The conservatives in the Anglican church have run into trouble conserving a basic distinction fundamental to the Biblical narrative, having a family, the continuing of the church as a community in history, and the building and maintenance of civilization. The BBC reports that:

The Church of England's governing body has voted to look into special services for transgender people.

The services, I predict, will be approved. Then they will be used as an excuse to move toward marriage between people with gender dysphoria. After that, sexual libertinism will be the norm. In fact, I predict that the only sexual sin in many mainline Christian churches in 20 years will be the sin of calling divorce a sin.

The Christianese

The Passage

16 Behold, I am sending you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore, be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. 17 Now, beware of people. For they will hand you over to the Sanhedrin, and in their synagogues they will flog you; 18 then they will bring you before rulers and kings because of me in order to be a testimony to them and the nations. 19 Now, when they hand you over, do not be anxious over how you will speak or what you will say; for what you will say in that hour will be given to you. 20 For you are not the ones speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaks by you. (Matthew 10:16-20) ^[1]

A Course Correction

But here are some points from the passage and elsewhere in the Bible that give us a more well-rounded point of view:

I used to be a Calvinist. I’ve since slowly drifted away from that point of view.

A few years ago I wrote about why.

Below I’ve simplified/clarified those reasons.

I know how complicated these debates get, and we see through a glass darkly. Our understanding of time, determinism, human will and consciousness, moral goodness, the Bible, and our own limits are but a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of other constraints upon our knowledge of God.

In the essay compilation Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, John Piper quizzically wrote:

Consider what is lost when women attempt to assume a more masculine role by appearing physically muscular and aggressive. It is true that there is something sexually stimulating about a muscular, scantily clad young woman pumping iron in a health club. But no woman should be encouraged by this fact. For it probably means the sexual encounter that such an image would lead to is something very hasty and volatile, and in the long run unsatisfying. The image of a masculine musculature may beget arousal in a man, but it does not beget several hours of moonlight walking with significant, caring conversation. The more women can arouse men by doing typically masculine things, the less they can count on receiving from men a sensitivity to typically feminine needs. Mature masculinity will not be reduced to raw desire in sexual relations. It remains alert to the deeper personal needs of a woman and mingles strength and tenderness to make her joy complete. (RECOVERING BIBLICAL MANHOOD & WOMANHOOD, 40-41)

Briefly, I know many women who lift weights. None of them are attempting to be more masculine (I’m sure there’s some of that in Crossfit circles). Most of them are staving off ageing, death, injury, weakness, and so-on. They’re also adding a degree of controllable trauma to their lives in order to avoid an overly plush life.

Socialism has a problem:

What? Sanders? He’s a nice guy. What problem? It’s a totalitarianism problem.

Over at CapX (an obviously biased website), this observation was made:

Obviously, not everyone feels that dictatorship and mass murder are too high a price to pay for equality. Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian, for example, was once asked whether, if Communism had achieved its aims, but at the cost of, say, 15 to 20 million people – as opposed to the 100 million it actually killed in Russia and China – would he have supported it? His answer was a single word: Yes. Even today, many people, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau among them, fawn over Cuban dictatorship, because of its delivery of supposedly free health and education to the masses.

The aim of this article was twofold. First we aimed to contribute to the ongoing discussion on left-wing authoritarianism. Using representative samples the relationship between authoritarianism and political preferences was examined in 13 ex-communist Eastern European countries. Employing six different indicators of left-wing/communist political orientations made clear that, despite cross-national differences, left-wing  authoritarianism is definitely not a myth in Eastern Europe. Secondly, it was aimed to survey whether authoritarian individuals in Eastern European countries might be a possible threat to transition to democratic political systems. It was demonstrated that in general the Eastern European population seems to hold a positive opinion on democracy. It becomes also clear however that the authoritarian persons in the ex-communist countries do not hold a positive perspective on the democratic political system (305).

1. Rejecting the image of God in man leads people to not mind the death of individual human beings, particularly if those human beings do not agree with them.
2. Rejecting the existence of God while still believing in the logical consequences of belief in being made in God's image leads to totalitarianism(this Charlton article is really good). Why? Because one still thinks of oneself as having all the trappings of being in God's image: innate goodness, rationality, authority over the earth, the capacity for virtue, free will, etc. But on the other hand there is no actual God (who functions psychologically as a hyper pinnacle in the human dominance hierarchy) to judge you, so your positions, moral attitudes, etc all take the role of God in the mind. So your belief system becomes total and therefore must be imposed.

One of the most startling elements of modern evangelical academia is how disdainful many of them are of the average parishioner. I sensed this happening to me in seminary and once I realized it, I started to see it in books. Then Twitter was invented and I started following more of these scholars to whom I looked for advice about Biblical interpretation and the like, and I discovered the outright disgust with undergraduate students displayed by those with doctorates, the foul modes of speech they used to talk about those they disagreed with, and the way they made fun of what I would call normal people. I have a social science hypothesis:

I find people wielding the wage gap as proof of oppression in the United States tiresome and stupid. But this article which acknowledges that it is close is ridiculous on a new level. In it the author observes:

Women want an equal partner, but there are increasingly fewer candidates to choose from. The census reports that “the average adult woman in the US is more likely to be a college graduate than the average adult man.” Moreover, today’s young, childless female city-dwellers [editorial chuckle] with college degrees are out-earning their male counterparts by 8 cents on the dollar. Their higher incomes may be why they are less likely (29 percent) to be living with their parents than single men (35 percent).

A favorite song of many evangelical Christians repeats the refrain:

“I am a friend of God, he calls me, ‘Friend.’”

But what does it mean to be friend of God, or more specifically, of Jesus Christ? The answer to the question leads me to hum that song line rather than proclaim it for fear of presumption.

To be Jesus’ friend is something that he decides based upon the state of my soul:

A Guardian article speculates on the sense of meaning in the world about a world beyond work:

You don’t need to go all the way to Israel to see the world of post-work. If you have at home a teenage son who likes computer games, you can conduct your own experiment. Provide him with a minimum subsidy of coke and pizza, and then remove all demands for work and all parental supervision. The likely outcome is that he will remain in his room for days, glued to the screen. He won’t do any homework or housework, will skip school, skip meals, and even skip showers and sleep. Yet he is unlikely to suffer from boredom or a sense of purposelessness. At least not in the short-term.

A friend recently asked about this topic, so I thought I'd give a sketch of my thoughts. I won't be citing any sources, but hopefully what I cite as evidence is either self-evident or easily obtainable.