Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, August 22, 2023
“Queerness as an interpretative tool” seems to be no more than the blunt assertion that today’s questions are the only ones worth asking and today’s categories the only ones worth applying. Never mind that when the ship sank, the crew drowned and that these artifacts spoke of real human lives that were lost and families that were presumably devastated. It is all about today’s categories such as gender and queerness. Difference need not be respected. Perspectives unsanctioned by modern Western progressivism need not apply.

The anti-Western left has been exposed for its sexual imperialism over the last few months. Evidence is all around. American Muslims have led protests against the imposition of LGBTQ policies and curricula in schools, leaving American progressives uncomfortably caught between two pillars of their favored rhetoric of political thought-crime: transphobia and Islamophobia. The Washington Post opined that anti-LGBTQ moves in the Middle East were “echoing” those of the American culture wars—as if Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan had been listed by the Human Rights Campaign as favored vacation destinations until their ruling elites started reading the website of Moms for Liberty.
It is, of course, the nature of imperialism that everything, everywhere, is always to be measured by the imperialists’ standards. And that is also what makes them so impervious to spotting their own imperialism. “Queering the Mary Rose‘s Collection,” an article on the website of the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England, is a recent example of this. The Mary Rose was a Tudor warship that sank in 1545 and was raised from the seabed in 1982 in a groundbreaking act of marine archaeology. The museum is dedicated to displaying artifacts retrieved from the wreck, some of which are now being analyzed “through a Queer lens.”
The specific examples are an octagonal mirror, nit combs, a gold ring, and Paternosters. Apparently, looking into a mirror can stir strong emotions for both straight and queer people, and for the latter it can generate, for example, feelings of gender dysphoria or euphoria, depending on whether the reflection matches their gender identity. Combs would have been used by the sailors to remove the eggs of hair lice. Today they are reminders of how hairstyles can be the result of imposed gender stereotypes, but also make possible the subverting of these through hairdos that break with social expectations. Rings are a reminder of marriage and, of course, that the Church of England founded by Henry VIII, king during the Mary Rose’s working life, still does not allow gay marriage. Finally, the Paternosters remind us that the crew were “practicing” Christians and that, once again, Henry VIII, via his initiation of the English Reformation, facilitated the civil criminalization of homosexual acts.
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One of his most recent and most destructive assaults on us all is via the trans activists. Transgenderism is a diabolical war on reality, biology, truth and people, and it is mainly a full frontal attack on our kids.

The more I think about it, the more diabolical things appear to be. We do not just have bad philosophies and bad ideologies and bad social policies and bad political agendas. We have satanic philosophies and satanic ideologies and satanic social policies and satanic political agendas. The god of this world is fully behind them all.
The truth is, Satan comes to steal, kill and destroy, as Jesus made clear in John 1:10. Name your poison: abortion on demand, the war on marriage and family, the scourge of drugs, the porn plague, the radical woke agenda items, and so on. They all cause tremendous harm and often death.
The devil does his evil work in so many ways, and children are especially in his sights. One of his most recent and most destructive assaults on us all is via the trans activists. Transgenderism is a diabolical war on reality, biology, truth and people, and it is mainly a full frontal attack on our kids.
But like just about anything that the enemy uses to cause carnage and havoc, plenty of clueless and carnal Christians will happily go right along with it. Thus we have pro-abortion “Christians,” pro-homosexuality “Christians,” and pro-trans “Christians”.
In my book, any Christian who supports and promotes the trans militancy in the name of ‘tolerance’ and ‘love’ is simply playing into the enemy’s hands. They have no clue what biblical love means, and they have no clue what Scripture actually teaches.
Simply put, if you love someone, you do NOT want them to go through invasive and irreversible surgeries and procedures that will leave them damaged for life. There is nothing loving about that. And even playing the pronouns game is unloving. Telling lies and denying reality is not how we help anyone.
Truth telling is what these confused and hurting people need—not falsehoods. Back in 2019 I penned a piece on why we should not buy the trans pronoun nonsense. Among other things, I quoted professor Robert Gagnon:
I am stunned that any leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, much less the President, would be contending that faithful Christians should practice so-called “pronoun hospitality” in addressing “transgender” persons by their delusional pretend sex. The idea that Jesus or Paul would have referred to a man as a woman or a woman as a man in anything other than satire and derision for abhorrent behavior is absurd revisionism in the extreme.
It is not an act of “hospitality” or “respect” to the offender but rather (1) a scandal to the weak and young in the church and a rightful violation of conscience for many that will lead many to stumble to their ruin; (2) an accommodation to sin that God finds utterly abhorrent; and (3) a complicity in the offender’s self-dishonoring, self-degrading, and self-demeaning behavior that does him no favor because it can get him (or her) excluded from the kingdom of God. Am I being obtuse here?
What’s next? Treating as a married couple an incestuous union involving a man and his mother, allegedly as a show of hospitality and honoring of their own perspective? Is that what they think Paul would have done at Corinth? Treating the man and his stepmother as “husband” and “wife” so as to extend “hospitality” and “respect”? What kind of revisionist lunacy is this?
I can’t believe that there is no serious push-back on this in the Southern Baptist Convention….I don’t really see what the point is of the SBC having an inerrancy doctrine if it leads to leaders encouraging their congregations to call men women and women men, which in God’s eyes would be blaspheming his work as Creator. I would expect this kind of nonsense from the PCUSA, not the SBC. I am in utter disbelief. Is this something that Al Mohler would approve of? And if not, has he said anything against it? And if not, why not?
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Why does the light still shine in the darkness, both now and until the end of the age? It’s because our Lord was willing to let his Father shatter the alabaster vial, so that the divine life within him—with all the light and fragrance it was meant to bestow upon a sin-darkened world—might pour forth from his new and eternal body: us.

In Him was life, and His life was the light of men.
John 1:4

When Jesus walked the earth, the entire godhead—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—dwelt in him in bodily form. So too did the eternal life of the godhead. In him was life: the eternal life of the triune God.
Whenever he spoke or performed miracles, the divine life within Jesus poured out into the world and became the light of men. The glory of God shone forth in all he did, briefly filling the darkness of this present evil world with light.
As we know from the Gospels, some were drawn to the light. They said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
Others, however, hated the light, sought to extinguish it, and—for a brief moment at the end of Jesus’ ministry—actually thought they did.
This is a great mystery, one that should cause us to marvel at God’s amazing ways. In Christ there was life; and yet, because of our sin, that life could not get out of him and into us once and for all. So God decided to let the darkness extinguish the light—
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