There are only two genders, a group of Christians in Norway declares
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store (left) embraces the rainbow activist. Also Crown Princess Mett-Marit (right) is going to do that. And Crown Prince Haakon (centre) gives support from behind. Still, not everybody in Norway is convinced of the rainbow logic. Photo EPA, Javad Parsa
Northern Europe
In Norway, 36 Christian organisations and denominations published a joint statement this week against the modern gender understanding. The statement says this ideology is problematic, confusing, and destructive. However, the government of Norway showed its distaste for the declaration.
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There are just two sexes in the whole of humanity: male and female. They are part of God’s creation design. God has given the marriage of man and wife as the only place for sexual activity. Family is “divinely ordained” and the preferred form of living together and raising children.
Very shortly, this is the content of the Joint Christian Declaration on Diversity of Gender and Sexuality. The whole text is short, too. It has four sections: the Bible, the biology, the child and the core values. In each section, a few statements are given. The authors have worked on this text since late May, spokesperson Øivind Benestad tells CNE.news from Norway.
The text came online this Tuesday. The number of supporting organisations started to grow immediately from 31 to the present 36. Mainly because of the participation of the Roman Catholic bishop Eric Varden, the declaration received international publicity, too. “Even the Vatican News wrote about us,” says a surprised Benestad. The text is also available on the website in English and four other languages.
The declaration takes position against the “activism” by the Norwegian state by pushing the message –for instance, in schools– that there are more sexes than two and that you can have your own “interior gender”. Such “pressure” is not teaching kids but confusing them. Sex is not fluid but fixed.
Apart from this, it is beyond the state’s mandate to follow such a gender “ideology” that has “no biological or scientific foundation”. The authors of the declaration know that “an extremely small number” of children in Norway are born with unclearly defined genitalia (10 to 15 babies each year). But this does not change the starting point of the two sexes.
The statement expresses itself very strongly against “depriving children deliberately and intentionally of the right to know their biological mother or father, and their wider families – for example through assisted fertilisation or surrogacy". This goes against the “human right for every child to know and be cared for by his or her parents”, in the words of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Those practices are quite usual to facilitate parenthood for same-sex couples.
According to the Norwegian Christian newspapers Dagen and Vart Land, the supporters of this declaration vary from the conservative Lutherans and mainline Pentecostals to the Roman Catholic bishops in Norway.
The semi-official Lutheran Church of Norway (DNK) was not asked for support. In 2016, this church opened marriage for same-sex people and also participates in the national gay pride. The authors of the statement did not expect the denomination as a whole to sign, but hope separate congregations will. So far, one local congregations has done that, says Øivind Benestad, one of the initiators. “We expect several Church of Norway congregations to join us. To ask the whole denomination would be almost crazy, seeing the woke character of much of the DNK today.”
The authors of the Norwegian declaration refer to an earlier statement from 2016. Øivind Benestad says the declaration from 2016 was supported by more or less the same denominations and organisations. “The main difference is that we have included text about sex and gender confusion now.”
There came some negative reactions in the days after the publication this week. For instance, Elisabeth Meling, from the Christian gay network, said the text caused a “trauma” in her since she had bad experiences in a church environment as a transgender. According to Vart Land, she regrets that so many people agree with the idea that “everything that differs from the traditional core family is a deviation.”
Another negative reaction came from the government. Minister Lubna Jaffery (Culture and Equality) called the statement “scandalous” because there is a “broad professional consensus” that gender is more complex than the two sexes. “Queer Christians cannot feel particularly welcome in those organisations”, she said, according to Vart Land. She adds that the Norwegian society is “beyond” the debate that the people behind the statement try to have.
Spokesman Benestad says that Minister Jaffery “is not in real contact with the churches”, he says to CNE. “It might be politically correct to say that there is a diversity of biological sexes. Perhaps she confuses this with gender identities. But to claim that there is consensus among professional scientists that there are more than two sexes is just nonsense.”
In the past, Christian declarations about traditional marriage and Biblical sexual ethics have not always been successful. In the Netherlands, publication of the Dutch version of the Nashville Declaration ended in a national scandal in January 2019. Almost all politicians –including Prime Minister Mark Rutte– distanced themselves from the ‘discriminatory thinking’ of this ‘fundamentalist’ statement, and even a criminal complaint was filed against the publishers.
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