In an age when presidential candidates of both parties ignore the will of the majority to cater to an infinitesimal minority, it is noteworthy when a politician takes an uncompromisingly biblical stand on public issues. It is more remarkable when that leader represents a secular nation, cites the Bible on a national platform, and has a delightful British accent. Yet a member of the U.K.’s Parliament made a statement that should serve as a model for any American leader.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Conservative Member of Parliament, literally quoted chapter-and-verse on the GB News show “State of the Nation” last Thursday. “Ladies and gentlemen. I can exclusively reveal that I in fact do not identify with a gender, because I take my line from Genesis 1:27: ‘So God created man in His own image. In the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.’ And it’s for not me to overrule the work of God,” he said. In 58 words, he exposed extreme gender ideology as nonsensical and idolatrous.
Rees-Mogg, whose aristocratic manner created a boomlet of support to elect him prime minister, possesses other traits now uncommon among British authorities. The father of six upholds a consistent pro-life position, describes abortion as a “cult of death,” and affirms marriage as the unique union of one man and woman based on his deeply held Christian faith. One prominent American priest called him “a practically perfect Catholic politician.”
The U.K. MP’s faithfulness contrasts markedly with America’s second Catholic president, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. The president’s handlers invariably label him a “devout” Roman Catholic. Yet last Thursday Biden issued the first of his two statements (and a fact sheet) celebrating the “Transgender Day of Visibility,” in which the president asserted: “Transgender Americans shape our [n]ation’s soul.” On the same day a politician in profoundly secular England proclaimed God’s creation of the material world, the president of the world’s most powerful Christian-majority nation credited transgender activists with forming the immaterial soul.
Biden has shown perplexing attention to the “soul of the nation.” He regularly sows confusion by subtly implying that God intended people to struggle with gender dysphoria. His humanistic hermeneutics, not coincidentally, echo the theology of transgender activists.
Last Wednesday night, a man who identifies as a woman asserted that God is a female and created transgenderism. In the next seat was the media’s most celebrated “evangelical” leader, who called Christian conservatism “anti-Christ.”
“I go to church every Sunday. My faith is very important to me. But God made me in her image. God made me transgender,” Charles Clymer, who now goes by the name Charlotte Clymer, told MSNBC’s “The ReidOut.” Moments later, hostess Joy Reid said she picked Clymer — the former press spokesman of an LGBT pressure group and ex-communications director at Catholics for Choice — as one of “the two specific people I wanted to talk to” about the shooting at a Nashville Christian school.
Of course, the Bible states that Jesus Christ is God and that “all things were made by Him” (John 1:1-3). Jesus, Who is certainly not female, referred to the First Person of the Trinity as “Father” more than 100 times. Furthermore, the Bible tells us, “God is not the author of confusion” (I Corinthians 14:33).
As Clymer proclaimed gender confusion a fruit of the goddess’ Spirit, Reid’s other chosen guest, Sojourners founder Jim Wallis, stared silently into the camera. When Reid gave Wallis the last word, he declined to correct his colleague for misgendering the Almighty but accused conservatives of “worshiping a false god.” Earlier in the segment, he charged anyone who opposes gun control with worshiping the Oriental idol Moloch, mentioned in the Book of Leviticus (which he cited without mentioning what that book says about the LGBTQ issue in the very next verse). After Clymer’s descent into heresy, Wallis — who sycophantically offered to “link our pulpits to the bully pulpit” during the Obama-Biden administration — rained fire and brimstone on his political enemies. Second Amendment advocacy “is anti-Gospel, anti-Christ. And so this is a false worship we’re confronting here. We have got to confront it theologically,” Wallis said. “They are worshiping a false god.”
Capitalizing on flagging faith, biblical illiteracy, and dwindling church attendance to preach some “other Gospel” is as old as Christianity itself (Galatians 1:8). Wallis and Clymer followed a devilish strategy laid out by C.S. Lewis in “The Screwtape Letters”: “[I]f men become Christians at all … let them at least be Christians with a difference,” Lewis wrote. “Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian coloring.”
The ultimate aim, the senior demon Screwtape tells nephew Screwtape, is to “direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.”
Presumably, this includes fretting about “transphobic” Christian speech and believers’ gun ownership at the moment a transgender mass murderer slaughtered a half-dozen believers inside a Christian school, three of them under the age of 10. Or getting worked into a foam about U.S. coastal lands going underwater as U.S. carbon emissions have fallen 31% since 2000.
Yet history teaches some theologians will always volunteer to assist in this game of biblical Three-card Monte. Witness the fact that the University of Helsinki announced it plans to present an honorary doctorate of theology to 20-year-old climate critic Greta Thunberg on June 9. This author has never seen Thunberg launch into lengthy discussions of Jesus, the Bible, or other weighty matters of religious faith and morals. The only thing Greta Thunberg and certain Christian theologians have in common is that both have inaccurately predicted the end of the world. Yet the faculty defended their award on biblical grounds. Thunberg’s “concern for the future of the Earth … has everything to do with academic theology which is no less interested in the Earth as it is in Heaven,” Martti Nissinen, one of the university’s theology professors, told the Daily Caller.
If their faith cares as much about Earth as Heaven, perhaps that’s because the Earth is where so much of their theology originates (James 3:15). The antidote to heresy is orthodoxy; the cure for counterfeit theology is quoting true Scripture; and the solution to America’s harmful transgender policies comes by electing leaders who can discern the difference between the two.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
