Last year, I wrote about how Christianity Today, a publication that Billy Graham helped start and which was once an important source of news for evangelical Christians, has veered increasingly further to the left in recent years. Christianity Today was once committed to exploring issues that were or should have been of interest to Christians who held to biblical orthodoxy, but now it traffics in theological and political liberalism more and more.
Christianity Today is guilty of what John Cooper of the band Skillet calls “leaning left and punching right,” taking stances that fit in with the political left so that no one would ever accuse it of being in league with those “evil conservatives.” From couching left-leaning environmental activism in the seemingly benign and biblical-sounding term “creation care” to going out of its way to make sure that the 2023 Asbury Revival was free of the straw-man “Christian nationalism,” Christianity Today does everything it can to endear itself to the left and alienate the right.
Last week, Christianity Today reposted one of its big stories from earlier in the year on X. It was an article from August about whether Christians should support the use of “preferred pronouns.”
When it comes to gendered language, these Christian leaders agree on three things: Everything is changing so fast. We’re figuring it out together. And we should give each other grace.https://t.co/NsYDai0kLn
— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) December 29, 2023
The author of the article, Kara Bettis Carvalho, began with the example of two employees at Houghton University, a Christian college in New York. Shua Wilmot and Raegan Zelaya both included their pronouns in their email signatures, even though the university told them not to. Both employees argued that their unusual names could create gender confusion, hence the need for pronouns.
Wilmot said in a YouTube video that his name “ends with a vowel, a, that is traditionally feminine in many languages”; therefore, “If you get an email from me and you don’t know who I am, you might not know how to gender me.” “Shua” is short for “Joshua,” so it’s his problem that he’s not using his full name. Zelaya claims to be in the same boat with the first name “Raegan,” even though that spelling is almost exclusively female.
Related: America's Largest Evangelical Magazine Continues to Drift to the Left
Houghton University fired Wilmot and Zelaya for bucking the school’s policy. According to Houghton, the policy doesn’t specifically relate to pronoun usage so much as it does to “extraneous items” in signatures — including Bible verses. Wilmot admitted that “his views regarding gender and identity do not fully align with the theology of the Wesleyan Church, the sponsoring denomination of Houghton University.” Again, that’s on him, and nobody asked him to become a pronoun crusader.
“The ideas that one’s pronouns are preferred, subject to change, and may be inconsistent with one’s biological sex are inconsistent with the beliefs of Houghton University,” the college’s president Wayne D. Lewis said to Christianity Today. “We believe the assignment of one’s sex and gender is a divine prerogative. We require that employees of the university be respectful of the university’s beliefs and positions.”
So two employees who ran afoul of their employer’s policies were fired. Cut and dried, right? Not for Christianity Today; instead the magazine decided that it was worth exploring whether Christians should cave to the left and push for “preferred pronouns.”
The discussion over pronouns goes beyond ‘virtue signaling’ or ‘political correctness,’” Carvalho writes. “Christians who have thought deeply about this issue understand the role of language in shaping reality and thought and believe it’s central in how we treat people as image-bearers of worth and value.”
Carvalho cites survey data that demonstrates that the pronoun debate has led a majority of mainstream Christians to hold fast to traditional, biblical gender roles, but that doesn’t stop Christianity Today from highlighting those who want to compromise with culture. After all, she writes, “Some people argue that to not use their self-identified pronouns is to erase their existence. For them, pronouns are not just ‘preferred’—they are in fact the most accurate.” So who cares what the timeless truth of the Bible says?
To her credit, Carvalho does cite and quote pastors, authors, and theologians who believe in following the norms of scripture over the whims of culture, but she cites them as a contrast to those who affirm sin out of “care” for those who use deviant pronouns.
“Using others’ requested pronouns can demonstrate that Christians care for them, whether or not they hold the same positions on questions around gender and sexuality,” she writes, adding later on that “One can believe in the inherent truths of maleness and femaleness and also that God loves and cares for every person.”
"While some Israelites don't mind visiting the green groves and high places…"
— Ben Zeisloft (@BenZeisloft) December 29, 2023
"While some Jews in Babylon don't mind bowing to Nebuchadnezzar's statue…"
"While some Christians in Rome don't mind offering incense to Caesar…" pic.twitter.com/8jhpGIDZeY
At the end of the day, truth is truth and sin is sin. God’s Word doesn’t call us to play word games to make unrepentant sinners feel better about themselves. The Bible tells us that God created male and female. We cannot pretend that there’s more than that, and we can’t pretend that humans can recreate themselves — no matter how much Christianity Today thinks we should.
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