It was good to see so many religious leaders at a pride event recently. Parts of the church are improving their teachings on gender equality but it is time for the church to stop focusing on moralizing long enough to examine why it is so comfortable violating Christ’s clear and direct command not to judge others in the first place. To be sure, we HAVE to judge the fairness of systems and the truthfulness of statements, but why does any church claiming to follow Jesus sit in judgment of people themselves?
A Christian lamented to me the other day that little girls school are declaring themselves nonbinary and so her son has no one to date. I understand how a concerned parent might fear that children are being lured into alternative sexual expressions, but how did Christians get into the business of brainwashing children about gender roles in the first place?
These are CHILDREN. They need to know there are all kinds of people, but it is way too early to shoehorn them into binary gender roles. To be “non-binary” simply means to step out of this culture’s sex obsessed world view and to consider themselves as whole persons.
Many churches need to ask themselves why teaching little girls to be the breeding stock of men, or teaching little boys to be unquestioning unemotional warriors is more important than exploring their spiritual gifts first?
As I say, the church is improving. Every step toward the “beloved community” of universal human rights is to be welcomed, but the church should not feel comfortable addressing sexual morality until it dismantles the entire scaffold of patriarchal assumptions that has led to abusive gender politics in the first place.
What does it mean to be “spiritual” if we define ourselves by the flesh? Think of the damage that has been done to children by teaching them their place in a binary breeding structure before they have explored their full humanity.
The church is in no position to ask individuals to repent if we ourselves will not repent of our own systemic abuses. Homophobia and sexism are not simply isolated flaws of individual Christians, they are the expressions of deep systemic flaws in the church’s teaching that manifest as all kinds of gender violence- child abuse, domestic violence, homophobia and sexism. We do little boys no favor by assigning them a gender role before they have even discovered who they are as a person.
As they say, if one fish washes to shore we must ask what was wrong with that fish, but if a hundred dead fish wash to shore we must ask what is wrong with the water. The sex abuse of children in the church, as well as domestic violence against religious women in Christian homes, is a direct result of men and women who were given their roles as breeders before discovering who they are as human beings.
We are making progress in the church but we are in no position to ask others to repent if we ourselves are not willing to look in the mirror and realize that teaching ancient gender roles instead of universal human rights is a cradle that will only nurture another generation of abuse.