April 22, 2023

Subject: Anheuser-Busch, Transgenderism and the Bible: Will You Speak the Truth?

John 17:17 “Set them apart by Your word. Your word is truth.”

Harvest Bible Chapel, a Chicago church of 6,000 members, is led by Pastor James MacDonald. He also hosts the weekly radio show ‘Walk in the Word.’ In his 2002 book called ‘God Wrote a Book’, he presented results of a questionnaire to 100 random Chicago people on if they thought the Bible was valuable in guiding their lives.

The overwhelming answer was no. The follow-up question was why not? Here are their top answers: “#1: The Bible is outdated. I don’t respect people from 200 years ago, so what could I possibly learn from a book written over 2,000 years ago? #2. I believe an individual’s faith is very personal. You don’t get that from a book. It comes from deep within. #3. The Bible is filled with inaccuracies that are offensive to the modern intellectual. Only the most naïve and simplistic could take seriously a book written by a bunch of fishermen or whatever.”

That was over 20 years ago. How has the rejection of the Bible so permeated American culture? In his 2003 article ‘How I found God at Columbia’, Dennis Prager points to educational institutions – our universities – as ground zero: “Why do so many people believe the nonsense of Marxism? Why do so many professors believe and teach the foolishness that men and women are the same? Why are so many professors morally confused? A biblical verse from Psalm 111 came to my mind from my childhood days: ‘Wisdom begins with fear of God.’”

Dennis Prager claims that today’s secular educational institutions have no fear of God. And the products from these universities are now leading our entertainment, information (media) and corporate institutions. The latest incident involving Anheuser-Busch highlights how rejecting biblical wisdom has infiltrated our corporations.

Anheuser-Busch just lost $5 billion in value as a direct result of using transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney as their spokesperson for their beer. Why did they hire Mulvaney? American corporations are hiring Senior-level Diversity & Inclusion leaders to train employees to be pro-LGBTQ, under the guise of this leadership position being essential within their business structure to ensure a culture of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Dylan Mulvaney is a TikTok personality with nearly 10 million followers since he began daily detailing his gender transition to a girl in early 2022. His TikTok fame led to an October 2022 visit to the White House to meet President Biden and speak on transgender rights. In February 2023 Mulvaney was showcased at the 65th Grammy Awards and celebrated by Hollywood with the “Queerties Groundbreaker” Award.

So, what is the problem? America’s mainstream education, entertainment, information, and now corporate institutions fully embrace lifestyles and ideologies that go directly against the Bible. This is America in 2023.

If you agree with the findings of Pastor MacDonald’s 2002 questionnaire, then I would agree that there is absolutely nothing wrong with promoting Mulvaney’s lifestyle as something to celebrate. But, if you claim to be a Christian, you believe all wisdom starts and ends with the Bible. That means you love Dylan Mulvaney enough to share what the Bible says: “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for all who do so are an abomination to the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 22:5).

God’s purpose in this verse is to prevent people from confounding the 2 sexes that He ordained in Genesis 2:27 so that any appearance of evil would be avoided. To put it bluntly, God says He assigned to each of us our identify as either male or female. Adopting an identity opposite to the one He gave you is sin in His eyes.

Christians are not transphobic nor haters against the LBGTQ community. That is absurd. But it is equally absurd to claim to be a Christian and yet live and act in opposition to Jesus Christ and the Bible, where God demands we live out our love for all people by sharing God’s truth in a kind, respectful manner (1Peter 3:15).

But that doesn’t mean the culture, which has rejected biblical wisdom, will tolerate true Christian love. Today’s culture demands all people, whether Christian or not, to approve of lifestyles regardless of what the Bible says.

The problem with this approach is there is only one truth on this subject – the Bible or the culture. Both cannot be right. In fact, before Pontius Pilate sent Jesus to His death, Jesus explained to him why He came to earth: “For this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. All who are of the truth hear My voice.” (John 18:37). In this week’s verse, Jesus Himself tells all of us where to find and then cling to truth so that we can avoid sinning against God – the only source is the Bible, the source for growing close to God.

As a Christian, if you stay quiet on either truth (that the transgender lifestyle is biblically sinful, or that God’s remedy to all sin is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ), you are being a coward and a hypocrite.

Ed Croteau is a lay pastor and resident of Lee’s Summit and hosts a weekly study in Lees Summit called “Faith: Substance and Evidence.” He can be reached with your questions through the LS Tribune, on Facebook and his website www.fse.life.