Is it appropriate for a pastor/priest to give in to the pronoun culture?

Raika

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Unfortunately, I had to unfollow a pastor on youtube for giving into the pronoun culture. Before preaching he announced his pronouns... which I found to be odd considering his position... What was the pastor trying to tell me when he told me his pronouns in his video? What kind of message was he trying to tell me when I simply clicked on his video to learn more about Jesus?
 

PloverWing

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When people announce their pronouns, they are communicating that transgender and gender-nonconforming people are welcome to be "out" in their presence, that it's safe for a transgender person to openly identify as transgender and still be welcome in this meeting or church or classroom.

If the pastor thinks of this as "giving into the pronoun culture", then, no, he should not do this. He should live by his conscience and his convictions. If he is not affirming of transgender people, then he should not pretend to be. That helps no one.

On the other hand, some pastors genuinely believe, based on the principles of their faith, that their churches should be safe and welcoming spaces for people who identify as transgender. These pastors should also live by their conscience and their convictions. This pastor may well be in this latter group. If so, it is appropriate for him to offer a message of welcome to transgender and gender-nonconforming parishioners and visitors.
 
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dzheremi

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Rather than talking about it in terms of 'pronoun culture', which makes any discussion susceptible to being bounded by the poles of the left/right political 'culture wars' that unfortunately characterize so much of modern Christianity in western countries, I would recommend that all Christians who feel themselves able to do so stick to discussing these things in terms of traditional Christian anthropology and theology.

In the reality, we've been here before in the very early days of Christianity, albeit in a different guise. We can know what to do by looking at how the early Church herself responded to the Gnostics, as the current situation with regard to transgender topics reveals a very gnostic understanding of humanity -- namely, that there is some intrinsic 'other' you that is necessarily divorced from your fleshly body (this is what separates it from traditional Christianity as found in the Fathers, where it is certainly permissible to talk about the soul and the body, but it is never in such a way that treats the body as something to be abhorred on account of its physicality). It was as far back as at least the early Latin Christian writer Tertullian (I think in his work The Crown, though I cannot remember exactly at the moment, as I try to avail myself of his work as rarely as possible, given his eventual embrace of Montanism) that it has been observed that the Gnostics within a given congregation would always make themselves known by abstaining from partaking in the Eucharist, as their theologies balked at participation with physical matter in worship.

Extending this worldview to today, we do not have to look far to see how some people involved in the current societal fashions of thought regarding transgender issues definitely abhor physical matter. The surgeries and puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and so on do so for us. So the question of how a pastor or priest or any Christian should respond to this is already settled, as it has been since the beginning. Remember that the great and controversial theologian Origen was condemned for supposedly mutilating his body by self-castration. Nothing was said in the process about 'his pronouns' (I personally think this type of semantic discussion obscures the deeper theological and anthropological issues at play, but if I were to say anything about it, I'd say it as a linguist rather than as a churchman: find me any time before very recently when people had pronouns they possessed as some things that were 'theirs' in an idiosyncratic sense, as that phrase is meant today, and I'll buy a hat just to eat it). It was what he actually did that led to his condemnation. (At least within the western/Greco-Roman imperial/Chalcedonian Church; the Alexandrian Church had actually already condemned him during his lifetime for procuring ordination while teaching in Palestine without the approval of his own Alexandrian bishop, which was in violation of the ancient canons regarding ordination. Just FYI.)
 
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seeking.IAM

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I only find the timing of stating pronouns prior to a sermon a wee bit odd, not that one would choose to state his/her pronouns. It seems an odd time/place to do that to me.

But, then I also find it odd that one would elevate having named pronouns as sufficient cause to unfollow a pastor they otherwise must have found value in if they were following them in the first place.
 
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