Christian disputes about the now famous Bp Budde sermon have borne an unusual intensity, even by the normal standards of online culture wars. As I’ve engaged some of these conversations and listened in on others over this past week or so, I’ve gained an even greater appreciation than I already had of what’s at stake in the Christian community’s grappling with the so-called gender wars. 

For those Christians convinced that ministries of oversight and teaching are by God’s design reserved to men, the bishop’s gender alone, regardless of anything else, has been a profound sore point and the focus of criticism, as it is always in various contexts. Aside from that given, two themes have been dominant as I’ve observed it. One I fully expected, the other has somewhat surprised me - at least in its intensity.  The former is the charge of political bias. The Episcopal Church, the American denomination (an Anglican Communion province) in which Budde is a bishop, is commonly presumed to be aligned with left or progressive politics. For quite a few Christian critics Budde’s sermon generally, and her plea to President Trump in particular, were but one more evidence of that political alignment. As the criticism went, the bishop was promoting leftist talking points rather than Jesus. Other Christians have been expressing the counter confidence that Budde’s message placed her firmly in the biblical covenant and prophetic justice tradition of defending the marginalised. 

Lest there be any doubt, the latter is my assessment. But my major motif in this series is more directly the second of the two themes I’ve just alluded to, namely transgender, the Christian conversation I believe must be had now for the gospel’s sake. My sense of the urgency of this conversation, especially among evangelicals, has only been heightened by the potency of reaction to a single word in Budde’s sermon, ‘transgender’, and its coupling with the noun ‘children’. It’s insisted by many conservative Christians that this is indicative of a ‘gender ideology’ to which the bishop subscribes and which she was intentionally promoting in her sermon. I’ll return to that claim in more detail in a later piece on this subject.

Male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27)
In opening the subject of Christians and transgender about 10 days ago, I ended with a concise biblical and theological reflection on what it means, and even more what it doesn’t, to love one’s neighbour, child or adult, who testifies to gender dysphoria in some form and may be considering, or has undertaken, gender transition. 

That reflection was in a way preparatory for the one I want to outline here. This time I’ll be a little more thorough hermeneutically, though still mindful of my modest scholarly ‘pay grade’. A more thorough exegesis is for another time, and maybe another writer. In part 1 I introduced a newly written and published so-called Christian “creed” for “Sexual Integrity”, including a single paragraph proscribing, as against God’s design, any attempt to alter a person’s gender. This is not to say there’s anything novel in that kind of statement. Indeed something along those lines has become a commonplace as evangelicals have responded to all talk of gender non-conformity. 

Yet the more I listen to people, Christian and not, who experience gender dysphoria, the more perplexing I find such credal assertions. The Church’s credal tradition has been about core gospel truths, such as the divinity of Christ, not sexual (or any other) ethics. And the biblical underpinnings of Christian credal confessions have drawn on the breadth of the Scriptural witness. In contrast the “creed” of immutable binary gender seems to rest on a single verse (v27) of the first Creation narrative, Genesis 1. (If there are other biblical foundations to the statement, I’ve not been made aware them). 

On that one verse, so it appears, it’s proclaimed as a matter of doctrine not only that both women and men share in the imago dei (the image of God), but also that:
• there are only two genders in human Creation;
• every human is ‘biologically’ either male or female;
• the genitalia of every newborn child is determinative of the gender God created them to be (so every child born is either a ‘biological male’ or a ‘biological female’);
• the child’s evident ‘gender’ at birth is God’s last word on the subject (i.e. it’s immutable);
• any suggestion, let alone action, to the contrary is sin, being rebellion against God’s creative design.

I want to highlight in this the language of biology. A common phrase employed by evangelicals who reject any place for gender transition is ‘biological (fe)male’. A person’s gender identified at birth is fixed by God, meaning that come what may that’s the gender they fundamentally are; because ‘biology’. 

What I find especially perplexing is the insistence on the ‘biology’ of gender, as a biblical hermeneutic, on the part of bible students and scholars who I know are not creation literalists. From many conversations I’ve had, and evangelical sermons I’ve heard, it’s plain that the majority of evangelical theology graduates today (and the colleges where they studied) would read and expound the Creation accounts (Genesis 1,2), according to literary genre, as theological texts and not as history or science in any post-enlightenment sense. Thus most would not subscribe to a literal 6-day or young-earth creation.

And yet we would pluck out a single verse from a chapter we agree is not a source of atmospheric or geological science, and in effect insist that that verse is a primary source of biological science; a complex field in which few bible students are trained. And then we must contend with the published insights of actual current genetic science, which are not readily harmonised with the authoritative ‘biology’ we claim to draw from the Bible. One starting place for this might be a short piece from about 2019, in which biology professor Dr Rebecca Helm introduced the complex interplay between biological, chromosomal, genetic, hormonal and cellular sex. The piece has been re-shared many times on social media and other platforms. Here is but one instance.

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My thoughts for future pieces on this theme include more on the widely believed ‘(trans)gender ideology’, and some human stories of gender dysphoria and transition. And more may emerge as this vexed and polarised Christian subject continues to evolve along with my own awareness. In closing this post I’ll point very briefly to a burden I’ve carried for some time now. I desperately don’t want the errors the evangelical community, myself included, made for decades in treating gays, lesbians and bisexuals as the enemy, to be repeated with the transgender community. And that’s why this all matters.