Sexual Orientation, Sexual Identity and Divorce

On my way to church earlier, I bumped into a neighbor (an old friend), who announced today was her 57^th wedding anniversary. I congratulated her and cheekily added “and you still haven’t killed each other” to which she cheerfully responded that while they have come close all was basically fine. In church, I came across a 20-page book titled “Gender Confusion” (see here) and later read it.

This issue is one a couple in my church have had to face for in the school (an Anglican primary) that their very young daughter is attending and as part of their contribution to encouraging inclusion and diversity the book being read by pupils at the school featured as one of its main characters a boy that chose to dress up as a girl, and it was portrayed as perfectly ok. The couple, having tried but failed to persuade the school to see the error of their ways, decided for their daughter not to take part. There are many instances of those going against societal norms, often at a cost, on this matter.

I have argued in recent blogs there is transhuman agenda pushed by a tiny, elitist, globalist cabal that is seeking world domination with ideas of Great Reset by the WEF and Agenda 2030 by the UN. Doing away with traditional marriage and human identity in traditional biological terms is part of that agenda. The teaching, adhered to by my church, includes marriage only between a man and a woman and for life and when it came to gender there can only be two sexes. This transgender / transhuman agenda being pushed is slowly becoming the cultural norm. Sadly, some / many churches in my own city are prepared to ditch or find caveats to traditional church teaching on marriage and what it means to be human, including in matters of sexual identity and orientation, due to a desire to engage with the culture and be seen as more relevant, inclusive and diverse. All this is part of a harmful world wide tendency many are going along with.

I was interested in the author of this book citing the teaching of Jesus to back up the stance the church and this merely re-iterated what God had declared to be the case right from the beginning of creation. At the outset, the author pointed out “Back in 1934, the Oxford academic, J. D. Unwin published his book Sex and Culture. His work investigated the correlation between a society’s level of sexual restraint and its stability and achievements. He found that where chastity and (old fashioned) monogamy prevailed, society flourished. But, according to Unwin, once a nation becomes too prosperous it tends to embrace an increasingly liberal stance towards sexual activity and relationships. This in turn leads to a loss of society’s cohesion (through such things as family breakdown or failure to form families) accompanied by a dissipation of a society’s momentum and sense of purpose. Social ‘entropy’ is accelerated, thereby diminishing its creativity and energy.”

After making a number of good points, which I believe to be pertinent to the situation society is in right now and one that “the church” mustn’t ignore, the author concludes with another quote: “‘Many Christians talk of engaging the culture. In fact, the culture is most dramatically engaged by the church presenting it with another culture, another form of community, rooted in her liturgical worship practices and manifested in the loving community that exists both in and beyond the worship service. Many talk of the culture war between Christianity and secularism, and certainly the Bible uses martial language…But perhaps ‘cultural protest’ is a way of translating that idea into modern idiom…The church protests the wider culture by offering a true vision of what it means to be a human being made in the image of God’. And if J D Unwin was right – this is all extremely urgent”.

Going back to Jesus’ teaching, and in the same discourse covering marriage and gender, I am reminded He dealt forthrightly with what was once another thorny subject in church circles: marriage and divorce. I have noted a tendency among Christians to get on their holy high horses on matters that don’t affect the personally and ignore those that do, evidenced by the number of Christians who are divorced and have re-married. It is not an issue that has bothered me much in either a personal or pastoral capacity and one I feel ill qualified to pronounce on, feeling compassion toward sincere Christians I know who are in that situation, arguably for good reasons. My point is that we need to take the teaching of the whole Bible seriously, including that of gender assignment, marital fidelity and sexual purity, and not to cherry pick the parts we like.

As Christians, we should be inclusive (the Gospel invitation is to “whosoever” and the command to “love thy neighbour” is one that should be universally applied) and engage with the culture when we can as we seek to remove needless barriers and work with others for the common good, but not ahead of standing firm on the righteous precepts as laid out in the Word of God since the beginning of time.