God, Creation, and Gender

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. It feels a little bit like we’re all playing whack-a-mole right now, what with all the attacks on marginalized groups along with the promotion of hateful and harmful rhetoric. In this week’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, I’d like to take a hot moment to stand with my trans siblings and break the myth of the gender binary nature of God’s creation. One of the first things many Christians do when you get into conversations of gender and sexuality is they go back to the start of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, to insist that the structure of male and female in marriage was part of the way God ordained creation itself to exist. There are so many errors to unpack here. Let’s get started. First, what you have in Genesis one is what’s known as a series of merisms. This is a rhetorical device where you use two contrasting parts to refer to the whole. So, for example, instead of saying you searched everywhere for something, you might say you searched “high and low.” If you said you searched “high and low” no one would think you didn’t search in the middle or assume only high and low existed. It’s a figure of speech. So, God in Genesis one, we hear about water and land, light and darkness, morning and evening, sea creatures and wingèd birds in the sky, and so on and so forth. So, when it comes to the creation of humanity, we read that “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” But that doesn’t mean that only male and female exist within humanity any more than Genesis one might mean that there is only light and darkness and nothing in between. The brilliant poet David Gate articulated this beautifully in a poem he wrote after the tragic death of Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old non-binary student who died by suicide after a year of bullying at school. The poem goes like this: If God created he night & the day & the dawn, of course & the dusk & the tangerine rosepink sunset & in the infant bright of morning & the deep amethyst of twilight Then to perceive the world in binary is to forego knowledge of the divine I couldn’t say it better myself. And, if both male and female were created from God and in God’s image, then we are reminded, of course, that God is neither male nor female. God is a non-binary entity, the divine source of all who holds all genders within God’s being. God is the original they/them. And when God created humanity, God made male and female and everything in between, God made people cisgender and transgender, nonbinary and genderfluid, agender and genderqueeer and intersex and bigender… God made all of these realities and expressions of gender, and just like when you look at the rich variety of daylight blending into evening, God looked at all those genders that came out of God’s own image… and God said they were very good. God said you were very good. And never let anyone tell you otherwise. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.