James Talico’s Confused Claims about Christian Convictions and Europe’s Trans-Society

Texas Democrat candidate for the senate, James Talico, has ventured into theological territory meant to challenge orthodox views about God and human sexuality.  Trying to challenge the Christian understanding of gender and sexuality, he alleged that God is ‘nonbinary’.  Clarifying his comment, he averred that God is ‘beyond gender’.  These are contradictory claims.

To suggest that God is nonbinary is to locate Him in the created order.  When people claim to be ‘nonbinary’, they are making a claim about their sexuality.  Sex, as we should know but also can see from Genesis 1.26ff, has to do with procreation and multiplying the species on the earth.  Those claiming to be nonbinary are claiming sexuality, whatever ‘nonbinary’ means to them.

Talico’s second statement is correct: God is beyond gender.  This is because He is beyond the created order.  God is not both male and female.  He has no sexual identity.  The fertility cult of Canaan understood their gods in terms of sexual identity, even pairing male and female gods.  The God revealed to Israel was wholly other than the created order, including sexuality.

Talico, however, confuses being beyond gender with being beyond a single gender. For him, God’s greatness is in being gender inclusive.  His objective is to affirm transgender inclusion in female sports.  However, God’s being is beyond the created order, not inclusive of whatever variety there is within it.  Of course, we might add the obvious: God’s created order consists of only two genders, male and female.  Talico is wrong on both accounts.

The politician ventured a further comment from Genesis 3.28, that there is neither male nor female in Christ.  His confusion seems to know no bounds.  First, as even he is aware, this passage is about Christians, not everyone.  Is he proposing that Christians should have transgender males participate in female sports, but not others outside of Christ?  Of course not.  Yet Paul has no such confused discussion in mind.  His point is not, of course, that Christians recognise no genders but that gender does not exclude one from being a Christian.  We might add that Paul’s statement recognises two genders, not the multiple genders of recent, Western, post-Christian culture.

Talico seems to think that he has shamed Christians with their own theological claims.  Instead, he has shamed himself with his simplistic, confused, and wrong understanding of Christian theology.  Yet the roots of his error are not new with the attempt to squeeze transgenderism from Holy Scripture.  For decades, the feminist movement has affected theological thinking of the same order.  In an attempt to undermine patriarchy, interpreters of Scripture were encouraged to find feminine metaphors for God and His work.  Of course, many metaphors are used in Scripture of God, including ones that include gender, marriage, and paternal roles.  One wrongly understands such metaphors as anthropomorphisms.  Anthropomorphism refers to attributing human characteristics to something that it not human.  In this case, it is attributing gender identity to God through the use of metaphors.  Thus, feminism, or persons submitting to feminist interpretation and agendas, has (at times) understood female metaphors for God an actual attribution of human gender to God.  This has led some to refer mistakenly to God as ‘Mother’.  This is the step Canaanite religion took, with the advantage of polytheism’s male gods and female goddesses.  It is the step now taken by Talico in his promotion of transgender identity and the undermining of the actual female gender by trying to include men in women’s sports on the basis of their non-biological fascinations.

Political efforts to approve of or even enforce transgenderism in post-Christian society are not limited to legislatures.  The Court of Justice of the European Union issued a ruling on 12 March that affirms transgenderism.  The ruling declares that the 27 countries of the EU must recognise one’s ‘lived identity’, not biological identity, in identity documents.  The ruling opposes any  understanding that civil law should be based on natural law.  On the contrary, as Marcus Tullius Cicero stated in the 1st c. BC, ‘nature herself is the foundation of justice’ (Laws XII) or ‘fountain of justice’ (XIII).  Indeed, by its ruling, the EU’s Court of Justice makes a mockery of justice.  The logic of the Court is that people must be able to move freely in EU countries, and so a transgender person with documents affirming the transgender identity must be able to carry the ‘lived identity’ throughout the countries of the EU.  Not to do so would be a denial of one’s ‘dignity and freedom’ in parts of the EU, as in Bulgaria, whose laws are based in nature and state that sex is biological.

The Court of Justice of the European Union illustrates for us how a minority’s imaginations about reality can become law for all.  If Talico were elected to the United States’ august body of legislation, and if his ilk somehow gained control of the Senate, theologically erroneous arguments would be unnecessary.  The ‘Trans-Society’ needs no theology or natural law to press its agenda.  All one needs is the idea that law should support one’s ‘dignity and freedom’, whatever one imagines oneself to be.