The church must either announce the holiness of sex publicly through clear Gospel preaching about the person of God, while showing love to both God and the neighbor (the essence of Twoism); or it must remain silent under the culture’s determination to eliminate all distinctions and to call gospel preaching hate speech (the essence of Oneism). Christians speak the truth about God not for the sake of “Christian nationalism” but for people to meet the love of God both in the person of God as their Creator and Redeemer. 

This irony is a warning for all Christians who are quite capable of similar sinful actions and who are constantly reminded that sinners in the hands of an angry God, including androgynous practitioners, can also know his forgiving grace if they turn to Jesus, God’s Son, confess their sin, and own him as their only atoning sacrifice.

The Gods of Sex

Why is the LGBTQ agenda now proudly affirmed as a valuable lifestyle choice? Why must kindergarten children be taught how gays think and act? Why does Disney risk losing the parents of their young customers by promoting the LGBT agenda in its movies? Why are there huge annual pride parades in so many large cities? Why are Drag Queens reading to children in our public libraries? Why is Baylor University (among other Christian colleges) happy to make its mark on Christian higher education by chartering Prism to create an LGBT student organization on campus?

In order to answer these questions, please allow me to go back a little in my own experience to show you the roots of the fruits we see so richly exhibited on the branches of paganism through which we walk today.

Pagan Spirituality Lands on Western Shores

Homosexuality is but one option in what might be called “androgyny.” Embedded in the ever-thickening LGBTQ+ alphabet soup is a wide variety of sexual options, all of which erase the male/female distinction: homosexuality, bi-sexuality, transgenderism, a-genderism, drag, and cross-dressing, to name but a few.

The open practice (one might say worship) of androgyny is a relatively recent development. I came to the States as a young European believer in 1964. I found a culture peppered with thriving Christian universities, seminaries, publishing houses, and television and radio stations. Churches were on every corner, pressing the truth of the Christian faith on the culture. Androgyny was nothing but an obscure word used by scholars of the Greek myths. There was no televised Ru Paul Drag Race; no eight-year-olds being encouraged to choose their own gender.^[1] But shortly after I arrived, this began to change, as the Cultural Revolution welcomed Eastern spirituality.

Bob Dylan’s astute 1963 song caught the “eschatological” character of the cultural change— The Times They Are A’Changin:

Come mothers and fathersThroughout the landAnd don’t criticizeWhat you can’t understandYour sons and your daughtersAre beyond your commandYour old road isRapidly agin’Please get out of the new oneIf you can’t lend your handFor the times they are a-changin’.

“Changin’” in what way? By the late Sixties, I was a young theological student studying “Death of God” theology. I, my fellow students, and even our professor concluded that the times were at a high point of atheistic secularism. Like Nietzsche, the atheists were killing God. However, in 1974, David Miller, one scholar in the Death of God movement, wrote a book called The New Polytheism, in which he triumphantly announced that the death of God would stimulate the “rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.”^[2] In the same vein, a generation later, Jean Houston (spiritual counselor who supposedly brought up the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt for Hilary Clinton in the White House) declared: “Now open your eyes and look at all the gods in hiding.”^[3] In other words, the so-called “Death of God” was the death of the God of the Bible but also the demise of secularism. It was the beginning of the postsecular era and the rebirth in the modern world of the old pagan notions of the divinity of Nature and of the self. It hailed the New Age epoch where people learned to say: “I am spiritual but not religious.”

What is the essence of New Age spirituality? It is historic paganism. Two thousand years ago the Apostle Paul accurately described the only two religious options we have: “worship of creation” or “worship of the Creator” (Romans 1:25). This distinction is known in theology as the Creator/creature distinction. I have come to use the terms Oneism and Twoism to describe these options. Oneism is the worship of all things created and relies on belief that there are no ultimate distinctions. Twoism holds that distinctions are knitted into our existence, with the fundamental distinction being that between the creation and the Creator. From this “otherness” flow all the distinctions embedded in the creation.

Eastern Oneism’s popularity in the West has caused many Westerners raised on biblical Twoism to take up yoga, trust the enneagram, walk the labyrinth, practice mindfulness mediation or seek the philosophical meaning of life in the teachings and practices of Eastern Buddhism and Hinduism. Multiculturalism seeks to bring all ideas together but, alas, Oneism and Twoism are fundamentally opposed. It is this irreducible conflict that causes the major divisions of contemporary culture.

Pagan Cosmology

Pagan Spirituality

In the early stages of our culture’s newfound curiosity about Eastern religions, people were seeking to come to terms with their personal sense of meaning, but before long there came a yearning for a much fuller expression of this individualistic spirituality. The Jungian and Gnostic scholar, June Singer, made a programmatic statement that others have since put into practice: “What lies in store as we move towards the longed-for conjunction of the opposites [the joining of the opposites]?…Can the human psyche realize its own creative potential through building its own cosmology and supplying it with its own gods?” [emphasis mine].^[4] Singer called for a coherent, all-encompassing, attractive and religiously pagan account of the nature of existence, which she saw as essentially one, based on androgynous sexuality. She realized that a cosmology or worldview would not function without an essential place for sexuality. She saw androgyny as a means of erasing distinctions and accomplishing “our own new alchemical opus.” She saw androgynous sexuality as being a “witness” to “primordial cosmic unity.”^[5] Singer is a true Jungian, conscious of promoting the important sexual element in the coming “new humanism” that Carl Jung envisaged: “The androgyne [the human being aware of being both male and female] participates consciously in the evolutionary process, redesigning the individual…society and…the planet.”^[6]

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