Just recently Bruce Jenner admitted that he is injecting female hormones to transform his body into a women. This is coming from a guy who was once a symbol of male prowess because of his glory days as a U.S. Olympic hero. His transformation was celebrated by many celebrities and goes along with the pop cultural trend of transgenderism.
As a matter of fact, the secular media and news is featuring this new fad so much that those who reject it are called “genderists” which is another new way of referring to somebody as a bigot.
The forgotten people in all of this are Jenner’s daughters, who are having a difficult time adapting to this. I don’t hear of any celebrities reaching out to them and nobody is publicly taking their side—most likely because they do not want to be called a bigot. Of course, I will go on record as saying that I empathize with their need to have a real man and a real father figure in their life—something that escapes the sentiments of secular mainstream pop culture.
Many Christian thought leaders predicted societal views regarding gender would change years ago when the slippery slope of alternate forms of marriage was legalized—which is based on the erroneous premise that there is no real difference between male and female. (They say gender difference is merely a human construct based on anachronistic religious biases carried over from the premodern religious era.)
Removing these foundational categories of male/female has brought an ambiguity that has opened up the floodgates of countless gender categories. For example, Facebook has dozens of possible ways to identify a person’s gender, and I heard one person say that gender identity has no limits. I also heard that there are now some school districts that forbid the use of the term boy and girl and all gender distinctions. Also a law has been passed allowing boys to go to girls bathrooms if they feel like they are a female.
This is because many secularists that gender is psychological not just physiological. In my opinion, this is akin to saying that I have the right to be the starting center fielder for New York Yankee baseball team because I feel that way—irrespective of the criteria based on physical ability, talent and experiential reality.
Of course, this flies in the face of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures that teach God made male and female in his own image (see Gen. 1:27). Jesus reaffirmed this teaching when He said in the beginning God made them male and female (see Matt. 19:4-5). To simplify the biblical argument—the way to tell if you are male or female is to check out your biological anatomy. (Even in the extremely rare case of a person born as a hermaphrodite—there is a biological way to determine their true gender).
Hence, both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Lord Jesus Christ affirm male and female distinction as God’s original construct of human design as His image bearers. Furthermore, it takes both a man and a woman united together as one flesh in marriage to reflect God’s image to their children. Many alternate forms of marriage assume that children don’t need moms or dads, which is a blatant rejection of both divine human design and God’s construct for families.
Without divine design as our societal template, we are left with a Darwinian understanding of random/chance origins with implications that go further since it undermines the uniqueness of humanity altogether. Philosophically, doing away with the biblical construct for humanity and families even opens up a door to human/robot families, human clone families, hubotism (attempts to create human and robot hybrids) or human/animal hybrids as well as a plethora of other machinations and creations. Consequently, without a belief in a purposeful human design, we have opened a door to cultural chaos resulting in a depreciation of humanity itself.
What is one of my solutions? We already have a growing “Intelligent Design” movement. I believe we have to take this further and birth a “Human Design” movement that brings us back to our roots as image bearers of God with the ability to philosophically, scientifically and sociologically debunk the notion of gender neutrality, as well as affirm the uniqueness of humanity by birth.
I also believe this gender-neutral trend is eventually going to result in backfiring on society as the folly of this erroneous philosophy cannot survive generationally against the back drop of the created order. Thirty years from now history will probably demonstrate gender neutrality and alternate family constructs as another failed human experiment.
The worst thing about this is the devastation this will cause to young children like the Kardashian girls, who need both a mother and a father since their emotional and psychological needs transcend the trendy norms of pop culture.
We need bold pastors in the pulpit and Christian thought leaders in the public square who are capable of articulating the biblical position and the implications of Genesis 1:27. We also need churches filled with strong, Christ-centered marriage ministries that will perhaps become the greatest apologetic of our faith in this century. All men, women and children intuitively long for the biblical norms in society because God created them with these divine instincts. This is greatest advantage those in the biblical camp have. The balance has already been tilted in their favor.
Joseph Mattera is overseeing bishop of Resurrection Church and Christ Covenant Coalition, in Brooklyn, New York, and author of numerous books, including Ruling in the Gates: Preparing the Church to Transform Cities. Follow him on Facebook or visit him online at josephmattera.org.
