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Oct 18, 2024

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Sexuality and the Image of God

“None dare call it sin.” Such is the bold attitude that the LGBTQ movement holds, silencing any who might consider such sexual practice to be against nature and outside of God’s norms. The culture has been tamed to accept the cultural “reality” of the LGBTQ agenda. Who in an office conversation now dares to say that there are only two sexes: male and female? Even committed Christians do not know how to counter current ideology, though they mourn the sad demise of the natural family. Our culture is saturated with one message: sexuality is whatever you want to make it. For example, Disney’s new miniseries, Agatha All Along, is rife with gay characters and its message normalizes gay sex for its audience of children as young as six.

In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court passed a law normalizing same-sex marriage. This ruling engendered a huge flurry of amicus briefs sent to the Court, many written even by conservative thinkers. The Court’s ruling means that “none even dare call it illegal.” That ruling came down nearly ten years ago. By now, Evangelical believers and their pastors (as Megan Basham shows)[1] do not want to become tangled in issues of civil and legal rights. Everyone is uneasy with discussions about the subject in general and about delicate issues of sexual practice in particular. Most Christians do not embrace the LGBTQ agenda, which goes against the clear teaching of Scripture. Yet we often remain silent, thus failing those under our influence—especially our Christian young people, who desperately need instruction, wisdom and compassion as they wend their way through an educational system that is increasingly antithetical to Gospel truth. 

Avoid Moralism

In our interactions about this issue, we must find a discourse that avoids emotionalism, moralism, hatred, or bigotry. Yet we must reach to the heart of the issue. Millennial and Gen Z Christians especially need a clear statement of truth on sexuality, for they are leaving the church in droves over this very issue, considering the gospel message as too restrictive. To understand sexuality, we need an intelligent, holistic, and non-judgmental account of what the Bible teaches on sexuality. 

We must not have contempt for people who consider themselves gay. Each deserves respect and love. He or she is a unique, complex, fellow human being, made in God’s image and part of His project of love for His creatures. We must not demonize, show bigotry, or bask in some kind of righteous anger. The book of James tells us that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (Jas. 1:20 ESV.) God Himself is the only being who shows true “righteous anger.” 

The problem is bigger than any one homosexual person. It is rooted in the Fall, which affects us all. We must be keenly aware that many people in the LGBTQ world have known suffering and hurt from early parental abuse or from the judgmentalism of misguided believers. Though Christians are responsible to speak up against sexual perversion, we must not forget the Gospel context, which sets as priority God’s forgiving love, freely offered to all who receive it. As God who is rich in “kindness, forbearance and patience…that lead to repentance” (Romans 2:4), so must God’s people be. In response to God’s love for us, Christians must love God as our Creator (Matt 22:37–39) and love our neighbors as ourselves. Such love includes those who are LGTBQ. 

Do Not Compromise

Here we must walk a fine line. To show deep love is not to accept sexual perversion of God’s design. Out of the wrong kind of love some pastors and leaders have fallen in line with the culture’s decisions, accepting the inevitability of the sexual practice of those who cannot help their inclinations. In this case, they posit, God will accept such behavior. If they just can’t help themselves, Christians can compromise, they say, without losing their faith. In this case, we need to heed the warning expressed by J. Michael Clark, a self-identified “gay theologian” and Professor at Emory University. Clark was raised in the church. To “affirming Christians” who seek to justify the practice of homosexuality or to Christians who fear social rejection if they dare to oppose such practice, Clark issues a solemn warning. His testimony shows both groups where such movements will eventually end. He states cogently that: “being a gay man or lesbian entails far more than sexual behavior alone . . . [it entails] a whole mode of being-in-the-world.”[2]

Show Compassion

Clark could not find in the Scripture a model for his chosen lifestyle, and he therefore self-consciously adopted the spirituality of the berdache, the American Indian homosexual shaman of pagan animism. This last sentence may have thrown you a curve ball. Berdache? Who are they? Homosexual shamans? What is that? It is important to know that homosexuality has been a significant expression of religious paganism throughout history. I began looking into this many years ago. I intended to get to the very roots of the conflict between pagan and God-honoring sexual behavior and love. I am citing in this article some of what I wrote. Some truthXchange readers will remember the article, but I take the privilege of re-iterating its crucial and foundational framework and research, since many new friends have joined in seeking help from the work of truthXchange. It is perhaps even more crucial for younger Christians to read this than those who read it some time ago, for the culture is now extending what may have seemed outlandish and obscure some years ago. 

Homosexuality: Ever Present in Religious History

Spiritual homosexuality is a common practice in the history of paganism throughout time and space. I developed this line of investigation in my article, “Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal,”[3] where I cite several important sources. This history is crucial for understanding the theological implications of homosexuality for today’s church.

The clearest textual testimony comes from 19th century BC Mesopotamia. Androgynous priests were associated with the worship of the pagan goddess Istar from the Sumerian age (1800 BC).[4] The priests’ androgynous condition was due to their “devotion to Istar, who herself had ‘transformed their masculinity into femininity.’”[5] They functioned as occult homosexual shamans, who released the sick from the power of the demons just as, according to the cult myth, they had saved Istar from the devil’s lair. “As human beings,” said one scholar, “…they seem to have engendered demonic abhorrence in others: the fearful respect they provoked is to be sought in their otherness, their position between myth and reality, and their divine‑demonic ability to transgress boundaries.”[6] No boundaries means no binaries.[7]

The renowned history-of-religions scholar, Mircea Eliade, calls this “ritualized androgynization.”[8] Androgyny is an appropriate term for sexuality today, for it evokes the joining of sexual distinctions in one reality. Androgyny can mean homosexuality, bisexuality, transgender or drag queens. Professor Eliade holds that “many myths, symbols, divine figures, and religious practices encountered in varying sociocultural contexts are likely to be reminiscent of one another despite the latitude of their culture-specific difference. They are human documents [that] express typical human situations [and] form an integral part of the history of the spirit.”[9]

Most pagan worship involves the myth of a non-binary god, who is part of nature and is served by non-binary androgynous or homosexual priests. This is far from the distinct Creator of the Scriptures. Such a phenomenon is not limited to ancient Mesopotamian and Indo-European nature religions. It also appears in the myths of Australian Aborigines, African tribes, South American Indians, and Pacific islanders. Eliade shows that there is an evident historical and “theological” connection between such religions despite being separated by both time and distance. As examples, he shows the commonality between homosexual shamans in Mesopotamia (assinnus), in Canaan (qedeshim), in Scythia (ensnares), and in Syria (galli). In the North American tribes there were similar shamans (berdaches), the Navajo (nadle), and the Zuñi, (Awonawilona — “he-she”).[10]

Eliade believes that “ultimately, it is the wish to recover this lost unity in existence [being part of nature] that has caused man to think of the opposites as complementary aspects of a single reality.”[11] Eliade explains the spiritual meaning of androgyny as “a symbolic restoration…of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the creation,”[12] in direct opposition to the Old Testament account of creation, which is marked by firm distinctions between Creator and creature. The androgynous being thus sums up the very goal of the mystical, Oneist quest, whether ancient or modern: “in mystical love and at death one completely integrates the spirit world: all contraries are collapsed. The distinctions between the sexes are erased: the two merge into an androgynous whole.”[13]  

Implications of Non-Binary Belief Systems

Moral Implications

Such belief has moral implications. The pagan monist who assumes guiltless responsibility for all his actions, whether “good” or “evil,” is exercising his personal, autonomous power, joining the opposites of good and evil, thus relativizing all morals. Just as the distinctions inherent in binary heterosexuality point to the fundamental theistic notion of the Creator/creature distinction, so androgyny in its various sexual forms eradicates distinctions and elevates the spiritual blending of all things, including the idolatrous refusal of human/divine and good/evil distinctions. This is the logic that brings Paul to a similar conclusion in Romans 1:18–28, where the denial of the Creator/creature distinction (that I have called Twoism; Romans 1:25) leads to the practice of “unnatural” (kata phusei) homosexuality (what I have called Oneism; Romans 1:26-28).

Theological Implications 

The theological implications of opposition to the sexual binary of male and female are enormous. Naiveté about abhorrent sexuality has swept through our culture, disrupting and deceiving even many in evangelical circles. To accept non-binary sexuality inevitably leads to accepting forms of non-binary (non-dual) spirituality, such as “contemplative spiritualty.”[14] In its Hindu form, such a practice has taken over much of the Western mind and soul. Philip Goldberg, author of American Veda: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West, calls this a spiritual “revival,” based on the Hindu term Advaita, meaning “not two.” The spiritual synthesis, to which progressives believe we are advancing, will be “non-dual,” non-binary. Goldberg declares that Advaita and “non-dual…oneness” and “unity around non-separation” are “generic term[s] describe the present and coming spirituality in America—meaning that God and the world are not two.”[15] That is, God is not distinct from the world as Creator, but, rather, that nature is god.

Understanding where such radical theology has always taken a society in its sexual practice will help us to see the necessarily close association between theology and sexuality, and how the one affects the other. Over the last thirty years America has gradually abandoned theism to embrace the spirituality of Eastern paganism in its various iterations. These same years have produced the most radical social engineering in America’s history—the deconstruction of normative biblical heterosexuality and the revival and pagan idealization of homosexual androgyny.

The Age of Androgyny

Another key architect of the non-binary culture is the Jungian psychologist[16] and Gnostic spiritualist,[17] June Singer. At the end of the Sixties spiritual Revolution, June Singer, in her book, Androgyny: Towards a New Sexuality, predicted the triumph of androgyny. This is exactly what others are now putting into practice: “What lies in store as we move towards the longed-for conjunction of the opposites [Oneism or non-duality]? … Can the human psyche realize its own creative potential through building its own cosmology and supplying it with its own gods?”[18] She is calling for a coherent, all-encompassing, attractive and religiously pagan account of a political cosmology of the nature of existence. This supposedly “new” paradigm is only a continuation of what we saw in earlier pagan androgyny, as noted above.

Singer affirmed what was called at the time a spiritual Age of Aquarius, which was also the Age of Androgyny. “We have at hand,” she says, “all the ingredients we will need to perform our own new alchemical opus [the Great Work] to fuse the opposites within us.” She goes on to say: “The archetype of androgyny appears in us as an innate sense of…and witness to…the primordial cosmic unity [the sacrament of monism/Oneism], functioning to erase distinction…this was nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition…and a patriarchal God-image.”[19]

Singer, a true Jungian, consciously promoted the deeply important sexual element in the cosmology of “new humanism”: “The androgyne [the human being aware of being both male and female] participates consciously in the evolutionary process, redesigning the individual…society and…the planet.”[20] By recognizing the “new sexuality” as the affirmation of Monism (Oneism), she makes a radical rejection of the biblical God and of the cosmology of the Western Christian past.[21] Notice how high she places homosexuality, as a kind of sacrament of Oneism. The ultimate goal of the spread of LGBTQ practice is to eliminate the God of the Bible. 

Baphomet is an ancient Satanic symbol of the divine, a mix of goat and human with both male and female genitals, made popular in witchcraft by the famous occultist, Aleister Crowley. Mircea Eliade calls this pagan spirituality “ritualized androgynization.”[22] Androgyny is an appropriate term for sexuality today, for this deep and anti-God “Oneism” pervades our culture, joining sexual distinctions in one reality, and no one can speak against it without dire consequences. 

The Cosmology of Synthesis 

Building on the Oneism that has produced our cultural acceptance of physical androgyny, as well as spiritual Oneism, some now speak of a new day in spirituality, what they call the Postsecular era. This is an era of synthesis, which rejects both Christianity and Secular Humanism, the first (biblical faith) because it is superstitious, and the second (secularism) because it dogmatically refuses any form of spirituality.

The “New Spiritualty” goes beyond binary thinking to create a synthesis between the intellect and the spirit, which will, in turn, produce a convergence of spirituality, science, and sexuality. Pagan philosopher Richard Tarnas brilliantly unpacks the content of this new synthesis of: “Platonic and Presocratic philosophy, Hermeticism, mythology, the mystery religions…Buddhis[m] and Hindu[ism]…Gnosticism and the major esoteric traditions …Neolithic European and Native American spiritual traditions” (no Christianity) —in short, all the ancient and modern expressions of paganism are “gathering now on the intellectual stage as if for some kind of climactic synthesis …as an authentic expression of nature’s unfolding.”[23]Tarnas and interfaith believers in all religions, including liberal churches, may eagerly await a world-wide pagan worship of a divinized, non-binary creation. Though we dread such a future, God’s Word indicates that such movements will occur before our Lord Jesus returns. In the meantime, God’s people, as in all times, will be excluded and persecuted. Yet our hope is in God our Savior! 

With the recent transformations of Western culture, we are facing the ultimate question: what is Christian orthodoxy? So many, in the name of love for mistreated sexual outcasts, now claim the title “Christian,” but what is Christian love and what does a Christian confess? In modern times the Church is not accustomed to associating issues of doctrinal correctness with seemingly peripheral issues like human sexuality. But questions of doctrinal orthodoxy now face us because of the deep integration of new/ancient sexuality and spirituality in an all-embracing pagan cosmology. 

If same-sex marriage is the physical symbol of Oneism, that is, the very essence of non-binary paganism, it is not surprising to find in Scripture that heterosexual marriage is presented as the ultimate “mystery” of Gospel Twoism. In Ephesians 5:32 we read: “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” 

Between these two mysteries, no synthesis is possible. Not only does this approach undermine the Bible and fail those under our responsibility. It denies the God who made us and redeems us, for on several occasions, Scripture affirms that our sexual human identity is a witness to the great Lord of creation and redemption. Our sexuality, in certain ways, reflects His image or His very being. This is the meaning of Genesis 1:26 and 27: 

Then God said, “Let us [the Trinity] make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

In the first biblical account of the creation of human beings, we meet the word “image” three times and “likeness” once. We must speak of our heterosexual identity since God demands that we give public witness to His existence. We are witnesses to His image in two ways: 1. In His very being as Trinity, and 2. in His activity and glory as Creator. 

In Our Sexuality We Witness to His Being as Trinity

The image of God is trinitarian. God said: Let us make man in our image (Gen. 1:26)..and God created man male and female (Gen 1:27). He reveals himself in three persons and those persons are never confused. This means that in God’s essence he is both unity and distinction, unity among the persons yet always distinct.

This is true of the human couple, distinct as male and female and yet wonderfully unified as one flesh. If the ultimate dignity of men and women is to reflect the trinitarian person of God, then in this sense, homosexuality is a denial of the Trinity and inevitably becomes a symbol of another expression of divinity, the expression of a Creator-denying, “all-is-one” non-binary pagan pantheism. 

Christians honor heterosexuality and heterosexual marriage, as did Jesus, because they teach us deep things about the nature of God in His very being and about His heart in reaching out to others. In the Bible there is no other human relationship that includes the one flesh relationship of marriage. The marriage institute in Genesis 2:24 uniquely reflects in a human way the trinitarian being of God. Being different (male and female) yet “one flesh” reflects God’s own image. At the beginning of creation, God created personal human reality to reflect His own personal character as Trinity. 

In Our Sexuality, We Witness to His Glory as Creator

It is essential to reflect God in our sexuality because it witnesses to God in His being as Creator. The Scripture states: “it is not good for man to be alone” (Gen 2:19), not because he is psychologically lonely, otherwise God could have created another version of Adam, or one of the animals to keep Adam company. God created Eve to be a “helper” so that both could be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (Gen 2:28) and thereby create the human race. 

Psalm 8 clearly affirms what we read in Genesis. God desires His glory to be known in the earth and seeks for it to be expressed by the human creature.

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens (Ps 8:1).

According to the psalmist, God wants His image to be known in the creation: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” God’s image as Creator is glorious… “What is man that you are mindful of him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor” (Ps 8:3-5).

Clearly the human being is glorious because “You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet” (Gen 1:26).

Here is the human image of God reflecting God the Creator. Male and female, in their sexual unity, create human civilization. Both Adam and Eve receive the call to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen 1:28). Eve is the mother of the living. She declares: “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord” (Gen 4:1). Partner B in a same-sex marriage could never have borne this child. The first baby (a “man”) is the work of the male and female who, together, bear the image of God the Creator. This is how God is to be known in the earth.

The Bible sees in human heterosexuality the noble expression of the image of God both in the beautiful mystery of His trinitarian person and in His powerful role as Creator. Both images express God’s nobility. In those two expressions of His image, God is made known to the fallen world to bring the goodness of creation and the good news of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God (2 Cor. 4:4). Christians, who are given in today’s increasingly pagan culture the unpopular task of witnessing to the being of God, must realize that we cannot normalize non-binary homosexuality but must rather practice and promote binary heterosexuality and child-raising families—for the sake of human civilization and for the glory of God.


[1] Basham, Megan, Shepherds for Sale, Broadside Books (2024), 194–231.

[2] J. Michael Clark, “Gay Spirituality,” in Spirituality and the Secular Quest, (ed. Peter H. Van Ness; New York: Crossroads/Herder, 1996) 335.

[3] Peter Jones, “Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal,” Journal of Evangelical Theological Society, 43/3 (September 2000), 443–469.

[4] Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 28. 

[5] Nissinen, ibid, 30.

[6] Nissinen, ibid., 32.

[7] Distinctions, such as male/female; right/wrong, etc.

[8] Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” vol vi, The Encyclopedia of Religion, (Macmillan, 1987), 277. See also Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (University of Chicago Press, 1969), 134.

[9] Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol, translated by J. M. Cohen. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 12.

[10] See the long and favorable study of the South American situation by Walter Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Beacon Press, Boston, 1986, 1992). He sees the role of the Berdache as elimination dichotomies for the acceptance of ambiguity (p.3).

[11] Eliade, Mephistopheles, 122.

[12] Eliade, “Androgynes,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, 277.

[13] Eliade, Ibid.

[14] Franciscan Father Richard Rohr, an authority for many Evangelical groups like Willow Creek on the use of contemplative spirituality, organized a women’s conference at his Center led by Marianne Williamson, authoress of A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”, which book is proposed as conference reading. Williamson’s center was a wildly successful New Age sect that denied sin and encouraged initiates not to cling to the old rugged Cross. Rohr taught Evangelicals that our awakened heart discovers that we and God and all things are one. We must abandon either/or thinking in order to follow what the mystics and holy people have learned, namely nondualist thinking. 

[15] Philip Goldberg, American Veda: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West (New York: Harmony, 2010), 344.

[16] In my book The Other Worldview, 29-41, 87-89, I show how Singer was implementing the vision of the radical pagan, Carl Jung.

[17] June Singer, A Gnostic Book of Hours: Keys to Inner Wisdom (Nicolas-Hays, March 1, 2003).

[18]  Singer, Androgyny: Towards a New Theory of Sexuality (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1977), 237.

[19] Singer, Ibid.

[20] Singer, Androgyny, 333.

[21] The more overt pronouncements about homosexuality appeared in lectures by Jungian followers and contemporaries of Jung, applying his theories to issues of bi-sexuality and homosexuality, like that of Beatrice Hinkle on “Arbitrary Use of the Terms Masculine and Feminine,” and one by Constance Long, “Sex as a Basis of Character,” a plea for a positive affirmation of homosexual love. Jung’s followers, like June Singer and Toby Johnson develop Jung’s thinking to include the full justification of homosexuality.

[22] Eliade, “Androgynes,” vol vi, The Encyclopedia of Religion, (Macmillan, 1987), 277: see also Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (University of Chicago Press, 1969), 134.

[23] Richard Tarnas, the Passion, 435.

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