Albert Mohler has undertaken to instruct the Godly what they ought to think about the matter of Caitlyn Jenner and, as you might suppose, we are on hard, grim times. From a transcript of his Tuesday radio broadcast.
Some days it is very difficult to know just what should be discussed on The Briefing. Sometimes there are issues I certainly do not want to discuss – but nonetheless, I must.
Golly — you’d think he was Winston Churchill announcing the British Army’s retreat to the beaches of Dunkirk. Perhaps that’s how he sees it.
That is the case today, in terms of the headlines that emerged yesterday, this headline from yesterday’s edition of the New York Times, “Caitlyn, formerly Bruce Jenner, introduces herself in Vanity Fair.”
Ho-hum. An incoherent paragraph or so later, he gets off this beaut:
How should Christians think about this? In the first place, the most important issue here, most certainly is the issue of gender transition or the transgender movement itself and the understanding that someone who had won the Olympics in 1976 as a male can now be presented in the cover of Vanity Fair magazine as a female. One of the saddest aspects of this is the candor with which the story is actually told.
Uh-huh — can’t be having none of that candor stuff.
Then he gets down to his real beef; read it closely.
Even as celebrity culture focused on this as a matter of sensationalism we’re looking at a very tragic human drama. One that should bring about the compassion of Christians in terms of our thinking, but also the most keen biblical analysis of understanding what’s really at stake here. The biblical worldview makes very clear that God, for His glory, has made every single human being as male or female because of his intention for us and for our good.
No. This is not argument, but assertion, and it is a rock-solid bolted-down fact that Mohler’s assertion is untrue. The Genesis creation tale is false, and all of the angst now roiling the shoebox-sized fundamentalist universe arises from that proven-false belief — as does the misery these smug fools inflict on gays, lesbians, transgenders, everybody who is … other. Unfortunately, he isn’t done.
This is not a freak show. Because in reality, Bruce Jenner, is not a freak. He is a human being made in the image of God. And even though he is here attempting a revolt against even the way that he was made by his creator, what he’s doing is actually the very essence of sin, which means that he is a sinner, which means he is a sinner just like every one of us. Christian compassion and Christian humility should lead us to understand that the confusion that we now see in Bruce Jenner is a confusion that is actually writ large in humanity. It is taking a particularly striking form in his case, but we delude ourselves if we think that in our own fallenness and in our own confusion, left to our own devices we would actually do any better.
I am reminded of William Wilberforce’s solemn instruction to London’s working poor that they were poor because God intended for them to be poor, so that’s that — before the labor movement successfully got them health care and a piece of the pie.
If the authors of the Baptist Faith and Message were honest, they’d have written this and called it quits: Eat shit joyfully, for y’all are no damn good.
We are trained from infancy to binary thinking. Boys and girls stand in different lines in grade school, we are told in church that “male and female he made them,” there are different locker rooms and rest rooms, there are (or, were, aeons ago) different games in gym class, on and on. It seems to simply be the natural order of things, the way the world is. But: Why should anybody be surprised to learn that the world is messier, more complicated, than that?
It is true that we don’t know yet just how sexual orientation and gender identity arise, but few scientists doubt any longer that they are innate, that they are Operating System settings and not susceptible of change. And if Caitlyn Jenner develops some work-arounds that align with those settings, rather than battering her head against a wall that can’t be breached, why should I, or anybody else, take offense?
This is not a matter of just the science. There is a moral issue here, too — and people like Mohler, who ignore the science, who choose ignorance, who would presume to constrict and condemn his harmless neighbor’s life on the basis of something he read in a ridiculous old book, is on the wrong side of it.