October 11th was celebrated at Umpqua Community College yesterday, but not for Christopher Columbus. No, it was “National Coming Out Day,” and our local college had tables set out for people to pick up rainbow cupcakes and stickers. UCC’s Queer Student Alliance had a poster out called, “The Genderbread Person.”
If you’ve never seen the poster, it presents in childish graphics the lie that a person’s gender identity, gender expression, biology, and sexual orientation are all separate elements of a person that can be chosen, changed, developed, or mixed. (If you want to see the graphic, you can go to the genderbread.org website.)
People used to be upset that cigarette ads were allegedly targeting children. No cigarette ad could ever be so harmful to children as the Genderbread Person campaign.
This kind of false teaching about God’s creation is now mainstream. It is being taught by government-controlled education systems, federal and state bureaucracies, woke companies, social media, and Hollywood.
Pastor and Grove City College Professor Dr. Carl Trueman explains how all this came to be in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. He connects the thoughts and influence of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, the Romantics, Reich, Marcuse, de Beauvoir, and others. The cumulative effect of disattaching mankind from God, and from eternity, and then from one’s body, and then from one’s gender, brings about an entirely new conception of what it means to be human.
We are now being taught that our inner, psychological selves must be liberated from all oppressing systems. The old Marxism, which saw oppression in material, economic terms, has been stretched, with Freud’s help, to apply to all traditional moralities or cultural norms which are said to oppress. Trueman says, “The psychologizing of oppression and the placing it at the center of the history of human society plays directly to the idea that history is something to be overcome.
After all, the history of humanity is the history of oppression and victimhood.”1 Trueman quotes feminist author Shulamith Firestone at length at one point, and the last sentence of her paragraph is, “The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.”2 Trueman observes:
“The most interesting aspect of the statement, however, comes at the very end: the purpose of this [feminist] revolution is to abolish the “tyranny” of the biological family. Firestone targets the same enemy as Godwin, Shelley, Reich, Marcuse, and de Beauvoir: the sexual revolution ultimately has one great goal, the destruction of the family.
It makes sense, of course, for the family is the primary means by which values are transmitted from generation to generation. From a Marxist perspective, that makes the family the means by which false consciousness is passed on and replicated over time. Its demolition is thus essential.”3
The Genderbread Person on the table at our local college is thus not simply a bit of silliness set out by a group of fellow county residents few might take seriously. It’s a manifestation of an all-out assault on the truth which is happening all around us.
It is imperative that we Christians hold fast to the teachings of the Scriptures. We affirm “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). There are only two genders. God assigns those genders, and He makes no mistakes.
God also assigns responsibilities, duties, and blessings to men and women, parents, children, and grandparents. Families are the key unit of God’s creation. When we are children, our immediate family is our first church, our first government, our first school.
We learn of God our Heavenly Father from our earthly parents. We are to be trained up in His ways by parents. We are adopted into God’s family; the Church is the family of God. We become the bride of Christ, we enter communion with the Trinity. Who we really are is actually bound up in our attachment to God.
The real oppression is not God and His laws but sin and our willful rebellion. I trust that Geneva families will be humbly faithful to the truth of God’s instruction and that He will use our faithfulness and repentance to bring others out of the morass of falsehood all around us. Please keep the school, and all Christian schools, and all God’s people, in prayer.
“Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding. For I give you good doctrine, forsake ye not my law. For I was my father’s son, tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother. He taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my words: keep my commandments, and live.” Proverbs 4:1-3
Trueman, Carl, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, Crossway, 2020, p. 267. There is more, very much more to this book, and I highly recommend it.
Ibid., p.261
Ibid., pp. 262-263
Bible verses are quoted from the Authorized King James Version
