Online Symposium September 26-30

A clever insult fits the theme of our up-coming online symposium: “He is a self-made man and he worships his creator.” 

The title of the symposium is Stolen Identity: The Theft of the Binary in Contemporary Society.

This event, consisting of nine gifted speakers, deals with personal identity and identity politics. So don’t miss it! It will be streamed on September 26-30, 2022. Here I give a general introduction to the symposium and specifically to my own lecture. 

Here are some of the terms used to dismiss the binary or “twoness”:

• Busting the binaries
• Discovering non-dual reality
• The delusion of duality 
• Non-dual spirituality
• Advaita (a Hindu Sanskrit term meaning “no distinctions” or rejecting distinction-making dogma in favor of unifying spirituality)
• Unitive consciousness
• Integral enlightenment
• Cosmic unity
• The sacrament of monism 
• Non-binary sexuality 
• Genderqueer
• Agender.
• Two-Spirit people—a person who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit 
• Pregnant male

Rachel Levine, presently Assistant Secretary for Health, gives us an example of non-binary speech. In her biography, we read: “while at Tulane, she married fellow medical student Martha Peaslee-Levine, with whom she later had a son and daughter.”^[1] Hmmm. Are you a little lost? There’s a solution to our puzzlement: The “she” who married Martha was originally “he,” known as Richard, who then fathered two children.

How can the difference between “1” and “2” define human culture and personal identity, and help explain the revolutionary times in which we live?

The Sixties Upheaval

During my youth, something profound was happening in the thinking of a Harvard PhD named Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Reflecting on the Sixties cultural revolution in which she had participated as a willing student actor, she stated: “Within a remarkably brief period … has occurred ‘A cataclysmic transformation of the very nature of our society.’”^[2] The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a cataclysm as “a momentous and violent event marked by overwhelming upheaval and demolition like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, tornados.” Interestingly, toward the end of her life, this revolutionary student committed herself to Christ.^[3] What did Fox-Genovese see in the events of the 60s and 70s to justify her intense fear?

I first came to the States in 1964, the same year as the Beatles, and was blown away. The tranquil 1950s had engendered endless Christian television and radio stations, publishing houses, and Christian ministries. There were churches on every corner. As a young European student, I was used to pubs on every corner! I watched with amazement as people gave incorrect change back to the person behind the register. A Ru Paul Drag Race would have been unthinkable to Americans at the time! No one could have imagined drag queen readings for children in libraries or pornography in one’s bedroom at the click of a personal computer. Now “flash mobs” of hundreds of looters rush into stores and steal everything they can get their hands on, grabbing for snacks, drinks, cigarettes, lotto tickets, and expensive merchandise. 

I was unaware of the turbulent rumblings that were developing out of the 60s and 70s. Vietnam raged. Nixon resigned in disgrace. In the early 60s, the U.S. Supreme Court banned Bible reading and prayer in public schools. In 1973 it legalized the pre-natal murder of human beings; what we now call “women’s health.”

As I sought to understand this revolutionary time, my eyes fell on Romans 1:25, which I had read many times, of course. But that day I realized the profundity of what Paul was affirming—that there are only two worldviews; one that glorifies God and the other that causes God to give us over to immorality and foolishness.

they exchanged the truth about God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

This verse offers us only two options. One is identified as the lie and consists in the worship of creation. The worship of creation rejects the objective reality of the binary, that is, the two distinct realities of God and the creation. The spirituality of Oneism demands that we eliminate the binary in all its forms. The other way of worshiping – that is, to worship the Creator, is identified as the truth. I call these two options Oneism and Twoism. 

The current frictions we see and feel in our Western cultural are not actually between bigots and progressives or between traditionalists and futurists. The real debate touches the root question of how the world is put together and by whom. If you do not understand the profound worldview conflict that “non-binary versus binary” creates, you will not understand the biblical God, human sexuality, or spirituality. 

If you can begin to get a hold on how Oneism and Twoism determine these three areas, you will have a wonderful tool for thinking about our culture and speaking to your friends and neighbors. Our symposium will dig into these issues, so be sure not to miss it!

A Non-Binary God 

Progressive theologian, Brian McLaren, once a conservative evangelical, now calls for a new definition of god as “a bigger, non-dualistic, non-binary god.”^[4] He prefers a god who is “in the story, not outside of time and space like a prime mover or divine watchmaker.”^[5] McLaren’s god is not different from us; he actually isus. The creation is divinized. The non-dualistic god makes no demands on us, of course, and because we are part of him, we can build our own identity. Truth becomes mere personal power that we attempt to impose on others. 

Non-Binary Sexuality

In the middle of the Sixties Revolution, June Singer published a book with the telling title Androgyny: Towards a New Sexuality (1977). Androgyny joins male and female in one person, eliminating the binary. It fits with homosexuality, since both partners get to play both roles. And such a view fits with bi-sexuality and transgenderism, both of which, in some sense, attempt to allow a person to be both genders. In all cases, the non-binary is affirmed, whereas in the Bible male and female are kept clearly distinct, symbolizing the distinction between God and creation. Singer states her Oneism clearly: 

The archetype of androgyny appears in us as an innate sense of…and witness to…the primordial cosmic unity—that is, it is the sacrament of monism [or Oneism], functioning to erase distinction…this was “nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition…and a patriarchal God-image.”^[6]  

Non-Binary Spirituality

The Sixties was also the time of the invasion of Eastern pagan spirituality that took over the West, described by sociologists as equal in effect to the Christian Great Awakenings of the 18th century. Christine Chandler, a Western, academically trained psychotherapist, describes her experience as a disciple of Tibetan Buddhism, practicing Mindfulness meditation for hours each day for thirty years.^[7]  She came to believe that “the world is just an illusion.” Eventually, “the self and the other must be destroyed” via the “esoteric logic of non-duality” or “non-binary,” or Advaita.

Even before the non-binary terminology arose, June Singer wrote of androgyny: 

We will need to perform our own new alchemical opus…the great work, [a term from satanist traditions] to fuse the opposites within us: the archetype of androgyny, the great work of normalizing pagan sexuality, is the ultimate goal of identity politics, namely a spiritual but satanic path towards idolatrous self-transcendence.

One is reminded of the goal of the occultic satanist founder of Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley:^[8]

…the great work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will.^[9]

The great work is the ultimate goal of identity politics, namely a spiritual path towards self-transcendence, that is, independence from any notion of a Creator. Indeed, as politics becomes more all-inclusive it becomes more religious, claiming to answer all the human aspirations, physical and spiritual, to usher in a better world. 

To this seductive but false cosmology of paganism our culture is being “given over.” We need to understand what happens to a culture that, in the name of moral inclusiveness, is systematically brain-washed into eliminating the binary notion of God and creation, right and wrong and male and female. Since there is no dependable knowledge of God, we will also lose any notion of who we are. 

Fox Genovese understood a generation before it happened what the cataclysm would be. She saw that Western culture had been shattered by an invasion of both ancient eastern pagan spirituality and pre-Christian sexual license. These changes would transform a world influenced for a millennium and a half by Western Christian traditions, a world based on the revealed divine logos, creating a civilization of intelligence and artistic beauty, scientific research and biblical spirituality and morality—a world we now learn to be rejected as “white supremacy” and to be replaced by neo-Marxist identity politics. This is catastrophic.

Our symposium is timely. There is hope that people will hear the gospel and turn to their Creator and Redeemer before it is too late.

[1] Rachel Levine | National Women’s History Museum

https://www.womenshistory.org › biographies › rachel-lev…

^[2] Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Women and the Future of the Family (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 17. 

[3] Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Women and the Future of the Family (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000).

[4] Brian McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration (New York: Convergent, 2016), 103.

[5] McLaren, Spiritual Migration, 222.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Christine Chandler, Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017), 36–37.

[8] Crowley appears on the jacket of the Beatles’ Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

[9] Lévi, Éliphas, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual. Translated by Arthur Edward Waite (London: Rider, 1968), quoted in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Work.