If you’re an American Christian, especially a conservative one, you’re not cool with this decade’s assault on mainstream pronouns and it’s many underlying factors. To you, a girl is a girl and a boy is a boy. If we entertain any shift in grammar that suggests otherwise, we’re lying. Many feel that it’s destructive.

America’s values are under attack, and must be protected.

You’re also not going to address a singular person in the plural, because that’s just bad grammar. “It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue,” a friend of mine recently said.

I get it. As a 56 year old, Southern born, formerly conservative Christian, I can’t say I’m comfortable either. No old person likes it when their culture makes such a massive shift.

My world is changing so much, so fast, that it feels alien to me sometimes, like I can’t go home.

But calling the people who are driving these changes evil, and/or feeling like I have to lay aside Jesus’ agenda so I can fight them is a bit outside of the Gospel metanarrative, far as I can tell. In any cultural movement, we’re compelled to understand what’s happening and how we got here so we can best respond.

Distancing ourselves and pointing fingers isn’t a biblical response to culture, and it certainly isn’t saving America.

We love to say, “Be in the world, but not of the world,” i.e., Jesus wants us to interface with everyone regardless of religion or moral code, while avoiding whatever destructive, “sinful” patterns and perspectives they embrace. But we’re not very good at that. The way we handle things like money, justice, equity/equality, etc. suggests that we don’t have much of a problem with the broken ways that our world operates.

Scripture handles things like justice, equity/equality, and money far differently than we do.

But when someone messes with mainstream gender norms, we blow our tops, disconnect, call the outside world evil, and distance ourselves from it, while at the same time – with much irony – embrace so many of its other values.

Listening, connecting, serving, etc. seemed to be Jesus’ preferred posture towards his world, with the exception of the distance/finger-pointing crowd.

To my Christian friends who are angry, what follows are a few things to consider before you engage in disengagement, and the two-sided condemnation that follows.

They/Them God

According to scripture, God’s pronouns aren’t techincally “he/his.” In the Genesis narrative of the Old Testament, God is neither male nor female, while at the same time fully representative of both. In addition, God is often referred to in plural form (אֱלֹהִים elohim), and the church has confessed for millenia that he/she/it exists in a mysterious “triune” state; the “father,” “son,” and “spirit” living, building, and breathing as one unified being.

In our culture, we call him “him,” but it would be more accurate to use “they/them.”

In this story, God’s image is said to be male and female. To drive it home, the narrator reiterates:

“in the image of God he created they them.”

Somehow, it takes male, female, and both in union to represent whatever God is.

And a singular human represents a part of it. In additon, scripture alleges that each one of us “bears his image.” While addressing someone in the plural assaults some grammatical/cultural rules to be sure, it’s not nearly so far afield from the bible’s anthropology.

Either way, it won’t kill you to address someone as “they/them.” Neither will it hurl our world into some mindless, immoral abyss.

Righteous Anger?

Christians have gone to war over cultural shifts since America’s inception. Dancing, Rock and Roll, bikinis, abolition, Civil Rights, the sexual revolution, divorce, et-al, etc., all made us grumpy. And, by the way, we lost, every time. If it’s our job to drive/preserve/protect culture, we really suck at it.

Most of us are no longer upset about these things, so you have to wonder, when a bunch of us get mad at some cultural development, are we really mad at what we think we’re mad about?

Sure, there are times when our anger is driven by a righteous response to something, but most of the time it’s more closely related to fear mixed with the belief that it’s our job to get grumpy.

Everyone thinks their anger is righteous. But it almost never is.

Given our propensity towards the wrong kind of anger, we should engage in a bit of brutal introspection when we go to war with culture.

We could start by asking if God is mad at this new pronoun thing, and turn to scripture for guidance. But that’s tricky because the Christians who went to war against abolition, for example, were convinced that God hated it too. They even managed to find a slew of Bible verses to back themselves up. So did anti-rock and roll Christians, and many others. Turns out we can make the Bible say anything we want, and, in turn, craft a God that hates everything we hate.

I think the best place to start is by asking if you have any friends who support alternative pronoun usage and/or the underlying shift in gender identity. If not, why not? As a former conservative Christian, I could list many reasons why straight, white, conservative, suburban Christians keep their distance from the rest of the world. The church has been doing this for a long time. I can tell you that the underlying motivators are less than holy.

What’s the harm in having coffee with someone from the queer/trans community, or a flaming liberal, or, God forbid, a Black person? If you can’t handle something that simple, are you qualified to engage this issue?

Another good step is to audit your posture towards the church. When is the last time you critiqued it with the same passion and frequency that you critique the outside world? Racism, greed, whatever-a-phobia, gluttony, self-righteousness, and a host of other maladies infect today’s church. I’ve been deeply connected to many congregations over the past 30 years and I’ll tell you that things inside are just as dirty as they are outside. It just looks different.

The idea that the church is “cleaner” and “holier” than the outside world is garbage.

If our anger was righteous, it wouldn’t be so biased.

Modern Humanity’s Gender Mess

We’ve been using gender specific pronouns for a really long time. Right or wrong, it’s always been important to dilineate between who’s bilogically male and who’s biologically female.

But that history is also full of the belief and praxis that females are “less than” male; often abused, marginalized, etc. Even in our modern, progessive world, women are paid significantly less than men, a fact that makes few anti-pronoun Christians angry.

Historically, our gender norms have played a dubious role in American culture, ensuring that women exist below men in a legion of categories. Why are we so surprised that people are challenging these norms and the structures that they’ve birthed?

Instead of leading with understanding, humility, and connection, we go to war, like we always do, making a futher mess of our country.

Regardless of what we do or don’t do, our culture is going to make drastic changes that we don’t like. Our political activity and/or social media rants simply don’t have the power to stop them. Maybe that’s because we’ve sacrificed our influence on anti-culture campaigns that only end up shooting us in the collective foot. Now, nobody wants to listen, adding to our anger, fear, and isolation, ever more convincing us that we’re right and everyone else is wrong.

To hijack one of Jesus’ favorite phrases, “Repent, for God’s world lives, walks, breathes, heals, and does so many other powerful things, right under your nose.” There’s something bigger going on than trying to conform the world to our image. We’ve been ordered to “turn” (the literal meaning of repentance) from our selfish, fear-full agendas so that we might have room to embrace God’s.

With all of that, i dare you; sit down with a singular they/them, or anyone else with the “wrong” prounoun, and listen to their story. Don’t get sucked into a debate or waste your time trying to bring them back into mainstream pronoun usage. And don’t just listen, leave with the ability to articulate their side of the story.

If you can defend it, regardless of whether or not you agree with it, you’ve understood it.

If you can manage that, you’ll understand that these aren’t evil people trying to destroy your world.

Jesus talked about evil people, but he more frequently referred to the misdeeds and broken perspectives of the bible-believing, god-follower crowd, especially, again, those who placed great faith in distance and finger-pointing.