A Question for the Gender Wars: Are Christians Conservative or Progressive?

By Paul Tyson

Photo by Emmanuel Phaeton on Unsplash

According to the psychosocial hypothesis put forward in Judith Butler’s 2024 book Who’s Afraid of Gender? anyone who questions her gender theory is at least tacitly a homophobic and fascist Christian. For a thinker who advocates a fluid, spectral, and mosaic approach to human sexual biology, Butler’s book puts forward an absolute binary separating “the Left” (humane and reasonable people who are not “afraid of gender”) from the “the Right” (bigoted and fascist people who are “afraid of gender”). Readers familiar with queer theory will recognize the genealogy Butler is deploying here. The queer story maintains that the core enemy of human dignity and liberal pluralism, and the central cause of exclusionary gender-identity oppression, is Western heteronormativity as inherited from our barbaric Judeo-Christian sexual ethics. So even if people who oppose Butler’s humane and progressive gender theory might be gay or lesbian, might even profess to be atheists, might even have a life-long history of Left/Progressive/Liberal political commitments, underneath it all, they remain psychosocially defined by their far-right Christian sex and gender phobia. That is, Kathleen Stock, Andrew Doyle, Julie Bindel, Peter Boghossian, Helen Joyce, and Richard Dawkins are all repressed conservative Christians. 

Butler is determined to make religion central to what she characterizes as far-right genderphobia, and there are good strategic reasons why she does this. For if Butler can keep gender-critical scientific liberals in terror of being associated with gender-critical Christians, she keeps two powerful opponents of queer gender theory from linking up, and she can generate conflict between these potential allies that will progress her queer anti-heteronormative revolution. And it should be recognized that we are at an historical moment where things could go seriously pear-shaped for the Queer Planet which the rainbow ideology is seeking to create. For Queer Ideology has gotten out of its academy sex/gender experimental enclave and has lodged itself in law, in education, and in corporate and political image projection. Queer Ideology is now seeking to colonize and completely reform the long and (arguably) natural customs and practices of human heteronormativity itself. At this point, a small minority movement (Queer Reformers) should expect resistance from the behemoth of the ancient customs and assumed naturalness of the heteronormative biological family. And indeed, heteronormative social structures have accrued around the biological family from time out of mind to the present. Unsurprisingly, push-back is happening. In this context, Butler’s strategic intelligence in publishing Who’s Afraid of Gender is not to be underestimated. 

But how reasonable is Butler’s argument? Let us first ask whether Christians are Conservative or Progressive. 

Would you characterize William Wilberforce’s anti-slavery campaign and his concerted opposition to cruelty to animals as Conservative or Progressive? Would you find Hannah More’s push for free education for the children and women of the Industrial Revolution Conservative or Progressive? Would you characterize the 7^th Earl of Shaftesbury’s tireless battle to reform lunacy laws, regulate working conditions, get women and children out of the mines and chimneys, establish the Ragged School Union, and regulate housing, Conservative or Progressive? Would you characterize Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s love of nature and the like-minded Christian movement for the preservation of wildernesses that mostly Presbyterians of nineteenth-century Britain and America advanced, Conservative of Progressive? Was the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum—on capital and labour—a Progressive or Conservative encyclical? Is Pope Francis’ 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si’ Progressive or Conservative? Was the Australian Labor Party—deeply influenced in its founding by Methodist and Catholic unionists—a Conservative or a Progressive political party? Were Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Conservatives or Progressives? 

Three things can be said to answer these questions. 

Firstly, if genuine Progressivism is atheist and implacably opposed to church authority, the Christian Scriptures, and the moral teachings of the Christian faith, then of course none of the above-mentioned Christians are Progressives. So, if Karl Marx’s atheist critique of religion itself—and if Thomas Huxley’s anti-Christian secularization push—defines what Progressive means, then Butler has a point. However, the moral commitments of theologically conservative Christians are clearly deeply tied to universal human rights (as all people are divine image bearers), compassion for the disadvantaged, concern for creation, and justice for the poor. This is inescapably integral to the Christian gospel. Hence, it is no coincidence that anti-racism, social welfare, universal education, firm opposition to antisemitism, advancing the rights of women and children, environmental activism, and so forth are clearly demonstrated in the above very short list of recent Christian political activists. And if one cares to look at the long historical sweep of Western European culture, its hospitals, universities, systems of justice, science, politics, concern for the vulnerable, art and literature, and even its atheist utopian Progressivism, are all deeply rooted in Western Christianity. It is then a very recent and narrow outlook to hold—as Butler clearly does—that the only real meaning of Progressive is anti-Christian, and the only real meaning of Conservative is bigoted, far-right Christianity. 

Secondly, if “the Left” is a political tag that signals a broad social concern for the common good and the preservation of universal human rights, then clearly all the above Christian political activists were of the Left. 

Thirdly, and blindingly obviously, being a Christian does not determine if you have politically Left or politically Right commitments. Like all people, some Christians will be Left-leaning and other Christians will be Right-leaning in their political views. 

Bearing these three things in mind, we are forced to abandon Butler’s binary religiously defined definitions of the humane and reasonable “Left” and the bigoted and fascist “Right.” This is performative political rhetoric, wherein Butler aspires to make her moral branding campaign come true simply by saying it. 

But what about the strategic aims of Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? 

For reasons that would take more space than this short essay to unpack, it seems that political philosophy itself has now imploded in the West. Very briefly, it goes a bit like this. The secularizing century in the West is between about 1870 and 1970. In that time the public domain moved from being religiously pluralistic whilst having warrants for high-meaning categories still firmly embedded in religious guarantees, to being decisively post-Christian. The past half-century—from the 1970s to the 2020s—has seen the pragmatizing and materializing of public meanings which has resulted in consumerism and neoliberal political economics, and few (if any) moral realist commitments undergirding what has become political party branding. So, the centre-left and the centre-right do not look vastly different in terms of their moral commitments. They both accept a very Right-leaning (now meaning self-interested and monied-friendly political logic) utilitarian vision of electoral realism and are trying to differentiate between each other on the grounds of… managing the economy! This is quite ludicrous as having cast our nations onto the globalist economic sea, our national politicians have increasingly little control over the most basic conditions of economic well-being within nation-states. So, security, fear, nationalist sentiment, and appeals to personal wealth accumulation, have become the real currency of Centrist political power in both the centre-left and the centre-right. Unsurprisingly, political interest is moving from the Centre and the Centre is deploying all sorts of tricks to try and keep power under its control. And this is where Queer Ideology (itself an attempt to create a new moral meaning in our pragmatic and post-Christian times) is deeply disingenuous in claiming ownership of the mainstream Leftist movement. For the Left with any old-fashioned political economics morality—as illustrated by Yanis Varoufakis—is long gone, as it was politically killed off by neoliberalism in the 1980s. 

Undoubtedly Queer gender-identity ideology has colonized both the center-left and the center-right. This is because it offers cheap optics of moral respectability to the Centre. With rampant two-speed economics being the inescapable socio-economic signature of the neoliberal experiment, we are looking for a band-aid on the accelerating financial inequalities everywhere apparent, which we can call a commitment to Equality. With the collapse of manufacturing and agriculture and skilled crafts (like jewellers) as employment pools, we are seeing ordinary people increasingly becoming excluded from the homeownership and the single-family income prosperity that characterized the post-war boom, so we need a band-aid for opportunity exclusion that we can call Inclusion. With an increasingly monochrome and highly remunerated pragmatic CEO class running all our institutional contexts, we need a band-aid for mindless pragmatic conformism that we can call Diversity. Hence DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is the ideal robe that both the centre-left and the centre-right can dress themselves in to try and look moral (without it costing them anything, and without changing their pragmatic Realpolitik commitment to preserving their own power interests). The Centre is now addicted to DEI virtue signalling, and this is increasingly not washing with the discontented electorate. 

Butler wants the label of far-Right bigotry to be pasted onto all expressions of suspicion towards DEI virtue signalling Centrism. The problem Butler has here is that there are obviously traditional Lefties who oppose the postmodern gender ideology on which DEI virtue signalling is premised. So, painting traditional gender-critical Lefties as far-right Christians is (though a complete lie) a good strategy. Working on the extremely limited post-1960s outlook on what a real Progressive is (i.e., an anti-Christian atheist), Butler locates something that both gender-critical Lefties and theologically conservative Christians agree on—that there is a real sex binary—as the ideal tool to smear gender-critical lesbian feminism with. This is all optics, all rhetoric, all brazen performative branding for an entirely pragmatic and manipulative political victory, but Butler has good reason to think it will work, at least in the heavily post-Christian academy. But will it work with most ordinary heteronormative people? Will it really hold in the electorate? 

The question of what happens to women’s safety if we replace sex with gender identity is Butler’s real obstacle to a queer cultural revolution. And this is a topic that unites traditional progressive feminists, conservative Christians, and ordinary family people who may have very little direct contact with the worlds of academia, power, and privilege. But the Centre is being questioned, if not yet abandoned, by gender-critical people, be they progressive feminists, conservative Christians, or ordinary family people. At some point, the Centre will follow the people if the people cannot be forced into going along with the Centre’s convenient rainbow-washing of its incredibly Monochrome, Unequitable, and Divisive reality. The real god (DEI) of the Rainbow movement is MUD. And this mud does not cover the naked amoralism and anti-humanism of contemporary Centrist politics. 

One final point. 

I am a great admirer of Kathleen Stock’s and Holly Lawford-Smith’s Gender Critical Feminism, and I am a theologically conservative Christian. At a grass-roots level, there are still a lot of Christians in the West. Further, the deep heteronormative grooves of Western family life still have strong resonances with their Christian origins. Butler very much does not want any serious alliance of interests to grow between Gender Critical Feminism and the Christian theological significance of the sexed human body as a divine sacrament. 

Genesis 1:27 states “So God created man in his own image; male and female he created them.” In Matthew 19:4, Jesus of Nazareth echoes this anthropology thus: “… He who made them from the beginning, made them male and female…” The human sex binary is a sacred carrier of the image of God to traditional Christians. Contemporary secular feminists often have all sorts of problems with Christian anthropology, Christian sexual ethics, and Christian understandings and marital roles, but on a commitment to the reality of the natural sex binary, gender-critical feminism and conservative Christianity are of one mind. 

As a Christian theologian, I would say to gender-critical feminists, do not let Butler drive a wedge between us on this important matter. And when it comes to grassroots mobilization, do not fear Christians, and do not fear to be tainted by Christian association. For God’s sake, Christianity really is an extremely broad church where we almost never agree with each other on a broad range of critical issues. Not even Catholics have to agree with the Pope on everything he writes, so you do not need to agree with everything Christians believe to have a common cause with some Christians on some topics of concern. 

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