Drew Stever, a female minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America who identifies as a man, recently generated controversy by suggesting that gender ideology’s incompatibility with biblical teaching, particularly about sex, demonstrates a deficit in the Bible.
Lisa Ling of “CBS Mornings” told Stever in a recent interview that “there is a lot of people who say that according to the Bible, God made man and woman, and that couldn’t be any more clearly defined.”
The program cited the finding from a 2017 Pew Research poll that 63% of American Christians say that gender is determined by sex at birth; 35% of Christian respondents alternatively said that gender can be different from sex at birth.
More
recent Pew data that CBS News apparently chose to ignore indicates that the percentage of American Christians who affirm the unity of gender and biological sex has significantly increased in the years since.
‘It’s hard to relate it to modern-day times.’
Whereas 68% of Protestants and 51% of Catholics polled in 2017 said that an individual’s gender is the same as birth sex, those numbers jumped in 2022 to 75% and 62%, respectively.
“How do you respond to them?” Ling asked Stever.
“It’s hard to relate it to modern-day times,” said Stever, who serves as lead pastor at Hope Lutheran Church in Hollywood. “Because it wasn’t written for 2024; it was written for then.”
Stever did not indicate why specifically moderns should have a different relationship with scripture than Christ, who
treated as authoritative sacred writ that was already in his time roughly 1,400 years old.
“When we read in the scripture that God created man and woman — yes, and God created everyone else as well,” continued Stever.
Stever is not the first LGBT activist to insinuate that the Bible’s teaching on sex and gender is antiquated and malleable.
‘Undermine the moral authority of homo-hating churches … by portraying such institutions as antiquated backwaters.’
The gargantuan LGBT lobby group Human Rights Campaign, for instance,
claims on its website that “scripture doesn’t suggest that respecting biblical authority means Christians should reject experience as a teacher.”
HRC notes further that “while gender complimentarity is indeed rooted in passages from Genesis 1 and 2, it is worth noting that these stories say God began by creating human beings of male and female sex (defined as the complex result of combinations between chromosomes, gonads, genes, and genitals) but there is nothing that indicates in Scripture that God only created this binary.”
Activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen noted in their 1990
strategy for the advancement of the LGBT agenda that it was necessary to “muddy the moral waters, that is, to undercut the rationalizations that ‘justify’ religious bigotry”; to “rais[e] serious theological objections to conservative biblical teachings”; and to “undermine the moral authority of homo-hating churches … by portraying such institutions as antiquated backwaters, badly out of step with the times.”
The late “New Theist” Rev. Michael Dowd
argued, “Those of us who wish to continue calling ourselves Christian must no longer enslave mind and heart to inert fossils of ancient texts and creeds.”
Dowd, regarded by some
critics as a neo-pagan, also implored Christians to “unshackle our religious stories and texts, and welcome evolutionary growth within our religious traditions.”
CBS News situated Stever’s response and ministry within the broader context of the push by some Christian denominations to embrace the LGBT activist agenda and transvestite clergy, noting further that the
ELCA ordained its first cross-dressing priest in 2015.
The
Church of England, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and the United Methodist Church are among the denominations that have ostensibly embraced gender ideology and transvestite clergy.
Transgenderism doesn’t similarly fly in
the Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Southern Baptist Convention, and in other relatively more conservative Christian denominations.
When asked about her message to people who feel “burned” by religion, Stever said, “I’m so sorry that the church missed you. I would say specifically to folks of color, to people living with disabilities, people who are LGBTQ: You are good. Nothing is wrong with you. You are so good. And you don’t need the church to tell you that.”
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