https://cbmw.org/nashville-statement/
The week before Labor Day, the Council for Biblical
Manhood and Womanhood (you need a council to discuss that like the canon of
Christian scriptures nearly 2 millennia ago?) released what they called the
Nashville Statement, codifying their views of sexuality and gender and how
everyone should conform to their particular view of Christianity and “Godly”
morals as relates to them.
The title is odd for a few reason: 1, they’re not
headquartered in Nashville, it’s out of Louisville, Kentucky. And the last
statement they released, reflecting a somewhat similar complementarian view of
male and female, was out of Danvers, Massachusetts.
Weird how they chose Nashville as the point for this
new statement, but it was because they convened at the Southern Baptist
Convention’s annual Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. So it could’ve
just as easily been the Atlanta Statement, unless they often go to Nashville to
talk about how their religious liberty is “at risk”.
The group is known for their reactionary views, the
Danvers Statement their first protest against “revolutionary” ideas like women
not being relegated to submissive roles and expectations about how they ought
to live their lives. They haven’t changed much, except that they’re not
primarily against feminism now, but gay and transgender people. In modern
times, it’s become less acceptable to reduce women to servants in one manner
when it comes to worshipping God.
So I’ll be doing a point by point analysis of sorts
on this 14 part thing, including the preamble for 15 aspects total.
Preamble
First off, the Preamble, which is really just
complaining that the world is changing, even though that’s a core tenet of
Christian practice: believers are meant to stand out from the world, even as
they are involved within it. Put another way: Christians are supposed to feel
persecuted and be disparaged for their beliefs because, in a sort of pariah
complex to rationalize it all, they must be in the right when people point out the
inconsistencies or disbelieve in general.
Cognitive dissonance aside, the gist is that
anything apart from God’s “plan”; which they apparently think they know fully
in spite of God being a perfect entity, which even the Bible is arguably only a
portion of its complete nature, seen through a glass darkly; is making us less
good as a society at large.
If anything, the evidence suggests the opposite:
we’re physically healthier than before in many respects, even if our
psychological health is questionable for a number of non religious factors, such
as socioeconomic pressures and unrealistic societal expectations. Obviously,
with a focus on manhood and womanhood, the group is trying to spin any
nontraditional sexuality or gender expression as the major threat to
Christianity without considering other factors as to why people feel alienated
by Christian groups, so we’ll just chalk this up to the echo chamber of the Southern
Baptist Convention reinforcing their own ideas
Article
1
The 1st article affirms that marriage is covenantal,
sexual, procreative and a lifelong union designed by God. And by association,
anything homosexual, polygamous or polyamorous is against that design. They
also emphasize that they believe marriage is not a purely human contract, even
though anthropology suggests that marriage was not primarily religious in
nature as economic, bringing families together for general benefits to their social
group at large
Today we have an arguably better society where
people can elect to get married or not in terms of both the civil contract for
tax benefits/etc and the spiritual union that represents an important moment in
one’s religious worldview as a metaphor for worship of their deity, etc.
Marriage is indeed sexual and lifelong, I won’t
contest that. Physical desire is a part of it, especially in the beginning,
though it shouldn’t become the primary aspect, especially when intimacy is as
much about being open with your feelings as how you express love physically
with your spouse.
Covenantal is, I’m almost certain, meant to reflect
the Christian idea that marriage is likened to the church marrying itself to
Jesus as the core aspect for God’s grace and salvation. I’d meet them in the
middle and say that marriage should be regarded as unitive, something that
bonds two people for the rest of their lives, provided there aren’t problems of
infidelity/abuse/etc. People too often seem to regard marriage as something of
a fad and that IS a problem, as I’ve said in the past regarding how giving
marriage recognition to gay couples is hardly an issue contrasted with people
being able to nullify their agreement because they don’t feel like they’re in
love anymore versus actual harm to the couple’s trust in each other.
The procreative aspect is the most questionable
here, though it’s not uncommon for that to be a sticking point, since people
are so scared about immigrants overpopulating us, or, heaven forbid, Muslims in
a country that has far more issues alongside the religious fundamentalist groups
that blend with extremist political views. The problem is not that some groups
are “outbreeding” others, as if this was reducible to natural selection of
populations, but that people are unrealistic in how much they think they ought
to breed in the first place.
I’m no gynecologist, but I’ve heard something to the
effect that the average woman is usually only recommended to have, at most, 5
pregnancies before things become dangerous for their own health and future
children. 5 children is more than I think many people can reasonably provide
for and even China has in more recent years, loosened its one child policy
because of the unforeseen consequences of having too few girls and limiting the
field for dating and marriage by association. The inverse is also a problem when
you have multiple children born into situations where the parents sacrifice
more of their health than anyone would think reasonable to provide for them,
when a better solution is moderation, since, even if I don’t want children, I
can’t deny that they are a benefit to society at large. And isn’t self control
important in Christian ethics to begin with, sexual ethics in particular with
tempering one’s desires?
So the 1st of 14 points already sets the stage for
making an unreasonable limitation on people, to say nothing of unrealistic
expectations of every couple conforming to so many qualifications that you’d be
lucky to find even a quarter that meet them all.
Article
2
Onto the 2nd article, which is simpler and less
disagreeable, but still questionable. It says that everyone should be chaste
before marriage and faithful in marriage. Again, I can agree with the latter
point, because at its core, that’s what marriage is, trust and commitment
between two people with a deep romantic connection. But they further muddy the
waters by saying that no desire justifies any sexual immorality, but fail to
qualify what this category entails. Rape, abuse, infidelity, of course those
are a generally immoral group of sexual acts. And I don’t disagree that desire
and affections are not the determinant factor of a healthy relationship, but
mutual reciprocity and understanding
They also note that even if you make a commitment otherwise,
you cannot be seen as anything but sinful for having sex outside their
particular idea of what constitutes marriage. So even if I and my future spouse
decide not to get married, but nonetheless exchange rings and make such a union
that resembles it in all other ways, we’re still not good enough, even if
there’s the same spirit and intent of remaining faithful to each other in a lifelong
partnership. And this definitely means civil marriage is just a façade, since
it’s not Christian marriage either
So while the intent is good, we have a similar
problem of being too short sighted in trying to solve a problem that they think
only requires people to conform to how they think rather than considering that
maybe their god’s a bit bigger than people fitting its will into a narrow box
that doesn’t realistically align with the human experience with regards to
sexuality.
Article
3
Article 3 gets into the first hints of trying to
make the reductionist ideas of male and female seem appealing even while they
further suppress any variation from their expectations at the same time.
First off, it talks like Adam and Eve were actual
people, but even granting that they might see it as somehow metaphorical, not
sure how you can talk about that without betraying your own naïve ideas about
human evolution (which is very likely theistic evolution, 1 step from
creationism), to say nothing of speciation and biological evolution over the
demonstrable millions of years that Earth has sustained life.
But here’s the part that has that vague notion of
being socially acceptable while also maintaining the countercultural idea of
fundamentalism. Any Christian worth their salt probably prescribes to part of
this in one form or another, unless you take that Genesis verse literally that
says women should be subject to men because God says so to Adam and Eve (in
which case, you’ve got bigger problems than just sexism). That idea is that
even with the divinely created differences between men and women, they are not
unequal in their dignity as people.
As I said, this sounds great, and on its own, would
probably gel pretty decently with a society that treats people with equality and
equity. But we haven’t gotten to the
deeper parts of what they really mean here.
Article
4
Article 4 exposits further on this complementarian
idea of a purely binary view of the sexes.
It says that the “divinely ordained differences” between male and female
are for the benefit of humanity, but also note that it should not be said to be
from the Fall and something to overcome.
Few problems already: 1) there’s no need to invoke
the divine as to why male and female are distinct: science can explain why we
have sexual dimorphism in terms of evolutionary benefits, as well as a theory I
recall learning around age 13: that having male and female allows for much
greater genetic diversity and thus the species can survive better should there
be some disease that spreads through the population at large. With enough time,
you’ll have strains of people that may be more resistant or outright immune, so
it benefits humanity just because of how nature functions based on an innate
law of trial and error without needing a mind behind it. The species that don’t
function will die out and the ones that function better will survive.
But there’s also the claim that this isn’t related
to the Fall, even though I’m pretty sure the Fall directly notes that at least
the aspect of a woman suffering pain in childbirth directly proceeds from Adam
and Eve being kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Does this mean epidurals are
against God’s design, since God gave a “just” punishment to Eve for being
tricked by a talking snake into eating a fruit that didn’t kill her, but
instead made her aware of good and evil (as if that was a bad thing for
creations that were intended to use their free will)?
They also say these differences aren’t something to
be overcome, which is somewhat vague as to what they mean. I don’t think it’s
reasonable to characterize people wanting women and men to be treated with
fairness in regards to hiring, etc, as overcoming the differences between male
and female, especially if these extend beyond distinct physiological traits due
to evolutionary progress and necessity for copulation, etc. Someone having
sexual reassignment surgery is hardly something that should be done lightly
anymore than someone entering into marriage: they’re both very serious things
that should be entered into with a lot of thought beforehand and in the case of
SRS, steps that take at least a year or more to my knowledge to even qualify.
A person wanting to use the bathroom of the gender
they identify with in a persistent sense of themselves and doing so without standing
out is hardly something worth the attention of a deity that apparently just let
its creation run wild after 2000+ years ago, because it gave them the best
solution to a problem it set the stage for: killing itself for redemption of
sins that it was angry about for millennia as long as people believe hard
enough.
So we see a clear indication that this isn’t purely
about complementarianism so much as encouraging sexual and gender norms that
reinforce it because otherwise the world would be too scary and their god
wouldn’t want them to feel uncomfortable (which is absolute bollocks when you
consider what I noted earlier in regards to being persecuted for being “right”,
if the Christian view is even remotely correct in its views about an afterlife).
And we’re not even halfway done
Article
5
This article is more directly about transgender
issues and how they think that one being distinct in their sexual identity is
essential to one’s concept of being male or female, even stating in no
uncertain terms that the differences of reproductive structures are integral to
one’s self conception as male or female.
First off, that’s a complete load in even a cursory
consideration of what makes someone masculine or feminine. People can behave in
various ways, but not stop identifying as a male or female, among some other
categories (because as much as I do acknowledge transgender people are a thing,
I think even they would say that some of the distinctions might be a bit more
about attention than self realization).
A woman can be tough and dress more masculine in
society’s view, but still very much identify as female and appreciate
childrearing or more “traditional” female practices. One’s idea of being male or female is as much
about the clothes you wear, what things you enjoy doing and how you act, being
more emotional or logical, among other dichotomies that aren’t unique to one
sex or the other, just tendencies in the same way that personalities vary from
person to person. Myers Briggs personality tests basically figure out
preferences rather than exclusion of one point or the other on the 4 spectrums.
The article then continues to note that both
physical anomalies AND psychological conditions don’t negate that their rigid 2
sex system is right and you can’t identify outside your genitals.
I don’t think anyone claims that intersex people or
hermaphrodites are common, but to be fair, transgender people are also a
minority. Intersex people are a whole other issue to tackle, but along with
hermaphrodites, the general differences are more physiological androgyny, to my
knowledge, and many may just be gender neutral or lean towards one gender
without being especially strong in their feelings. Much of this is based on
hormones and not even people born without chromosomal variations are going to
be perfect in regards to that, same as the related spectrum of mental illness
that can come about because of chemical dissonance in the brain and such. People
being different doesn’t mean they should feel ashamed about it in any sense,
but acknowledging that sometimes, there is harm involved, either to oneself or
others.
I won’t deny there can be an environmental aspect to
developing one’s concept of gender, since society is where we get the ideas of
what is considered conforming to a male or female identity, though that changes,
since the societal presuppositions aren’t always right and in fact are usually
misguided because of people not wanting to incorporate something slightly
different from what they’re familiar with. But this article is one of the worst
in saying that someone should reduce their idea of being a male or female to
their genitals when that’s something we use maybe a quarter of our lives and honestly
aren’t usually that fixated on as we grow up and appreciate life as more than
just physical experiences.
Article
6
This one is not so much anything problematic in the
statements they make, but more the implication that they felt the need to do this
as a way to avoid being accused of prejudice towards transgender people in any
way.
Put simply, they utilize a bible verse referring to
eunuchs who were born that way and connect that to people born with physical
anomalies such as being intersex or the like.
It then goes on to say that such things do not mean that a person isn’t
born in the image of God and that they can most definitely still live a life
dedicated to Jesus.
All that is very much true, and I’d imagine no self
respecting person, let alone a Christian, would claim that someone being born
with some physical deformity means they shouldn’t try to live a full life. It’s
an admirable thing to see people with handicaps behaving in a way that
acknowledges that they are still a full person, not someone to be pitied
So really, this article is just reiterating a point
that should be a given from the start, as if it needs to be its own article out
of the 14 in this attempt at bridging a gap between the secular and religious
world. It works slightly, but it’s arguably an attempt at smoothing over public
relations so that they don’t look like heartless people who don’t care about
the disenfranchised.
Article
7
Here’s a fun one to read, and by that, I mean just
retreading old ground with a new coat of paint.
Article 7 says that people ought to live as male or
female by God’s intended purpose of creation and redemption, which rings fairly
hollow if we consider that one being born male or female, while not comparable
to being born into a particular religious household, isn’t something that
should be so important to one’s identity to deny anything counter to that in
their self worth as a person. If a biological male feel like a female and have
for years since one was old enough to have a gender identity in any sense, then
it doesn’t mean they’re a broken individual. And even if it did, that doesn’t
mean the solution involves repression of those feelings, insisting that you’re
better off just going through the motions as what people expect, rather than being
true to yourself and respectful without being a doormat.
Here’s the weird part: they follow it up by talking
about both a homosexual and a transgender self conception, as if they’re meant
to be even remotely the same, when one’s sexuality and gender identity are not
innately connected. One can be attracted to females as a trans female and
consider oneself lesbian even if they are technically a biological male. Or one
could be polysexual or pansexual, not making an intimate connection based on
one’s sex or gender identity, more about the person themselves.
And who are they to say that being gay or
transgender is in conflict with God’s design for people as humans? Aren’t these
the same people that said a few articles ago that people ought to be chaste
before marriage? So if someone feels that God has told them they should never
be married and live a chaste life, they’re in the right, but if someone wants
to be in a committed relationship, a union that is marriage at its core, then
they are wrong even if they are faithful to their spouse of the same sex? There
are straight and gay people that choose a chaste life, but if someone wishes to
participate in an institution they have deep respect for and understanding of,
denying it to them feels more than petty, it alienates them as a fellow
creation of a loving god.
The same applies to gender identity as with sexual
orientation: if you are a Christian and love God, believing that it created you
as good, only with a flawed core in desires not lining up with what is best for
you, then something that is not harmful to you, but helping your self-actualization
and improving your perception as someone with dignity is the exact opposite of sinful
or in conflict with God’s plan.
So again, we have people taking the “straight and
narrow” path Jesus spoke of and putting it even more out of reach for anyone
who doesn’t fit into an outdated idea of what is considered appropriate for a
human created in the image of God, as if they somehow know God’s intentions for
people in regards to things that are primarily inborn, environment twisting
them more than complementing them.
Article
8
Just to follow up on the trend of dismissing
transgender people, they go on to cover up their bigotry with more platitudes saying that people who
have same sex attractions can still be good servants to God if they live like
every other good straight Christian (without directly stating that, of course).
It then claims that someone who continues to be gay
and live as such is not in line with God’s plan, but is not outside of
salvation either, so they can have their cake and eat it too. They get to
waggle their finger in disapproval at someone being gay, saying it’s impossible
for them to be seen as good to their heteronormative God. But they also get to
act like they have a moral high ground, because they’re just concerned about
the well being of the poor gay people, trying to direct them to a way that is
better for them
So in short, this seems a lot like the ideas that
some Mormons put out there to seem more positive towards gay people, but still
having that disregard for any idea that they could be functioning and faithful
Christians just because they have desires for the same sex that they likely
realize should be tempered in marriage and fidelity to someone in a lifelong
monogamous partnership (or polyamorous or polygamous, however uncommon they are)
Article
9
We’re back to the “being gay is bad” angle, but with
a fun twist, trying to cover up the prejudice with a tinge of acknowledging
flaws within the flock
It states that sin is the cause of your desires to
commit sexual immorality outside of marriage, and this includes BOTH gay and
straight. I don’t think anyone denies that; the only difference is how people
make a mountain out of a molehill for a disproportionately small group and
ignore the proverbial plank in their own eye. Sure, there are bad examples for
same sex couples, but they’re far outshone by the horrible patterns that have
persisted for decades, if not centuries in regards to straight marriages,
rooted in unhealthy practices when marriage was less about autonomy and more
about utilitarianism sacrificing people’s feelings for the greater “benefit”
And the follow up is just redundancy, as if anyone
is going to claim that an enduring pattern of desiring to do something immoral
justifies that action in any sense. If you want to murder and rape and are
compelled to do so, you should get help, no one’s going to say you’re confused
and need sympathy, so why try to say that anyone is claiming that gay people
just want to do this knowing that it’s wrong rather than others perceiving it
as such?
Article
10
Now we get into more of how approval of gays being
in a committed marital relationship or being transgender is in complete opposition
to God’s plan. Again you shouldn’t presume that you know the full plan from
books transmitted 4000+ years ago in a perspective when people didn’t think
about things beyond tribal identity and whose god was better (henotheism was
arguably a thing for the Israelites, considering they acknowledged a power from
the lesser gods, even if it paled in comparison to Yahweh)
Interestingly, they use the terms homosexual immorality
and transgenderism, not homosexuality and transgender identity. As I said
before, there can be immorality in homosexuality as much as heterosexuality,
which they noted previously. So just being homosexual and chaste is fine, but being
transgender in any way, even if it just means presenting as the opposite gender
without any SRS or hormones, is a horrible sin against nature? There’s a verse
suggesting as much in 1st Corinthians 11:3-15, like having long hair is an
affront to God when you’re a male.
The article then continues by saying that such a
thing isn’t just a matter of debate that Christians can agree to disagree on,
like whether the day of rest is Saturday or Sunday, or if women can wear pants
and be authoritative alongside men in terms of church leadership (which in most
circles stops at the point of counseling others as a priest/minister would, but
they can still teach kids in Bible school). Which makes you wonder why this has
to be so essential except in the most basic of agreements among any Christian
group: there shall be no adultery, no rape, no sexual impropriety that would
violate the autonomy and dignity of God’s creation. It’s not that complicated
to say that some groups could say that gay people ought to be chaste and never
be married because it’s “not their place”, but it’s hardly antithetical to
Christianity for people to want them to be happy and expect the same
restrictions of not being adulterous and violating consent as with straight
couples.
So they really want to hammer it down that being gay
isn’t immoral, just acting on it, but being transgender, even if you don’t try
to transition, is something that needs to be erased entirely? If they qualified
transgender immorality, though, I guess they’d start to acknowledge gender
roles as variable and not monolithic, and that wouldn’t do for the Council of
Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, right?
Article
11
This article is shifting the conversation back to
transgender people and in this case, it’s saying that intentionally
misgendering someone isn’t a bad thing, it’s just “speaking the truth in
love…about one another as male or female”. And they even insist they are under
no obligation to speak to someone in a way that would ruin the idea of people
as created by God as male or female.
I’ve misgendered people before, many times because
I’m still used to their previous identity. And I don’t pretend to fully
understand the situation, mostly because I haven’t had the opportunity to speak
and ask about it with said individual. Accidentally calling someone by the
wrong pronoun is a genuine mistake anyone can make, regardless of generation.
But when you’re so stubborn you can’t even attempt to change your perspective
and try to spin your ignorance as a moral high ground, it’s no longer just a
mistake, it’s opposition to someone being happy and not making an attempt to
compromise because you don’t want to admit you could be wrong.
The whole angle here is that calling someone by
their preferred pronoun as a transgender person is somehow insulting them as a
creation of God. If someone is born male, but their disposition (apart from sin
nature, which is desires regarding actions and habits) is that they self identify
as a woman, then it seems to me it’s not the person that made a mistake, it’s
the one that created them. If someone wants to self realize AND acknowledges
they are a creation of God, who is supposed to love them unconditionally and will
remove male/female distinctions in the afterlife (Jesus even notes as such in
saying there is no marriage in heaven in the Gospels)
Speaking to someone from God’s love seems more like paying
lip service rather than actually being compassionate and understanding of someone
being different from, but not fundamentally opposed, to you. I’m borderline
antitheist at times, yet most of my best friends are religious or spiritual:
yet do you see me trying to “speak the truth of reason” to them and be a
caricature angry atheist? No, because I have empathy and a human conscience,
which means I understand that we can coexist without agreeing universally on
everything.
Just because many people see being a man as purely
based on what you have between your legs or your chromosomes doesn’t mean it’s
true, nor does it mean people have to take it seriously when the evidence and
experiences of many people, cisgender AND transgender, suggest the opposite
Article
12 and 13
More fun pseudoscience and conversion therapy defending
malarkey here: these articles basically says that God’s grace lets you overcome
any sinful desire, strongly implied to connect back to same sex attraction and
outright stated for transgender self conception.
Again, I’m not one to believe in such things, but a
sense of purpose can motivate people to change from habits that are
demonstrably damaging, such as alcoholism (though that is lifelong, it doesn’t
just go away like a cold or the like) or abusive behavior to loved ones, to say
nothing of things like compulsive lying/etc. The difference is that being gay,
same as being straight, is not the same as the twisting of sexual desire into
something it shouldn’t be, it’s the default state.
Gay and straight people can have desires to rape, to
violate marital trust, to inappropriately touch others and justify it by saying
they were asking for it. But these are not the same as the innate desire to be
with someone in a healthy relationship. And I’ve already noted how being
transgender is not connected to your sexuality, plus, if you are better off as
a person when you present as the gender you genuinely and thoughtfully align
with, then it’s no different than someone correctly regarding sex as something
special between people, not just physical pleasure.
When someone claims that conversion therapy doesn’t
work or that you can’t pray the gay (or transngender?) away, that doesn’t mean
they’re limiting God, should they believe in it. It’s more that God’s nature is
such that it doesn’t interfere with freewill and most certainly doesn’t force
someone to conform to societal expectations, since that would encourage a
person to be part of the world rather than just in it (see my comments on the
Preamble)
We keep getting the insistence that this perspective
is right and that there’s somehow no debate among Christians in its entire
history about how self conception as male or female that clashes with one’s
assigned sex might not be sinful, same with how same sex desires can be used in
the same way as opposite sex desires, reflecting a healthy and God centered relationship
that follows respectful communication, mutual trust and fidelity to the
commitments made
You know what that’s called? Presuppositionalism,
circular logic that invokes the Bible to make claims that only work when you
believe the Bible to be true, and in the case of this inane thought process,
infallible and inerrant, as if nothing could be wrong when written by humans,
even under divine inspiration, or that people could misinterpret, using
eisegesis, which is inserting your own prejudices into an interpretation of the
bible. Ultimately, this is trite idealism that refuses to recognize the world
doesn’t work that way and that people should be willing to adjust to new ideas,
especially when they’re not forced down your throat from childhood through
church indoctrination and suppressing any other ideas.
Article
14
We end the whole torturous, needlessly divided set
of patriarchal ideals masked as better sounding “complementarianism”, with a
statement that no one is apart from God’s love as long as they repent of sin. Even
the “poor gay and/or transgender person” is not too far from God’s grace,
because they’re the people that the CBMW is trying to make peace with (and
failing utterly at).
Well, that’s nice and pithy, but it’s in
contradiction to any sort of claim that God is perfect love and that said
affection is unconditional, which is one of the major reasons many people are
less than impressed with Christianity even as it shifts with the times while
trying to remain “pure”. When the love requires you to follow such things, it’s
not unconditional anymore, because there’s a demonstrable condition there. One
could argue that it’s more like common sense, but the problem with such sense
is that it’s often too common and doesn’t use any kind of critical thinking, so
it amounts to conformity and peer pressure rather than principles like empathy
or compromise.
If God is indeed such a loving being and created
humans good, even if they had some twisted dispositions regarding actions, this
is entirely different from stuff that is innate to their identity as people:
skin color, sexual orientation, gender identity, among other traits I could list.
To say that someone can be made so that even good desires are wrong is to
ascribe utter cruelty to a deity that you insist loves you.
That’s like saying you love the mindless obedient
automaton you create to serve your needs or even to reflect you. That’s not
love, that’s pure ego masquerading as kindness, as if you’re some magnanimous
ruler, when you’re just a feudal lord looking down on their serfs.
Not only does this statement not represent
Nashville, but I can’t even say it represents Tennessee as the Volunteer
State. At best it reinforces the
preconceptions of the Southern Baptist Convention to not stray away from
biblical fundamentalism and inerrancy, tow the party line of being the moral
majority and religious right, and generally be a fading group in terms of
relevancy to a generation that isn’t passive about mistreatment of minorities.
Call it the Statement on Biblical Manhood and
Womanhood, it’d be far more accurate and easily convey the same message, even
if you have to use more words than just the location to qualify the meaning. In 30 years, all that’s managed to be done is change
the format of their presentation, the Danvers Statement from 1987 the same
thread of bemoaning change as some doom and gloom indication of the world being
worse off. But again, I have to remind them that the whole point is that the
world will never be perfect until Jesus comes in with the end times, a sword in
his mouth, unrecognizable as anything but the petty apocalyptic prophet who
cursed fig leaves and knocked over tables in the temple.
And let’s not forget the most important thing here:
that many of the signers here also supported President Trump, some even in his
evangelical advisory committee. These “Godly” people have seemingly ignored the
swath of sexual immorality he’s engaged in, particularly divorce if there was
no infidelity on the part of either couple, though if he was unfaithful, it
only raises more questions of his morality.
Any sorts of statements about knowing proper sexual
morality fall apart and lose impact with these people saying that Trump is a
good Christian, which apparently means he pays good enough lip service to it
rather than acting in a way that’s remotely like a follower of Christ ought to
be (which is to say, doing more than empty charity by refusing the presidential
stipend and actually using his wealth for bigger things than casinos, golf and
frivolity on the beach)
I only know people who are Nashville natives or
otherwise are part of the city, but I still cannot imagine this represents
anything more than a dying breed of rural theology that insists that change
shouldn’t be accepted unless it’s on their terms: again, ironic, considering
that Christian doctrine would probably vehemently disagree on that, since it’s
God plan that is of prime importance, not what humans think is God’s plan.
This group can continue to exist as long as people
keep encouraging this backwards ideology, but like Westboro Baptist Church and
the like, being on the fringe of society tends to not change and with time,
like the Shakers, you die out because there’s no real persistent interest. The
sooner this happens with overly traditional gender roles and ideas about
sexuality, the better.
