Last week, I posted to facebook a link to a page on our church website introducing my new series of messages. It’s a series where I promise to tackle some of the biggest questions of life and faith. However, an atheist friend of a lady in our church saw the post and posted a number of questions of her own. I thought I would take some time to write one or more blog posts about the questions she posed.
You can see the first post in this series here: Questions from an Atheist: Part 1.
Question #2
Why do Christians care about which bathroom a transgender person uses but they don’t care about corruption, war, poverty, environmental destruction and homelessness?
This question also has a number of layers to it, so I’d like to break it apart and deal with the different pieces separately. As I read it, the three concerns are these:
- Why do Christians care about which bathroom a transgender person uses?
- Why don’t Christians care about the big problems in our world?
- Why are the priorities of Christians so backwards?
Why do Christians care about which bathroom a transgender person uses?
I can think of a few answers to this one:
- Christians and other religious people tend to be more concerned with privacy and modesty than the general population. This comes from our emphasis on sexual purity. Granted, Christians have done a terrible job of consistently upholding the lessons of the faith regarding sexual purity. Our hypocrisy on this topic is great.
- Christians highly value submitting to the will of God. Many Christians believe that a person who embraces a gender other than their biological sex has chosen a path of rebellion against the created order. The conservative Christian opposition to the LGBTQ worldview is partially based on a commitment to biblical sexual ethics, but it is also based upon a commitment to the “natural order” of creation.
- Christians in America are frightened by a world that is growing increasingly secular particularly because the past 400+ years of life in North America has been very favorable to the Christian worldview, and the prospect of losing the privileged status of Christianity is threatening. There is a religious reason for this fear, and I will address it below as well.
- Most of all, Christians believe that the morality taught in the Bible is not just commanded by God but beneficial for humans. Therefore, Christians draw the conclusion that when a society displays biblical morality, everyone wins overall. However, this attitude has caused two related problems. First, Christians often feel as if we must act as the moral police in our world. Secondly, Christians have failed to treat all moral issues equally, and have put undue emphasis on certain moral issues ignoring others.
As a result of these four things, Christians feel that normalizing transgenderism violates God’s created order, blurs the lines of modesty and privacy, threatens religious freedom, and will cause societal harm that must be spoken against.
Let me expand just a bit on each one of those four partial answers.
The concern for privacy, modesty, and sexual purity is one of the most strongly held convictions of Christians and it has been for centuries. It is the primary reason priests, monks, and nuns take vows of chastity. It is the primary reason Christians speak against divorce. It is the primary reason Christians oppose pornography and explicit books and movies.
It is also a primary arena for Christian hypocrisy. Christians are promiscuous outside of marriage, Christians get divorced, Christians participate in explicit media. The statistics I have seen indicate that Christians are better than the population in all these areas (less promiscuity, fewer divorces, more cautious about media, etc.) but they are still quite prevalent among Christians. Nevertheless, the question of hypocrisy is something I will tackle at the end of this article. For now, I want to focus on the reasons why issues of privacy, modesty, and sexual purity are so important to Christians.
There are three watershed passages in the Bible about modesty and sexual purity:
But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. — Matthew 5:28 NIV
This passage, having come directly from Jesus is taken by Christians as authoritative and somewhat scary. The male mind is especially prone to lust based on what is seen, and therefore is especially in danger of crossing a line that should not be crossed. Christians (and Muslims as well) view female modesty as a gift the women give to men who desire to honor God with their eyes and heart. Of course, good Christian men know that the responsibility for their lusts is upon themselves and not on the way women dress, but good Christian women know that the way they dress may make spiritual maturity more difficult for men. Therefore, the unspoken contractual agreement among Christian men and women is that men will discipline their eyes and women will be cautious how they dress, and both will value modesty and privacy.
Another passage:
I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God. — 1 Timothy 2:9-10 NIV
Paul writes to young Timothy that the beauty of a woman should come from her integrity of life with her good deeds and her affirmation of faith working together in unison. Accordingly, he advocates modesty and “propriety” in dress and de-emphasizes the external adornments that are sometimes societally expected of women. In this way, modesty is an expression of a value system that places who the person is and how the person lives above how the person looks. In this regard, I think Paul was centuries ahead of his time. Even today, there is a large segment of the developed world that tells women they are not women unless they “look like women” regarding clothing, hairstyle, makeup, and their body shape. However, a growing segment of modern society is realizing that these external adornments are not what makes a woman valuable, and Christians actually are the trailblazers in that way of thinking. Paul was among the first men in history to advocate that women be evaluated based on who they are and not how they look. From this perspective, modesty advances the status of women!
And finally, on sexual purity:
I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.” — 1 Corinthians 5:9-13 NIV
This last passage, also by Paul, indicates the severity of sexual immorality. His claim is that if a person claims to be a follower of Jesus but is sexually immoral, Christians should literally shun that person! However, there are two additional things to note here: First, Paul isn’t only talking about sexual immorality. He lists greed and slander as similarly disqualifying sins. By that standard, most of the Christians in North America are guilty of this and should be similarly shunned! Without a doubt, North American Christianity is hypocritical on this point. Secondly, Paul also mentions that this judgment should only be passed on those who are “inside” the church or those who claim to be followers of Jesus. That is, according to Paul, Christians should not judge people outside the church for sexual immorality! Without a doubt, North American Christians have failed to uphold this standard too.
So to conclude this point about modesty, privacy and sexual purity, Christians give these issues a great deal of attention because sexual immorality is a grievous sin for those who would follow Christ, and living in a modest society will be a spiritual benefit to everyone in it. However, Christians are at fault for giving these issues too much airtime while ignoring other sins like greed and slander and for judging the unbelieving world by a standard that was only supposed to apply to other believers.
This all helps to explain why Christians are opposed to transgenderism, but it doesn’t give an excuse for how they have opposed it.
The concern for submitting to the will of God is another key motivator for Christians opposing transgenderism and the sexual ethics of the LGBTQ worldview. Granted, there are some church traditions that embrace the entire LGBTQ worldview, but conservative Christians still reject it on the grounds that (1) the Bible opposes it and (2) natural law opposes it. Nevertheless, both of these grounds are actually the same at heart: the desire to submit to the will of the Creator God. The only reason to obey the Bible is to submit to God’s will, and the only reason to value natural law is to honor the Creator.
Christians therefore oppose the LGBTQ worldview because it is incompatible with submission to our Creator.
The fear of a secularized society is another motivation for Christians to oppose the current culture shift. Christians who are committed to the sexual ethics of the Bible are growing more and more aware that living in a secular society will demand they compromise their beliefs in public life or face ostracism when they hold their convictions in public life. So far, North American Christianity has experienced a level of religious freedom unmatched in the history of the world. There has been no moral command in the Bible opposed by American society until recently. Now, though, the society is embracing a sexual ethic that is directly opposed to the teaching of the Bible, and Christians are scared of the consequences.
As I said before, there are real reasons for this fear. One reason for this fear is that religious persecution has been around for nearly forever, but historically, it has been the worst in those societies that fully embraced secularism. Whether you are talking about Soviet Russia, North Korea, or China in our modern day or Rome of old (Yes, despite the Roman Pantheon, Rome was a very secularized society), Christians have always faced intense persecution in secularized societies. Another reason for this fear is that it will make difficult what Christians consider their “Great Commission” the spreading of the good news of Jesus to others. Yes, in a fully secularized society, Christians are afraid that it will be more difficult to share their faith.
Since America is still a democracy, and since Christians still have a voice in that democracy, they are attempting to slow the progress of secularization to preserve the freedoms they once took for granted, and that means speaking against what would advance secularization and speaking for the morality of the Bible.
Why don’t Christians care about the big problems in our world?
Okay, you caught us. North American Christians are selfish. We are hypocrites, and we haven’t solved the biggest problems in the world, nor have we spoken out as loudly about global poverty as we have about homeland sexual ethics. But do not conclude that Christians don’t care about the big problems in the world. In fact, a great argument can be made that Christians are almost always the first to care about the big problems in our world. Some history might be helpful:
- In the first century, A.D. Christians were widely known as the people who would go to the outskirts of the city to rescue abandoned babies. Consider this.
- This article lists dozens of examples of the good Christians have done in the world including the top one being that in 2010, the Catholic church was the largest health care provider in the world, running 26% of all the world’s hospitals and health agencies especially in the poorest parts of the world.
- According to the research cited in this article, marital problems are significantly reduced among religious people, even quoting research that over 53% of “Highly Happy Marriages” are those where God is the central figure in their marriage.
- Christianity and the teaching of the Bible were the strongest motivators of the anti-slavery abolitionist movement of the 17th century, and Martin Luther King, Jr was of course a Bible-believing pastor.
- To this day, Christians are leading the charge in humanitarian aid, education, the eradication of poverty, the efforts to supply clean water, and the ending of sex slavery around the world through agencies like the Salvation Army, World Vision, Compassion International, To Write Love on Her Arms, and many more.
- In America, evangelical Christians are “far and away” the most generous people in the country, giving more money to charitable causes than any other demographic group. See this article.
- Nevertheless, the Christian world has not gotten involved in environmental causes at nearly the same level as humanitarian causes. There are a number of reasons for that that are too complex for this post.
Therefore, to summarize, Christians actually do care about the big problems in our world, and are collectively more involved in solving global problems than any other group.
Why are the priorities of Christians so backwards?
If I convinced you with the previous section, then you should realize that Christian priorities are not backwards. Far more time and money is spent from the Christian world at solving global problems than is spent on keeping bathrooms segregated by biological sex.
However, Christians in America are perceived as having backward priorities because of the amount of time we spend talking about the wrong things.
There are two reasons for that:
First, Christians take personal responsibility for the problems in the world. They give money, time and effort to solving global problems, and they feel they can make a personal difference in those areas, so they act on them, but don’t do much talking about them. However, when it comes to the political issues of modern America, many Christians are powerless to make direct changes other than to voice their opinion, and democracy encourages them to voice their opinion. As a result, in America, Christians are far more vocal about the issues of social and moral change than they are the issues of global humanitarian causes.
Secondly, the global humanitarian causes, though not solved yet, are currently in action. Christians have been doing them for a long time and are quite confident that they will keep getting better at doing them. As a result, inside the Christian subculture, these humanitarian causes are are promoted and praised, but in communicating with the outside world, Christians know that the unbelieving world does not share their spiritual or moral values and therefore won’t be interested in joining the Christian humanitarian causes.
Christians rarely ask non-Christians to give money to Christian causes.
However, the result is that non-Christians don’t know all the work that is being done in the world by Christians, and the non-Christian world tends to again only hear the noise Christians make over societal issues that are viewed as petty and insignificant.
Conclusion
Therefore, the best way to answer the question is this:
- Christians have legitimate biblical and moral reasons for opposing the societal acceptance of the LGBTQ worldview.
- Christians have frequently done so in an improper fashion, offering more judgment than love and overemphasizing sexual morals.
- Nevertheless, Christians have not allowed that issue to distract them from the humanitarian causes that have been at the core of Christianity for centuries.
- Still, they tend to get the most vocal over societal moral issues which leads people in the non-Christian world into thinking that we care more about people’s morality than about their dignity.
Christians have at times failed to speak about what is most important, but we have, with a few exceptions, led the way in almost every area of humanitarian concern.