It has become abundantly clear that the LBGTQ+ political activism has expanded its vision of what it wants to achieve. In recent years, this activist group has added two letters, T and Q, which stand for “trans'' and “queer” people. The acceptance of trans people, on their terms, demands that one must ascribe to the idea that gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth. This idea must be accepted despite one's religious views. Indeed, the normalization of the statement "I feel like a woman trapped in a man's body," which seems weird to many Christians and Muslims and even perceived as detrimental to society, is becoming the norm.

However, in America and elsewhere, most Muslims and Evangelical Christians oppose forcing Americans to embrace transgender ideology. The concern is reflected in a religious ruling by Muslim scholar Yasir Qadi on behalf of the Fiqh Council of North America, who said,

"The Quran is explicit that mankind has been divinely created from a male and a female (for example: "O Mankind! We created you from a male and a female…" [Ḥujurāt: 13]). It also states that mankind is divided into the two sexes of male and female (such as: "…and from the two of them, He spread forth multitudes of men and women" [Nisāʿ: 1], and "And the male is not like the female…" [Āl ʿImrān: 36]).

The Southern Baptists, the largest U.S. Evangelical denomination, equally rejected the prevailing modern view on gender, "arguing that God created distinct genders with distinct masculine and feminine roles and suggested that 'the fall of man into sin and God's subsequent curse' were responsible for transgenderism."1

One of the reasons the statement about a woman trapped in a man's body makes sense to so many people in the West is because of the predominance of what Charles Taylor calls the "buffered self." This is where the self is "self-defined and shaped from within, to the exclusion of external roles and ties. We find our true selves by detaching ourselves from external influences like home, family, religion, and tradition and determining who we are for ourselves."2 Part of the detachment process is reinterpreting divine revelation to fit the desires from within. The reason both Evangelicals and Muslims balk at the idea of gender fluidity is that they believe the Bible and the Quran teach a binary view of gender which only includes a man and a woman, and that gender is rooted biologically and is thus synonymous with one's biological sex at birth.

However, there is a significant influence in our culture that thinks otherwise. David Brooks captures this mood well when he says contemporary culture seeks to "follow their passion, to trust their feelings, to reflect and find their purpose in life … in order to figure out how to lead their life because their most important answers are deep inside themselves."3 Whereas modern elevated science and reason over divine revelation, the postmodern motif elevates feelings over divine revelation.

In the coming months, I will discuss this issue with Christian and Muslim leaders in different parts of the country, hoping to bring Evangelicals and Muslims together in conversation.

Before I do, I want to explain why this issue is so prevalent in American society. I believe four movements have worked their way into American culture and are now well-established to help bring the sexual revolution we see today. I will borrow heavily from ideas from the book titled The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman.

1. The Call by Secular Elites to Reimagine the World - Changing the Lens through which you see the World and Its Problems.

2. The Call by Secular (and Religious) Elites to Reimagine Religion - The political philosophies of progressivism and Christian nationalism redefine religion

3. The Call by Secular Elites to Reimagine the Self - We now look inwardly to feelings to determine who we are

4. The Call by Secular Elites to Reimagine Sex - The Day Freud Took the taboos away

The Call to Reimagine the World

 When you and I look at some aspects of the sexual revolution in America, we wonder how the advancements have taken hold so quickly, which is the same question our Muslim friends and neighbors are asking. Jointly, we are asking what is going on in the world. The truth is the social elites have influenced people over the last couple of centuries to look at the world through a secular lens so that everyday people think and act differently today.

Today, our values are almost purely secular. The way people think about the world, through assumptions that have developed over time, shapes how people think and act. This new social imagination has produced societal institutions like public schools that carry out their value to our children. According to Phillip Rieff, we now live in an age in the West where the dominant culture rejects any transcendent sacred order and is thus foundationally different from that which preceded it. Charles Taylor refers to two beneficial words that result in two ways to understand the two worlds operating simultaneously today in America.


The first way is the mimetic view of the world, which is a view of the world, says Charles Taylor, where it is almost impossible not to believe in God, a world that Evangelical Christians and most Muslims call home. When I say this, please don't think I am minimizing the theological differences between the two faiths. Still, there are some similarities, too, and belief in the mimetic view of the world is one of those similarities. This view is more aligned, as it regards the world as having a given order and meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that God has written into the world and conform to it. The phrase " I feel like a woman trapped in a man's body " makes no sense. In the mimetic world, the individual seeks to conform to the expectations of religious tradition and the larger community.

The mimetic view starts with the idea that the world has a given order and, in the case of Christians and Muslims, that given order to be discovered through revelation from God. This means God gave God’s revelation and is inherent. For the Christian,

Scripture is the written form of God’s special revelation for his people, both the Old and New Testaments. It provides an enduring, permanent witness through which the Spirit brings them into union with the resurrected and ascended Christ.[4]

For Muslims, divine revelation, according to Mohammed Ali Shamoli, is the “general belief of Muslims concerning the revelation, based on the Qur'an, is that the text of the Qur'an is the actual speech of God transmitted to the Prophet by one of His chosen angels.”[5]

By contrast, the poiesis view of the world rejects, for the most part, divine revelation and adopts the buffered self, and thus sees the world as the raw material from which the individual can create meaning and purpose and even change their genders if they so choose. This is because today's world is not the objectively authoritative place that it was eight hundred years ago; we think of it much more as a case of raw material we can manipulate with our power. Poiesis's view is more aligned with modern culture, where people are responsible for creating their understanding of themselves and resisting the temptation to conform to an outside source of the self-imposed on them by religion, politics, or society.

The Call to Reimagine Religion

The secular and religious elites want to reimagine religion in our day in two different ways, undergirded by two completely different stories. The progressive story sees most, if not all, of human history as the history of oppression, with religion playing a major part. The human story is a long struggle between the oppressor and oppressed groups, creating a systemically oppressive system that progressive politics must tear down.

 What "woke religion" does is utilize religion and progressive politics to address injustices in the world. These theological commitments were formed over a century ago when the clash between fundamentalism and modernism emerged. According to George Yancey and Ashley Quosigk, "The fundamentalist/modernist debate [which took place between 1900-1940] was a battle to determine the identity of Christians and the social image of Christianity." While religious progressives embraced biblical criticism, naturalism, and therapeutic spirituality, fundamentalists rejected such notions. Instead, fundamentalists positioned themselves as the pillars of orthodoxy because they saw themselves holding dear to biblical inerrancy and moral absolutes. So, the traditions are running in entirely different directions and have radically different goals for their faith.

The primary focus of "woke religion" is to bring about a specific type of social change focusing on progressive political solutions. Woke religion then forms belief using primarily human reason instead of strict biblical exegesis, which evangelicals see as mitigating orthodox theology and traditional Christian values, leading Christians to create their morality.

"Woke religion" is also found in Muslim circles. When I studied at Islamic College in London, I took a class on modern forms of Islam. I did my Master's thesis critiquing Ziba Mir Hosseini's feminist religious epistemology. Upon studying Islamic feminism, I discovered that these scholars borrowed heavily from White Liberal Protestantism. They, too, employed what Yancey and Quosigk call a "humanistic ethic of social justice," which is a kind of justice that they see as valuing compassion, tolerance, and social justice rooted in a political philosophy of progressivism and defines how one is to create social change. Thus, religious progressives, Christian or Muslim, use religion's language and envision using this influence in reforming social problems like racism, sexism, and LBGQ+ concerns.

 Unfortunately, with the emergence of Donald Trump in 2016, an older form of secular co-opting of religion took place that assumes a nationalistic stance. The problem is that Christian Nationalism conflates American identity with religious identity. "Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America's constitutional democracy."[6] It is undergirded by the idea that this belief sees America as enjoying a special relationship with God, and Christians must keep it Christian. It undermines gospel priorities. For example, Muslims threaten a nation that God blesses because Christian Nationalism ties the nation's success to Americans adhering to Christian civic virtue. Therefore, there needs to be a different relationship between government and culture, where the First Amendment reigns. 

The Call to Reimagine the Self

Jean Loch Rousseau first motivated the call to live out the psychologized self & expressive individualism. For Rousseau, "People are intrinsically good until the forces of society corrupt them. According to Rousseau, an individual's real identity is found in their inner psychological autobiography."] Rousseau wrote of his Confessions: "It is the history of my soul that I promised, and to relate it faithfully, I require no other memorandum; all I need to do, as I have done up until now, is to look inside myself."[7]Trueman states, "In Rousseau, we can see emerging the basic outlines of modern expressive individualism." In "Expressive Individualism," a term first formulated by the late sociologist Robert Bellah, is the concept that believes

 Human beings are defined by their psychological core, and life's purpose is to allow them to find social expression in relationships. Anything that challenges it is deemed oppressive. Building a society based on a true understanding of the human person begins with acknowledging the situation in which we find ourselves.

Personal identity is who you are; determining who you are has vastly changed. This change in identity took place when identity was no longer constructed by looking outward. Then when Roussue came along, he influenced identity formulation by redirecting the self to look inward. It used to be that your identity was given to you by God, your family, your tribe, and your community. For example, if you were born in a traditional culture, your identity served a communal purpose. If your dad was a locksmith, he did his community by being a locksmith. A locksmith was who he was; chances were you would also serve that role. The idea that someone can be whoever they want has not yet emerged. What's more, if you were born a man, you served your community by fulfilling the roles of being a man, father, and grandfather that society had already prescribed the roles to be fulfilled.

However, what Rousseau offered was a new foundation for modern selfhood, namely the psychologized self. Carl Trueman is particularly insightful when he says, "Psychological categories increasingly dominate the world in which we live. Indeed, the greatest political questions are determined by identity, and modern identities have a distinctive psychological aspect."[8] Thus, following Rousseau means making one's identity psychological. This is why hate speech and microaggressions arise from a culture in which psychological categories fundamentally shape what is understood to be oppressed. There is a real preoccupation with psychologically oppressed actions. It offends their dignity and inflicts psychological harm by refusing to recognize them on their terms. Psychological categories dominate almost every LBTQ+ discussion.

The Call to Reimagine Sex

Remember, progressives look at everything through the lens of oppression. Why this lens? They relegate all problems of society to patriarchy. The problem is the power structure of society was developed by cis-gendered white males who knew that to maintain the patriarchy, a traditional form of asexuality between a man and a woman had to be the norm. Thus, "Cis-Heteropatiarchy is a system of power and control that positions cis-straight white males as superior and normative in their expression of gender and sexuality." It is thought that this patriarchal system must be torn down. According to Freud, happiness came from sexual gratification; if true, according to him and the theorists who came afterward, multiple forms of sexual gratification should be allowed, which means that every moral regulation is self-negating because it seeks to infringe on someone else's happiness or fulfillment. This is why the state and the school system are dedicated to demolishing traditional moral codes. Polemics against sis-gendered white males need to flourish because their beliefs restrict human nature's sexual instinct.

According to Freud, people from infancy onward were sexual beings. He believed it was our sexual desires that define who we are. To ensure there is a dismantling of cis-heteropatiarchy, even kids need to be able to explore sexuality beyond the traditional forms. Therefore, you can't leave sexual education to the parents because any deviation from sexual revolutionary orthodoxy is repression. To deviate from such orthodoxy is to hold up the forms of patriarchy that the people of the sexual revolution are trying to delete from culture.

The Politicized Sense of Self

 However, what transpired in 1969, from an article by second-wave feminist Carol Hanisch, wrote an article titled The Personal is Political. The "personal is political" emphasizes that women's issues … are all political issues that need political intervention to generate change."[9] Protests were so widespread during sporting events because the personal was political. This thinking no longer makes sex a private activity because sex constitutes a public social identity. They are public and political because of how our culture thinks of identity. And it is only through the public that it is recognized as legitimate. To refuse to have drag queens in the classroom is to reject an individual identity. And would be a form of oppression. Putting the theorists previously mentioned together, one must make identity psychological to follow Rousseau. To follow Freud is to make identity sexual. Following Marx means making identity political. To transform society politically, one must transform society psychologically and sexually.

 

Conclusion

 I hope this post was digestible enough to improve your understanding of this issue. I will share more in the coming weeks about how I will use this issue to connect Christians and Muslims in conversation.

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[1] ​​https://www.christianpost.com/news/southern-baptists-pass-transgender-resolution-disavow-efforts-to-alter-bodily-identity.html

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/religion/temptation-and-the-crisis-of-identity-lessons-from-adam-and-eve-/10095406

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/religion/temptation-and-the-crisis-of-identity-lessons-from-adam-and-eve-/10095406#:~:text=Indeed%2C%20the%20regular%20advice%20today%2C%20as%20the%20New,most%20important%20answers%20are%20found%20deep%20inside%20yourself.%22

[4] https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/scripture-divine-revelation/

[5] https://www.al-islam.org/articles/divine-revelation-islamic-perspective-divine-guidance-and-human-understanding-mohammad-ali

[6] https://religionnews.com/2019/08/02/christian-leaders-condemn-christian-nationalism-in-new-letter/

[7] https://www.9marks.org/article/summary-of-carl-truemans-the-rise-and-triumph-of-the-modern-self-cultural-amnesia-expressive-individualism-and-the-road-to-sexual-revolution/

[8] Truman, Carl. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. 41

[9] https://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html

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