One of the areas in which Conservative forms of Christianity seek to distinguish themselves from the wider culture is their understanding of sexuality. As I have been contemplating this in recent months I have been helped by an observation in James Brownson’s book Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing The Churches Debate On Sexuality, that the notion of gender complementarity lies at the heart of evangelical views on sexuality. Whether it be the argument that leadership in the church and home is to be defined by gender, or the argument that homosexual partnerships violate a God ordained pattern of gender complementarity, or the rejection of transgenderism, the fundamental argument is that gender is essential rather than constructed. A certain set of qualities that requires a certain ordering of relationships are thought to belong to people by virtue of their biological sex.
The late evangelical doyen John Stott articulated this view in Issues Facing Christians Today. In his chapter on homosexuality he pointed to the fact that Genesis 2 speaks of woman being created out of the flesh of the man,and then of the man and woman becoming “one flesh” again in sexual union.
[This] teaches that heterosexual intercourse in marriage is more than a union; it is a kind of reunion. It is not a union of alien persons who do not belong to one another and cannot appropriately become one flesh. On the contrary it is a union of two persons who originally were one, were then separated from each other, and now in a sexual encounter of marriage come together again… heterosexual intercourse is so much more than a union of body; it is a blending of complementary personalities through which, in the midst of prevailing alienation, the rich created oneness of human being is experienced again. And the complementarity of male and female sexual organs is only a symbol of the physical level of a much deeper spiritual complementarity.
Robert Gagnon, whose The Bible And Homosexual Practice is widely lauded as the finest contemporary work articulating a conservative evangelical view of homosexuality, follows a similar line of argument.
Yet in all of this there seems to be confusion. When it comes to defining what it is that is essential to gender conservative evangelicals flounder when they try to nominate anything beyond biological capacities related to reproduction. When Stott speaks of physical complementarity signaling a deeper spiritual complementarity, one wonders what he actually means. The argument requires us to believe that there is something essentially different in the way men and women engage with God and the world.
In an otherwise excellent article on unconscious gender bias, Caroline Turner asks us to imagine a masculine-feminine continuum on which
Strengths of the masculine style include confidence, authority, decisiveness, competitiveness, and handling conflict directly. Examples of strengths of the feminine style are collaborating, seeking and gathering input in making decisions, valuing connection, and influencing through persuasion.
I assume that the author sees these as socially constructed rather than innate to men and women. But when we argue for an essentialism to gender these are precisely the sorts of places we are led to. Men and women are then trapped inside the essentialist boundaries of their gender.
The moment an essentialist tries to spell out what is essential to gender we end up back with Aristotle and the notion that people’s identity and capacities are determined not by a complex interplay of genetics, biology and environment that is unique to every human being but by their belonging to a particular group. This allowed Aristotle to argue that some people are by nature suited to slavery and some to being free; that women are by nature are less intelligent and less trustworthy than men and thus in need of control by men.
One way out of this is to argue that essentialism does not relate to being but to function. Many Complementarians, for example, speak of roles assigned by God to men and women, but shy away from the notion that men are essentially more fit to lead. My problem with this is if there is no essential difference between men and women, the notion that one sex should lead and the other should follow is completely arbitrary. It is difficult to imagine any reason that God would ordain things be this way.
The other option is to reject the notion of gender-based essentialism. I think there is a form of essentialism at play in human beings but it occurs at the level of the individual rather than the group. Every one of us has intellectual, emotional, and volitional characteristics that are shaped by our genetic make up and our environment.
I’m still thinking all this through, but it seems to me that those of us within the evangelical wing of the church need to think much more carefully about gender, identity and sexuality.
Transgenderism, Same-Sex Marriage & Gender Roles. The Unspoken Tie That Binds Evangelical Hang Ups o https://t.co/1obutAleXX
You write, Scott “Yet in all of this there seems to be confusion.” Yet you seem to nominate “evangelicals” as being the ones confused. Why? Isn’t identifying gender differences as simply being “male” and “female” precise not “confused”? When it comes to correlating such viewpoints to Scripture by such evangelicals, can you point to any references in Scripture that take us beyond gender identification as “male” and “female” ? Who are the “confused” ones? Kind regards.
Thanks for your comment Andrew. My point is that biological sex, that is maleness and femaleness, is not the same as gender. Gender I take to be the ways we believe men and women should conduct themselves and perceive of themselves.
Thanks for this helpful contribution, Scott. Appreciate you – as ever!
Thanks Allan
Johns Hopkins psychiatrist drops TRUTH BOMB about transgenders – liberals furious!
U.S NEWS May 12, 2016, by admin 0 Comment
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CNS News reports, Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and former psychiatrist–in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital, who has studied transgendered people for 40 years, said it is a scientific fact that “transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men.
All such people, he explained in an article for The Witherspoon Institute, “become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they ‘identify.’”
Dr. McHugh, who was psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital for 26 years, the medical institute that had initially pioneered sex-change surgery – and later ceased the practice – stressed that the cultural meme, or idea that “one’s sex is fluid and a matter of choice” is extremely damaging, especially to young people.
Now this will REALLY whip liberals into a frenzy, but Dr. McHugh says those who wish to change their gender suffer from a psychiatric condition, not an accident of birth.
Gender dysphoria—the official psychiatric term for feeling oneself to be of the opposite sex—belongs in the family of similarly disordered assumptions about the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder,” said McHugh.
“Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction,” he said.
Perhaps the most tragic part of this new trend is the consequence. After the immense pain and hardship of transitioning, a high percentage of transgendered individuals eventually take their own lives.
When “the tumult and shouting dies,” McHugh continued, “it proves not easy nor wise to live in a counterfeit sexual garb. The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over 30 years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest.”
“Ten to 15 years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers,” said McHugh.
I will probably get hammered by our liberal readers for apparently “trivializing” this issue, but here I go anyway…
When I was growing up in the ‘70’s there was a TV commercial for Chiffon margarine, which apparently tasted just like butter…but it’s not. The very last (and very famous) line from the commercial was “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”
Source: allenbwest
– See more at: http://newsflash365.com/johns-hopkins-psychiatrist-drops-truth-bomb-about-transgenders-liberals-furious/#sthash.3oAJBG1D.MuJOaCnV.dpuf
John, thanks for the contribution. It’s worth pointing out that Dr McHugh’s position is starkly at odds with the consensus of his profession and his study has been challenged. Nonetheless my point was not about the science of transgenderism but the theology of assigning character traits to people on the basis of their sex. Even if Dr McHugh turned out to be correct it has no bearing upon the argument in my post.
Good on you Scott. There is no room for bigotry/homophobia in Christianity.
Andris
I’m late to this party, but still wanted to leave a comment. I believe that there is a coherent way of defending complementary genders without resorting to essentialism: prophecy. The Bible contains many commands given to people that have no inherent moral quality, but which are primarily acts of communication. Some of these are individual (such as Jeremiah’s loin cloth) and some are communal (many of the commands in the Law that were to distinguish Israel from the nations around them. One could argue that the commands themselves are arbitrary and, to a certain extent, they are; it’s not inherently righteous for someone to buy a loincloth, bury it and dig it back up again, but it was righteous for Jeremiah because God had commanded it in order to communicate what was going to happen to Israel. The fact that similar acts are mandated for all Israel suggests that prophetic actions such as these are not contingent upon essentialist human attributes, rather upon a situational need for communication.
If this understanding is accepted, we turn to the question of whether gender can be understood in this fashion and, if so, whether there is a link between the communicative act and the essentialist quality of sex (in contrast to gender). For this, I turn to Ephesians 5:22-33. Paul speaks of revealing a mystery about why marriage, as part of the original separation of man and woman, was created in the first place. This passage has a chiastic structure, pointing the focus towards its centre; while the commands for wives to submit and husbands to love as Christ loved the Church are not unimportant, they’re of secondary status as far as this passage is concerned. The central focus is that marriage is structured so as to reflect the relationship between Christ and his Bride. The wife’s submission is not based on some essentialist ability to submit, rather a communicative act that proclaims out of the difference between husband and wife that the Wedding that is the telos of all weddings has a Bride who submits to her Lord. The husband’s leading, self-sacrificial love is not based on some essentialist capacity to lead, rather a communicative act that proclaims from the same Wedding that the Lord self-sacrificially leads his Bride. This reading offers a useful defence around abuses of this passage; a husband’s leadership and a wife’s submission are not good in and of themselves, rather they are good when the successfully communicate the relationship between Christ and his Bride.
This model makes it difficult to justify homosexual relationships, given that the difference is fundamental to the communicative act, but it does potentially open the door for transsexuality. If we’re to totally disconnect essentialist traits from gender roles, the focus moves from relationships having to be both opposite sex and opposite gender, merely opposite gender; every person ought to pick their gender and then play out the communicative part associated with that gender. On this matter, I remain undecided. On one hand, the Ephesians passage does pair this explanation with a reference to the creative act, suggesting that it understands the assigning of gender roles as going hand in hand with sex. Perhaps, to moderate the traditional position, there is some limited number of essentialist traits that generally make biological men better suited to the male role and biological women to the female role, but that the possession of those traits is ultimately less important than obedience in carrying out the communicative act inherent in the role-based commands. This arrives at the traditional prohibition on homosexuality and transsexuality, at least in the context of romantic relationships, via a rather different passage. However, I can’t deny that essentialist traits are greatly diminished in their importance in this model, so much so that it still seems like they could very easily be rendered null and void; this permits transsexuality, although the homosexual prohibition remains. I’m continuing to wrestle with this one myself; I lean towards the former for now, but I’m still very open to shifting.
Anyway, sorry for the wall of text, but I hope you find something interesting to reflect on in the presentation of a complementarianism based on prophetic communication rather than essentialist sex.