Nothing Will Placate Transgenders But the Cancelling of Christianity

Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine, 4/4/23

Now that the trans activists have told us what an awful provocation our beliefs have become to their way of life, maybe the time has come for us to just go ahead and cancel Christianity altogether. Mightn’t that be the right thing to do in the interest of keeping our children safe? How else are we to ensure the goodwill of our LGBTQI+ neighbors if we’re not willing to dismantle the very structures that are so oppressive to them? We certainly don’t wish to continue driving them to the extremity of trying to kill us, do we?   

We Christians have certainly shown ourselves to be intolerant on the matter of nonbinary sex for a very long time. Right from the beginning, in fact, we’ve drawn draconian lines. Haven’t we alienated enough people already? Why do we persist in wanting to punish people because they choose to love differently than we do? If someone chooses not to identify with the sex they were given before they were born, is it our place to complain, much less to condemn? Judgmentalism can only lead to death and destruction. 

Of course, it is not really Christianity that is the hobgoblin here. After all, we didn’t invent it. Nor did we fashion the moral law that tries to prevent people from pursuing their dreams. God did. Shouldn’t He be cancelled? Along with the constitution of being to which we are expected to conform, shaping our lives in accordance with its norms and strictures? Why should we allow monotheism to stand in the way of the self-centered self? So, yeah, let’s go ahead and cancel everything!

Will that placate the transgender community? Will that make them happy? What other healing gestures should we offer to those threatened by the tyranny of our beliefs? We can surely do more than show tolerance for deviant behavior. We can actually affirm it, celebrate it.  

Won’t that please Joe Biden, whose bold leadership on this issue has clearly shown us the way? His latest proclamation, in fact, marking Transgender Day of Visibility (March 31, on which, as it happens, I’m writing this appeal), is a rousing call to action against nothing less than “an epidemic of violence” directed against people of transgender persuasion. Here are the very people who, he assures us, “shape our nation’s soul.” We are being asked to join, therefore, with the president himself “to celebrate the joy, strength, and absolute courage of some of the bravest people I know—people who have too often had to put their jobs, relationships, and lives on the line just to be their true selves.”  

We can do no less.    

All this is sheer caricature, of course. Dangerous nonsense, in fact. But what is truly awful is the fact that so many on the woke Left believe it. Joe Biden certainly believes it. And he is perfectly willing, moreover, to mobilize the entire government on behalf of making all of us believe it, too. On behalf of people who appear to have convinced themselves that Christianity is the real enemy here, against which they are determined to prevail. And by any means. Whether they succeed or not is another matter; the jury is still out on that one. But who can doubt but at this fraught moment in our nation’s history, amid the constant culture wars, that they actually appear to be winning?  

Consider the media coverage surrounding this latest event, the shooting of six unarmed Christians, including three nine-year-old children, by an enraged member of the transgender community. How cleverly our news outlets have managed to spin the story, insinuating somehow into the narrative the notion, wholly preposterous on its face, that the killer was no less a victim than the six human beings left dead on the floor of that small Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee. 

By the most amazing sleight of hand, the story has turned out to be not so much about the wanton killing of innocent people but, instead, the tragic tale of a persecuted minority forced to defend itself against systemic hatred and violence.  

An astonishing reversal, wouldn’t you say? How do they do it? The answer is not hard to come by. It is because we have allowed them to do it, to get away with it. By our own craven submission to those determined to destroy us, to cancel our past and our future, we have permitted this to happen. Isn’t this what the myth of pluralism, of that endlessly repeated slogan of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (D.I.E.), is finally about? As a sheer practical matter, that is, given the implicit logic of the doctrine, what has it come to mean?  

Two things, it seems to me, have long been in play here. On the one hand, it implies the complete exclusion of Christian values, Christian virtues and concerns, from the public life of this country. Our thought leaders have made a clean sweep, leaving the proverbial public square empty of any possible reference to God or the life of virtue to which He has called us. And, on the other hand, there has been a near total willingness to go along with that nonsense on the part of great numbers of Christians. We are more and more disposed to embrace, as it were, our own extinction. It is the Death Wish of the West.  

If we refuse to speak of God, refusing in any way to remind people either of His existence or the fact that He gave us a nature—the structures of which do not include categories other than male and female—it seems then that we deserve the mess we’re in. What it all comes down to, finally, is a failure of nerve, of courage, to speak the truth about God and about the world He made—then remade—taking no end of delight in filling it with images of Himself. How much courage does it really require to speak the truth? To repeat that one line from the Book of Genesis, spoken a mere twenty-seven verses after God made the world out of nothing? “So God created man in His own image…male and female He created them.” 

Give it a try, a good workout, and see what happens.

Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome.