“The other extreme, though, is the capitulator,” he explained, meaning Christians who “never bring a Christian worldview into the conversation. They never seem to critique any trend that’s going on culturally.”
Instead of being a culture warrior or capitulator, Yarhouse said, “I’m in favor of ambassadorship. So now we’re getting into the nitty gritty of, how do you hold those convictions?”
While it was impossible for Yarhouse to address many situations that pastors will face when it comes to gender identity, one piece of advice he did give related to people who are not pursuing what he called “a mountaintop experience” of gender.
The “mountaintop” represents the idea that people should wholeheartedly embrace “a cross-gender identity” to the point where they medically transition. “Sometimes our society treats that as a mountaintop experience that everybody should move towards,” Yarhouse said.
But the truth is that Christians who are seeking to encourage people to express a gender identity consistent with their biological sex are in step with the fact that most adults struggling with gender dysphoria do not medically transition. Such Christians are also in agreement with many secular experts who believe that rushing to provide “medically affirming care” to young people could actually be harming them.
Yarhouse explained that he does not go to a specific chapter and verse in the Bible for his views on gender but rather approaches the topic from the framework of the Bible’s overarching story of creation, fall, and redemption. “I think of dysphoria as reflecting the fall. It’s not the way it was meant to be,” he said. “But God doesn’t leave us in our state. He’s redeeming us actively all the time.”
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However, Yarhouse added that “doesn’t mean that every issue, like a number of medical conditions, psychological issues, conditions like this, get resolved. I don’t know that we have good evidence that this gets resolved. I think people end up living with it as more of a besetting condition in most cases once they’re adults.”
Yarhouse gave an example of “a biological female who’s sitting across from you, and she keeps her hair really short. Or maybe she wears long sleeves or big, baggy clothing to hide body shape and size that’s distressing to her.”
“Or you sit down across from a biological male who keeps his hair longer,” he continued, “or maybe wears long sleeves to cover secondary sex characteristics like body hair.” These are small efforts these people are taking to “manage the dysphoria,” and “most people wouldn’t see those as moral issues, as issues of faithfulness.”
