Idolatry of Idiocy: The Church’s Anti-Trans Tyranny
Barron Mind: A Series of Grievances
On all things wrong (and some things right) with the Catholic Church...
2022 was the year of the transphobic temper tantrum, and unfortunately the Catholic Church was no exception. While I’ve alluded to such bigotry in the past, I’ve admittedly dragged my feet in addressing the issue head on. For one thing, I’ve just been too pissed off: I try to bring some measure of levity to these ecclesiological excursions, but given the putrification of doctrinal and scientific errancy into real-world violence, I’ve struggled to muster much more wit or insight than a hearty “fuck off.” For another, there is a nominal medicinal quality to these fulminating epistles, however medieval, like little maggots nibbling away at the Church’s spiritual and intellectual necrosis. Yet this issue perhaps like no other makes me want to go full League of Shadows and declare it “is beyond saving and must be allowed to die”.
But disengaging only further emboldens rightwing knuckle-draggers to claim Jesus, and the Church founded in his name, for their own shitty politics of heteronormative grievance. Take the backlash against the trans man who recently took to Twitter to proclaim his love for Christ. It came predominantly from LGBTQ+ community and the left, and look, it’ complicated: many people have been actively harmed by Christianity, and rightly don’t appreciate feeling like they’re being “evangelized.” At the same time, though, many people, including LGBTQ+ people, find hope and healing through faith in Jesus, and because of it feel alienated and ostracized both within and beyond the Church.
On both counts, that’s largely because of people like Bishop Barron and his ministry of theological miscreants, Word on Fire, which most recently published a new anti-"woke" video series, “Idolatry of Identity: Progressive Wokeist Ideology and the Catholic Response.” As previously written, Barron already fucked around and accidentally made the case for “wokeism” as a Gospel imperative, but this series of pseudo-intellectual “lectures” (seriously, fuck off) by Dr. Matt Petrusek of Loyola Marymount University only heightens the absurdity–and hate.
The Audacity of Dopes
Petrusek’s effort to weaponize the term “identity” is itself deeply laughable. Not only is “idolatry of identity” (be it religious, racial, gender, or class) the stock and trade of the WOF bridge trolls, but his opening dig at advancing political goals by “incanting a spell-like litany of endlessly ambiguous words that supply immediate and unquestionable moral supremacy over your ideological rivals” quite aptly applies to that “Progressive Wokeist Ideology” subtitle. Indeed, from the get-go Petrusek engages in snarky, bad faith (and bad faith) sophistry to attack what he terms “progressivism” or “wokeism,” taking pithy aim at terms like “intersectionality,” “transphobia” and “misgendering” (I’m sure his classes at LMU are delightful.)
Like all things Barron, the petulance would be laughable were the underlying agenda not so dangerous. In the case of Petrusek, whatever he is building to in his 10-part schlockumentary (only three have been released at the time of this writing), he precedes it with a November 2022 christo-fathead screed on the WOF website, “Ambiguous Words Invite Bad Actions.” In it, he makes the case against himself, tossing out meaningless conservative trigger terms like “gender ideology” to whip up fear and outrage against the alleged “poisoning and mutilation of healthy human bodies, including children’s bodies.”
Despite being hosted by a man who thinks words like “opprobrium” elevate 8chan hate speech to academic rigor, in a Tweet promoting the endeavor WOF had the audacity to frame the series as an explication of Catholic Social Teaching aimed at addressing injustice. These shenanigans are to be expected: Barron’s Catholic Brocial Reaching and Benedickish interpretation of Vatican II are meant to muddy and corrode those tenets of the faith anathema to their Pants on Fire misanthropy. Again, not with any intellectual integrity, and always with a wink to the right. For instance, even though here he produces a series ostensibly grounded in CST hosted by an even more ostensible “ethicist,” in August 2022 Barron went on Fox News to say although there’s “nothing wrong with ethics or social justice” (that you even need to clarify), Vatican II saw the Church “reduced” to these concepts and “caving in to the very relativistic culture.”
Of course, couching your own effort to oppress and marginalize trans people in a tradition which proclaims “every person is precious” is its own kind of moral relativism, but that’s the thing: for all Barron’s purported efforts to make the faith “beautiful and intellectually compelling” (again, on Fox News, whose viewers hate both beauty and intellect), it all sort of amounts to specious drivel.
Gender absolutism: The Frankenstein of Christian queer panic
Which makes sense in the case of the “gender binary,” because the arguments, be they theological or scientific, are profoundly stupid. In Christianity, it all hinges on the story of Adam and Eve, a creation (and procreation) myth which the Catholic Church hasn’t taken literally since it lifted its ban on works by Copernicus in the (embarrassingly late) 19th Century. Yet while we no longer claim the sun rotates around the Earth or the world was created in six days, when it comes to gender, the Church seeks to elevate “boys have pee-pees and girls don’t” to high-minded exegesis.
As with most of the Church’s muddled sexual politics, it holds little theological water. Genesis doesn’t say people can only be made male or female, or that this distinction has anything to do with their reproductive organs. In fact, given that Adam was created before “female” even existed as a concept, who’s to say he had a penis at all? Maybe that all came later. Or maybe, just maybe, Genesis itself is an allegorical theological exercise, seeking through observation and imagination to name and respond to a universe created and infused with the agency of God (rather than prescribe and invent reality whole cloth). Because if not, where do celibate priests and religious fit into the Genesis paradigm? Why does Mary, (allegedly) ever-Virgin, not “be fertile and multiply” with Joseph for whom she was supposedly made? Why does Jesus himself, while becoming “fully human,” (again allegedly) never enter into marriage as the pinnacle of human experience?
The Church, of course, would say such people are answering a higher spiritual calling, Yet, in making this case, it also undercuts holding gender sacrosanct according to biological law. Because, in the Christian imagination, at least, humans aren’t mere animals, we’re spiritual beings, becoming ever less like the beasts over whom we “have dominion” and more like the God who created us . In that context, holding ourselves to the same gender construct we apply to a horny goat makes about as much sense as judging a hyena against the Ten Commandments. All we can truly glean from nature is that reproductive organs exist and can be used for sex, but if you really want to go there, in many cases even those can change depending on environment and reproductive necessity.
“Ladies and gentleman, I’m just a caveman…”
On some level, trans-antagonists and skeptics know gender is a social construct: there are no “trad wives” or self-identified “alphas males” in the animal kingdom; a fruit-bearing tree is only “female” because we say so. As we know, though, none of this matters, at least the likes of Bob Barron or his perennially online cult of cro-magnon bro-stans and racist grandparent donors. They just want facile quips with which to “own the libs.”
And on that measure, Petrusek offers plenty of rancid red meat. His verbose, acrobatic trans-antagonism can basically be reduced to “a man can’t be a woman, that’s just crazy talk!”, and his real beef (see what I did there?) with “progressivism” seems to be that (in his mind, at least) it’s winning: he laments the fact that transphobia, white privilege and patriarchy (“name-calling,” to hear him tell it) are suddenly now seen as bad; he considers the elevation of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion to moral goods as signals of a dystopian world consisting of “no objective rationality below and only a utopian, intersectional sky above.” To him, “wokeism” is now the “dominant ideology in the United States,” “pervasive” in “higher education, entertainment, corporate HR and marketing departments, journalism, professional sports, non-profit foundations and even the government itself” (duh, duh, DUH!!!).
All of these are merely the frightened, confused ramblings of a dude who perceives his white male Christian status as carrying slightly less social capital. He even pisses and moans about various identities not his own receiving “fawning media coverage” and “lavish corporate sponsorship” (Word on Fire continues to be a safe space for wannabe celebrities), and warns that they (God forbid!) even receive “civil legislation to protect [their] political aims” (this from the demographic which owns the Supreme Court). It’s basically an appeal for old school, primordial sexual and racial dominance, but gussied up in academic tassels and sanctified with holy oil. Any loss of status (real or imagined) is a problem not just for guys like Petrusek and Barron on an individual level, but the institutions which insulate them and advance their interests, in this case a US Church hierarchy obsessed with puritanical sexual ethics and allegiant to white heteropatriarchy and the Republican Party.
Gods and monsters
Listen, these videos are terrible and premised on razor-thin arguments, and you will find a greater measure of peace in ignoring them entirely (who’s going to watch ten of these monstrosities, anyway?). But the Church is disseminating and acting upon this hateful ideology in almost prophetic lockstep with their own rotten fruits, whether it’s Barron releasing a video rooted in white grievance and lamenting that “it’s like we’re not in America anymore” one day before the racist mass shooting in Buffalo, NY, or the USCCB electing homophobic bigots as President of their conference and Chair of Evangelization and Catechesis less than a week before the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs.
Club Q offers perhaps the most pointed, damning example. In the wake of the murder of five people and injury of 25 others at the LGBTQ+ nightclub, Denver Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila offered a brief response which failed to address bigotry and took pains to note that “While the motives remain unclear, what is clear is that evil incidents like this have become far too common in our society.” However charitably you want to read this statement, as reported by the Denver Post less than two weeks prior, his Archdiocese had recently recirculated guidance for Catholic schools not to enroll transgender or “gender non-conforming” students, including not re-enrolling such students currently attending (making them literal outcasts).
Actively engaging in anti-trans discrimination then decrying anti-trans violence is kind of like attending the klan rally and wanting a gold star because you left before the lynching. Tellingly, the guidance also included a refusal to acknowledge students by their preferred pronouns, because this is about control, not faith. Even with so much confusion in Catholic schools drawing exactly from the doctrinal ambiguity and theological fuzziness mentioned above, the Church opts to pretend their stances on things like pronouns, deadnaming and bathroom access are rooted in Gospel truths, as opposed to the festering mix of confusion and intolerance it actually is.
And here’s the thing: even if you do believe in gender absolutism as defined by biological sex, you aren’t required to oppress people based on that belief. Quite the contrary, Christ and Church Teaching impel you to stand with them against oppression, just as Catholics all over the world form inter-religious and inter-cultural partnerships to combat repression and violence.
So again I say to our anti-trans bishops and siblings in Christ, “Fuck off.”