How many fingers am I holding up? It’s a loaded question, I know, especially these days. And it also has a lot to do with what you’ve been searching for. I’m Joel Fieri for Christian Podcast Central, stay tuned.
In our research, continuing research, that we’ve done on what you, the Christian podcast listener, have been searching for two questions came up that are actually the same question and probably would have been the number one question. One is how many sexes are there and the other is how many genders are there. Without getting into the differences between sex and gender, it’s essentially the dealing with the same issue on our society and that’s transgenderism.
Now, lately I’ve been telling you who not to listen to, Oprah Winfrey, and I mentioned someone you should listen to, Voddie Baucham, in my previous podcast. I’m going to tell you another person that I think you should be listening to, especially when it comes to this subject and that’s Albert Mohler. Al Mohler, he’s President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. And recently in a podcast, he tackled the subject of transgenderism, putting it under the umbrella of Christians making distinctions.
https://albertmohler.com/2021/05/04/briefing-5-4-21
He talks about how Christians, as Christians in today’s society, we need to maintain the ability to make distinctions. And within that, he divided the distinctions we need to make into three separate ones.
First is the distinction between God and his creation. That’s a clear distinction. The second one is between man as created in the image of God, versus the rest of creation. And the third distinction we need to make is between within that creation of man in God’s image, there is male and female. God created man in his image, male and female he created them. Where men are the expression of the male characteristics of God and women are the expression of the female attributes of God.
Well, in today’s world, there’s an attempt to blur that distinction or completely erase that distinction between male and female through transgenderism. And in this podcast, Mohler talked about some of the current expressions of that in our society, current issues that that’s bringing up. Specifically biological man competing against biological women in sports transgender men who have gone through male puberty, which gives them an advantage in sports versus women who have not.
And from that he also talked about current political situation here in California, where we’re voting to recall our governor. And if we do, the leading candidate for governor would most likely be Caitlyn Jenner, who is the leading transgender person in our society. Who recently said that biological men should not be allowed to compete against biological women, which completely sent the left and to an uproar, which is very telling.
And also on this podcast, this is where my finger question came at the beginning. As some of you are way ahead of me, he mentions George Orwell. And if you’ve ever read the book 1984, you know that there’s a famous scene in that book, famous part of it, where Winston Smith, the protagonist who has been resisting big government the whole book, is being interrogated and tortured by O’Brien.
And O’Brien holds up his hand with four fingers and he says, “How many fingers do you see?” Of course, Winston says, “I see four.” At which point he’s tortured severely. And he holds up his fingers again and says, “How many fingers do you see?” And he says, “I see four.” And O’Brien says, “No, you see five.” And this goes on and on and on. As long as Winston says he sees four instead of five, he gets tortured more and more.
Until eventually O’Brien explains to him, “It’s not how many you see. You’re defective. What you think and what you see can’t be trusted. You need Big Brother to tell you how many fingers you see. If Big Brother says you see five, you see five. If Big Brother says you see three, you see three. If Big Brother says you don’t see any fingers, you don’t see any fingers. You’re defective, we’re not. We’re not insane for saying two plus two equals five or three or whatever. You’re insane for thinking two plus two equals four.”
So eventually Winston’s mind is brainwashed and remolded to think, “What I think doesn’t count, it’s only what Big Brother thinks.” And this was ridden famously in Star Trek Next Generation, where Captain Picard was captured by the Cardassians. And not Kim and Khloe, but the actual space Cardassians, despite what some cameraman may think. And he is being tortured and the Cardassians are trying to get him to say he sees five lights when he only sees four, and he’s being tortured and tortured and tortured.
Now in that story, that has a happy ending because Captain Picard is rescued before he has to say he sees five lights. In 1984 it’s not a happy ending, because Winston is eventually brainwashed into thinking he’s the problem, not Big Brother. Big Brother needs to do the thinking for him. Big Brother needs to shape reality for him.
So in the cultural moment we’re at right now, this is kind of what we’re facing with the issue of transgenderism. And what Al Mohler mentioned in this podcast makes a very good point. He said because of the craziness of the idea of transgender, where men can be women and women can be men, they’ve had to reinvent language.
Or they had to invent language to explain away their craziness, and to make us think that we’re the ones that don’t know what we’re talking about when we say there are only two genders. Words like misgendering and cisgender. All these new phrases that come up to make us think that we might be the mentally defective ones or the ones who don’t know what we’re talking about, whereas they do. And this is the same dynamic you see in 1984.
So as Christians, we need to maintain the ability to make intellectual and moral distinctions. And what it goes back to is we need to renew our commitment to the truth of the word of God, because that’s where we see these distinctions originate. And if you listen to my podcast, that this is a recurring theme. I started off the very first podcast with C.S. Lewis and his point that, wherever you choose to go and Christianity, whatever denomination or church or when you start your journey with Jesus, you need to find out where truth is. Truth is the key.
We’ve already abandoned … Much of Christianity has already abandoned truth when it comes to the idea of marriage, that distinction we used to make between what marriage is and is not. And we’re being pressured to erase and not make the distinction between male and female. And if we do that, then we’re going to eventually erase the distinction between man created in the image of God and the rest of creation, which is being pushed now. And if we erase that distinction, we will have to erase the distinction between God and creation itself. At which point God will cease to exist and Big Brother or the state will have won, and will have won the ability to tell us what to think.
So it’s a heavy subject. There may be a happy ending, there will be a happy ending because we’re on the winning team. God does exist and he’s not subject to these things. It’s just a matter of whether we can maintain our ability to be on his side and not on our society and the world’s side. A lot of people say that the cultural moment we’re in right now is a winnowing away of separation of the wheat and the tares.
Well, if you’re the wheat, it’s a happy ending. If you’re the tares, not so happy. We need to get this one right, folks, this is a key thing we need to get right as Christians. And hopefully this podcast has helped you do that. We’ll put a link to Al Mohler’s podcast in the description below. Next week I’ll discuss more about today’s cultural moment and the divide we have in Christianity that we’ve been talking about the last few weeks.
Thanks for listening. Please like and subscribe, comment below. Tell us what you think. As always, look us up on Facebook and YouTube the newer social media platforms like Gab and Parlor and Rumble. And most of all, go to christianpodcastcentral.com for more good content like this. See you next week.