The John Money Cult
So you think you’re a woman?
Imagine two adults. They are having an argument. The argument is about whether or not one of them is a woman. Adult #1 says, “I am a woman.” Adult #2 says, “no, you’re not.” By what authority is this dispute settled? One answer is biology, chromosomes, and sex organs. But for those in what I am calling the John Money cult, this is not a satisfactory answer. They believe they are being authentic and true to themselves by determining their “gender” based on their sexual desires and how they feel. This is the viewpoint adopted by the vast majority of intellectuals today. So what is a satisfactory answer? What will finally settle this madness that has affected the crowd of “academics” in our day? There is no doubt this is an embarrassing time in which to have lived when future generations are told our intellectuals didn’t know what it is to be a woman. “Don’t kindergarteners know how to figure that out?” they’ll ask.
John Money the Cult Leader
For those who have studied the LGBTQ+ sexual philosophy, John Money is a well known pervert, or rather, a well-known name. Although raised in a Christian home, he set out to make his life’s work overthrowing Christian sexual morality. He was a researcher at Johns Hopkins University working in the field of human sexual behavior. Like Alfred Kinsey, his research was plagued with falsification, gross ethical violations, and more than the usual nonsense for a secular intellectual. He is perhaps best known for having destroyed the Reimer family with no consequences from his peers. He went before the Lord for judgment in 2006.
What is important about him for our question is that he made it so that kindergarteners can no longer answer, “who is a boy and who is a girl?” How? By inventing the terms “sexual orientation,” “sexual preference,” and “gender roles.” These are now terms around which entire university departments are built. At my university (Arizona State), and in my school, we have a “gender studies” program that promises to help the student do the following, “Gender, women and sexuality studies is an interdisciplinary field that involves analyzing societal issues through the lens of feminist theory. Through coursework and scholarly research, you’ll gain critical knowledge and a deep understanding of feminist theory and practice. You’ll also have the opportunity to challenge conventional wisdom about gender and explore many new perspectives.” All of that for only 15K a year. What will the student do with that degree? The first job recommendation is “advocate.”
The Gender Cult
What are these “new perspectives?” Money, like Kinsey, taught that human sexual development begins identity formation in each person from the time of birth. Both did unethical sexual research on children and neither faced discipline, in fact, they are praised as heroes. Their new project is that there is this thing called “gender.” Here is where the kindergartner’s expertise is called into question. The kindergartener knows how to determine sex. It is biological. But does the kindergartener know how to identify gender?
No. But here’s the secret. Nor does anybody else. This is why Jordan Peterson told Matt Walsh, in “What is a Woman?” that gender is a completely unhelpful term in research. It cannot be measured and it is imprecise. Instead, Peterson recommends “temperament” which can be measured. A woman can have a temperament like some men, and a man can have a temperament like some women. The biological facts aren’t in question, and the word “gender” is useless. The solution to a man with a temperament like some women is not to cut him up, it is to help him understand how to use that temperament in pursuit of the highest good.
The Cult’s Failed Solution
The failed solution of “gender” remains with us because it has the features of a cult. What is different about this cult is that it is State funded and taught in all secular and many Christian universities. The United States has had its share of cults. This is the first time that they are given unquestionable status in the university and almost limitless resources. In other essays, I have written about the Marxist cult and its hold on the intellectuals of our days. This gender cult is a close second. They go hand-in-hand so that future scholars will undoubtedly link them.
But why? They share a common problem and common parameters of acceptable answers. The problem is the unfairness of life and the unhappiness this causes. The acceptable parameters are that any solutions must affirm the basic goodness of the individual. The explanation is that the good individual only becomes corrupt due to human society. For the Marxist, this starts with the invention of private property. For the gender cultist, this begins with rules about different roles in life. These rules cause the suppression of the individual’s desires. Suppression leads to inhibition and potentially to neurosis and psychosis.
The solution to the dangers of suppression is to just stop it. Be yourself. Be brave, have pride, and tell the rule-makers of your society to go pound sand. This message resonates with a culture that is already enamored with the individual and the search for happiness. Recently, Carl Trueman wrote about this, however, he was repeating the insights of Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind.” Bloom traced the conflict between the Lockean and the Rousseauean streams of thought in America. The Rousseau branch teaches that the individual is good and corruption is due to society.
We know this has had many implications in American thought and life. For instance, criminals are no longer immoral but are forced into crime by need and environmental factors. Our pop culture praises the villain (pirate, vampire, adulterer, thief) and portrays pastors as setting out to ruin everyone’s fun (Footloose). Enter the drag queens reading to children at the public library. Why do you care if a man wants to dress in drag and read to children? Let him live his dream.
Why Do We Care?
One reason to care is that psychology tells us a healthy mind is one that is integrated with reality. If our friend tells us he is surgically removing four inches from his shins because he is the Emperor Napoleon, it is our duty as friends to help him reintegrate back into reality. He isn’t Napoleon. Loving your friend means telling him he isn’t Napoleon and should never carve up his body to try and look like Napoleon. So why do we play this game with gender? Why is thinking you are something enough to make everyone else be forced to agree you are?
There have been many useful answers. An overemphasis on individual happiness. A short-sighted consumerism culture that values immediate gratification. An over-sexed society that is always looking for new ways to be perverse. However, I’m a philosopher and a pastor so I will give a different answer.
The Answer Eludes Us
Why can’t these two persons settle the matter about if adult #1 is a woman? They don’t have common ground. They no longer have a common authority to which they can appeal. On the one hand, adult #1 might say that personal experience is her (?) authority. On the other, adult #2 might say some objective standard like science or the Bible is his authority.
Is that really all there is to it? Is it merely a matter of the subjective vs the objective? I think that only answer gets us so far. We still must answer, “why would adult #1 be persuaded by a subjective proof that is so problematic?”
The answer reveals a deep problem at the heart of the United States. In my last essay, “The Seven Visions of the United States,” I explained different ways that people conceptualize the American project. What remains a central problem is that although we see the need for God as the foundation of law and rights (Declaration of Independence) we don’t hold people accountable for the quality of their thought about God. We don’t hold people accountable for using Reason to know what is clear about God (Rom 1:18-21).
This is true for the atheist but can also be true for the Christian. Our universities are stuffed full of atheists who build their lives on an incoherent philosophical materialism. We don’t seem to care. We send our children to them. However, we also don’t do much about fideism among Christians. When a Christian says they believe based on blind faith, or they offer an unsound argument to support Christian belief, we’re just happy they are a professing Christian. When a Scripturalist tells us all knowledge is only from the Bible, we say, “at least he believes in the Bible.” Yet, there are consequences.
It Was Bound To Happen
I propose that it was only a matter of time. That is, it was only a matter of time until our neglect of the knowledge of God filtered down to what is one of the most obvious truths about humans. Sinful neglect of knowing God also means you will have sinful neglect of knowing yourself. The problem isn’t that there is too much individualism. Pure individualism can still result in people seeking God because God is the source of their highest good. Nor is the problem merely that people want to be happy because a consequence of knowing God is happiness and joy.
The gender cult is simply an expression of the failure to know God and to know oneself. This is why Paul begins where he does in Romans 1. God is revealed to us in the creation. We can and should know the eternal power and divine nature of God revealed to us in all of his works. And knowing this will be the source of our greatest joy. There can be nothing better than knowing the highest being.
This is what the sexual pervert is seeking. He (why assume a “he”?) believes that the feeling of sexual pleasure is the highest reality. This belief is inexcusable. But he lives in a society that hasn’t expected people to reason any better. Most people around him also seek pleasure and believe this connects them to the highest reality. You can even find well-known Christians advocating for a hedonistic lifestyle–find your happiness in enjoying God’s creation rather than find your happiness in knowing God who is revealed in his creation.
The result is that we don’t know anything. Even the simplest pieces of knowledge, what we thought every kindergartener knew, have been taken from us. As a society we are humbled low, to ignorance barely above the animal. We are in a new dark age without any idea of how to get out or why it even matters. How the mighty have fallen. Pride goes before the fall.
Solution
So what is the solution? Paul tells us. It is as if Romans 1 is about us. Americans should know God, and we did, but we have exchanged our knowledge of God for a lie. Now our society uses that lie to suppress the truth about God. This means they teach the lie and censor the truth. Now wait, I thought the gender cult tells us suppression is wrong and leads to neurosis and even psychosis? Yes, and the experts tell us that mental health problems have never been worse. We are no longer integrated into reality, and instead we live in our own vain imaginations and suffer depression and anxiety.
The solution is repentance and works in keeping with that repentance. This means we recognize that we are not naturally good, but instead our hearts are desperately wicked. Like George Costanza, we would be better off doing the opposite of what we naturally want. We don’t deserve to live in a good world; we are getting exactly what we deserve. I believe most Christians are on board with Paul at this point. What is next?
We need good work keeping with repentance. If the problem began when we neglected clear general revelation of the eternal power and divine nature, we must repent of that failure and begin seeking God in his works. Americans, of all nations, should be able to show that God is our Creator and has given us a moral law that directs us to our chief end. Perhaps no country has ever had so many Bibles. We of all people should be able to show our need for redemption through Christ. That is what the sound use of Reason asks of each of us. When we abandon Reason, or to use Schaeffer’s phrase, try to escape from Reason, we fall into madness.
Even So. . .
This might sound like I am simply saying we can think our way to a solution. The sound use of Reason (Warfield’s Right Reason) is necessary but not sufficient. We haven’t seen Americans repent and turn to seeing what is clear from general revelation about God and his law. We need to see this. But there is more. Any Reformed Pastor knows about the need for regeneration. We don’t want to know God. We are born alienated from God. We can’t think our way back because we won’t think our way back.
This is a sin problem. And men love the darkness because their deeds are evil (Jn 3:19). Not only that, they love to encourage others into that darkness. Let the light so shine that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven (Matt 5:16). Let’s make the witness of clear general revelation shine so bright that they must close their eyes and gnash their teeth to avoid it. Any attempt to live out a fantasy as if it were reality is without excuse. Any attempt to deny God’s role as the one who created male and female and the one who “assigns gender” is doomed to a darkened mind.
Acknowledging that level of hatred for the light only makes the case for redemption through Christ all the more clear. You clearly rejected what is clear about God, you have no excuse, and you cannot save yourself. There is only one person in the history of the world who says he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world to reconcile you to God. And there is only one book that records this. It is a clear solution.
The Finale
Returning to our two disputants: by what authority will they settle their disagreement? The answer lies in clarity and inexcusability. This is not merely a matter of determining truth or agreeing on biology. It is a matter of spiritual death. Adult #1 is replacing God with his own vain imagination. The consequences will be extreme, not only for him but for all those connected to him in society.
A society that encourages and celebrates those who replace God with their own vain imaginations is one that is not integrated with reality. A society that funds universities to teach “gender studies” so students can become “advocates” is one that is already far gone into a dark age of the mind. We do not need to go along for the ride. If Adult #1 wants to know himself, he can do so by knowing his Creator. We must call his bluff: he isn’t being authentic, and he doesn’t know himself.
The truth of God always shines. This is the case whether our society wakes up from this nightmare, repents, and learns to know God as He is clearly revealed, or whether it continues down this path. The wages of sin is death—“the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” This outcome cannot be avoided.
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