, puts it more concisely: “There isn’t a right way to deconstruct, nor is there a right destination. You do you.”
Why isn’t there a right place to land in deconstruction? The answer is that deconstruction is a postmodern process. What I mean is, deconstruction isn’t about objective truth. It’s about personal happiness. In one sense, the destination of deconstruction is like the destination of a vacation. Whether you end up in Hawaii or Jamaica or somewhere else, it’s all personal preference. It would be silly to say Hawaii is the “right” vacation destination for everyone.
Notice how deconstruction assumes there is no objective truth when it comes to religious beliefs. That’s why it doesn’t matter how you do it or where you end up as long as you’re happy.
Now contrast this with Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount. He says, “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it.
Read More
Related Posts: -
The Love of God in the Shepherding of Souls
Christians need pastors and that God loves His people enough to provide for them such godly men. When we neglect this gift, we neglect pastoral oversight of our souls! As if we are strong enough to reject God’s plan for our soul’s protection and fend for ourselves. When we neglect this gift, we neglect personal application when it comes to the proclamation of God’s Word. As if we can survive only on Christian generalities and never need to embrace personal and tangible change.
The undeniable love of God for His people pours forth abundantly from the pages of Scripture. God really loves and cares for the good of the Church. One of the ways this shows itself is in His wise bestowment of godly pastors to His local churches (cf. Eph. 4:11).
Every Christian needs a pastor! And since pastors/elders/overseers/bishops are Christians, this includes them too. Even pastors need pastors, since God displays His love for all of His people by giving them under-shepherds to care for their souls (cf. 1 Peter 5:1-4).
Every Christian needs a pastor. This implies that professing Christians separated from the local church are at best in great danger, but there also exists a very great possibility that those separated from the church for a long time are not Christians at all. For if every Christian needs a pastor, how can one go through life apart from such a vital necessity?
For those separating themselves from the local church, or failing to take seriously membership in the local church, here are some things you are missing out on when it comes to faithful shepherding:
Protection
God loves His local churches enough to give them qualified men charged with “keeping watch over your souls” (Hebrews 13:17). What an amazing thing!
God has provided a means by which your soul can be guarded. This does not do away with personal responsibility, of course. It does, however, supply for us an added defense against the world, the flesh, and the devil because we have godly men involved in our lives who are appointed by God to help keep the sheep from destruction, whether inflicted by self or others.
For officials in high positions, we provide bodyguards. These guards are entrusted with watching over the physical well-being of people, protecting them from sinister plots.
How high a position must every Christian be in since God has provide them with soul-guards! Men entrusted with watching over the spiritual well-being of His people, protecting them from various dangers.
Proclamation
God gives His local churches men who are able to rightly divide the Word of truth and to proclaim that truth to them regularly in the public assembly, i.e. weekly worship (cf. 2 Tim. 2:15, 4:2).
Some would object and say that in such a day of technology we can listen to godly men in a variety of ways via YouTube, Podcasts, Sermon Audio, etc.
But I humbly submit to you that our sovereign God knows what He is doing in giving you godly men who are present with the sheep, and who are preaching the Word to the sheep in both the language and specific context they need to hear.
Read More
Related Posts: -
How Blood-Earnest Should a Preacher Be?
If we fixate upon the tone of the service—stamping out laughter and mirth—making sure we have the proper atmosphere of being around the holy, we’ll never arrive at anything more than contrived stillness. Because when you focus upon being blood-earnest you’re no longer really preaching.
C.S. Lewis once spoke about the difficulty of sustaining worship. Worship by it’s very nature is a looking outside of ourselves. As soon as we start thinking about worship we end up not worshipping, this is how Lewis said it:
The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing than worshipping.
I was thinking about that Lewis quote recently while thinking through this address by John Piper on The Gravity and Gladness of Preaching. Piper is trying to make an argument for a seriousness to our preaching that conveys both the gladness and happiness and joy that we have in Christ but which moves away from frivolity or levity.
I’ve gleaned so much from John Piper over the years. I believe his blood-earnestness in preaching has had such a great impact upon me. The seriousness with which he considers the glory of God is helpful and challenging. And that is, I believe, what Piper is attempting to communicate in this lecture on preaching.
Read More
Related Posts:
