Deep-seated rebellion against God is at the heart of the transgender movement and activists and sympathizers are demanding public approval to compensate for the conviction they feel over their own sin, according to the pastor of a prominent Washington-area bible church who has written extensively on the subject.
The transgender issue exploded again in the news this week as Olympic champion turned reality television star Bruce Jenner announced he was a woman named Caitlyn and Vanity Fair magazine released of Jenner in women’s clothes. The story instantly dominated traditional and social media.
Virtually every outlet diligently began referring to Jenner as “Caitlyn” and using female pronouns in reference to him. Many who ridiculed the story or merely refused to refer to Jenner as a woman were labeled as bigoted or hateful.
Immanuel Bible Church Lead Teaching Pastor Jesse Johnson wrote about the appropriate response of the church to the transgender movement this week. The week before, he wrote about it in the context of accommodating transgender students and teachers in Fairfax County, Virginia, where his church is located.
Johnson says the relentless push from activists for the general public to accept and even applaud transgenders should come as no surprise.
“When somebody rebels against God in this way, that’s never sufficient enough for them. Their goal in rebellion is to silence their conscience and to silence the conviction of sin that they feel. Simply changing their body or changing their sexual identity is never going to actually going to achieve that. It’s not going to fix the conscience at all. So the second part of that rebellion is to demand that others approve,” said Johnson.
He says that is the same motivation for the demands of transgenders to have access to bathrooms of the gender with which they identify.
“It goes back to this idea that I don’t want to be confronted with the sin I’ve done to my body. I don’t want to be confronted with it. Where’s the place you’re confronted with it every single time. Every single day, you’re confronted with that sin when you have to choose which restroom you’re going to use in public,” said Johnson.
“It seems so strange that some political movement with nationwide support would target elementary school bathrooms,” said Johnson. “It seems so surreal, but what’s behind that is this idea that that is the place where these people are confronted with their sin. They’re confronted with the fact that God made them in a way that they reject, so their goal is to attack that place in our culture,” said Johnson.
Johnson believes the rapid onset of the transgender movement could be heading for a major backlash, especially if accommodations and forced in areas of the country far less liberal than Fairfax County, Virginia. He says if there is a backlash, it could get the public to rethink the push to redefine marriage.
“It is connected to gay rights and same-sex marriages. If you say that gender doesn’t matter for a marriage, why would you say it matters for a bathroom? Marriages are obviously more significant than what bathroom you use. It’s an argument from the greater to the lesser. If the thing is absurd at the level of the bathroom, obviously it’s absurd at the level of marriage,” said Johnson.
While the biblical condemnations of homosexual conduct in passages ranging from Leviticus in the Old Testament to many of the letters from Paul in the New Testament are fairly well-known after years of debate, what about being transgender? Johnson says the Bible is clear.
“It is a sin because it’s a form of rebellion against God. The scripture teaches that people were made in the image of God and that they were made male and female. We live in a country that has freedom of course, and people can do, in many respects, what they want to with their own body as long as you’re not harming other people, but we still have a category for something that is sinful because it’s done out of rebellion against God,” said Johnson.
Not only that, Johnson says this rebellion takes on additional dimensions.
“Most Americans who want to rebel against God just say, ‘I don’t need God to forgive me of my sins because I’m a good person.’ They go on and they try to work hard to be good people, totally ignoring God,” he said.
“There’s a second degree of rebellion against God, where somebody says I’m not going to be content just being my own person. I want to actually rebel against the way God made me. It’s this idea of, ‘Who does God think He is that He would choose that I get to be male or He would choose that I get to be female. What right does he have?’ I think it is a deeper form of rebellion against God than simply rejecting Him,” said Johnson.
Johnson also contends that the transgender movement inherently contradicts the rest of the gay and lesbian argument and much of the feminist cause.
“The core of feminism is you can’t reduce femininity to a certain set of physical features. That’s exactly what the transgender movement tries to do. Men who are changing their bodies to be women are presenting this idea that femininity is just simply the lack of maleness, remove the male parts and you have a woman, add some other physical parts and you have a woman. . Of course, that’s not what true womanhood is,” said Johnson, who says there is also a major breakdown in rationale between this movement and homosexuals.
“It’s definitely hostile to this idea in the gay rights movement that you’re attracted to somebody based on their physical appearance, where the transgender movement says physical appearance is not necessarily connected to gender or to sex. So that becomes a huge problem,” he said.
But Johnson says it’s really the tip of the intellectual iceberg.
“Logically, things that are presented by the two movements don’t correspond at all. They conflict all over the place,” he said.
How should committed Christians approach this emerging issue in the culture? Johnson says a line must be drawn in the sand, namely believers not giving approval to the movement.
“The Bible makes it clear that’s the one thing Christians can’t do. Romans 1 talks about how people who fall into this kind of sin immediately go pursuing and demanding that other people approve of it as well. The book of Jude talks about people who display their shame like the foam of the ocean, throwing it up. Jesus talked about people who feared man and wanted the approval of men more than the approval of God,” said Johnson.
“The very thing they’re after is for people who know God to approve of what they’re doing and that’s the one thing that Christians can’t do. They can’t be seen as approving of that which God calls evil,” he said.
Johnson says believers should extend the love of Christ, who has the power to forgive all sin.
“This is sin, but it’s not the unforgivable sin. Believers understand that all sin can be forgiven through the person of Jesus Christ, faith in Jesus and submission to His word and His rule,” said Johnson.
“Love your neighbor. Love those who are around you. This is key for Christians to remember, part of love does not mean accepting someone as they portray themselves. Part of love is wanting what is best for that other person and God, of course, knows what’s best,” he said.
