Overly coy?

Sasha and Beck choose some beads for him to wear 
From Cambridge News

I stumbled across this article from Cambridge the other day - about a couple in the UK who concealed the gender of their child for some years after his birth. The boy, Sasha, is now 5 and attending school. The "experiment" is about to get a whole lot more complicated.

Why do it? The mother, Beck Laxton, said that her motivation was:

“Because I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping,” she shrugs. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes? It’s like horoscopes: what could be stupider than thinking there are 12 types of personality that depend on when you were born? It’s so idiotic.” 

But for Beck, slotting a child into a ‘male’ or ‘female’ box isn’t just idiotic, it’s potentially damaging. “It affects what they wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that they become.” And if that’s skewing their potential, she believes, then it is wrong. 

“That’s when I start to get cross about it: it’s not just a harmless bit of silliness, like horoscopes, it’s actually harmful.”

I'm willing to concede at the outset that we should, generally, avoid stereotyping - slotting people into boxes. Stereotyping practically denies that a person is "fearfully and wonderfully made" by God (Ps 139:14) - a unique individual. A stereotype diminishes a person's humanity. It diminishes the person Jesus died to save.

There are still some big questions about Ms Laxton's actions and motives. Can't you avoid stereotyping, and still identify with your gender? What is the cost of Ms Laxton's decision? Who bears that cost? Is that cost worth paying to make a point?

To her, the cost of her decision is nothing - her decision frees Sasha to become whatever sort of person he would like to be.

But I think that her reasoning falls into two significant errors. Firstly, she has swallowed the idea that ones biological gender is irrelevant; that it forms no significant part of ones identity. This is a position that is impossible to maintain biblically. The Bible speaks clearly about mankind being made "male and female" (Gen 1:27). It emphasises further the different purposes for which man and woman were created (eg 2:15,18), the different roles they were to play in God's perfect creation, and consequently the different effects on each of the decision to rebel against God (eg 3:16, 17-19). This theme is carried throughout Scripture - that men and women are different in fundamental ways, and that biological gender is an important factor in ones identity.

Even without the biblical witness, this conclusion is inescapable.  In just about every society on earth, and in every system of thought, the distinction between men and women has been recognised and respected. The detail differs between cultures and times, but the fact of the distinction does not. The distinction is real, unlike the imagined differences in horoscopes!

So in refusing to acknowledge her son's maleness and masculinity, she is denying him, from the earliest age, a significant part of his own identity. Who can say how that will affect him as he grows?

Secondly, she seems to believe that one can make a neutral decision about child rearing, one that leaves the child free to become whatever he or she wants. But why would this be so? Why would a decision to dress a little boy in boy's clothes affect (skew?) the man he grows to be, while a decision to dress him in "girl's clothes" leaves him unaffected? Why would playing with "gender-neutral toys, as well as plenty of dolls" have no effect on his emerging personality, where playing with cars or guns or robots or barbie dolls might limit his full potential?

The truth is that this is nonsense. Every decision concerning the raising of a child communicates some value judgement to that child. Every decision draws lines: this conduct is acceptable, that is not. More fundamentally, the potential of a child is not something that will grow and flower beautifully if left to its own devices; rather, a child must be carefully tended, nurtured and trained so that he or she can blossom into a mature man or woman. 

As the proverb goes: "Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it." (Pr 22:6) This is not an optional instruction, along the lines of "if you want to be sure how your kids will turn out, then start early".  Rather, it is a truism: "the way that a person is trained as a child is the way that person will turn out as an adult."

The final, alarming thought that struck me about this article is Ms Laxton's attitude toward parenting:

But she also admits to an ulterior motive: to make mums who choose overtly ‘girly’ garb for their daughters think about what they’re doing. 

“These women dress them up like dolls, but they’re not dressed like that, so why are they doing it to their children? ... 

So is she hoping that dressing Sasha in pink will change anything? “Yes. If it just made one person think: ‘No, I won’t put that frilly dress on her because it’s a bit silly’ or: ‘Yeah, if he really likes that doll, then that’s OK,’ then that would be really brilliant. 

“All I want to do is make people think a bit.”

Did I read that right? Is she seriously using her son as a means to change the behaviour of other parents with their children?

As a Christian dad, my whole attitude toward my children must be markedly different.  They are individually created by God, loved by Him, saved by Jesus.  They are beings who will live eternally with Jesus (or separated from Him, if they choose wrongly). I get to love and nurture and protect them to the best of my ability, and have the joy and burden to train them up for maturity and independence. I must not treat them as tools to be used for my own ends, but help them to see their true identity - as sons and daughters of God.

Hearken to the evidence ...

I didn't catch the Q and A episode with John Lennox - it had started before it hove into my conscience, but some friends of mine on twitter were tweeting about it.  So it's in the iView queue, and I followed the thread on twitter for a while.  Two significant themes emerged from the tweets: One is an assertion that Christianity cannot be proved, and so should not be taught in schools at all; the second is that teaching any form of religion in schools is brainwashing.


Both views seem to be pretty widely accepted in our society, and both views are complete rubbish.  So I want to respond, and think about how we can inoculate our kids against these fallacies.


Firstly - evidence for Christianity.  The standard argument that there is no evidence is usually one that relies on there being no scientific evidence for Christianity: that the existence of God, or the occurrence of miracles, or the efficacy of prayer cannot be tested under laboratory conditions.  Therefore they are unprovable scientifically, and therefore there is no evidence for a belief system that includes these things.  But if we look at these statements, it's clear that there are many things that will fall outside the field of scientific enquiry.  I know that my wife loves me; I know that I can trust my close friends to keep my confidences; I know that I can believe what my parents tell me: but there are no scientific experiments that can prove these things.


Perhaps nearer the point, most of us only know what our children did at school today because someone who was there told us.  We only know that Hadrian built his wall, or that Stalin killed his millions, or that Hannibal crossed the alps on elephants because of historical documents that record what witnesses to those events observed.  Most of us only know that there are microscopic things like atoms, molecules and cells because someone has told us about them (and certainly not because we've undertaken the scientific experimentation ourselves!)


The fatal flaw in the "no evidence for Christianity" argument is that it overlooks other categories of evidence in exclusive favour of scientific evidence.  As a criminal lawyer for 8 years I saw this same error occur at times in jury trials.  Extremely persuasive and cogent eyewitness testimony was rejected because there was no forensic scientific evidence.  If we refuse to take note of any evidence that is not scientific, we exclude significant sources of reliable knowledge.


I think it is important to teach our kids about this!  Not everything can be known through science.  Not everything that science tells us is necessarily reliable.  Our kids need to be taught to sift through and evaluate the evidence.  Just as our kids need to be taught to sift through and evaluate other forms of evidence - eyewitness testimony, historical record and the like.


And that leads to the second false view circulating - that any teaching of any religion amounts to brainwashing.  In my view, the fact that the term is bandied about so freely in the religion-in-schools debate is either a display of ignorance about how religious education is (or can be) approached in modern schools, or else a misleading piece of rhetoric.


Let's assume ignorance to start with - I suppose that hangovers from the 40s or 50s might lead some to assume that any religious education in schools will be rigid, dogmatic, programmatic and allowing of no dissent.  Where belief (or expressions of belief) are coerced, then perhaps this does fit a description of brainwashing, such as occurs under some totalitarian regimes and in some times of war. It cannot seriously be suggested that Christians or the churches currently have the social or political power to coerce belief, even amongst children.  It cannot seriously be suggested that the churches would use a fear-based technique that would bring such fleeting and superficial results.  But do we truly believe that teaching kids the tenets and historical foundation for the world's greatest faith amounts to brainwashing?  Laying out a belief and providing reasons and evidence for that belief is not brainwashing - it is education!  


I suppose there might be some Christian parents who enforce belief in their children through objectionable means - but given that this is a universal parenting problem that spans all beliefs (and lacks-of-belief) - it's stretching things too much to credit this evil to the Christian side of the ledger.  The argument might more strongly be put that atheist parents are brainwashing their children by refusing to present the evidence for Christianity - certainly in the current prevailing culture those children are less likely to see both sides of the debate fairly presented.


Which brings us to the use of "brainwashing" as a rhetorical device.  If the real concern is coercive Christian education, why not say so?  We can understand that we are happy for our kids to learn about Christianity, but not to be pressured into a decision.  We can then truly agree, perhaps, that we want each person to make up his or her own mind by reference to all of the evidence and arguments.  I suspect, though, that this is precisely what many aggressive atheists do not want - they do not want every person to have the opportunity of fairly and individually assessing the evidence for and against Christianity: they want to push any discussion of Christianity out of the public sphere altogether.  They want the field to themselves.


Again, what to do for our kids?  Just as our kids need to know about different types of evidence, and need to learn how to evaluate such evidence, our kids need to know about different types of argument.  They need to be prepared to meet these different worldviews in their school yard, from their teachers, from their teammates.  They need to be prepared to present and defend their own beliefs (even as they are being formed and refined!), while they can carefully assess (and where appropriate, attack!) the beliefs that are being pressed on them.


Now how on earth do we do that!?