The calling of Christian counsellors and pastors is a spiritual calling and a missionary calling, rooted in the very Great Commission of Jesus to 'teach [disciples of Christ] to obey everything that He has commanded [in the Word of God] (Matthew 28.18-20). This calling for nurturing ministries such as counselling and pastoring is increasingly difficult in a post-Christian culture that rails against the commandments of God. Yet nothing is more important than that the Church gives a clear witness to God in such a culture.
There has been a trend in
the United States to ban sex change therapy for minors since New Jersey was the
first to do so in 2013. The current list
of states doing so is: New Jersey (2013), California (2013), Oregon (2015),
Illinois (2016), Vermont (2016), New Mexico (2017), Connecticut (2017), Rhode
Island (2017), Nevada (2018), Washington (2018), Hawaii (2018), Delaware
(2018), Maryland (2018), New Hampshire (2019), New York (2019), Massachusetts (2019),
Maine (2019), Colorado (2019). In
addition to the District of Columbia
and Puerto Rico, a number of counties, communities, and municipalities have
banned conversion therapy. Moreover,
there are fourteen states with pending legislation to prevent such therapy.
Such legislation is billed as a protection of minors from abusive therapeutic
attempts to alter their ‘natural’ sexual orientation. The abuse, however, is on the other
side. What could be more abusive than to
leave a child without helpful guidance while negotiating the confusing twist
and turns of growing up? And where is
confusion more evident for children than as they become sexually aware?
A child force-fed the sexual confusion and perversion
of Western culture is only further abused by a culture that outlaws guidance in
such matters. As Plutarch wrote around AD
100,
Yea,
and the very souls of children readily receive the impressions of those things
that are dropped into them while they are yet but soft; but when they grow
older, they will, as all hard things are, be more difficult to be wrought upon.
And as soft wax is apt to take the stamp of the seal, so are the [9] minds of
children to receive the instructions imprinted on them at that age (Plutarch, ‘A
Discourse Touching the Training of Children,’ 8-9).[1]
What is interesting at this time in Western culture is that this ‘natural
orientation’ argument has arisen during Postmodernity. Postmodernity is the natural extension of
Existentialism, set against Modernist, scientific arguments about
identity. Existentialism held that ‘existence
precedes essence’, i.e., the human condition is that we are ‘thrown into’ existence
without any essence of what it means to be anything. There is, the argument has gone, no directive
for being: our being is simply what we make it out to be through the choices
that we make. Nothing could be more
opposed to science and religion. As
Francois Lyotard famously said, Postmodernity (following on from this
Existentialist claim) entertains an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. Nothing will define us. We are what we choose to be. And there is no ethic—no right or wrong—to say
that our choices are better than anyone else’s.
This became the basis for the Postmodern ethic of ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’. But what is tolerated is tolerated not
because it is in itself good; it is tolerated because it is different. The argument of what is ‘good’ is a Modernist
argument. Postmodernity puts its stamp
only on what is alternative. It is
summed up in the practice of awarding prizes for participation rather than
accomplishment, if one needs an example.
For Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and
Nothingness), Existentialism criticized living any ‘imbalance’ on the
grounds of being—what is—and of what is not (‘nothingness’). The right way to live was to make choices.
If this is the background to Postmodernity, where, then, did this
confused combination of saying that children are wired with a particular sexual
orientation (‘being’) and must be given the right to choose their gender
orientation with no guidance? The only
answer that comes to mind is that Western culture has still not sorted out its
recent history. It is at the same time
this Modernist powerhouse of science and technology that operates according to
laws of the universe and this Postmodern, Existentialist experiment absolutizing
choice per se over what is chosen. At the same time that advocates of sexual
diversity attempt, without scientific proof, to argue that humans are hot-wired
for an increasing variety of sexual orientations (not just male and female)
apart from their biological make-up, they also promote ‘gender fluidity’. They want the Modernist argument (science) if
they can get it, but if they cannot, they will happily promote the
Postmodernist arguments of fluidity and choice.
Who needs philosophical consistency in arguments when all that matters
is the conclusion?
Yet something even more
ominous is lurking in Western culture: the State. Of course it is; the State always rushes in
to bring regulation where religion and tradition do not. (What would ancient Israel have been without
the prophets to oppose the culturally influenced kings?) In the United Kingdom, the State is promoting
a sex education curriculum throughout the key stages of education that includes
this new agenda of Western culture. The United
States has not quite seen the same level of State management as the UK in sex
education. Yet both are on the same
trajectory. The double-edged sword of
Postmodernity, however, is the education of
children to choose their own sexual orientations amidst an alphabet-soup of
options without parental or religious interference and the litigation against counselling that would help confused children in
a sexually perverse society find the truth.
(I say ‘find the truth’ in part for effect: it is this very notion at
which such a culture scoffs while insisting that their view is true over
against what virtually every culture since the beginning of time has believed.)
If one wants a gage to
measure the quality of a culture, one might find it in how the culture educates
and cares for its children. Western
culture aborts the unborn in the name of freedom (‘the mother’s choice’),
sexualizes pre-pubescent children, perverts their understanding of sex, advocates
feminism over masculinity, encourages children to make choices while
legislating against guidance, administers puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones on them, performs sex operations on them, and celebrates the legalization of mind-altering
drugs. While promoting every sort of
sexual experimentation and perversity, it recoils in horror whenever anyone is simply
accused of a single sexual impropriety as a teenager, as though it holds some
moral high ground in such matters. The
duplicity is repulsive.
What is the way
ahead? It must be in the Church’s
response to this double-edged sword with a clear plan and an unwavering
stance. On the one hand, the Church
needs to educate its own children about sex.
In a post-Christian culture, Sunday School stories about David and Goliath
constitute an inadequate education in the faith. We need a Church education that is far more
serious about the Christian faith. It
needs to be an education in Biblical literacy, to be sure, but it also needs to
be catechesis in the faith, both in what we believe and how we should live.
Second, we need Christian
counselling, not in the sense of therapeutic counselling (there is a place for
that) but in the sense of pastoral counselling.
This begins in classrooms and through sermons and continues in the work
of the pastors and the elders of the church.
The pastoral care of sinners is the primary calling of the pastor, not
the running of programmes, church growth, Sunday worship services, and so forth
(though all of this is important).
As the arm of the State
gets stronger, it will see the Church as an enemy of the State. This is the very point of the Book of Revelation,
which paints in apocalyptic colours the relationship of Church and State in the
era of the would-be god, the Emperor Domitian, ruler of the all-powerful State,
the Roman Empire. The State will try to
silence the Christian counsellor and the Christian pastor (follow the battles in California, such as Assembly
Bill 2943, recently stopped, AB 2119, recently passed, and now resolution 99, recently proposed, to get a glimpse of the battlefront).[2] Whatever the world does, however, the Church
needs to step up to the task of teaching a full curriculum and offering clear counselling
about everything Christ has commanded (Matthew 28.18-20) us to obey, beginning
with the biologically based, binary distinction of ‘male and female created He them’
(Genesis 1.27).
[1] Plutarch, ‘A Discourse Touching
the Training of Children,’ Moralia, trans.
Simon Ford, in Moralia, Vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1878).
[2] For news and helpful resources, see the California Family Council site: https://californiafamily.org/oppose-ca-ab-2943-ab-1779-and-ab-2119-reference-materials/ (accessed 22 August, 2019).
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