It’s a fascinating and challenging time to be alive. Along with the confusion and chaos of burning businesses and toppling statues with the blessing of government, is the ever-present penchant for “identifying.”
I imagine a time in the distant future when someone reads that a white woman identified as a Native American, or another female Caucasian identified as a black woman, that raucous laughter will ensue. But that is some time away, since we are living in a time when all categories are fluid, including race and even gender.
The Lord, through the prophet Jeremiah (13:23), asks the rhetorical questions, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots?” The obvious answers to those questions are no longer obvious, and the questions themselves no longer rhetorical.
Today, even the boxes we used to check as either “male” or “female,” “Black” or “White,”are under siege, even as one professing Christian sociologist is calling racial identity a “social construct.” Apparently, if we do away with the category of race, racism will disappear. Perhaps, if we do away with gender, then hate crimes will disappear.
Ironically, all of this can happen because we are made in the image of God, which includes an imagination which has no limits. Gender and race, on the other hand, do have limits. It’s just that as a politically correct culture, we are refusing to acknowledge them.
Without going into the myriad, well-known ways human sexuality has been perverted down through human history, it appears that we are normalizing these behaviors in our culture, confirming them with surgical procedures and honoring them with an array of new pronouns.
Regardless of society or surgery, however, our DNA neither lies nor changes, and however we try to re-imagine and remake ourselves, we will be fighting a losing battle. Time alone will tell the tragic, misguided story, which is akin to attempting a repeal of gravity.
The question remains, how shall Christians respond? Not to oversimplify, there are two broad categories of response:
First, we need not cave to the popular culture in its purposeful redefinitions of life, whether in race, gender, or any other human category. There are clear political advantages for those who seek to divide us into small, special interest voting blocks which we dare not question for fear of being labeled intolerant. Let’s not take the bait.
When Jesus (Matthew 19) and the Apostle Paul (Ephesians 5) addressed normalcy and righteousness in relation to the sexes, both anchored the conversation in Creation Order and quoted Genesis 1. Are we going to devise a better plan? Do we really believe that gender can be a preference, like coffee or tea?
Second, while we dare not take the ideas seriously, we must take the people seriously. Many truly believe that nature makes mistakes in which bodies we happen to be born, and that can be “realigned” through various treatments and procedures. God loves these people, and they do not need our ridicule. Love them as God, in Christ, has loved you.
The best analogy I can think of in responding to today’s absurdities is how we view Monopoly Money. If you want to walk around with those blue fifties and gold five hundreds in your pocket, pretending to be rich, that is fine. Just don’t expect to use them in my store, and no, I won’t give you change for that yellow ten.
“So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them,
“Be fruitful and increase in number;
fill the earth and subdue it.”
Genesis 1:27, 28