Dear Evangelicals,
I love Jesus. My faith is strong. My family and I cherish the sacred. We pray together. We openly talk about our love of God. We use the Scriptures for correction.
So, you and I share something. And yet I have a bone to pick with you.
Last week, the president announced a policy that totally eliminates the rights of transgendered people to serve in the military. While your leaders were lauding the President — or, even worse, staying silent in consent — the LGBTQ community was shocked and hurt. Instead of defending transgendered people, you let your leaders speak out in favor of the President’s announcement with little challenge. Suspiciously, some of them had even advocated for the ban two weeks prior to the announcement on a visit to the White House.
Do you not get what a terrible witness that was — and continues to be — to our hurting world? At a moment when you could have risen up in disagreement and defended fellow citizens, you chose to rekindle the culture wars. I’m begging you to reconsider. We should be known for our compassion toward people displayed in a willingness to fight for others’ rights, not to withhold them.
“Wait, wait,” you might say like Dr. Robert Jeffress — pastor, speaker and radio show host. “We have compassion for transgendered people. We just don’t want them to serve in the military.”
Dr. Jeffress might sound compassionate (he uses the word “compassion,” doesn’t he?), but in fact his compassion hides a political and moral bias. He believes — as many of you do — that being transgendered is a disease and from a religious standpoint leads to sin if untreated or is sin already.
You and Jeffress are entitled to your bias. But pretending that you are compassionate when advocating to deny a right to someone is destructive to our mutual Christian witness on this earth. If you share Jeffress’s viewpoint on the issue, do you think people are that dumb that they can’t see through the false compassion of this rhetoric?
The statements of Dr. James Dobson — a revered voice in American Evangelicalism, a voice with which I grew up — demonstrate similar, thinly-veiled and destructive rhetoric. The same day on which the President tweeted his policy change ex cathedra, Dr. Dobson affirmed the president’s military rationale in a confident Facebook post.
Dr. Dobson is a Christian specialist on family and marriage. Why is he defending the policy change as a military move? He writes, “I support the president’s decision and commend this administration for having the courage to protect our military from what would only amount to an enormous and costly distraction.” And yet Dobson himself has not been courageous in what he says because he is not really saying what he means. Dobson’s points about “disrupting the world’s most elite fighting force” are euphemisms for what he really wants to say:
“Stop making our military a den of sin. We already lost on gay marriage.”
In my opinion, the army has always been a social experiment. It should reflect the people it defends, and every citizen of every generation should have the right to be a part of it. To deny someone that right requires real proof that those who serve could be in great jeopardy or that the ongoing cost of a policy supporting inclusivity (which already exists) will drastically hamper our military effectiveness. It requires the voices of medical experts, not moral ones.
Apparently, Franklin Graham, head of Samaritan’s Purse and staunch supporter of the President, knows better:
Again — Franklin Graham is a moral leader for a religious community, and a person for whom I have historically had a lot of respect. My family and I have participated in a number of Samaritan’s Purse campaigns. Yet, statements like these cause me to question his soundness as a leader in the church. Graham’s major flaw here is that he utilizes the notion of costliness to give a false sense of objectivity to his tweet. Improving the healthcare of sick veterans and paying for the costs associated with gender change are not mutually exclusive.
Graham (and Dobson for that matter) are right in some manner. The President should consider cost and troop disruption when evaluating any change to military policy, which he didn’t really do. As Alex Wagner, a former Army chief of staff, puts it, “Although Trump declared transgender troops a ‘disruption,’ I can think of nothing more distracting or disruptive for a military at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia than demanding that its leadership identify, locate, and discharge trans service members. The military has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars recruiting, training, and equipping these troops. Trump’s plan, if implemented, would impose real budget costs, undermining any insignificant savings derived by denying these service members medically necessary health care. Of course, Trump’s tweets are often not the definitive word on a subject. His staff may very well walk back these tweets, as they have done with so many others. And while Americans may have grown numb to Trump’s Twitter rants as deliberate distractions rather than substantive policymaking, the pernicious impact of this ban on good order and discipline, as well as unit cohesion, would be unfathomable and severe.”
In addition to being very misinformed, Franklin Graham’s tweet is also manipulative, driving you to answer a question that never really existed so that you reach same conclusion. So that you have an enemy. Just as Dr. Dobson points out that we must “protect” our military, Graham’s manipulative tweet solicits your indignation so that you focus it on something. Or someone. That is, the LGBTQ community or, in a dehumanized manner, the LGBTQ agenda.
It is this demonization of the other — the gay agenda, the liberal agenda, the transgender agenda , the agenda agenda — by evangelical leaders that we must speak against the most. If your witness and your rhetoric cannot convince people of God’s transformative love or of your religious worldview, then do you really think forcing “behavior” through political policies will do much better?
Christianity spread because the Roman and Persian worlds became convinced of its truth and of its relevance to daily lives. Until the third century, Christians did not have the luxury of forcing their points of view on others. Their faith was reviled and mocked and persecuted; and yet Christianity’s influence grew and grew and grew.
Listen, Evangelicals: I support your right to believe what you believe. I will defend it to my friends, my colleagues, my enemies. I don’t expect you, me and others to agree all time time. But why fight this fight? Is it really worth the loss of our witness?
Perhaps you fight because you feel ostracized; like the kid who the teacher makes a point to scapegoat daily. Perhaps you fight because you feel like you’re always the brunt of a joke, or have been for the last eight years. And in many ways you’re right. People do misjudge you. All the time. And they will continue to misjudge you.
I understand that This — technology, family, church, culture, world and nation — is all changing so fast. For those of us who revere our faith, our scriptures, our houses of worship, it’s difficult to tell what life will look like a year from now, let alone four. But don’t let this feeling of becoming strangers in the world goad you into lashing out at communities that represent the change you fear. Don’t let them become effigies for your anxiety and sense of social abandonment by mainstream culture. You’re better than that.
Instead, fight the fight of healing the sick, of feeding the poor, of defending the rights of the unloved and uncared-for, and of showing the world that genuine faith changes us all for the better. Start by speaking out against leaders that continue to rally our churches on quixotic crusades. Fill your church foyers and fellowship halls, your news feeds, your bible studies, your coffee meetups with a challenge to them and your fellow believers: choose a different battle.
And most importantly find someone in your life who is transgendered and say to them what Rachel Held Evans said with beautiful brevity in response to the President’s announcement. “Transgender friends: You are loved & valued & whole.”
With truth in love,
A Fellow Evangelical
