Countryside Bible Church, Southlake, TX
Morning Worship Service | Sunday – July 18, 2021
The following points are highlights of pastor Pennington’s sermon [all bracketed statements, emboldening and underscoring are mine]:
- This sermon is about how our culture has arrived at its current state; it is part of a summer series aimed at addressing significant cultural events
- 2004 UK passed the gender recognition act: anyone having lived 2 years as a person of the opposite sex could request a gender certificate stating their new gender, and would be qualified to receive a new birth certificate at a later point
- 2015 NYC made it illegal to call someone by a pronoun other than they have chosen
- 2017 CA made it illegal for care givers to use wrong pronoun for those who have tried to have their sex changed, they called it ‘misgendering’
- 2017 Canada made it a hate crime to question someone’s stted gender
- February 2018 Ohio parents lost custody of their 17 year old daughter because they refused to support the hormone therapy she wanted to transform herself into a male
- The above sampling is representative of the multitude of gender issues arising around gender
- How did we get here?
- Recent sermons have discussed that abandoning God, silencing scripture and reimagining morality are bearing fruit in the form of gender confusion
- That is, our culture has rejected the biblical worldview that God created man and woman in His image; they have replaced it with gender theory
- This may be the issue that ushers in real persecution of Christians in the US
- The background given today will apply to the 3 parts of the Gender Question series
- Most of the facts of this message are from a book by Sharon Jones, Gender Ideology
- What is gender theory? That every person has a gender identity that may or may not be their biological sex. Traditionally, sex and gender were interchangeable, but gender theorists use the word sex to indicate biological sex “assigned” at birth, it is solely about body
- “Gender” in gender theory is reserved for gender identity which is unrelated to biological sex. It is about whether one feels male or female; it is one’s internal sense of self
- This theory is unsupported by science or scripture
- UK: Caring cross gender identity clinic, those who have been at the forefront of all these issues, wrote in 2011, The least certain diagnoses of identity is that made by the patient … even if they feel certain one way or the other
- 2016 Article in New Atlantis representing a comprehensive survey of scientific evidence of over 200 peer review studies in biology, psychology and the social sciences concluded: the hypothesis that gender identity is an innate fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex, that a person may be a man trapped in a woman’s body or vice versa, is not supported by scientific evidence
- Such statements have not hindered the growth of this new field
- The acronym LGBTQ has become LGBTQ IA plus: L = lesbian; G= gay; B= bisexual; T= transgender; Q= queer or questioning (or one who calls themselves non binary); I= intersexual; A= asexual (not attracted to either m or f, possibly androgynous); Plus= future designations
- Main point: in gender theory, biology doesn’t matter, what one feels is the pronoun that accurately describes them best is most significant
- To disagree with what one feels they are is to be guilty of hate speech or to be a bigot
- Christians are to be compassionate and gracious, and to bring the gospel message to others; therefore, we must disagree with gender theory and agree with God in such matters
- How did gender theory develop?
- Three historical movements: 1) Darwinian evolution theory is the foundation; Darwin’s Origin of Species, 1859, removed humanity from its biblical position stated in Genesis 1 and 2; he described humanity as just another animal species on the planet
- Thereafter, academics began to argue that any sexual act an animal did was appropriate for humans to do
- The second movement that contributed to gender theory was the sexual revolution. Frederick Nietzsche founded this movement. He claimed that God was dead; that there was no objective truth and no moral absolutes.
- Nietzsche demanded that “repressive Christianity” be replaced with by total sexual freedom
- He took the ethical implications of Darwinism and made them real (brought them into the daily lives of people)
- Sharon Jones listed a series of influential thinkers who championed Nietzsche’s ideas, helping to lay the foundation of the sexual revolution:
- Carl Ulrich, 1825-95, a German doctor who argued for homosexuality
- Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939, who believed God to be a fairy tale … we are simply highly developed animals, therefore, whatever animals do, is also appropriate for humans [in the writings of Dr. Peter Jones, I learned that Carl G. Jung is another significant contributor to the sexual revolution, my series on Paganism included two posts on him]
- Magnus Hirschfeld, 1868-1935, a German homosexual doctor who built on Freud’s ideas, became the architect of the sexual revolution, he supervised the first sexual reassignment surgery
- Alfred Kinsey, 1894-1956, called himself a sexual researcher, a Harvard grad who started a Sexual Institute in Indiana. His experiments included abusing infants, children…. He advocated pornography, bestiality and pedophilia
- Harry Benjamin 1885-1986, wrote the first textbook on transgenderism in 1966; he was the first to champion the idea that if one believed themselves to be in the wrong body, then they should change it
- Cultural Marxism is the third movement that joined with the aforementioned movements to bring us to our current cultural state
- Critical Theory came from Germany; it is the basis of CRT (it will be more fully explained in future parts of this series)
- Briefly, CT grew out of Marxism. In every society, there are the oppressors and the oppressed; society is all about power; the oppressors keep their power by enforcing their values and norms
- When the sexual revolution joined forces with cultural Marxism, they argued that the standard that was being used to oppress the people was traditional Christian morality
- Herbert Marcuse, of the Frankfort School of Marxism, taught that mere tolerance of different lifestyles was actually pseudo tolerance because it kept the oppression in tact
- He argued that to have real freedom, all traditional views of morality and those that hold those views must go away [be reeducated?]
- Queer theory says that if you believe heterosexuality is ‘normal’ then you are a bigot; if you believe that heterosexual marriage is crucial for a stable society, then you are oppressive
- In the news, LGBTQ are portrayed as the oppressed and are celebrated for living out their real identities in the face of oppressive Christian morality
- Binary understanding of sex and gender (male and female only) was created by the oppressive class of heterosexual Christian influenced males to maintain control
- That brings us to our current cultural state
- That Christian morality be rejected is the aim of this movement; all who disagree will be marginalized [silenced, punished in some way]
- Ephesians 4:17 This I say therefore, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, 18 being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; 19 and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality, for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.
- This passage calls us to stop acting and living like Pagans who are marked by worthless worldviews; futility in thinking and by darkened minds
- Pastor takes several moments to explain these things about Pagans from verses 17-19; his points basically define the difference between the regenerate and unregenerate and the qualities each possess, per scripture; most importantly, that born-again believers are NOT to act like Pagans
For other similar posts, see Categories: CRT and Social Justice / Identity Politics