Does the Christian Sexual Ethic Ask LGBTQ+ Persons to Deny Who They Are? (2/5)
In my last post, I said that a Christian sexual ethic can be summarized in three statements:
1. Human beings were created by God with physical bodies that are sexually differentiated as male and female (Gen. 1:27)
2. Our sexed bodies play a significant role in the institution known as marriage where one man and one woman come together as “one flesh” (Gen. 2:24)
3. Any type of sexual behavior outside of the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman falls short of God’s design for sex and is therefore wrong
Keeping this in mind, we can now begin to address the primary question of this series of posts: “Is the Christian sexual ethic harmful to members of the LGBTQ+ community?”
Many would answer: “Yes! The Christian sexual ethic is harmful to the LGBTQ+ community…it asks them to deny who they are!” But is that what embracing a Christian sexual ethic requires? This is what I want to address in this post. But before we go there, we should talk about how identity and the self are understood in our current culture.
OUR CURRENT CONCEPT OF THE SELF
Our current concept of the self is…
…individually constructed
…highly sexualized, and
…increasingly disconnected from biology
Let’s look at each of these in turn…
1. Our Current Concept of the Self is Individually Constructed
The late esteemed pastor and author, Tim Keller, has noted that individuals in ancient cultures and in modern non-Western cultures understood themselves in relation to their family and community. The West’s current concept of the self is different. It is not formed by looking outside oneself but by making a psychological choice to speak and act in a certain way. In other words, our current concept of the self is individually constructed.[1]
2. Our Current Concept of the Self is Highly Sexualized
A more recent development in the modern understanding of the self is the sexualization of identity—Freud being the primary architect for this newer shift. The result of this shift is that many in the West now primarily understand themselves in terms of their sexual orientation.[2] This is why the topic of someone’s sexual orientation can come up so early in conversations when making new friends today.
3. Our Current Concept of the Self is Increasingly Disconnected from Biology
Once the concept of the self was unhitched from societal and religious expectations regarding roles and sexuality, the last outside attachment to drop off from our concept of identity was our physical bodies. Nancy Pearcy—Professor and Scholar in Residence at Houston Christian University—has connected this “body/person split” to a radical secular dualism that arose out of the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment and the subsequent reaction of the Romantic Movement.[3] You see this dualism for example in the work of UC Berkeley Professor Judith Butler, who has argued that gender identity is the result of performance and unrelated to the metaphysics of substance.[4]
IS OUR CURRENT CONCEPT OF THE SELF TRUE, GOOD, AND BEAUTIFUL?
When you mix the three ingredients that make up our current concept of the self together—(a) the individualization of identity; (b) the sexualization of identity, and (c) the demotion of the body—what you will eventually pull out of the oven is a freshly baked new identity that bears little resemblance to previous ways of thinking about the self. It is important to note that this way of looking at the self is essential to the LGBTQ+ view of identity. If all this is true, then the following questions emerge: Is this a good way to think about identity? Is it stable? Is it coherent? Is it livable? These are important questions to answer when thinking about whether a Christian sexual ethic is harmful to the LGBTQ+ community.
I believe that this new way of conceptualizing the self is inherently unstable for several reasons. First, Keller has pointed out that building our identity solely on inner desires is problematic since those desires are: (a) often contradictory; (b) frequently selfish; (c) mostly elusive; and (d) constantly changing.[5] Second, I hope we can agree that there is more to us than our sexual orientation. And finally, it is counterintuitive to separate our identity from our body. When we do, we are doomed to affirm nonsensical statements about ourselves like: (1) “My body was here before me” and (2) “I’ve never been hugged.” [6]
In addition to being inherently unstable, this new model of the self makes certain aspects of the LGBTQ+ ideology incoherent. As Trueman has pointed out: “as soon as biology is discounted as being one decisive factor of significance for identity, the L, the G, and the B are also destabilized as meaningful categories.”[7] For these reasons, the West’s current understanding of the self seems to be built on unstable ground.
WHERE SHOULD WE FIND OUR IDENTITY?
I have argued that the LGBTQ+ community’s conception of identity is built on unstable ground, but before anyone attempts to saddle up on their high horse, I think it is important to recognize that we all are in danger of doing this. Keller has noted that the traditional way of rooting a person’s identity in their expected role in a rigidly hierarchal society is not much better than rooting it in individual psychological choice.[8] Could there be a firmer foundation upon which to build?
Regardless of our conception of identity, the call to follow Jesus includes a call to deny oneself. In fact, Jesus seems to place this idea at the very center of what it means to be his disciple when he says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34). At the same time, this does not appear to be an ultimate denial of the self because Jesus went on to say in the following verse: “…whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” Jesus seems to be saying that self-denial for the sake of following him also includes (paradoxically) gaining yourself.
Remember our question: Does the Christian sexual ethic ask LGBTQ+ persons to deny who they are? The Christian answer is “yes and no.” Yes, self-denial is part of what it means to be a Christian for everyone—not just LGBTQ+ persons. If we want to follow Jesus, we need to give up trying to build our identities upon shifting sand and instead build it securely on the person and work of Jesus. There is definite loss here (there is a cost to following Jesus) but, there is a difference between loss and harm. And in the strange arithmetic of Christianity loss = gain.
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[1] See Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical (New York: Viking, 2016), 119. See also Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020), 201.
[2] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 201-268.
[3] Pearcey has argued that one of the negative consequences of the scientific revolution—to accompany all the positive ones—is that it has led many to believe that the physical world is all that there is. Seeing the world through this lens has led to a disenchanted view of physicality. This demystifying of the physical world (including our physical bodies) coupled with our need to find our sense of self somewhere, led thinkers in the Romantic Movement to make identity a matter of one’s individual psychological desires. See Nancy Pearcey, Love thy Body: Answering Questions about Life and Sexuality (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), 13-14. Robert P. George has pointed out that once these philosophical moves were made, our physical bodies became merely instruments to use or discard. See Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2013), 172.
[4] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd Ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 22-34.
[5] Keller, Making Sense of God, 123-124.
[6] Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage in Culture, 2nd Ed. (Wheaton: Crossway, 2023), 86.
[7] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 362.
[8] Keller, Making Sense of God, 121.