Though Not Victorious, the Christian Right’s Consistent Resistance to Child Sexualization Has Been Vindicated
Christians may be a genuinely prophetic voice against the injustices of our culture. We may need to sharpen some critiques, such as those against current manifestations of greed, while on others, such as those related to sex and gender, we need the courage to continue to proclaim Biblical truth against the cultural tide.
The American ruling class and its apparatchiks are increasingly post-Christian. This is bad in all kinds of ways, but it does highlight the differences between Christianity and the ethos of our exploitative and incompetent elites. A telling example was recently provided by Kat Tenbarge, a tech and culture reporter for NBC News, who opened a rambling Twitter thread by declaring:
Kids frequently go to concerts with female pop stars who wear sexy outfits, perform suggestive dances, and sing lyrics about sex—the kids sing along, wear their merch, and copy their mannerisms. This is never seen as a problem but equivalent drag performances are…The problem has never been kids exposed to sex or suggestiveness. Kids have always been welcome to watch movies with their parents that have sexual innuendo, dine at Hooters, watch cheerleaders, and pass by magazine racks that include Playboy. Have you seen some movie posters?
This “culture reporter” has apparently never met a social conservative. Despite Tenbarge’s (perhaps feigned) ignorance, millions of us object to all of this sexualization of children, and we work hard to shield our children from it. But the decades the left spent denouncing us as scolding, prudish killjoys were memory-holed as soon as this history inconvenienced the latest talking point.
In contrast to the conservative Christians who have consistently opposed sexualizing children, Tenbarge is only concerned with ensuring that the sexuality children are exposed to is rainbow-infused. This view is increasingly normal, and it is the result of social conservatives having lost repeatedly for decades. This is the world liberalism created. The many victories won by the sexual and cultural revolutionaries are the reason we are now trying to hold the line against child drag shows and sterilizing children.
Of course, there are some people who eagerly signed up for the toboggan ride down the slippery slope and are only now wondering why there aren’t any brakes. These people persuaded themselves that the cultural and sexual revolutions would go just as far as they were comfortable with, and not any further. But the real, consistent resistance to those revolutions has always been from people and communities providing a comprehensive critique against—and a lived alternative to—them.
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The Differences Between Typology and Allegory
In recent theological scholarship there is a move to combine typology and allegory under the heading of figural reading.[1] Many Theological Interpretation of Scripture (TIS) advocates view typology and allegory as lying on a continuum, or posit that both belong to the same family of reading strategies. Much of this is driven by the push for theological retrieval, with TIS proponents arguing that distinguishing typology and allegory in the early church writings is impossible. Further, they argue that the patristic writers rightly applied literal and spiritual senses because the biblical texts carry deeper meanings that point beyond itself.
In some quarters of past evangelical scholarship, typology and allegory were distinguished in a simplistic or reductionistic manner. When one says that typology involves history and thus is acceptable while allegory is non-historical and to be rejected, this is an overly simplified attempt of distinguishing them. Further, while some evangelical scholars have appealed to church history to categorize typology as the approach of the Antiochene school (a notable figure being John Chrysostom) and allegory as the method of the Alexandrian school (influenced by Origen) in the fourth century, but this has been shown to be misguided.[2] Nevertheless, careful Bible readers must distinguish typology and allegory in order to avoid confusion and interpretative mistakes. Another critically important distinction is to separate biblical typology and allegory from typological or allegorical interpretation. This article seeks to address both issues in what follows.
Typology Is Not Allegory
Allegory and typology have literary characteristics that differ in the Bible. Just as there are many figures of speech and nonliteral language—metaphors, hyperboles, synecdoche, and metonymy—so there are also parables, symbols, analogies, prophecies, allegories, and typologies in Scripture as well. At a most basic level, an allegory is “to mean something other than what one says.”[3] Allegory as a literary form is an extended metaphor or a trope that illustrates a story or conveys a truth by personifying abstract concepts.[4] In an allegory, meaning is extended in terms of parallels or analogies between two or more ideas. A common example of an allegory is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. But allegory is also found in Scripture; examples include Ezekiel 17:1–10, Ecclesiastes 12:3–7, Psalm 80:8–15, John 10:1–16, Ephesians 6:1–11, and arguably Matthew 22:1–14. In each of these passages there are literary features of extended metaphors or figures that represent or symbolize certain truths or concepts. In sum, an allegory describes a larger narrative episode that has features laden with symbols.
On the other hand, typology in Scripture is a special and unique phenomenon of special revelation. Biblical types are particular Old Testament persons, events, actions, and institutions that God has providentially intended and invested to correspond to, foreshadow, and prefigure escalated and intensified New Testament realities (antitypes).[5] There are many examples of types, such as Adam, the flood, the exodus, Melchizedek, the sacrificial system, the temple, and so on. Allegory features an episode with many elements of metaphor and imagery to convey a truth or idea. However, typological patterns in Scripture are more discrete as real phenomena—persons and events—correspond and anticipate future fulfillment in similar, yet different persons and events—primarily Jesus Christ and the redemption he accomplishes. Typology generally involves a heavenly prototype or archetype which corresponds to an Old Testament copy or shadow (the type), which in turn points to and is fulfilled in the New Testament antitype.
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Don’t Believe Culture’s Lies about Men and Women
Don’t mistake Butterfield’s confidence for pride. Her heart throughout the book proclaims this message (my paraphrase): “God the sovereign creator brilliantly and beautifully designed men and women. We should obey what he tells us. We should live according to his design. We shouldn’t believe lies.” That assertiveness may strike some people as arrogant since it goes against the grain of worldly thinking, but worldly thinking goes against the grain of reality. Christians should not be embarrassed of anything that is true, especially anything that God has revealed in Scripture: “This book is for Christians not embarrassed by the Bible and its teaching on women’s roles and callings. An unbreakable biblical logic connects God’s design for men and women, God’s standards for sexual behavior, and the Bible’s teaching on sex roles in the family, church, and world” (p. xx).
Rosaria Butterfield used to be a lesbian activist who lived with a woman partner while serving as a tenured professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University in New York. Now she is a Christian who is married to a Presbyterian pastor and who invests her time as a homeschool mom and grandmother and as a hospitable neighbor in North Carolina. (When she wrote this book, her four adopted children spanned ages sixteen to thirty-four.) The title of her new book specifies what she is warning against: Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023).
Butterfield’s Thesis
Here is one way to summarize Butterfield’s thesis: Don’t believe our culture’s lies about God’s design for men and women. She presents five lies and explains, “What all these lies have in common is they don’t think that God had a plan and purpose when he created men and women” (p. 290). At the root of the lies is what she calls “our nation’s reigning idol, a formidable monolith represented by the letters LGBTQ and the symbol +” (p. xxi; cf. p. 91).
Lie #1: Homosexuality Is Normal
The lie: The way you feel defines who you are. For example, if you are a female who feels sexually attracted only to women, then you are a lesbian. You have a homosexual orientation that is immutable. That is your core truth. That is your identity. And it is an identity that is good and normal.
According to “gay Christians,” a person’s homosexual orientation is morally neutral—like being blind or deaf. It’s not a sin that you should repent of. The church should not just welcome but empathetically approve of “sexual minorities.” When people sin in heterosexual and homosexual ways, the nature of the sexual sin is equally fallen.
The truth: Our sinful feelings do not determine our core identity. Those with homosexual desires are responsible to mortify their sinful desires. “The normalization of homosexuality is the central controlling narrative of our anti-Christian age” (p. 33). “Sexual orientation, a secular concept, began in the nineteenth century. You will not find the concept of sexual orientation in the Bible” (p. 67). “It all comes down to this: Do you trust your feelings, or do you trust the word of God?” (p. 98). We should have sympathy for those enslaved to sexual sin, but we should not empathize with the sin itself.
The identity narrative makes sense in our culture because people have swallowed the lie of intersectionality—the idea that the world consists of power struggles between oppressors (e.g., white, male, heterosexual, Christian, fit, free) and the oppressed (e.g., person of color, female, LGBTQ+, non-Christian, overweight, incarcerated). “Today, failing to affirm LGBTQ+ rights is considered an act of harm. … Today, even in the church, it seems, accepting someone without approving her is to reject her” (p. 59). Harm is now psychological, not material. The way to accrue social status is to claim an intersection of victim statuses. This creates a community that is “fractured, victim-minded, angry, and inconsolable”; it is “identity politics on steroids” and devoid of “a biblical category of sin” (p. 61). “The victimized identities that emerge from intersectionality are perpetually immature and in constant need of therapy and affirmation” (p. 62).
When people sin in heterosexual and homosexual ways, the nature of the sexual sin is not equally fallen: “The heterosexual pattern is natural even if a particular practice is sinful, as in adultery. If a man and a woman are committing fornication but they come to Christ and repent of their sin, they could someday get married and live in God’s obedience and blessing. But if a man and a man in a homosexual relationship come to Christ, they would need to break up in order to live in obedience and blessing. … Homosexual sin is a violation against both God’s pattern of creation and the moral law of God, while heterosexual sin violates the moral law of God exclusively” (p. 304). The hermeneutic that justifies women pastors is the same hermeneutic that justifies LGBTQ+. “Egalitarianism is the highway to LGBTQ+ church leadership” (p. 75).
Lie #2: Being a Spiritual Person Is Kinder Than Being a Biblical Christian
The lie: A spiritual person finds true spirituality inside himself or herself. Everything shares in a single divine power. Distinctions and hierarchies are abusive and violent.
The truth: There are two realities—God and not-God (i.e., the Creator and creation). And there are two kinds of people—those who love the triune God and those who defy him. It is not kind to be a person who misleads others to defy the Creator by living contrary to reality.
Lie #3: Feminism Is Good for the World and the Church
The lie: The traditional biblical view about God’s design for men and women is wrong. Male headship is a result of the fall. The Bible does not require a wife to submit to her husband, nor does the Bible forbid women from serving as pastors or elders. The traditional view results in sexual abuse. Any male-female sexual relationship that rejects sameness (i.e., interchangeability) and calls a wife to submit to her husband is foundational to rape culture.
The truth: The traditional biblical view about God’s design for men and women is true, good, and beautiful.“A godly woman who is the wife of a godly man is receptive, teachable, and life-giving, her beauty increasing with her age because her Christian character is being more and more sanctified. … At its most basic distinction, God created men for strength, women for nurturance, and both for the other, her submission yielding to his headship creating the harmony of mutual work and worship of God. The simplicity, beauty, and perfection of the creation ordinance may be marred by sin but not by the designer’s perfect plan” (p. 158).
“A helpmate is not a doormat. She is smart and strong and knows how to think and advise her husband when called upon. While she may also have a job or career that contributes to the household, being a helpmate means that the husband’s vocation comes first” (p. 172).
“A godly woman is not called to universal submission. She is called to submit to her husband, elders, and civil authorities” (p. 161).
“A Christian’s best defense against abuse of all authority is membership in a biblically faithful church” (p. 162).
“When feminism is the interpretative tool for reading Scripture, the powerful, supernatural word of God shrinks into an easily manipulated tool of sociology, revealing power plays and oppressors and offering no hope beyond its creation of new possibilities and new words to express one’s never-ending hurt” (p. 177).
“Feminism’s war against patriarchy isn’t its only problem. By denying the centrality of the creation ordinance in defining woman and her glory, feminism insults women. Worse still, feminism can’t offer the protections against violence that it promises. In fact, feminism has become a place of such confusion that it cannot define what a woman is without offending the LGBTQ+ movement—especially the T part (transgenderism)” (p. 189).Lie #4: Transgenderism Is Normal
The lie: Your sex is gender-fluid. The biological sex you are born as does not necessarily correspond to your gender. It is normal for a person recognized as a male at birth to later realize that he is actually a woman trapped in a man’s body. How you feel is the real you. There are more than just two sexes (the traditional gender binary is wrong), and there are even more genders. If your child is transitioning, you must comply or else you will be guilty of that child’s suicide: “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”
The truth: God created mankind as either male or female. There are only two sexes—male and female. God designed males to be masculine, and God designed females to be feminine. It is sinful for a man to be effeminate or for a woman to be masculine.
Tragically, transgenderism has become “the cool and cutting-edge expression of individuality” (p. 198). The question “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” is manipulative. The solution to a sinful desire—in this case, the sin of envy—is to put that sinful desire to death. The solution is not to enable your child’s sinful desires by pumping the body with hormones that do irreparable damage and by mutilating healthy body parts (“to lance off breasts and purge ovaries in the name of emancipation” [p. 199]). “Love holds people to the impartial, objective, and safe standard of God’s truth, not the malleability of sinful desires and the posturing of sinful people” (p. 204).
Lie #5: Modesty Is an Outdated Burden That Serves Male Dominance and Holds Women Back
The lie: It is oppressive to call women to dress and act differently than men. If a woman dresses provocatively and entices a man to sinfully lust after her, then that is not the concern of the woman at all; it is solely the man’s problem. If a woman wants to exhibit her body or to express herself loudly and freely in an “unladylike” way, then male oppression shouldn’t hold her back.
The truth: “A godly woman is a modest woman” (p. 267). Butterfield approvingly quotes how Martha Peace and Kent Keller define modesty and immodesty:modesty: “an inner attitude of the heart motivated by a love for God that seeks His glory through purity and humility; it often reveals itself in words, actions, expressions, and clothes”
immodesty: “an attitude of the heart that expresses itself with inappropriate words, actions, expressions and/or clothes that are flirtatious, manipulative, revealing, or suggestive of sensuality or pride”Butterfield asserts, “No Christian woman wants to be seen in the eyes of God as a ‘provoking object.’ Women, don’t minimize the seriousness to your own soul if Satan uses you as a tool for any reason” (p. 278).
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Gender Identity and Christian Discipleship
As parents, we are called to engage, instruct, and disciple our children for the glory of God. As we continue to watch the darkness spread across our land, we must be gaining resources, tools, and ultimately taking responsibility to educate our children through a proper biblical worldview.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere over the last couple of years, you’ve witnessed a drastic increase in the LGBTQA+ agenda in our nation. This agenda is well funded and far more organized than you might want to believe. While the stories of transgender athletes dominating women’s sports is concerning, you must know that this agenda transcends beyond swimming and track & field competitions. It involves a well organized political indoctrination campaign. In short, it’s called—discipleship.
A number of Disney employees are protesting what’s been called Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The employees are protesting as Gov. Ron DeSantis plans to sign the “Parental Rights in Education” bill into law in the state of Florida. This controversy has sparked much attention. What’s the issue? The bill will restrict K-3 grade students from being instructed or influenced by gender identity curriculum in the classroom. Once again, it points to the obvious reality that the LGBTQA+ agenda is using the classroom to make disciples, and this decision doesn’t fit within their deconstructive framework.
Ground Zero
The public school system and university campus have become ground zero for LGBTQA+ grooming. It’s called discipleship. Parents, if you don’t make disciples in your home with a biblical worldview, the enemy will gladly provide a worldly substitute. Such substitutes are offered by friendly and often very knowledgeable teachers and professors who engage in grooming activities to lead struggling children or teens into embracing a LGBTQA+ lifestyle.
The grooming starts early with children. For instance, one controversial activity that has become popular in many cities across our nation is “Drag Queen Reading Day.” This is an event sponsored by local libraries where transgender men who are obviously pretending to be women are given a public platform and access to children in a way that seems fun and interactive for children, but it’s extremely powerful.
Children will respond to the drag queen like you might expect them respond to a fun character at Disney World. They enjoy the costume and the fun stories. However, the transgender man is dressed up in a glitter covered costume with loads of makeup and eyelash extensions as an ambassador to deliver a message. The message is about gender fluidity. The goal is to make disciples and allies in local communities in order to normalize transgender and homosexual behavior in the eyes of little children and their parents. Remember the word of the year for 2021 for Dictionary.com? It was allyship.
Prior to their first day of kindergarten, little children are attending these powerful experiences in local libraries and this prepares their mind and heart to receive the more extensive grooming instruction as they enter the local school system.
The Wave of LGBTQA+ Studies
There has been a steady agenda to impact students through curricula within the local school system and university campus for decades. Back in 2008, a lesbian student at a high school in Vallejo, California filed a complaint with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) accusing the school district of discrimination. The settlement involved the introduction of films that were assigned to students as a homework assignment that depicted homosexual families. This assignment was issued as early as elementary school.
The agenda has picked up speed in recent years. An article published by Time Magazine back in 2014 was titled, “It’s Time to Write LGBT History into the Textbooks.” The social justice agenda has dramatically intensified the homosexual agenda in the sphere of education. For instance, back in 2016, California became the first state to add the LGBTQA+ agenda into the public school curriculum. After the new law passed and the new framework was adopted into the school system, it was highly praised by the California Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Torlakson who called it “a big win.” He stated the following:
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