Round Table Discussion

Transcript (edited for readability).

Psychologist, working with Doxology. A couple weeks ago, I got a phone call from a pastor in the middle of a wheat field, is how he explained it. He says, "School is starting." I said, "Yes, it is." He said, "I've got a problem. I've got a family. Chucky went home in seventh grade, and his parents called to say Chucky's coming to school on Monday, but Chucky's going to be dressed as a girl, and we would like for you to call him Callie, and we would like his teachers to call him Callie, and we would like for you to honor his request to use the girls' bathrooms and locker rooms and to play on the girls' basketball team. I'm sure you'll want to support us in this effort." The pastor said, "This isn't supposed to happen in the middle of a wheat field."

Right? For a long time now, we've imagined that it's out there — ill-defined, but out there. And we know, given what we've heard from both of our speakers today, that it is among us, and that indeed we need to think carefully about how we're going to choose to respond to it.

We have Pastor Fleming, who has the roving mic for questions. But one thing I'd like to do, just to start out, is get a quick sense from our speakers of setting the scene. You've both been brilliant in giving us an overview. I sensed the urgency in your speaking — there wasn't nearly enough time to allow for everything to be shared. But I'd like for you, if you could, to share with us: what is your single greatest sense of hope that we can move through and beyond this to a place that's reasonable, rational, and not total chaos and total persecution? Can we indeed withstand the general culture and survive as a Christian community and preserve Christian sexuality?

So, I mean — is this on? Oh, there we go. The question is: what's my greatest source of hope? The greatest source of hope is that we know how the story ends, right? Hope is the theological virtue — we know who's reigning on the throne. We know, eschatologically speaking, how this all comes to a close, and that we're on the side of the truth.

Now, more temporally, a sign of hope here is that it's not just conservative Christians who are raising concerns about transgender ideology. Abigail Shrier is an Orthodox Jew, and in her public writing she writes like a secular, middle-of-the-road journalist. There are many lesbians who are against what's happening with the "T." There's an alliance called the LGB Alliance, because they think the T engages in child abuse. They think the T is not based on science, that it's not ethical medicine. There are a variety of radical feminists who have spoken out against boys identifying as girls entering female-only spaces, competing on female teams, et cetera.

So in the short run, I don't think there's much hope on the LGB part of the acronym — I don't think we're going to recover a sound understanding of marriage in the short run. But I do think in the short run there's progress to be made on the T, that there are a lot of people who have deep reservations about what's being done, especially to children, with transgender medicine, and that we should partner with them. We have to agree to disagree — a lot of the people I'm working with on transgender issues, we vehemently disagree about gay marriage, about abortion, et cetera — but we can make common cause on protecting children from unethical experimental medicine.

Okay, very helpful. Doctor, would you—

Yeah. From my perspective — one of the things I didn't get to share earlier — I look at history and ask, has something like this occurred before? We've often heard the phrase "we're on the wrong side of history." Really, I think what that's actually revealing is that people have forgotten history, because it's simply repeating itself. So it's not a progressive stance our culture is taking — it's actually regressive. In the first century, in the second century, there was sexual explicitness, particularly among the rulers — even one, under Elagabalus, who was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus — in the second century, he actually asked his surgeon to cut him a vagina. And Suetonius, who wrote about it, didn't know if that actually ever happened. The point is, it's nothing new under the sun, like Ecclesiastes says. It's just new to us. So as for the broader culture and the influence of Christianity within it, I agree there are a lot of challenges we're facing, but the confidence of Christ leads us forward, and again, eschatologically speaking, we know the end of the story. So as we carry forward, we do so in the light of Christ leading the way.

Excellent. Any questions you may have saved up that the clock prohibited you from sharing? Dr. Anderson, if you'll recall, spoke about making the case for man-and-woman marriage, about biology — which is not bigotry — the transgender movement, and religious liberty, and Dr. Woodford's comments about how to apply this in a Christian family and a Christian congregation.

Yes, sir. Yes. I've just got a question for you all. Considering a single parent — let's say a mother is raising a young boy — how much of the pushing is coming from the mother for the boy to transition to a young lady, because that's just maybe what mom wants?

That could be the case. I don't know of any clinical examples of that specifically, but I will share a clinical example I do know of — this was mentioned in one of the journal articles I read, and I think I quote it in the book. A little boy was identifying as a girl. His mother takes him to a therapist, and at some point he says to the therapist, "Mommies love little girls more than they love little boys." He was identifying as a girl as a way of trying to get more attention from his mom. So the therapist talked to the mother about this — said, "You know, your son said today that mommies love little girls more than little boys. What's going on?" Long story short, it turns out the mother had been sexually assaulted and never got the counseling and healing she needed, and inadvertently she could not be as affectionate with her son as she could with her daughter. Children are very perceptive about this stuff — the son was picking it up: "Mom cuddles with my sister, she doesn't cuddle with me. If I were a girl, mom would cuddle with me." So the therapist didn't have to do anything with the boy — the therapist worked with the mother, got her the healing she needed, and she could then be affectionate with her son again.

Your question is really good, because what it highlights is that there was a family dynamic that was out of whack. Rather than putting that boy on puberty-blocking drugs and estrogen, all that needed to happen was for the mother to get the help she needed to process the sexual assault, heal from it, and then be affectionate with both her son and her daughter. Frequently there are comorbidities — there's something else going on, and a good therapist can figure out what else is going on, direct the therapy at that, and then the gender dysphoria goes away.

Dr. Woodford, thank you for your suggestions on rearing children and creating a good environment in the home. What suggestions, as we in the body of Christ — as pastors — can you give to families, moms and dads, even brothers and sisters, grandmas and grandpas, where you can do everything right and still have a child who embraces transgender ideology or same-sex attraction? We've talked a lot about how we can create a bulwark against that, but even doing everything right, it can still happen. What comfort do we give to parents who say, "I thought I did everything right — what did I do wrong? How has God failed me, or my child?"

Correct — that's a very important question. I've dealt with this, not just with parents, but also with pastors and families who experience that — in a sense, they should know better, and yet it still happens. So dealing with the guilt a parent has, and whether it's appropriate for them to bear that guilt, and freeing them of it — it's something along the lines of saying, "Well, I taught my child to look both ways crossing the street, and they should have known that, and then all of a sudden they crossed and got hit because of a reckless driver." In other words, it's simply saying that the sin of this world is still corrupt and moving forward, and it afflicts us and any individual caught up in it — that's not excusing the behavior of someone engaging in it, but the reality is, there is only so much in our control as parents.

So where does the parent find hope? That hope still comes in Christ, and God's promises are always stronger than our weakness. So it's encouraging them — in the midst of that, we can explore why they might have this sense of guilt, agonizing over some decision they made in the past, and helping free them of that. Because Satan wants to give them a bad conscience — he wants to thwart their faith by saying, "Look, you're a failure." He's sinister in that regard as well. It's not an easy situation, but that's the comfort we offer.

I'd like to invite Dr. Anderson, if you would, to speak a bit about social contagion, because sometimes parents presume that they are the prime and only movers in their child's life.

Yeah, sure. Social contagion — think about COVID. There's a physical contagion: someone was in this church, they had it, the air droplets could spread, and so on. We've all heard more than enough about how disease spreads physically. A social contagion is the idea that an idea can spread the same way. Most people are familiar with this: if a suicide happens at a school, they frequently rush in grief counselors, because they're afraid of imitative suicides — the idea that once someone does it, others will imitate it, and it can spread into clusters.

Well, that's exactly what's happening right now in high schools and colleges, particularly with young women. It's not just that one person comes out as trans or gender fluid or non-binary — a whole friend group does. This also has huge online aspects — chat groups, social media — and they're coaching kids to reject their parents, telling them their parents don't know what they're talking about, and the internet, the chat group, the social media site becomes the source of authority in their lives. So you could do everything under the sun correctly as a parent, and still, if your child is at a school where one person comes out and it becomes part of a cluster — that social contagion — you can't protect your child from that.

The only other thing I'd add — and I might get in trouble, because I'm not a theologian and I'm not Lutheran, so feel free to correct me — I also think that part of our theology, or at least Catholic theology, is that we are free to reject God's grace. There's a theological dimension to this too: you can do everything correctly with your child, and you still can't make the decision to accept Christ on their behalf. They have to do it for themselves. And as a new dad, that's actually really scary — to know that I can do everything within my power and my kid can still go to hell, because it's up to him, up to her, to respond to that grace. It's anxiety-riven, because at the end of the day it's not up to you — but you still should do everything you can.

It used to be called gender identity disorder — please talk about the language and how that's changed.

Yeah, great. So DSM-IV, which was prior to the current one, DSM-5 — and I think three, and possibly earlier, because it didn't always exist as a diagnostic category — it was gender identity disorder, and part of the very definition was that if you had a gender identity not in accordance with bodily reality, that was the disorder. They changed it with "gender dysphoria" to say it's both that, but there also needs to be clinically significant stress or distress. The disorder — gender dysphoria — was located in the stress and the distress, not in the mistaken belief. It's interesting that they still needed it to be a psychiatric condition so insurance could pay for treatment. But whereas the historic diagnostic criterion held that the belief being out of whack with reality was the disorder, and so the treatment was helping the belief line up with reality — the new disorder is the distress you feel because your body is not in alignment with your identity, and therefore the treatment becomes tinkering with the body to line it up with the identity. It's really Orwellian, how it was advanced. There are a couple of pages in the book When Harry Became Sally that look at the original definition, look at the current definition, and explain why the update took place.

A question for the Reverend Dr. Woodford: looking at a Christian perspective on sexuality, how do we respond to those in the church, particularly those coming from the progressive Protestant side, who are pushing back against purity culture from the past couple of decades and are decrying it as antithetical to what we believe now as Christians?

Did you hear the question? Were you able to understand it?

I didn't hear the question — getting a lot of echo. Could you give us a translation?

Sure — how do they react to the purity culture that was kind of that evangelical thing years ago, with "you don't kiss until you're married," "you don't ever date," that kind of stuff?

Oh, so react to that? I'll give a couple of thoughts. Recently — if you haven't followed him — Josh Harris rejected the faith altogether. He was the one who wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye. That approach was completely legalistic and didn't have a necessary, healthy balance to it. In terms of a general reaction to the purity movement, you'd have to define for me what that entails, what it means, and where law and gospel are present within it. That's why I go to baptismal virtue ethics — whose you are determines who you are and what you do. It gives us a guide that way.

Okay, please — I just can't pass up this opportunity. I feel like it's been glossed over a little. The role of contraception, and getting back to God creating things — we took that power and made it seem like we can control what God is controlling, and that evolved into not just controlling what is being created, but into what has already been created — with abortion — and into what sex am I. Your thoughts on that, and on the general acceptance that it's medically all good, culturally all good, and taught in schools as a good thing for our children.

I'm Catholic, and I believe that — I believe Catholic teaching on this is true. I just didn't want to read the riot act as a Lutheran. I'm going to let the Lutheran bishop handle it.

Sure. No, I agree. Having read a lot of the Catholic moral theologians on this, there's a lot they have to offer us. We have to have some very thoughtful reflections. In the outline I had, I noted that the changing teachings of the church regarding divorce, contraception, and homosexuality have followed the same pattern — that's on page four. First, limited exceptions are made. Then those exceptions are no longer limited and become the norm. And finally, the new norm itself is sanctified as theologically acceptable. That's what we've arrived at — and from our Lutheran perspective, that's why I give the Catholics a lot of credit. They've been consistent and maintained that position all along, particularly on contraceptives.

When I began teaching on this in my last congregation, it was a very sensitive issue — saying, "Why do you use contraceptives, whether chemical or barrier methods, and what do you think God's Word has to say about that?" That instantly got people upset: "Are you saying we're sinning, pastor, because we're using contraceptives?" It's a delicate matter, being able to say there's no necessary eleventh commandment that says "thou shalt not use contraceptives," but there are things that are very telling about what we should and should not do regarding reproduction. I think that's an important conversation — every time I've spoken publicly on this, I've invited our Lutheran church to have that conversation, because I think we've glossed over it. It's become, "Well, it's the practice, so it's okay, just because it's the practice." I don't think that's what Scripture necessarily frees us to do.

So again, I'm very sympathetic to the Catholic moral teaching on contraceptives. I do understand the freedoms we have in the gospel, but what does it say that we're preventing an act God designed for procreation to occur — we're intentionally doing that, if it's a barrier method. Or if it's chemical contraceptives — this is a conversation I would always have with couples in premarital counseling — what is it doing to your body, your God-designed body, and do you understand that some contraceptives are actually abortifacients, that they simply prevent implantation? We do need to have those conversations. And with one — with seven kids — you can probably tell where I land.

It's hard to know. Can I make one recommendation? It's a great book, by an author already mentioned — Mary Eberstadt. She wrote a book titled Adam and Eve After the Pill. What she does is look at the moral analysis but also the cultural analysis — that regardless of what you think about the morality of any particular contraceptive act, a contraceptive mentality will view fertility as a disease, will view children as a burden to be prevented, where we view our God-given reproductive capacities as things that need to be neutered, sterilized — and this has consequences for how we view children. Contraceptive failure becomes abortion. It affects how we view marriage — children become secondary add-ons rather than the crowning perfection of the union. And then, as a result — I don't remember if gay marriage had already come about when she published this — but if marriage has no necessary connection to procreation and children, then why can't two men or two women marry? I think there is a deep logic connecting the LGBT movement to a contraceptive culture. At one point, Andrew Sullivan wrote an article titled "We're All Sodomites Now," with the idea that what straight people are doing with their sexuality isn't all that different from what gay people are doing. I think that goes too far, but you can see a certain logic there. Anyway, Mary Eberstadt's book, Adam and Eve After the Pill — I'd commend it to you.

And with that, we need to say farewell to Dr. Anderson, who is going to fly to the airport to catch his plane. Please join me in thanking him for his contributions. If you do have questions for Dr. Anderson, you can write him. At this point, however, we have the opportunity to reconnect exclusively with Dr. Woodford, with questions regarding family, teaching, and catechizing children about Christian sexuality. A question in the back, please.

All right, thanks for taking my question. My wife and I are grandparents of nineteen grandchildren — the oldest is fourteen now. We're going to have a lot of conversations — we've had a lot of conversations. Down to a fifth grader who talks about the transgender boy in their classroom, and what they do and don't do — this isn't a big-city issue, these are all small schools in rural Iowa, rural Wisconsin. So my question is not what we should do as grandparents and parents, explaining what God says in the Bible, what's right or wrong with Jesus — the road I'm on is: where do we start and stop with the pushing? Not really pushing, but where's the end result, when we talk to the kids and some of them say, "Oh, that's just stupid, that's just wrong, we know that's wrong," and others say, "Well, we're trying to be compassionate, we're trying to be nice to them, we don't want to push them away." Where do we go with that? Because they get it from the schools — high school, junior high, elementary — they get it from some of their Sunday schools, believe it or not, in their teachings, and of course they get it from sleepovers and after-school activities, and these kids are getting really confused about which direction to go. As parents and grandparents, how far do we push the issue, where do we let it go, how do we control their environment?

Yeah, I think you just gave insight into the challenge we're in — how do we control it? Depending on your assessment of what level of things being out of your control you're comfortable with, that will dictate your direction moving forward. For example, the realities of public school, and what is normalized and mainstreamed — regardless of rural or inner-city — you will have to decide what you'll do with your children, whether you'll send them to public school, where it is almost guaranteed by state mandate that they'll be taught a sex-ed curriculum embracing transgenderism. So if you want that within your control, you have that option — parochial schools, Lutheran schools. If you're concerned about one of our Lutheran schools embracing transgenderism, I don't know that any of ours would actually do that — I'd have a concern if it were one of ours. But again, it's in your control. Homeschool — as one who homeschools, it's definitely hard, but there's a significant homeschool network. That's one example of how you navigate that.

Those choices are hard, but when it comes to matters of control, there will come a point in time — I use the example before, of crossing the street. There will come a time — we're actually dealing with this with my six-year-old right now. The rule, for a little while longer, until she turns seven, is that she has to hold her sister's hand when they're crossing the street going to a friend's house. Her mother and I are cautious, but there is a time when she has to learn to do it on her own — look both ways, check again, and move forward. There's risk when we let go and put things out of our control.

But something else that is in your control: you can lament, you can pray, and you can intercede for your grandchildren and children before our Lord's gracious throne of grace, and continue to do so daily. I'd also encourage you to look at what happened with a local school board — I think it was in Rockland, California, about three years ago. They began to adopt a vigorous, offensive sex education program for their children. Parents showed up en masse at the school board meeting, wanted to know why, expected explanations, and wanted prohibitions. The school board sadly shook their heads and said they were unable to do anything about it, and the parents took every child out — they lost about six hundred children from their school system, and then the board decided it might merit a conversation. So sometimes one voice speaking in the wilderness is important and essential, but sometimes we need to speak together as one voice and show up and say, "This is not all right among us." Grandparents still have a lot of power, even when it sounds like your voice isn't being heard. Your labor in the Lord is not in vain — we stay faithful, we confess, and we ask the Lord to bless it.

Okay — anybody else? I have a question for Dr. Woodford. After talking about catechizing kids and helping to, in some ways, preempt what otherwise might happen naturally — we know so many kids have been exposed to things we'd prefer they hadn't seen or heard. How do we re-catechize children? How are we, in large part, able to move children who have false facts burned onto their hard disk into your school, your church, your environment? Is that something done purely by faith and conversation, or does it invite conversation with others who can help?

Oh, I think yes, to both. It's forming and informing them — wrapping the child into the life of Christ, certainly baptismally, but also the liturgical life of the church, and the truths taught within it — but also being intentional with the partnership between teachers, parents, and pastors, depending on the age of the child and what it is they've actually embraced or thought, and using certain pedagogies along the way to catechize and help them understand the fullness and beauty of God's counsel. I had a particular verse in mind — Psalm 119:37: "Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things, and give me life in your ways." Whatever's noble, whatever's right, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable — think on these things. It's helping that child think on those things — not just intellectually informing them, but forming them in the life of faith, with parents, teachers, and pastors wrapped into the mix.

Another question, please. Just looking for some words of guidance, if you can give that to us. My wife and I have a son who is gay. He came out to us when he was twenty-two, which was eighteen years ago, and I asked him, "Why didn't you come out to us sooner?" He said, "Well, Dad, you taught me — I'm a pastor, you taught me in confirmation it's wrong. How could I come out to you?" And for eighteen years, in order for us to have a relationship with him, we cannot speak what the Word of God says. I know the Spirit works through the Word, obviously — I've seen it work through the Word — but our son does not want us to speak about what the Word says. He was married once; it lasted a year and a half. He got married again this past year, and we just gently reminded him and his partner that according to the Word of God, marriage is meant for a man and a woman, and he was not happy with us — stopped speaking to us. We continue to pray, we look for guidance, wondering how to redevelop a relationship with him. I know there's no golden answer for that, but any guidance is appreciated.

Yeah, thank you for sharing — that's so heart-wrenching for parents to go through. It's very brave, and I commend you for sharing that, because you're not alone — others have gone through it too. Certainly, may God bless you and sustain you as you grieve in the midst of that, but also give you words to say and actions to take in caring for them, while standing on truth as you have done — I know that's not easy, but thank you for doing that, and thank you for still loving your son in the midst of it. It is heart-wrenching. Thank you so much for sharing with us — we commend you, and him, and his partner, to the Lord, and to the truth of the Lord's Word.

May I ask for a quick show of hands — of people in this church right now who have a family member, a friend, or a close acquaintance struggling with, or who has struggled with, some sort of LGBTQ issue? Let's see — you are not alone. So you have a crowd of earthly witnesses all around you, and you've done the extraordinary thing of sustaining a relationship in love for decades — you are much like the prodigal's father. You haven't run chasing after your son, but you have wept, and you have prayed, and you await the working of the Lord's will.

I think maybe one more question — the one in the back corner. Went up and down? No, it's down. Okay. Any other questions?

Pastor Fleming, do you have some remarks you'd care to share at the close?

Well, I'm going to preach in a moment, so — but I guess I'd add, I feel it with you, as we all do. There's a shame when we observe sin and rebellion, particularly by people close to us, our own family members. One of the things we teach in Doxology's classes, thanks to Dr. Kleinig and Dr. Yankee, is this beautiful concept that our Lord not only forgives our sin, but also cleanses us from shame. It's right there in the liturgy: "If we confess our sins, God, who is faithful and just, will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." And "unrighteousness," Dr. Kleinig argues, is the word for sins done against us. So we're not only forgiven for the wrong we've done — and who hasn't done wrong — but we're also cleansed from the shame of the sins others commit around us. I do think this is why our Lord had to die naked in front of his mother — that he is bearing the shame for us all, of when others sin against us and around us, and it hurts us. That's all on him too — he bears it with us, to be our Lord in the midst of that, as you continue to pray and care for those who sin against you.

And thank you to Dr. Woodford for his roundtable participation and answers. Thank you.