A Christian Family Challenging "Traditional Gender Roles"

“I tease sometimes that I hope one of my boys turns out to be gay because it will increase my street cred as a liberal, hippie mom. . . . We are a Christian family and we deliberately challenge traditional gender roles,” said a self-proclaimed Christian named Lisa in a recent blog post by Religion News Service’s Eliel Cruz. Lisa says she is raising her two sons to be gender nonconforming children, but she completely disregards God and His Word, and in her effort to “increase [her] street cred,” she exchanges the truth for a lie!

She says, “Gay, straight, cis, trans, it doesn’t matter. Our children are a gift, and we should be teaching them to love. The greatest commandment (Mark 12:31). Love others, love themselves, and love the world around them.”

Well, God’s Word says the greatest commandment is, “‘you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Mark 12:30–31). How we are to show our love for God is by obeying Him: “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments” (1 John 5:3) and “now I ask you . . . that we love one another. And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments” (2 John 1:6).

If we are completely disregarding what God has clearly told us in His Word about gender, are we really following the greatest commandment to love Him with all of our being? And loving others includes showing them their sin and pointing them to the life-changing message of the gospel—showing them the truth (1 John 3:18)! In our supposedly tolerant culture, telling someone they are a sinner or calling their behavior sinful is not considered loving, but how much more unloving is it to allow them to continue walking in sin and never let them know about the redemption and life that Jesus offers? This is not to say that boys can’t play with dolls or that girls can’t play with trucks, but encouraging children to decide for themselves what their gender is without regard to their God-given gender is a problem.

This mom also says, “We just do the most we can to make Wyatt and Eli feel that whoever they are, whoever they love, they are beautifully and wonderfully made in our eyes and in the eyes of God.” While it is certainly a good thing to teach children that they are beautifully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14) and that they are deeply loved by God, it is also important that we teach our children to think biblically! As parents we have a responsibility to “raise up our children in the way they should go” (Proverbs 22:6) and to “bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). This certainly includes teaching them what the Bible says about gender. Telling them that they are “fearfully and wonderfully made” and that they are loved by God is not enough. They also need to be taught that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). This includes Scripture that talks about gender. And they also need to be taught that sin has affected us—for instance even affects our bodies, which is why we get sick. And sin affects our minds—which is why we can’t just go on our ‘feelings,’ but we understand what God means when He says to us: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect”(Romans 12:2).

God clearly created male and female: “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). This was reaffirmed by Jesus in the New Testament when He quoted from this very passage, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female’?” (Matthew 19:4–5) We need to be diligent in teaching our children that God has made us different as males and females and that both sexes are made in the image of God. While secularists may want to say that a person can have a “gender identity” separate from their biological gender, nowhere does God make this distinction in His Word. Yes, we live in a sin-cursed, fallen world, and sometimes children are born with hermaphroditism and other related issues, but these exceptions (and we need to emphasize—they are exceptions), clearly do not negate the fact that God has designed us male and female. And He has given certain expectations exclusive to each gender, such as men being the leaders of their families. These standards are grounded in God’s original creation in Genesis and reaffirmed elsewhere in Scripture. (For more about expectations regarding masculinity and femininity, see “Are Gender Roles a Social Construct?”) Part of the confusion in regard to these issues is that many people no longer either accept or understand the effects of sin in relation to our minds and bodies, in this fallen world.

It is no surprise that as the church continues to reject the Genesis account of creation that is so foundational to nearly every other major doctrine of Scripture, that we are seeing a continual rejection or confusion of other doctrines such as gender and marriage. If you attack and destroy the foundation, then everything else collapses! This is why we at Answers in Genesis do what we do. We want to see the church come back to the authority of God’s Word from the very beginning and not compromise with man’s ideas. We want to create a generation of “workers who do not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). I encourage you to teach your children to stand on the authority of God’s Word from the very beginning in every area.

The account of creation and the fall of man is foundational to understanding all doctrine.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,

Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.