If there’s going to be a Pride Month, let’s make it meaningful.
Jun 6, 2024 by David Fowler
June is “Pride Month,” and the social media firestorm between Pride supporters and Christians is heating up. But what if the conversation about Pride Month were to take place at a level I think we have all grown accustom to ignoring? The kind of conversation I’m talking about is one that did not cross my mind until recently.
I previously thought of Pride Month as a conversation about morals or, more accurately, sexual ethics. When I thought that way, it was because I had a narrow understanding of what being a Christian is, assuming at the time I was one.
That I thought only morals or sexual ethics defined the nature and scope of the conversation about Pride Month led me to engage in something akin to what I now see as not much more than a moralistic spitting contest that solved nothing.
The reason the conversation degenerated to that level is because I overlooked the one question fundamental to a right understanding of every human being’s sexual ethic: What kind of creatures are human beings?
The reason that question is fundamental to everything is that everything partakes of being—having some kind of existence—and one type of being is human. Everyone reading this is a human being and together we form a class, human beings.
And everything we do as human beings depends on what kind of creatures we think we are and what we are for.
Reframing the Pride Month Conversation
It seems to me that the homosexual-transgender-heterosexual debate is rarely, maybe never, framed in terms of being but in terms of doing. What we do identifies and defines us, and so we debate conduct as either right or wrong.
I think few today give much thought to what kind of thing a human being is and what being human is for.
The disappearance of such thinking doesn’t mean that the questions disappeared. It only seems like they did because Christians and non-Christians alike changed how they think of being and that changed everyone’s answers. The new way of thinking made those questions rather meaningless, a point to which I’ll return.
How Do We Decide What Being Human Is and What Humans are For?
What kind of creature we are depends on how we answer two fundamental questions, failing which we will, by default, assume the answer provided by those around us—parents first, peers later. They are: Does anything have a given nature and, if so, does it have permanency or is it susceptible to change?
The answers to those questions shape the way we answer a third fundamental question: What are we for?
If you are still reading, you deserve kudos because today, we tend to like things simple, such as, do this and don’t do that. But the cosmos is complex, and in my view, those who want simple and easy will never feel like they fit in; they really need a different kind of cosmos. That’s why so many are so busy and intent on making up their own cosmos.
A Question I Had to Ask Myself As A Christian: Do I Think Like An Evolutionist?
Questions of meaning and purpose didn’t rise to the surface in my thinking very often because I didn’t realize how much I thought in terms of and was influenced by evolution. Meaning and purpose are, by definition, excluded by evolution.
I would have denied believing in evolution, but you would not have gathered that from the fact that most of what I said about Pride Month was directed to what kind of sex human beings should and should not have—to conduct. Doing, not being. I never posed fundamental questions about what kind of creatures we are and what we are for.
Upon reflection, I realized the reason for this: I was awash in a form of evangelicalism that unwittingly tore asunder that which God joined together.
What I Overlooked in My Christian Thinking
Until about five years ago, I had never given much thought to the fact that God, in creating a being called human and creating that human in His image, had joined matter to spirit by a soul made for a body.[i]
Sure, I knew the story in Genesis 1, but beyond the facts of creation necessary to explain how we got here, the meaning of the facts and what revelation of the glory of God they were intended to communicate were beyond what I considered important to a biblically moral way of life.
And here is why I think the importance of that kind of thinking was lost on me.
The Change in Evangelical Thinking That No One Told Me About
What no one told me in the evangelical church I had spent my life in is that since the early 1900s, evangelicals increasingly tended to consider human beings as souls that need to escape their material bodies and the limitations of the body with its twisted affections, wrong thinking, and off-the-mark exercises of our will. It was the body that pressed down on Christians and kept them from being “spiritual” persons.
Not surprisingly and since that time, evangelicals also began to increasingly think about escaping their bodies and the flow of history by taking flight to Heaven.
I was told that this flight was by means of a rapture, following which God would allow the cosmological machine with its remaining inhabitants to finish falling apart until it ended in a final conflagration, like a car’s engine after running for hours at high speed with no oil, coolant, or water in the radiator.
How This “Evangel” Changed the Gospel
Consequently, I subconsciously but increasingly came to believe that the ticket to escape to some celestial shore—whether by death or rapture—was having the right ideas. Most Christian worldview training programs I attended drummed into my head the importance of the right ideas!
Now, though, it seems to me that this is nothing more than ideology—having the right ideas which Christians label as truth because it conforms to the reality they perceive (a Lockean-Kantian theory of knowledge)—coupled with a decision to follow those ideas instead of others.
Christianity and Christians are reduced to mere followers of Jesus’s ethical teachings instead those offered by Muhammad, Buddha, Marx, or some other philosopher. Maybe that’s why the phrase “Jesus follower” is popping up among so many church-goers.
This kind of Christianity starts to seem like the creeds of Rotary International or the Kiwanis Club but with a “spiritual” twist.
I’m not saying having the right ideas is unimportant, but Christianity is a person in relation to all of history, namely, the Son of God who entered history by a supernatural union by which His distinct being and the distinct being of the person named Jesus abided.
True Christianity not an idea but the declaration of physical and historical realities with meaning and purpose beyond what is physical and historical.
How The Foregoing Change Relates to Pride Month
This change in the evangel relative to bodies and history easily comes to the aid of those who want to justify sensual attraction and conduct between those whose bodies are the same (including those who act upon that attraction).
For example, I could easily describe a homosexual or a transgender person as a human being who is escaping what Christians consider bodily limitations on sexual desire and a flow of history that they believe imposes false ideas about those limitations on human beings.
Might it be said that they are just the new kind of “spiritual man” with ideas about being that are more fully evolved?
Is Pride Month a Mirror for Christians to Examine Themselves?
The discipline God metes out to His people to correct them in the way they should go is always just and instructive.
Perhaps, then, homosexuality and transgenderism are God’s way of providing a mirror by which Christians can see what it looks like when they abandon or de-emphasize a saving faith that believes the doctrines of the Trinity and creation ex nihilo are true and have real meaning for everything.
I mention those two doctrines because they provide a certain and definitive answer to what kind of creatures we are and what we are for. Tweak either one of them away from the historic creeds of the Church, and you get different answers.
Moreover, until a person begins to develop some understanding of these two doctrines and the relation of them to everything, he or she can’t begin to fathom the greatness of what being a human made in the image of God means and what that nature was for or the greatness of the salvation offered to all in Christ, specifically, the nature of it and what it is for.
Until then, salvation for everyone—homosexuals, transgenders, heterosexuals, and many professing Christians—will tend to be reduced to nothing more than what we do—to conduct—and we can argue any side of that we want depending on what kind of creatures we think we are and what we are for.
“What, then, should I do?”
If these thoughts pique your interest, I want to offer you for free a monograph I’ve written on how the Bible answers the questions fundamental to understanding human nature and purpose in relation to transgenderism.
Dr. George Grant, a noted theologian here in Tennessee, said it is “vitally important at this moment of our cultural crisis,” and Jason Farley, a regular guest on the podcast “Choc Knox Unplugged,” called the monograph “a game-changer.”
If you want to be part of changing the conversation and move beyond mere biology, moral dos and do nots, finger pointing, and meaningless social media bites on X, then email me at info@factn.org, and I will get you the book.
I previously thought of Pride Month as a conversation about morals or, more accurately, sexual ethics. When I thought that way, it was because I had a narrow understanding of what being a Christian is, assuming at the time I was one.
That I thought only morals or sexual ethics defined the nature and scope of the conversation about Pride Month led me to engage in something akin to what I now see as not much more than a moralistic spitting contest that solved nothing.
The reason the conversation degenerated to that level is because I overlooked the one question fundamental to a right understanding of every human being’s sexual ethic: What kind of creatures are human beings?
The reason that question is fundamental to everything is that everything partakes of being—having some kind of existence—and one type of being is human. Everyone reading this is a human being and together we form a class, human beings.
And everything we do as human beings depends on what kind of creatures we think we are and what we are for.
Reframing the Pride Month Conversation
It seems to me that the homosexual-transgender-heterosexual debate is rarely, maybe never, framed in terms of being but in terms of doing. What we do identifies and defines us, and so we debate conduct as either right or wrong.
I think few today give much thought to what kind of thing a human being is and what being human is for.
The disappearance of such thinking doesn’t mean that the questions disappeared. It only seems like they did because Christians and non-Christians alike changed how they think of being and that changed everyone’s answers. The new way of thinking made those questions rather meaningless, a point to which I’ll return.
How Do We Decide What Being Human Is and What Humans are For?
What kind of creature we are depends on how we answer two fundamental questions, failing which we will, by default, assume the answer provided by those around us—parents first, peers later. They are: Does anything have a given nature and, if so, does it have permanency or is it susceptible to change?
The answers to those questions shape the way we answer a third fundamental question: What are we for?
If you are still reading, you deserve kudos because today, we tend to like things simple, such as, do this and don’t do that. But the cosmos is complex, and in my view, those who want simple and easy will never feel like they fit in; they really need a different kind of cosmos. That’s why so many are so busy and intent on making up their own cosmos.
A Question I Had to Ask Myself As A Christian: Do I Think Like An Evolutionist?
Questions of meaning and purpose didn’t rise to the surface in my thinking very often because I didn’t realize how much I thought in terms of and was influenced by evolution. Meaning and purpose are, by definition, excluded by evolution.
I would have denied believing in evolution, but you would not have gathered that from the fact that most of what I said about Pride Month was directed to what kind of sex human beings should and should not have—to conduct. Doing, not being. I never posed fundamental questions about what kind of creatures we are and what we are for.
Upon reflection, I realized the reason for this: I was awash in a form of evangelicalism that unwittingly tore asunder that which God joined together.
What I Overlooked in My Christian Thinking
Until about five years ago, I had never given much thought to the fact that God, in creating a being called human and creating that human in His image, had joined matter to spirit by a soul made for a body.[i]
Sure, I knew the story in Genesis 1, but beyond the facts of creation necessary to explain how we got here, the meaning of the facts and what revelation of the glory of God they were intended to communicate were beyond what I considered important to a biblically moral way of life.
And here is why I think the importance of that kind of thinking was lost on me.
The Change in Evangelical Thinking That No One Told Me About
What no one told me in the evangelical church I had spent my life in is that since the early 1900s, evangelicals increasingly tended to consider human beings as souls that need to escape their material bodies and the limitations of the body with its twisted affections, wrong thinking, and off-the-mark exercises of our will. It was the body that pressed down on Christians and kept them from being “spiritual” persons.
Not surprisingly and since that time, evangelicals also began to increasingly think about escaping their bodies and the flow of history by taking flight to Heaven.
I was told that this flight was by means of a rapture, following which God would allow the cosmological machine with its remaining inhabitants to finish falling apart until it ended in a final conflagration, like a car’s engine after running for hours at high speed with no oil, coolant, or water in the radiator.
How This “Evangel” Changed the Gospel
Consequently, I subconsciously but increasingly came to believe that the ticket to escape to some celestial shore—whether by death or rapture—was having the right ideas. Most Christian worldview training programs I attended drummed into my head the importance of the right ideas!
Now, though, it seems to me that this is nothing more than ideology—having the right ideas which Christians label as truth because it conforms to the reality they perceive (a Lockean-Kantian theory of knowledge)—coupled with a decision to follow those ideas instead of others.
Christianity and Christians are reduced to mere followers of Jesus’s ethical teachings instead those offered by Muhammad, Buddha, Marx, or some other philosopher. Maybe that’s why the phrase “Jesus follower” is popping up among so many church-goers.
This kind of Christianity starts to seem like the creeds of Rotary International or the Kiwanis Club but with a “spiritual” twist.
I’m not saying having the right ideas is unimportant, but Christianity is a person in relation to all of history, namely, the Son of God who entered history by a supernatural union by which His distinct being and the distinct being of the person named Jesus abided.
True Christianity not an idea but the declaration of physical and historical realities with meaning and purpose beyond what is physical and historical.
How The Foregoing Change Relates to Pride Month
This change in the evangel relative to bodies and history easily comes to the aid of those who want to justify sensual attraction and conduct between those whose bodies are the same (including those who act upon that attraction).
For example, I could easily describe a homosexual or a transgender person as a human being who is escaping what Christians consider bodily limitations on sexual desire and a flow of history that they believe imposes false ideas about those limitations on human beings.
Might it be said that they are just the new kind of “spiritual man” with ideas about being that are more fully evolved?
Is Pride Month a Mirror for Christians to Examine Themselves?
The discipline God metes out to His people to correct them in the way they should go is always just and instructive.
Perhaps, then, homosexuality and transgenderism are God’s way of providing a mirror by which Christians can see what it looks like when they abandon or de-emphasize a saving faith that believes the doctrines of the Trinity and creation ex nihilo are true and have real meaning for everything.
I mention those two doctrines because they provide a certain and definitive answer to what kind of creatures we are and what we are for. Tweak either one of them away from the historic creeds of the Church, and you get different answers.
Moreover, until a person begins to develop some understanding of these two doctrines and the relation of them to everything, he or she can’t begin to fathom the greatness of what being a human made in the image of God means and what that nature was for or the greatness of the salvation offered to all in Christ, specifically, the nature of it and what it is for.
Until then, salvation for everyone—homosexuals, transgenders, heterosexuals, and many professing Christians—will tend to be reduced to nothing more than what we do—to conduct—and we can argue any side of that we want depending on what kind of creatures we think we are and what we are for.
“What, then, should I do?”
If these thoughts pique your interest, I want to offer you for free a monograph I’ve written on how the Bible answers the questions fundamental to understanding human nature and purpose in relation to transgenderism.
Dr. George Grant, a noted theologian here in Tennessee, said it is “vitally important at this moment of our cultural crisis,” and Jason Farley, a regular guest on the podcast “Choc Knox Unplugged,” called the monograph “a game-changer.”
If you want to be part of changing the conversation and move beyond mere biology, moral dos and do nots, finger pointing, and meaningless social media bites on X, then email me at info@factn.org, and I will get you the book.
[i] In other words, our spiritual being was made for a material body, thus the importance of the resurrection of the body – the end time event in which our spiritual being as souls is again joined to a body, though in a glorified form. That most preaching today stops at going to heaven and the resurrection of the body is deemphasized shows how Gnostic (dismissive of a material body) evangelical thinking has become.
