The ERLC has published an article on Jesus and women written by a lesbian Critical Race Theory / Intersectionality advocate. What could possibly go wrong here?
Rebecca McLaughlin recently wrote an article for the ERLC website on “How the Gospels Show that Jesus Valued Women.”
Russell Moore and his ERLC work overtime to push Evangelical Christians leftward in our views of everything from animal rights to private property ownership, while simultaneously mesmerizing simple minds with distracting dribble: Do cats make it to heaven? What about space aliens? Should we baptize robots? All the while the ERLC adroitly avoids what the Bible has to say about the most pressing Ethical and Religious Liberty issues of our day: abortion, Drag Queen Story Hour, the militant homosexualist agenda. So why wouldn’t the ERLC use the writings of a lesbian to teach us how to read our Bibles on the topic of women with fresh eyes?
Does “Lesbian” sound like an exaggeration? Rebecca McLaughlin openly states she is romantically attracted to women without mentioning repentance or change. McLaughlin has recently published a book on apologetics which seeks to prove the Christian faith has always bowed down to the most fashionable ideological idols of our day: homosexuality, identity politics, multiculturalism, feminism.
Her ERLC article is an excerpt from a chapter in that book titled, “Does Christianity Denigrate Women?” Before diving into the substance of McLaughlin’s statements on Jesus and women, we would do well to understand her approach to scripture—something the ERLC does not mention. Writing in this chapter of her book, McLaughlin states she came to love Christ because:
“The Bible had offered me a radical narrative of Power Inversion in which the Creator God laid down his life, the poor outclassed the rich, and outcasts became family. The gospel was a consuming fire of love across differences to burn up racial injustice and socioeconomic exploitation.”
In other words, for Rebecca McLaughlin, the New Testament works as a Critical Race Theory / Intersectionality / Liberation Theology manifesto. In the world of Critical Race Theory, the world is divided into identity groups at war in a zero-sum game. For one group to be lifted up, another must be pulled down.
This explains why in a presentation at The Gospel Coalition conference in April, McLaughlin exercised affirmative action in the Q&A segment following her talk. No really. McLaughlin actually mandated to her audience that there be one female question for every male question. She explained that if the male voice is not muted, women will keep very good questions to themselves. She simply cannot see persons or ideas apart from gender, factions, oppression.
In Rebecca McLaughlin’s Thinking, For Women to be Pulled Up, Men Must be Pulled Down.
So how does McLaughlin go about pulling men down in this article? As she opens her Bible to the gospel of Luke, here is how she reasons:
“Luke constantly pairs men with women, and when he compares the two, it is almost always in the women’s favor.”
McLaughlin has us ever tabulating our score cards while she points out the sins of men in Luke’s narrative as if they exist to magnify the virtues of the women closely mentioned.
She contrasts:
- Zechariah vs. Mary
- The “female oriented” prayer of the persistent widow vs. the “male-oriented” prayers of the Pharisee and tax collector
- Mary Magdalene vs. Simon
And guess which gender always wins?
McLaughlin also follows what she calls the “male-female thread” through the gospels to tally how many women receive healing from Jesus verses men:
“First Jesus heals a man with an unclean spirit… then he heals Simon’s mother in law… Jesus heals a centurion’s servant and then raises a widow’s son… Jesus heals a man with a demon and then a bleeding woman…”
Can we be done with this tiresome, dreary hermeneutic already? This focuses all our attention away from the eternal glory of God the Son’s redemptive acts in history onto a pathetic little story of “Power to the Woman.”
Thanks but No Thanks ERLC
We don’t need a lesbian enamored with Identity Politics to show us what Jesus says about women. Our Bibles tell us from the very beginning that God created woman very good in his own image, just like man (Gen. 1:27), and that the seed of the woman would one day crush the seed of the serpent (Gen. 3:15).
We hear “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28), and understand there is no distinction of persons here. Why? Christ Jesus makes all sinners he died to save one who stand on equal ground beneath the foot of the cross. Men and Women. There is enough dignity and wonder in that reality we will ponder it for eternity.
Christian women don’t need to pull men down to secure their value. Unless they are lesbians who love Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality.
