What Christianity teaches us about the transgender wars

It’s Christmas – again. For old timers like me, the familiarity of this time of year can blunt the strangeness of what we celebrate: the birth of Christ. The basic moral Christian precepts that Jesus embodied are also easy to take for granted. Do as you would be done by, love your neighbour, think of the poor; we accept these Christian attitudes, mistake them for innate human qualities, and rarely stop to think about them. The concepts go unexamined, embedded in our culture after centuries, though now minus any superhuman authority. 

What we’ve forgotten is that these are peculiar, counterintuitive ideas that literally set the world on fire. They established themselves so deeply that they’ve survived the religion that instituted them. The ghost of Christianity Past haunts us, unseen, everywhere.

Take: ‘To err is human, to forgive divine’. Those words are from an eighteenth-century poem by Alexander Pope, not the Bible. We’ve all heard that phrase so many times without hearing it that it can be hard to remember where it came from.