Do Not Cede Robustness to the Religious Right
I was in London a couple of weeks ago and had lunch with Rocky Roggio, the creator of 1946, the excellent documentary about what the Bible says about being gay. We talked a bit about what it would be like to produce a similar movie supporting the transgender community. It was a very preliminary conversation, but it got me thinking.
Marriage equality became the law of the land because the media, primarily comedic television, normalized gay people. As I have written before, it started with Norman Lear’s All in the Family, which introduced the subject in a sympathetic way. From there it went to the scripted Ellen show, in which the protagonist came out as a gay woman. After that is was Will and Grace, a comedy in which the showrunners wanted to focus on the concepts of will and grace and what life is like for those who are gay. From there we went to Modern Family in which one of three storylines was about a gay family. Today, in television, characters are incidentally gay. It is evidence that our culture has come to embrace gay people, a wonderful thing.
Unfortunately, the same has not happened for the transgender population. We could use a few television shows or movies to help our cause. As Jonathan Haidt said in The Righteous Mind, humans do change their minds, but not unless information comes to them in a non-threatening way. As I’ve written before, I do have a life rights deal for a three-season 30 episode television show with a Hollywood studio, but getting the show funded is a whole different story.
Short of a media miracle, what can ordinary Christians do? First, we must return to teaching Jesus. As I have written recently, for the last 500 years we have lived in a culture fixated with the left brain, the hemisphere focused on what it knows rather than what it experiences. It is the hemisphere that wants literal meaning, scientific explanation, and certainty.
Evangelical Christianity long ago sold its soul to the modern age, which was not good for the teachings of Jesus. Jesus taught in metaphor; they want literal meaning. Jesus taught awe for the creation; they want scientific explanation. Jesus taught mystery; they want certainty.
So they jettisoned the teaching of Jesus and started worshipping the Bible – not as it was written, but as their religious leaders interpreted it. The Bible became a book of literal meaning. Therefore the earth was created in six days and is only 6,000 years old. They wanted scientific explanation, so the Bible became a book of science. They wanted certainty so the Bible became a book without errors, something it never claimed for itself. And they focused on the teachings of Paul, more left brain, rather than the teachings of Jesus, which were decidedly right brain.
Therefore there is nothing more important than returning to the Gospels. If we teach the stories of the Gospels, we will not go wrong.
Second, we can refuse to work from an evangelical hermeneutic. There is no value in getting in debates over exegesis. The Bible is silent on transgender issues. If you wanted to make a case for the New Testament saying anything about trans people, it would be the positive words spoken by Jesus in Matthew 19: 11-12. Do not take their bait suggesting Genesis 1 precludes the existence of transgender people. It is lousy exegesis that absolutely no one taught until being anti-trans became a thing.
Third, stop teaching the rhetoric of the extreme left. Essentialism, standpoint theory, cultural appropriation, and the like have not helped anyone’s cause except the anti-woke cultural pushback. A return to classical liberalism, in which we believe there is more that unites us as humans than divides us, is the only way out of this morass.
Fourth, speak up. There are more than a few similarities between what is happening here now and what happened with Jews in Germany. From vilifying rhetoric to extermination took just 9 years. Look at these striking similarities. Jews were a tiny fraction of the population. Vilifying rhetoric began in 1933. Bureaucratic measures stripped away rights. Jews were banned from the military in 1935. In 1942 mass extermination began. One of the most striking things was the silence of the masses.
Trump in his State of the Nation speech spent five minutes denigrating trans people and ten denigrating immigrants. In the Democratic response there was no mention of trans people and one mention of immigrants. That is not speaking up for a beleagured minority.
The silence of our potential allies is stunning. Back in the day, Francis Schaeffer wrote about modern man wanting only personal peace and affluency. He equated that attitude with the end of the Roman Empire, when people only wanted bread and circuses. It appears most people are too comfortable to do anything about the plight of transgender people or immigrants. It is time to speak up.
Fifth, own what you know. Stop apologizing for being a Christian and start having confidence in the Jesus story, rightly told. No culture has thrived without robust religious communities. We have ceded robustness to the religious right. It is time to properly claim what we know to be true – that loving God, neighbor, and self is the hope of the world.
Yes, I believe a robust church can change the narrative. The reality is that a perverted church claimed the narrative while the rest of us stood by and watched. It is time to return the church to its rightful place as a cultural influencer, and make America what it has never truly been, the land of the free.
