I have never been a big fan of fighting what has come to be called the “culture wars” in America. I find moral politics and legislative haggling to be tiresome and messy. But even more, these cultural conflicts can become for the church a terrible distraction and barrier to keeping Jesus Christ and His gospel our central concern. Recently, however, with the rapid rise of power politics and the overt legal threats brought against the free exercise of religion, I have been rethinking the role of political and legislative power.
The tension here is that many Christians see the use of political and legal power as a misunderstanding, misuse, and distortion of divine power and priorities. To some extent, that is certainly true. But in another very real sense, when enforced policies and political power moves become matters of causing harm, then at what point is the Christian obligated to use means of power—political power included—to protect the innocent and promote the common good?
There’s no doubt that at some important level, Christians have a responsibility to protect human life. Proverbs 24:11 says, “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.” And as Genesis 1:26 makes clear, as gendered divine image bearers, we are also responsible to lovingly steward and rule over God’s creation in ways that honor Him.
In my mind, many of the recent moves to demand greater access to and funding for abortion alongside the full affirmation of the LGBT+ agenda as well as the active promotion of medical interventions to “transition” youth who are struggling with gender dysphoria are good examples of areas where real and lasting harm is being done to the people directly involved in these decisions and lifestyles.
You can call it a “culture war,” or something else, but when real and active harm is being done to people, then beyond active avenues of persuasion, all legal and political means should be used to protect those who would otherwise be harmed, even if that might mean protecting some people from themselves. This is where libertarian freedom fails to recognize that in a world suffering the consequences of the fall, unbridled liberty is an open invitation to the harm of self and others.
In short, we are all sinners, and sometimes we need to be protected not only from others, but also from ourselves. And whether or not we admit it, there is a cultural and spiritual battle being waged. This battle is not merely a set of abstract arguments for a vision of what constitutes the common good. It is a concrete battle being waged in real time and real space. Right now, specific people are being harmed and becoming casualties in the process.
Christians who claim to love God and His justice should not turn a blind, indifferent, or fearful eye away from these real-life tragedies currently unfolding before us. We must wisely and appropriately use whatever power God has graciously given us to humbly, lovingly, and courageously fight for those who need to be protected from the devilish and destructive deceptions and deeds of our time. As G. K. Chesterton reminds us, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
Genesis 2 explains that Adam was to name the animals as one of the ways to fulfill God’s mandate to “have dominion” over the created order. When Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were brought to Babylon, one of the first things the king did to assert his authority over them was change their names to Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter, fundamentally altering his identity.
Names both impart and express identity, and the one who does the naming claims a special kind of authority over who or what is named. Names are also expressed in language and whether or not we realize it, our understanding of language impacts how we understand and relate to the world around us.
Unfortunately, we live in an age that is deeply confused and ambivalent about language, reality, authority, and self-identity. The prevailing attitude is that reality is primarily (if not solely) conventional and therefore socially constructed. In this view, language does not correspond to a reality external to the speaker, but instead creates and determines it.
Christians, in contrast, recognize that language, properly understood, refers to a concrete external reality that is created not by us but by God. As His creatures, we are part of that external reality which has a givenness that is presented to us as a gift. Refusing to accept and submit to this givenness is described in Romans 1:21 as a refusal to honor “God or give thanks to him.”
According to Genesis 1:27, one important creational gift God has given to us is our sexuality: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Thus, our sexual gender is not determined by us or the culture in which we live but is a concrete and immutable gift from God for a very important purpose, namely, to reflect and reveal His nature in the world together in a complementary way. Consequently, names and pronouns have traditionally been expressed in gendered language in recognition of this God-given and divinely-determined reality.
Recently, a debate about the use of gendered pronouns has arisen within the Christian community. Some argue we should be “hospitable” in our use of preferred pronouns and that 1 Corinthians 9:20-23 supports an accommodating stance by saying, “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.”
The idea is, “to the trans I become trans” by using their preferred pronouns as an act of love and an affirmation of their humanness so that I can share the gospel and hopefully see them come to Christ. This idea is considered especially important since trans people (and the broader LGBT+ community in general) often claim that any refusal to use a person’s preferred pronouns is a denial of their humanity and dehumanizes them. Consequently, they will not continue the conversation or relationship, and any opportunity to share the gospel will be lost.
Proponents often share lots of stories about people who came to Christ who say that they would never have listened if the person sharing the gospel had refused to call them by their preferred pronouns when they were not believers.
It would be easy at this point to be somewhat pragmatic and say that since it results in people coming to Christ, we should accommodate and be hospitable towards the way they describe themselves, just as we generally allow people to define themselves in other (non-sexual) ways.
However, many Christians are deeply troubled and concerned by the accommodation to and use of such pronouns. For them, this is a matter of honesty and telling the truth to ourselves and others about who God created us to be. While we do have some God-given freedom to define some aspects of our identity, we are not free to do so in areas designed by and given to us by God, no matter what we think or how we feel about them. Thus, using pronouns that do not correspond to our God-given sex constitutes a loss of integrity and surrenders to the spirit of the age, all in an attempt avoid offending someone. In short, it is an attempt to please people rather than staying true to God and the gospel (Galatians 1:10).
In an August 14, 2023 Christianity Today article entitled, “Should I Offer My Pronouns?”, the debate is framed this way: “Which takes precedence: using language that reflects God’s immutable design, or using language that honors our neighbors’ wishes and invites them into deeper relationship?” In short, which is more important, showing deference to the expressed preferences of the person you are relating to or ensuring that your language conforms to what you consider to be true reality? The latter is often depicted as bordering on, if not explicitly, unloving, whereas the former is put forth as showing love and honor to the person in order to maintain the relationship and preserve opportunities to share the gospel.
Quotes like these may initially sound persuasive, but they are deceptive because they subtly suggest a false dichotomy between being truthful and being loving and honoring to others as persons. As Brad Bright once said, “truth without love is not God’s truth, and love without truth is not God’s love.” Truth-telling is an indispensable aspect of loving one another. Without it, trust, one of the primary foundations of love, simply cannot be built. This is why Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 13:6 that love “rejoices with the truth.”
When it comes to gender designation, language matters. And the fight over pronouns demonstrates this. If it wasn’t important how we refer to ourselves and one another using language, then the whole pronoun debate would be largely trivial. But referential language matters immensely because it concerns descriptions of God-determined realities and not mere social or conventional constructs.
One of the great rebellions of our age is the refusal to recognize the givenness of our nature and our insatiable demand to self-determine all aspects of our being, especially in the area of sexuality. Everyone is told that authority is ultimately vested in the self. To be “authentic,” I must decide who I am, and no one else can and should tell me who I am. But as I have written about elsewhere, this is a dehumanizing and destructive lie that must be vigorously denied and refuted.
Created realities like maleness and femaleness are considered by Christians to be endowments, built into the created order by divine design. Far from being discardable and infinitely malleable, they are meant to be gifts to be received and submitted to with gratitude. And they are intended to show God’s nature and image in the world. It should therefore come as no surprise that confusing our understanding of what it means to be male and female would be a major goal of the evil one. What better way to obscure God’s nature than to confuse male and female image bearers who together are meant to show what He is like through their gendered natures?
Now of course, we can be (and sadly often are) guilty of telling the truth harshly or without love. However, being committed to telling the truth is not inherently unkind or unloving as some would have us believe. Sometimes love requires “speaking the truth in love” to those who do not want to hear it. It is a severe mercy to be told that what you love will ultimately dehumanize and destroy you, but we should not back away from the truth just because we might offend someone.
Whether or not they understand this, agreeing to use someone’s preferred pronouns is essentially affirming that their sexual feelings are the best and truest determiner of who they truly are and are an essential aspect of their humanness. But this is not unlike arguing for God’s existence by admitting in advance that atheism is true. The foundational questions surrounding humanness and identity are precisely what’s at stake in the discussion. As George Packer puts it in the aforementioned CT article, “If you accept the change [in pronoun use]—as, in certain contexts, you’ll surely feel you must—then you also acquiesce in the argument.”
God’s kindness does not lead us to affirmation but to repentance. As such, we can be kind and empathetic but also crystal clear. And we need to be able to explain to others why we cannot speak to them from their own premises but are compelled to speak with and to them from what we believe to be the proper foundation of reality, namely that being created male or female is a divine gift and blessing, not merely a cultural or self-generated and self-determined perception.
lewinkler 