Virginia, a once a staunchly conservative southern state, has been trending “blue” (Democratic) for over 16 years. This trend has nothing to do with anyone changing his ideology or political views, but simply with who lives in the state. The party of big government is the Democratic Party, and as the federal behemoth has grown stupendously large, Democrat-voting federal bureaucrats, contractors, and subcontractors, lured by essentially infinite federal largesse, moved to northern Virginia by the hundreds of thousands, turning Virginia purple, and eventually solid blue.
So it was quite a shock when little-known Republican Glenn Youngkin bested former governor and longtime Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe in last month’s gubernatorial election. Republicans also won control of the Virginia Assembly, the state legislature. Voters were highly motivated; it was the largest voter turnout in a gubernatorial election since 1997, 24 years ago.
What happened?
The issues upon which the election turned had little to do with national politics, much less with last year’s disputed election between Trump and Biden. The issues that motivated Virginia’s voters last month were local issues. In fact, they were school board issues, and nothing is more local and closer to home than your local school board. McAuliffe’s biggest gaffe was when he stated that parents shouldn’t have much say in their children’s education, but should defer to the education bureaucrats.
Parents were disgusted at having their children force-fed the toxic brew of Marxism, America-hatred, and vicious bashing of the white race known as “critical race theory.” Since utopian Leftists have no fixed ethics or morals—their utopian end justifies any means, any crime—they tried to lie to the parents and tell them their children were not really being taught critical race theory.
But one of the unintended benefits of “remote learning” is that parents could see and hear what their children were being taught in the Zoom “classrooms,” so they knew that the Leftist school boards were lying to them when they denied that the schools were teaching critical race theory. They were already concerned about what their children were being taught, and then when the school boards blatantly lied to their faces, they got angry—and motivated to vote.
Then there is the issue of transgenderism. The Leftist teachers’ unions and school boards are zealously pushing transgenderism, but most parents understand the facts of life and know that a child’s sex is determined at the moment of conception, when the sperm that fertilizes the egg carries either an X or an Y sex chromosome. By and large, parents—even parents that typically vote “D”—do not want their child’s teachers, or other agents of the state education bureaucracy, pushing gender confusion on their children. They’ve been showing up at the leftist school board meetings of northern Virginia to protest this.
This issue was sickeningly highlighted when a 14-year-old girl was raped in the girls’ bathroom in Stone Bridge High School, in Loudon County, last May 28th, by a boy wearing a skirt and claiming to identify as a girl. Democrats in the Loudon education bureaucracy covered up the rape, transferring the boy to another high school, because they were pushing a district-wide policy allowing boys who “identify’ as girls to use the girls’ bathroom, and they didn’t want this telling proof of the stupidity of such a policy becoming widely known. When Scott Smith, the victim’s father, showed up at a Loudon school board meeting on June 22, not even planning to speak, the school board cops tackled and arrested him. The results of the cover up were predictable: in October, the same perpetrator raped another girl in a different school, this time in an empty classroom.
[Video discussing the story here]
Obviously, Virginia has a problem with radical transgender activism.
The cherry on top of this excrement Sundae was when the “Biden Administration” declared that the justifiably angry parents of northern Virginia—the victims of a radical education bureaucracy bent on destroying the created sexual order and brainwashing children with vile race hatred—were incipient domestic terrorists and should be closely monitored by the FBI. (The Democrats are unequaled in their understanding of power and how to use it to advance their agenda, and so you see Democrats leveraging their control over federal law enforcement—DOJ and FBI—to consolidate their control over local school boards.
The rest, as they say, is history. Virginia voters showed up in large numbers last months and said, basically, “stop the madness.” They tossed out the party that sponsors the ugliness of aggressive transgender activism and critical race theory—even if it was the party they typically voted for.
So what does this have to do with Seventh-day Adventism?
Adventists of a certain type are always urging us to be “relevant,” to reach for a broader appeal to the masses based upon current cultural enthusiasms. I don’t think we are at liberty to change the gospel to something more palatable to modern ears (Gal. 1:8; 2 Cor. 11:3-5) but we should emphasize points of commonality with the people we are trying to reach. If last month’s Virginia election tells us anything, it is that most people clearly do not approve of the program, pushed so aggressively by Leftwing activists, of bending the genders.
Here is a point of commonality that we should push to the front of our teachings. Because we have zealously guarded the biblical origins narrative—that we were created in six literal days and that God rested on the seventh day, hallowing it for all time as His special day of rest and worship—we are positioned to preach and teach the creational distinction between male and female.
Scripture is very clear that God created two and only two genders:
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Gen. 1:27.
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,” Mat. 19:4.
The need to think carefully about the implications of these passages. There are two sexes and two corresponding genders, male and female—not the 58 listed on Face Book. Second, both male and female are in the image of God. If you modify your body to efface your sex, you are marring the image of God in your body.
God directed us to guard the edges of gender identity: “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.” Deut. 22:5. If transvestitism—dressing as the opposite sex—is an “abomination” and is strictly forbidden, then certainly mutilating oneself to make one’s body look more like the opposite sex is forbidden by implication. Even male effeminacy is forbidden in Scripture. (1 Cor. 6:9 KJV). A man is not even to act “soft,” effeminate, or other than fully masculine.
“The writers of Scripture viewed any attempts at overriding one's birth-sex as abhorrent, a sacrilege against the structures of maleness or femaleness created by God, and ultimately a rebellion against the Creator who made our bodies,” says Robert A. J. Gagnon, an associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
God created two sexes, and at conception each of us was assigned a sex, a miracle of procreation that points back to the original creation of Adam and Eve as male and female. God wants every male to grow into masculinity, and every female to grow into femininity. Christian men are to act and appear as men, and Christian women are to act and appear as women, because that is how God created us, and that is His plan for our lives.
The reason why there is marriage is that God created two distinct sexes, male and female. Marriage, along with the Sabbath, are the two divinely created institutions that have been with us from the very beginning, right from the creation. As I have argued before, as Seventh-day Adventists, we need to guard the reason for marriage—the fact that God created two distinct sexes—just as carefully as we guard the reason for the Sabbath—that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day.
It is past time for Adventists to emphasize that we believe in God’s created sexual order, and that as followers of God we will not advocate, or participate in, the deranging of that order. To insist that God created us male or female is a simple thing, but it highlights our fidelity to the written word of God and our rejection of destructive religious, cultural, and political fads. It will be attractive to people seeking shelter from the storm of contemporary Leftist nihilism.
It is also time for Adventists to emphasize the biblical teaching on race, which is that there isn’t one. Race is not a biblical category, and the Bible says nothing about it. According to Bible history, we are all descended from Adam, and even more closely from Noah, who lived only about 4,500 years ago.
Although we are all, because of Adam’s sin, born with sinful propensities, a “bent toward sinning,” we are not born with bloodguilt because of our race (which, again, is not even a biblical category). Blacks, whites, and all other races were created equally in God’s image and are equally the object of His saving grace. We are only guilty of racism or race hatred if we consciously embrace and practice it; we are not guilty simply by being born to one race or another. To teach that one race is worse than another is a false, unbiblical teaching.
Adventists need to emphasize that the Marxist, anti-Christian doctrines of critical race theory can only create resentment and racial strife—and ultimately tribalism and genocide—where Bible Christianity would engender peace and harmony. If we repudiate evil racist lies, that will be attractive to people who are seeing through these destructive Marxist stratagems.
So, yes, I believe Adventists can draw important lessons from the Virginia elections: we must emphasize our biblical teachings on origins, and particularly on God’s created sexual order.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Gen. 1:27.
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,” Mat. 19:4.