It may initially seem absurd to claim a group of Christians who believe the KJV is divinely inspired is like a group of Christians who believe gender identity is so fluid it can change several times a day. But as I’ll show, both fundamentalist groups are strikingly similar in at least seven ways.

In the book of Judges, after the warriors of Gilead defeated the tribe of Ephraim, the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross the Jordan River back into their home territory. The Gileadites attempted to cut them off from the fords of the Jordan and needed a way to determine if a person was an Ephraimite refugee. The solution was both simple and clever:

The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time. (Judges 12:5-6)

Since then the term shibboleth has become synonymous with any custom or tradition that distinguishes one group of people (an ingroup) from others (the outgroup). On Wednesday a new website, ChurchClarity.org, was launched to distinguish churches using the latest shibboleth: LGBT-affirming.

In a post examining the problems with the project (which I recommend reading in its entirety), Denny Burk points out, “The leadership team that runs the website is comprised exclusively of those who affirm homosexual immorality and transgenderism. And they seem to be focused on forcing evangelical megachurch pastors to clarify where their churches stand on the issue.”

When I learned about the website and its peculiar mission it sounded eerily familiar, as if I had heard this type of thing before. And, in a way, I had: LGBT-affirming is the liberal fundamentalist equivalent of the conservative fundamentalist KJV-onlyism.

Tale of Two Fundamentalisms

If you haven’t spent time around conservative fundamentalist/independent churches, you may be unfamiliar with King James-only views (aka KJV-onlyism). This is a church movement that believes the King James Version of the Bible is not only to be preferred to other English translations but is the only reliable English translation. All other modern translations, they contend, have been corrupted by a conspiracy of Bible translators.

It may initially seem absurd to claim a group of Christians who believe the KJV is divinely inspired is like a group of Christians who believe gender identity is so fluid it can change several times a day. But as I’ll show, both fundamentalist groups are strikingly similar in at least seven ways:

1. Both LGBT-affirming and KJV-onlyism believe their issue is the key dividing line between Christians.

As Trevin Wax has noted, “Rising to the forefront of the fundamentalist squabbles is the King James Only controversy. Some groups are claiming that this is the hill on which to die, the main issue by which to tell a fundamentalist from a liberal.”

Similarly, on the liberal fundamentalist side, the willingness to embrace homosexuality and transgenderism is treated as if it is the most important dividing line. It’s telling, though not surprising, that a website like Church Clarity seeks to pin down churches on where they stand on the sexual revolution’s latest shibboleth.

2. Both LGBT-affirming and KJV-onlyism reject church history, tradition, and sound scholarship.

To believe God re-inspired the Bible in 1611 or that Scripture does not clearly and equivocally reject same-sex sexual behavior requires rejecting not only all of church history and tradition but also hundreds of years of sound exegesis and biblical scholarship. This is why in both camps the “scholars” ushered out to defend these positions tend to be self-taught or have irrelevant qualifications (e.g., gender studies) rather than being experts on theology or biblical languages.

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