or how Catholics use natural law to avoid doing theology.
Pope on Gender: “Stop oppressing my oppressive ideology!”
I get that it must be confusing. You grew up looking at the world and thinking there are only two options. And really, they seem like the only real ones anyway.
Man or Woman. Coke or Pepsi. Shirts or Skins. I mean, the world really just seems like all of its great ideas come only pairs.
It’s not like we’d even accommodate for divergence from that. I mean seriously. How decadent do we need to be? It’s like, I know you’re left handed, but just get used to using scissors like a righty. Who would pay for lefty scissors? Ha! The point is to deal and pretend like your difference is unnatural. Biodiversity be damned.
I really do get it.
And I was kinda there, before seminary. No, I didn’t call gender theory “ideological colonization” like the pope does (without the hint of irony). And no, I don’t mean that anti-trans ship of fools. But I was in that same boat about trying to find an absolute truth through historical conviction.
OK, not the same boat, but like, I was in a sea-going vessel is what I’m saying.
I didn’t believe in the modernist delusion of a knowable absolute truth. But, you know, the kind of boat we jump into when we think theology is something decided long ago by dead Italians or Germans. Everything is figured out by now, right? All Aboard the S.S. Certainty!
But theology isn’t history; it’s a practice. It’s a way of looking at the world for all those places God is at work. As in the present tense. God is actively doing stuff.
Theology isn’t about being right. It’s about making sense of things.
The idea that we figured it out years ago is beyond ridiculous.
But what happens if we’ve all boarded that ship and the captain already has us out to sea? The smart play would be to turn around or chart a new course. But not on the Certainty!
There’s no way the Vatican’s theological appeal would be to the present. Not when too much valuable time has been invested in long-dead Europeans and their philosophy about God. Because the boat is built on the illusion of theological constancy. That we’ve always believed the same things.
It’s totally false, of course, but there’s such conviction behind it. I mean, minorities aren’t going to persecute themselves.
Let’s Welcome Natural Law to the Party Boat! They need a drink!
And the favorite source for all things gender-defining and patriarchy-defending is natural law.
Natural law is simply the idea that certain rights come to us through our human nature. But how that works and what it means is always a lively debate.
Usually natural law gets dragged into the conversation as a way to show how God has already oriented the world into a beautiful binary. In part because scripture and tradition can’t get the job done without it.
So, the thinking goes, we are a certain way (complementary) because God made us that certain way (complementary). So then we can circle our way back to say that God did that on purpose. There is no such thing as gender, then. Just two options. Two bathrooms. You get a stickman with pants and a stickwoman in a dress. All the other junk is made up.
With this view Sex = gender. Men must be both male and masculine. And wear pants and drink beer. Women must be female and feminine. Because biology, genetics, and stuff.
I’ve got to admit, this view is really tempting. It’s also incredibly stupid. But it’s tempting.
Circular Logic isn’t logical.
The problem with the appeal is it folds instantly when science is introduced—when the actual nature part in the natural law shows up.
The two buckets hypothesis of the gender binary can’t deal with genetics which reveals the total inadequacy of such a simplistic worldview. Because it explodes the buckets themselves.
This is why the document released by the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education stresses that intersex is a construct (it literally put it in quotes!). It can’t deal with nature actually going against Roman Catholic teaching. Because the whole thing is based on it.
If you have people who can’t fit in one bucket or who naturally arrive in the world fitting in both, then the entire binary is compromised.
You can assign a gender at birth (as was often done) and pretend that solves the problem. But the very presence of intersex disproves the theological foundation of the binary itself!
And rather than steer the ship in a new direction, they choose to stay the course.
So teachers have to pretend that the science is fiction because the teaching must inform natural law, not the other way around.
How Creation Reveals God
Beyond natural law, the central theological conviction regarding humanity comes from the book of Genesis. Actually, a particular reading of Genesis.
If we read the idea that humanity is created in the likeness of God and we look at creation through Greek lenses, we’ll see binary everywhere. Men and women, white and black, light and dark. And then we’ll find it really easy to like the formers and blame the latters. The point is order, nature, humanity: we represent the binary God of logic.
This would be a natural way of seeing the world for the early church in Rome. And this way of seeing things is what we call a hermeneutic.
But that isn’t the only way to see what God is doing in creation.
When we learn that we are created in the likeness of God, we don’t need to impose a gender binary or complementary dualism back onto God. We don’t have to say God must be like us.
We don’t have to impose such a restrictive and self-justifying frame upon creation.
A different hermeneutic, or way of seeing things, would be to say that we are all “like” God. We all reflect the likeness of God through our diversity. No circular logic is actually needed! No justifying the buckets we sort each other into. We simply represent a diverse God of love.
What counts as natural dramatically changes when we observe nature and reflect upon it rather than impose a binary to it.
The Pope is Wrong
The Vatican’s teaching on gender identity is wrong. It’s wrong on the science and as a matter of compassion. But it’s also wrong on the theology.
It’s not wrong because there is a binary (right vs. wrong theology) but because it rejects the moral consistency in other theological claims. It isn’t just wrong because it calls my hermeneutic invalid, but because it believes its own hermeneutic is the only one.
In 2016, Pope Francis referred to gender theory as “wicked” and a force of oppression. From the seat of power…and its history of oppression…to an oppressed people…saying stop oppressing my oppressive ideology!
His argument isn’t that there are many theologies and that he doesn’t like a particular one. He’s saying there really is only one theology and that gender theory is incompatible with it.
But a theology which includes diversity in gender identity is traditional and catholic in all historic senses of the words.
Better Theology
It would be easy enough to dismiss the teaching as backward or manipulative. We could focus on the brass tax and pretend that the Pope’s gonna pope and we need to live with that.
I will stand alongside my siblings in calling out the meanness and the scientifically dubious teachings. And I will show my solidarity with those LGBTQ and nonbinary persons looking for a little respect in the world. So I don’t want to belittle the lived experience of others.
But this teaching isn’t just wrong for all of those reasons. It is wrong for its really weak theology, its tenuous appeal to bad tradition, and its ecclesiastical hubris. If this were calculus, then they didn’t just get the problem wrong because they got the answer wrong. All the work that got them that answer was wrong, too.
If we’re to take the document’s subtitle seriously, then I expect more from them:
TOWARDS A PATH OF DIALOGUE ON THE QUESTION OF GENDER THEORY IN EDUCATION
I expect movement, inclusion, and compromise. Not only on matters of gender but on theology. They need to recognize other theologies aren’t mutations, but revelations of God.
We don’t just need a more inclusive universal church. We need one that does its theology well, and generously, too.