The contemporary obsession with identity is really a religious impulse, the idolatrous worship of self. It is so whether it appears with reference to sexual desires or identity, or in other matters (e.g., matters of ethnicity). Refuge goes along with that false religion and seeks to import it into the Christian faith. If this be doubted, consider this statement from Refuge’s FAQs: “The Chaplain’s Office continues as a key resource for students seeking to individually or corporately develop their faith in light of their sexual attractions and gender identity.” So it is one’s faith that is to be developed in light of one’s attractions and identity, not one’s attractions and identity that are to be developed in light of one’s faith: sexual identity is really the central element, to which faith is therefore subordinate.

In a previous article I criticized Wheaton College for asserting it remains committed to historic Christian faith and practice while also doing things that bring such claims into question (e.g., employing women who are ordained as ministers as professors of theology). There is more to be said upon the matter. Wheaton’s great fault is that it attempts to meet the world on its own terms, as shown in at least two other points.

Refuge

Refuge is a group for “undergraduate students personally navigating same-sex sexuality and/or gender identity.” There is also a Refuge small group through Wheaton’s chaplain’s office. It is not clear what they purport to be a refuge from, but both groups are exclusive and secretive, limiting membership to people who identify as experiencing aberrant sexual identity or desires, requiring approval for participation from leadership, and meeting largely in secret. It is rather strange that people who profess to want to be able to live openly with full social acceptance then keep so much to themselves.

However that may be, Refuge’s mission statement is essentially that of the Revoice conference that roiled the Presbyterian Church in America: one has but to substitute ‘college’ for ‘church,’ and ‘students’ for ‘Christians’ for them to be functionally interchangeable. (Revoice also has some exclusive tendencies, restricting ‘allies’ from one of this year’s pre-conferences.) And like that conference, its participants prefer worldly terminology to describe themselves. The college’s approval of Refuge’s current iteration was contingent upon not using such terms at one point (per the Wheaton Record), but that has apparently changed, since they openly use them now.

Whatever the reasons for that, there is danger in such an approach. Christian institutions are to call people to repentance from their sin, not encourage them to faith while remaining in it; and insofar as such things have a cause in mental illness, our effort should be to encourage people to sanity. Wheaton would say that the point of Refuge is to teach such people to embrace the faith in truth, and highlights – even on Refuge’s home page – that it remains committed to scriptural notions of sexual morality. That largely misses the point. The current obsession with self-identity increasingly has little relation to behavior: I’m not sure that actual sex is more than about two percent of it even for many of the people caught up in it who do not share our faith. The key thing is that one’s self-conception or membership in a category is recognized by other people.

The Problem With This

That assertion of the preeminence of one’s self-conceived identity is where the fault lies. Granting that the people associated with Refuge and Revoice are sincere when they say they obey God’s commands against various forms of sexual immorality and respect marriage as between a man and a woman, they are still wrong. They rebel against God by openly controverting his established order by asserting a departure from it as an essential, immutable part of their persons, and encouraging others to do likewise by organizing on this account. And in some cases this means more explicit rebellion against God’s commands, as when people mutilate themselves to attempt to make themselves into a different sex than they truly are, or by acting as though they are that sex without undergoing such procedures.

If it be doubted this behavior is wrong, consider that God forbids crossdressing (Deut. 22:5). If it is an evil for a man to take upon himself a woman’s clothes, dare we think it any less egregious if he permanently alters his body by donning a woman’s physique? Is this not the ultimate rebellion, the refusal to be what one actually is in favor of what one prefers to be? God says “each one should remain in the condition in which he was called” (1 Cor. 7:20), referring primarily to socio-economic station and cultural identity as Jew or Gentile (vv. 17-24): should people not much more retain their nature as men or women?

And not only that, but God forbids lying. If a person has a Y chromosome and a man’s physique and goes about calling himself a woman, he is lying—and liars have no place in the Kingdom of God (Rev. 21:8). When he then demands others join him in his pretense, he is enticing them to sin, and Christ has strong words for those that do so (Lk. 17:1-2), especially where they do so to the vulnerable (young, mentally afflicted, etc.), as is common in these matters.

And granting that people are sometimes afflicted with a mental confusion that causes them to imagine their sex is opposite to what it actually is, we should not encourage them to embrace that fantasy when it entangles them in such sin and woe. To do so is unloving, and not at all in accord with the desire for them to abide in the truth about themselves, in which lies their only hope of health and a right relation to Christ.

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