Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church’s Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality by Greg Johnson, (Zondervan, 2021). “A Certain Madness Amok: In Canada, trans ‘justice’ has gone haywire” by Bruce Bawer, City Journal, April 1, 2021.
By Dr. Ralph Blair
(PDF version available here.)
After far too many damaging decades of the “ex-gay” pushers’ bogus claims of “cure”, Johnson sees there’s “still time to care” – for those, like himself, who believe that same-sex behavior is wrong. He wisely, openly, commits to celibacy in fellowship with fellow celibate gay Christians. Sadly, even that term, “celibate gay Christians”, doesn’t sit well with the homophobic church leaders. Nonetheless, commitment to celibacy, if believing that a same-sex marriage would be sinful, is surely a faithfully wise decision. Living that commitment in fellowship with other gay celibates is sensible teamwork, too. Johnson’s well-written book is due this fall, from the evangelical publisher, Zondervan.
Johnson is lead pastor at Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, a prominent congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America, the major evangelical Presbyterian denomination in America. He graduated from the PCA’s Covenant Seminary, founded by its first president, Robert G. Rayburn, who, in 1975, was the first evangelical leader to endorse our founding of Evangelicals Concerned as a soundly evangelical ministry for gay evangelical Christians, whether single or in a monogamous same-sex couple.
Sadly, the PCA today isn’t as well-informed as its seminary’s founder was some five decades ago. It also lacks a wise patience to refrain from ripping up “wheat with tares” (Mt 13) and refuses to live the Golden Rule vis a vis all the otherwise sexually oriented.
A former atheist, Johnson is now an evangelical gay Christian committed to celibacy, He’s also an active leader in Revoice, “to support and encourage Christians who are sexual minorities so that they can flourish in historic Christian traditions.”
With a doctorate in historical theology from Saint Louis University, Johnson looks into the scandalous history of the “ex-gay” movement and the relevant theological issues.
Celibate Christians, as all folks do, at times, may think they’re “missing out”. Yet, if they’d act on what violates their conscience, they’d regret it. Whether it’s celibacy or a marriage, gay or straight, it’s inevitably a challenging and mixed experience and not the “fantasy” people easily dupe themselves into expecting. Even if celibate gay Christians eventually see their way clear, without violating conscience, to move into a committed same-sex marriage, it’ll still be a mixed experience. But, apart from the predictably bad outcomes from violating conscience, what all’s been missed, is being missed or will be missed on roads never traveled can’t ever be known. So, let’s ditch all foolish fantasies!
Johnson’s insights should be taken as instruction, not only for gay Christians who’ve not settled these issues, but for the heterosexual hierarchies that can be so insensitive.
Insensitivity is what’s found in the “woke” hierarchies’ craze for unquestioning cover for radical medical interventions on even elementary-school kids who think they’re in the wrong gender. Bawer, a journalist, gay Christian and veteran of the early gay rights era in New York City, lives in Europe. He writes on this topic with skill and sensitivity.
In his City Journal essay, aptly, though probably unintentionally, published on April Fool’s Day, Bawer reports in disturbing details, on this fad of foolishness that’s all the rage in Canada. His focus is on the social chaos now taking over in Canada in these matters where major medical decisions on diagnosis and treatment regimen with lifelong consequences, are foolishly handed over to the decision-making abilities of the patients, who are, literally, children. These children’s decisions over their diagnosis and treatment involve matters of which there are major controversies in the professional medical and psychiatric literature, yet, in Canada, these decisions are given over to mere children and the Canadian courts not only support the children’s decisions, but bring heavy burdens of even imprisonment onto parents who disagree. We’re talking of minor children announcing that they’re not the gender of their birth, they’re another gender, and they need immediate medical intervention – e.g., puberty blockers and surgery. Yet kids aren’t asked to diagnosis or prescribe for even a common cold!
A half-century ago, today’s mess was foreseen and warned about by major pioneering clinicians and scientists in what was then the beginning movement in “transsexualism”, now “transgender” or “gender dysphoria”. Trans activists today have no living memory of those days of patients’ disappointment, disillusionment, depression, remorse, regret, resentment, grief and suicide. Whoever calls attention to this history gets “cancelled”.
Bawer writes: “At this moment, a Vancouver postman named Rob Hoogland is sitting in a jail cell in British Columbia.” Bawer asks: “Has Hoogland killed or robbed somebody? Is he an arsonist? A rapist? No. What did he do, then? Short answer: he tried to save his emotionally unstable daughter from self-destruction.” And it all began with a school counselor’s seeing her in the 5th grade. Unknown to Hoogland at the time, his daughter was receiving feedback from this same counselor well into the 7th grade.
“Hoogland saw that she was listed in her yearbook under a male name. It turned out that the school had been feeding her transgender ideology, and that she’d already begun ‘socially transitioning’ to a male identity under the direction of a psychologist.”
“In recent years”, as Bawer gives some backstory, “there’s been an epidemic in many Western countries of older girls who suddenly claim to be in the wrong body.” This fad of “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” as Abigail Shrier argues in her 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, is a tragic trend. Bawer’s review, “Pied Pipers with Scalpels”, was in David Horowitz’ Frontpage.
This May, Hoogland was released on bail under very extremely rigid conditions.
Meanwhile, a transgender crafter knits little “penises” in a variety of colors for “trans and non-binary” kids, and thanks parents who support their trans youngsters, saying, it all began by, “looking for a pattern to make a soft packer for myself.”
“60% to 90% of trans kids turn out to be no longer trans by adulthood”, according to surveys of studies by James Cantor, psychologist and sexologist on the University of Toronto medical faculty. But clinicians fear the cancel culture if they affirm this data.