Refreshing Honesty from "Desiring God" on Men Acting Effeminate

I want to keep up my series on Relationship, having finished part one, and I will, but when I saw this article and then read it, I knew I had to write this instead.  I will be coming back to finish the Relationship series, Lord-willing, however.  I don't know how many parts it will be, but it could be many.

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Apostasy is a real and ongoing threat to Christianity.  It has never stopped since sin entered the Garden of Eden.  When true believers dwindled to eight out of about eight billion before the Genesis flood, that process took over a thousand years.  Churches don't jump straight to apostasy either.  However, it can happen quickly.  When Jesus wrote to the church at Laodicia in Revelation 3, it had run its entire course in the space of about 40 years, start to finish.

What often occurs did in Corinth with church members' denial of the bodily resurrection.  Corinthian culture declared all flesh evil and bodily resurrection didn't conform.  Due to pressure of various sorts, the church at Corinth straddled mythology with the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Churches see their own beliefs and practices as a threat to their existence.  The world opposes and they negotiate a truce by conceding some of what they believe, convinced that it isn't important enough to preserve.  They relegate biblical teaching that clashes with the world to a secondary matter.

How is apostasy stopped?  Someone like Paul mediates, as he did in 1 Corinthians 15, confronting the problem.  He also revealed the cause of deceit, which were relationships that exposed them to wrong thinking (cf. 1 Cor 15:33).  Likewise, in the six earlier letters to the other churches in Revelation 2-3, Jesus admonished and warned them to repent or face negative consequences.

In the slide toward apostasy, the beliefs and practices that clash most with the world depart first, which of necessity requires a dismissal of biblical authority.  God is One.  His truth is one.  The surrender of any part at least anticipates a total abandonment.  A path of deviation reaches a tipping point, one that seems like a place of no return, where Christianity might not be Christianity anymore.

On February 5, Greg Morse published an article for Desiring God, the organization of leading evangelical John Piper, entitled, "Play the Man You Are:  Will Effeminacy Keep Anyone from Heaven?"  If someone believes the Bible, knows 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, and so cares about the eternal soul of a professing Christian man who exhibits effeminate traits or characteristics, he can't let this one go.  What Morse has written, represented by the following tweet on the Desiring God twitter address, follows very close to scripture on a cultural issue.

If we are faithful to the word of God, we will call men away from the sin of brutality. We will also call them away from the sin of effeminacy. https://t.co/F7h33PBRuv

— Desiring God (@desiringGod) February 5, 2019

Men should rejoice in what he's done, his explanation and application of scripture.  I want more of this in evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

What Morse wrote, I don't know of any fundamentalists right now who would write it.  I haven't read it anywhere, except here on my blog in a two part series December of 2017 (part one, part two).  Please reread those two posts and compare them with what Morse writes. Very few joined in my concern.  Churches are full of effeminate men and they are doing next to nothing about it.  Leaders are afraid, which will result in more and more effeminate men in churches.

A majority of the comments in the twitter feed under the Morse article are horrific, and he receives little defense.  This opposition is now normal, even for professing Christians.  I get it myself, calling it hateful, hate speech, unloving, and unchristian.  It is one of the reason these articles are not being written.  It is why churches tolerate the behavior.  Churches and their leaders are afraid.  But how could it be hateful to caution someone towards avoiding eternal punishment?  The possible offense is not worse than the terrifying outcome.

I want to comment on what Morse has written.  I agree with almost all of it.  I write to commend it, but also to explain why.  I don't fellowship with John Piper.  Commending the article isn't fellowship. Love rejoices in the truth.  He tells the truth.  I want to draw your attention to it.  I'll go straight to his first section.

What's At Stake?

Morse writes:

We need not concern ourselves with separating one’s “gender expression” from his biological sex. We need not tell men they must dress a certain way and not another (Deuteronomy 22:5) or call them to “act like men” (1 Corinthians 16:13) — no such thing exists. I believe this all to be gravely mistaken. 

As unclear as the distinctions may feel in any given culture, the word of God is surprisingly plain: those who gladly, consistently indulge in effeminacy as a lifestyle are in eternal danger (1 Corinthians 6:9, as we’ll see below). Love will dive headlong into all the sinful aspects of manhood to kill whatever sin Satan has tucked under the veils of cultural acceptance.

In the first paragraph, Morse is doing what Paul calls, speaking as a fool, that is, representing how the other side, the foolish side, thinks or expresses itself.  He justifies his article, that church leaders should be concerning themselves with gender expression, even as Deuteronomy 22:5 teaches distinguishes male dress from female, to which he will refer later in the post.  If Paul calls on men to act like men, then there must be a way that men act.  Moses concerned himself and Paul concerned himself, so Morse does too.

Then, just because the culture makes distinctions unclear (and I would add evangelicalism and fundamentalism) doesn't mean they're not.  As Morse says, 1 Corinthians 6:9 says the distinctions are clear enough -- they would have to be -- that an effeminate man would not inherit the kingdom of God.  Because of the culture and then concerns of church growth, the attraction of attendees and continued popularity in the world, churches and their leaders would prefer risking someone's eternal soul than causing waves.

How Satan Covers Sins

Morse writes:

Satan tries to obscure sins by rendering them nearly impossible to define. He smuggles effeminacy into the church by forbidding any specific definition. In the ancient world, effeminacy entailed a moral frailty (acting cowardly or “womanish” in battle), inordinate love for luxury (rendering men delicate and tender), and the sexual deviancy of acting like a woman in one’s demeanor, speech, and gesture. The Bible addresses each, describing men who “become women” on the battlefield (Jeremiah 50:37; Nahum 3:13), go “soft” due to luxury (Matthew 11:7–8), and become sexually deviant (1 Corinthians 6:9). The term effeminacy is not an attack on femininity itself — which is a woman’s glory — but rather on femininity when attached to a male.

What Morse decries here, Satan covering sins, is a norm for evangelicalism, including Desiring God.  It's good he's talking about it, but he's pointing out something that I would hope he notices is right where he lives.  Obeying scripture always requires a second term.  Scripture doesn't define these terms.  The second term comes in a logical syllogism like the following:

Major Premise:  The effeminate man shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
Minor Premise:  The effeminate man is a man who acts womanish.
Conclusion:  Therefore, a man who acts womanish shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

It assumes we can know, what I have called, "truth in the real world."  If someone can't do this with scripture, then most of scripture means nothing.  This is an attack on the meaning of scripture, an attack on the application of scripture, and an attack on the truth itself.  In everyone of those, it is an attack on the Word of God, and, therefore, an attack on God.  It is common in evangelicalism as another attack on the grace of God, a cheap grace that is used as an occasion of the flesh.

In the next paragraph, Morse gives effeminate traits of men and describes a way that people will condone those traits -- excusing each individual trait as not being enough to make a man effeminate.  It is essentially defending effeminate traits or explaining them away.  By doing so, Morse rightly observes, no one can even judge whether a man is effeminate or not, which just can't be the case.

I can't rewrite what Morse wrote.  Just read it.  He provides these as effeminate traits in our culture and being effeminate is cultural.  Cultures are required to create those differences. Godly cultures will.  Effeminate characteristics he gives are (each of these picked out of his words):

acting cowardly or “womanish” in battle 

inordinate love for luxury 

acting like a woman in one’s demeanor, speech, and gesture 

lispy sentences, light gestures, soft mannerisms, and flamboyant jokes 

American culture associates pink with women, as it does dresses 

to walk down the street holding hands with another man 

a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him 

peak flamboyantly, gesture lightly, or wear lipstick

The Gay Vibe

 Morse writes:

On a recent family vacation to Orlando, I witnessed men blatantly, boldly, proudly play the woman in public. What did I observe? They did not commit any sexual acts before me. What I observed was not homosexuality but effeminacy. They were effeminate, sending out what Doug Wilson calls “the gay vibe.” They were living out of step with their nature, and out of step with our cultural expressions of maleness, and denying in their behavior their God-assigned manhood.

A part of the problem here, as I've witnessed it, is that Christians make playing the woman no issue today, as if it can't really be done anymore, when men know it is done.  We should not be giving this behavior a pass -- those who exhibit effeminate qualities.

Sex Governs ‘Gender Expression’

In the midst of this section, Morse comes back to Deuteronomy 22:5, something we just don't hear today from either evangelicals or fundamentalists, but it is true:

From the beginning, God clearly wed sex and sex-expression. Under Moses, Deuteronomy 22:5 expresses a timeless prohibition that stood true long before the old covenant and long after the coming of the new covenant: “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.” God means, in the strongest terms, for men to dress as men, and represent themselves as men, because he desires no observable confusion between the sex he gave and our expression of it.

For women to put on a male garment there has to be one designated and for men to put on a female garment, there must be one.  Earlier, Morse said men don't wear dresses.  It is true.  Of course, all readers here know that women don't wear pants either.

I like the way Morse ends it with his section on honoring God's design.  He gets the brunt of the issue.  Believers want to honor God.  Those rebellious against God, we see in Romans 1 are rebellious against God's design.  This is also how this subject relates to salvation.  Someone is not worshiping the Creator, is not thankful, when he does not want to fit with, conform to, glorify God's design.