I’m
black, I’m a woman, and I’m a Christian. And recently I have come to realise
that those three parts of who I am open me up to discrimination on a regular basis.
Fortunately more people are talking about racism and sexism than ever before
(although not enough, I hasten to add) but nobody seems to care about
discrimination against Christians. Apparently our human rights just don’t
matter all that much.
Now,
I’m used to being discriminated against due to my being a Christian. That has
been the case since I was ten years old at primary school. And although it’s
not been easy, I accept that it’s part of the package. Jesus Christ told us: “Blessed are you when they revile
and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My
sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so
they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
But whilst I’ve been used to
people thinking me weird or disagreeing with my faith, I’m not used to being
shut down – effectively not allowed to speak because of my views. And I’ve
found that in the last few years it has become more and more common to think
that Christians should put up with this. Well, sorry, but I don’t agree.
Particularly during my last two
years at university I have found that there are a lot of people that quite like
to shout me down or shut me up whenever I talk about my Bible-based views on
contentious issues when asked. Usually a very confident person, I find myself
feeling cornered by a horde of people who want to paint me as some outdated
idiot or worse, someone who hates on groups of people. I’m not the only one
being treated in this way.
Homosexuality
My home church is one often
referred to as a ‘holiness church’ and ‘Bible-believing’. That’s evident enough
in the name: ‘Deeper Life Bible Church’. The Bible is the basis of everything
we do. In the average DLBC service you probably look up around 50 Bible
passages. We know our stuff.
So it
is with some confidence I can tell you the Bible’s stance on homosexuality. The Bible does not condone homosexuality.
“Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the
kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor
adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor
covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the
kingdom of God.” 1 Corinthians 6:9
Please note that
homosexuality is listed as a sin alongside fornication (sex before marriage),
adultery, and theft. Homosexuality is
not regarded by God as worse than these sins. It annoys me when people try
to paint homosexuality as the worst of all sins. That is just not the case. “For
there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of
God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in
Christ Jesus.” (Romans 3:22b-24.) Later in the same chapter, we see these
words: “Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body,
but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.” Sexual
immorality refers to anything that goes against God’s plan for marriage,
because God made sex for marriage. That makes sex before or outside marriage a
sin, and it also makes sex between the same sex a sin. Just like any other sin,
homosexuality is forgiven and forgotten by Jesus once a person surrenders their
life to Christ. That doesn’t mean people do not struggle with temptation once
they become Christians. Just as a man may admit to lusting after other women
despite being in a happy marriage, a person may struggle with attraction to the
same sex after becoming born-again. It is when one gives in to temptation that
it becomes a sin.
We already know that Jesus spoke
of a man leaving his father and mother to be “joined to his wife, and the two
shall become one flesh”. No references
to marriage in the Bible talk of a man leaving his parents to cleave to his
husband, and the young women are never admonished to love their wives. So can
someone please explain to me how a person saying that objecting to same-sex
marriage on Biblical grounds is unfounded?
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Even this meme is deemed offensive to some people. Isn’t
telling people that espouse the view above that they should take this off their
pages doing exactly what they are asking not
to be done – for their right to say what they believe to be taken away from
them?
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I have a lot of non-Christian friends, but I’d like to think
they love me in spite of my being a
Christian. I don’t drink: does that mean I hate or fear all people that drink?
Nope.
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I have a right to say what I believe, just as you have the right to say what you believe – as long as neither you nor I are spouting hatred. And I don’t believe that saying I don’t support homosexuality as a practice is spouting hatred.
Sadly there are too many people who do just that under the name of Christianity and they are giving people like me a bad name. For instance, I was incensed when I read a story a friend sent through to me of a ‘Christian’ pastor telling his church that all homosexuals should be executed. You would be right to call this homophobia. ‘Phobia’ can be defined as a ‘strong fear, dislike or aversion’. I’d say calling for all homosexuals to be wiped off the face of this earth is demonstrating a fair amount of aversion, wouldn’t you?
But to consider people like him on a par with people like me is utterly ridiculous. It would be as ridiculous and unfair as stating that all Muslims are terrorists. If doing the second is indicative of Islamophobia, shouldn’t the first be tantamount to Christianophobia? Wait, you think that isn’t a word. So does Microsoft Word. So did I. Well, I’ve got news for you! Christianophobia, or Christophobia, is a real thing! Just not enough people care about it, so no-one’s really talking about it.
Just because hardly anyone knows
that Christianophobia is an actual thing doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I can
give you numerous examples of cases that confirm it to be real.
I could talk to you about the
attack on Christians at a Kenyan university by Al-Shabaab which left 147 dead,
or I could remind you of the numerous attacks on Christians by Boko Haram in
Nigeria, or I could talk about the terrorisation of Coptic Christians in Egypt,
or the beheading of Christians in Iraq. But I think you’d agree without
question that these are clear cases of anti-Christian sentiment. What you might
never have considered is that right here, on Western shores, Christianophobia
is rampant.
One quite recent case from here
in the UK springs to mind. A Christian couple in Northern Ireland lost a court
case over their refusal to make a cake with the words ‘Support Gay Marriage’
imprinted on it; the judge ruling them to have ‘unlawfully discriminated’
against the customer. In response to the court ruling, they stated: “We happily
serve everyone but we cannot promote a cause that goes against what the Bible
says about marriage. We have tried to be guided in our actions by our Christian
beliefs.” They made clear it was the message, not the customer, that they had a problem with. I for the life of me
cannot understand how this can be labelled discrimination. It’d be absurd to
expect a halal meat shop to supply bacon for your bacon butty or a kosher
butcher to provide you with sausages for a hot dog. So why doesn’t the same go
for Christians who aren’t comfortable with carrying out a particular action
because it goes against what they believe to be an important doctrine of their
faith?
The Parliamentary Assembly within
the Council of Europe has recently called for its member states to allow for
the ‘reasonable accommodation of religious beliefs and practices’ and has
warned specifically against intolerance towards Christians in the wake of
recent events; (See http://www.lawandreligionuk.com/2015/03/02/the-council-of-europe-religious-intolerance-and-reasonable-accommodation/) a case in point being the dismissal of a
nursery worker who when asked, told a lesbian colleague of her views on
homosexuality: ‘If I tell you that God is OK with that, I’m lying to you. But
if I tell you that God hates you
because of it, I’m lying to you’. (Hating people
is not in line with Christianity, but sin is something we are called to do
away with, hence the line, ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’.) Her employers also
sacked her for her refusal to read stories about same-sex couples to children
which conflicted with her faith. It is a
human right to be able to practise one’s own religion, and to deny someone that
right is by no means right.
I have another example of such a
predicament unfolding closer to home. At my university, the senior research
scholar at the theological college Wycliffe Hall, named Ravi Zacharias, was
censured by our university student union for reportedly being ‘homophobic’ and
‘Islamophobic’. Now all that this man had said was that homosexuality was not
part of God’s plan for human sexuality, and pointed out what he felt were the
failings of Islamic teaching. He did not say anything that could be considered
spouting hatred, he simply explained why he didn’t agree. It would be silly to
call a Muslim Christianophobic simply for saying they don’t believe that Jesus
is the Son of God, because this is something that their religion teaches.
The fact is, calling someone an ‘x/n-phobe’ is a very quick and easy way to
get them to shut up. And lots of people don’t like what Christians say and
believe so they attach these labels to them in a valiant attempt to shut them
up.
I don’t think that’s fair.
Abortion
Sorry
if you’ve heard me go on about this already, but the time when a debate was
scheduled to take place at my university entitled ‘This House Believes
Britain’s Abortion Culture Hurts All’ was another clear case of shutting down a
view that isn’t shared by the majority. It was ruled that the debate had to be
shut down because of “security concerns, both physical and mental” of students,
since in some women’s eyes, “my uterus
isn't up for discussion”. Say what now? I am a woman and I am fully aware that
should I get pregnant, (don’t worry, that ain’t gonna happen any time soon) it
would not be just me that would be affected. There would be a father involved,
family members, and of course the child. So to suggest that it’s simply
me as a woman that would be affected by an abortion, to my mind, is frankly
ridiculous. (If you’d like to read more about my views on abortion, click
here.)
I believe in the equality of
the sexes and frankly I don’t see how being pro-abortion is obligatory in this
stance. But there are lots of women who’d like to shut me and others down for
not agreeing with them.
Another controversy, involving both the Oxford University Student Union
and the pro-life society Oxford Students for Life, clearly revealed this. The
student union, which is supposed to represent all students, decided that it would be donating £50 each year to a
pro-abortion group. Speaking to The
Oxford Student, one second-year undergraduate, who describes herself as a
“pro-life feminist”, did not wish to be named for fear of being “vilified by
Oxford’s pro-choice mafia” and said: “I don’t see why they need to formally
declare an opinion. I am a female student at this University, and I am
pro-life, and I don’t feel represented at all by our student union. They treat
people like me as evil, immoral people, just because I happen to think that
life begins at conception. I didn’t even go to the OUSU meeting about it
because I knew I would just be shouted down and not listened to.”
This is exactly the kind of
discriminatory sentiment I am talking about.
Transphobia
I’ve recently found those like
me labelled as ‘transphobic’ and I’d like to address this matter to explain why
I believe this is unfair. As I’ve already discussed, the word and suffix
“phobia” can be described as “strong dislike, fear or aversion”, in this
particular case to transsexual people, who have decided to undergo surgery to
change their sexual characteristics.
Not too long ago I attended a
talk centred on whether or not the Bible oppresses women (I am confident that
it doesn’t; for more on that keep your eyes peeled for a post from me) and I
remember in the Q&A session which followed, the lady who had delivered the
talk was asked about the Christian view of transsexuality. She talked of how most
human beings are born with clear sexual characteristics which make them either
male or female, and acknowledged that in rare cases there are those that are
born without any clearly identifiable sexual organs or characteristics.
She highlighted that most cases
of those that undergo surgery to change their sex do so without there being any
sign of intersex traits, but rather do so because they wish to live as a person
of a sex different to that which they were born into.
I’m not comfortable with people
hailing this decision as self-affirming and I don’t think it’s fair to label
those that feel the way that I do as ‘transphobic’.
It is serious and deeply
saddening that there are people that grow up battling with problems with gender
identity. But I don’t believe that people offering ‘gender re-assignment
surgery’ is the right way to manage the psychological trauma that comes with
this.
Let me put it this way: the sex
you were born into is an integral part of who you are. Let me go further – it
cannot be changed.
As I’ve already mentioned, I am
a young black woman. I am black. That cannot be changed. My ethnicity is a
central part of who I am and I believe that God made me this way for a reason.
The Bible reminds me that God has a plan for each of the creatures He moulded: “Before
I formed you in the womb I knew you”. Being black is not easy but I love being
so. Being a woman isn’t easy but I am more than happy to be a woman.
Why should it be considered anything
but sad that there are people that feel unhappy in the bodies they are born
into? We live in a society where it is normal to be dissatisfied with our own
bodies, as reflected by the rise in plastic surgery: more and more people just
aren’t happy with the breasts, noses, bums and tums they were born with. This
is not something to celebrate or see as normal – it shows a large degree of
self-loathing in our world.
A very topical case comes to
mind when thinking about those that try to change their phenotypic make-up.
Remember Rachel Dolezal, the leader of African-American civil rights campaign
group the NAACP? Well, she was revealed to not
be black, as she had claimed to be and presented herself as, but rather to
be a white woman who had covered herself with fake tan and donned an Afro wig,
as well as rejecting her white parents and constructing a black family for
herself. There was an uproar from people
of all races when this was
discovered. Why? Because here was a woman presenting herself as something that
she wasn’t.
The results are in and although
Rachel Dolezal managed to pass as black, the unanimous agreement is that she isn’t black. She can identify as black,
she can make herself look black, but
that does not make her belong to the ethnicity of those of African descent.
As a black person who finds
herself and those of her race discriminated against time and time again on a
racial basis, I could easily decide that I’d like to be white. I could go
through the process of lightening my skin and reconstructing my facial features
and change my hair but I would still not be white. More than that,
attempting to change my God-given ethnicity would be snubbing the one I was
born into. It would be saying, being black just isn’t good enough and being
white is so much better. Maybe that’s
what some would like me to think but it just isn’t true.
Scientific research shows that
the same goes for transsexuals: they can go through all the gender assignment
surgery they desire, forming or removing breasts, changing the shape of their
genitals, taking in hormones, but that does not clinically change them from
male to female or vice versa (e.g. transsexual women cannot have periods or
give birth). A review of more than 100
international medical studies of post-operative transgender people conducted in
the UK found “no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is
clinically effective.” Walter Heyer, a man who underwent gender reassignment
surgery in the 80s to become a woman, changed back to a man eight years later and
has since been alerting others of the dissatisfaction that so often comes with
undergoing transsexual surgery. Numerous cases point to the alarming prevalence
of suicidal thoughts and attempts amongst transsexuals. See http://waltheyer.typepad.com/blog/2013/11/20-regret-changing-genders-over-40attempt-suicide-and-even-after-surgery-a-large-number-remain-traum.html.
As we see with so many other
dilemmas, people are quick to offer a ‘quick fix’ without considering the very
real harmful effects. In my eyes we would do much better to make people facing
gender identity crises feel comfortable in their own skin, rather than
encourage them to change into something that they can never fully be.
It is true that there are people
that are born with intersex traits. Perhaps the most famous person in such a
position is the South African athlete Caster Semenya, who in 2009, aged only
19, was subjected to humiliating scrutiny by the mass media after winning the
women’s 800m at the World Championships in Berlin. A gender test allegedly
revealed that the athlete was born with internal testes and neither womb nor
ovaries, yet was born with the female-determining XX-chromosome. She was
cleared after a gruelling 11-month stagnation period of being allowed to
compete with women. Despite having both male and female sexual characteristics
Caster Semenya is a woman and the IAAF (the international athletics governing
body) ruled it would be unfair to treat her as anything else.
It would be ‘transphobic’ to
wish that those that choose to undergo ‘gender reassignment surgery’ should die
or to declare that they are not worthy of being called human beings. However I
do not believe that saying it is better for a person to be happy in the sex
they are born in is discriminatory. And I think it’s time people realised that
saying so is Christianophobic; it shows a fear or dislike or aversion to those
that espouse views that are in line with the Christian faith.
Thank you for reading through to
the end. I hope from now on we can agree to disagree, as the case may be, with
no hatred involved. Much love, Ruth.
