It was the African American social commentator Candace Owens who once quipped:

‘Telling children they can pick their gender is as fundamentally stupid as telling children they can choose their species. If we did, we’d have classrooms filled with mermaids, aquamen, wizards, gnomes, fairies, and aliens.’ 

And it was David Gunnlaugsson writing in the UK Spectator who said:

‘If Jordan Peterson can fill big venues with his message of the importance of taking responsibility – and base his views to a great extent on scripture – then why can’t the church do the same? Rather than aggravating its followers, the church can become an answer to the angst and extremism of our times. Christianity has stood the test of time, but a church that seeks to appease the zeitgeist of the time, rather than stick to its principles, will not.’

Put the two together – a Woke church with radical trans ideology – and you have a whole world of ideological confusion.

When the church sells its soul in order to be hip, trendy, cool, and ‘relevant’, you can be sure it has become as lost as any pagan will ever be. We have seen countless examples of the church imbibing of the secular Left’s radical agenda, including all things Woke. The latest should come as no surprise. The Church of England has been on a long, slow, downward spiral. Its current inanity is simply another indication of a church that has well and truly lost its way.

Essentially, The Church of England no longer appears to know what a woman is. Or at least, some within its ranks have gone down this moronic path. For a church that was proud of how it treated women and sought to put them in leadership positions, to all of a sudden forget how to define one, is the height of Woke insanity.

Consider how one English newspaper puts it:

The Church of England has admitted it does not have a definition of the word woman. A bishop said yesterday that the meaning of the word used to be ‘self-evident’. But he added that there are now ‘complexities associated with gender identity’ which a church project about sexuality and relationships is exploring. The admission, in an official report prepared for the gathering of its governing body this weekend, stirred criticism last night. It comes despite Anglicanism continuing to oppose same-sex weddings – and only recently allowing women to be bishops.

Campaigner Maya Forstater said: ‘When the Government redefined women through the Gender Recognition Act, the Church of England could have stuck with its long-established understanding, which makes sense whether your starting point is biology or the Bible. ‘It is shocking that they so readily gave up the definition of man or woman for the state to amend, as if this fundamental truth did not matter.’

And Rev Angela Berners-Wilson, who in 1994 became the first woman ordained as an Anglican priest, told The Telegraph: ‘I’m not totally happy with it. I mean, I do think certain things like “men can’t have babies”, just to say the complete obvious thing.’ But she added: ‘But I think we need to be very sensitive and maybe we need to re-examine our boundaries.’ It comes after months in which the definition of the word woman has gripped politics. Several Labour MPs refused to define it, while leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was wrong to claim that only women could have a cervix.

By contrast, Cabinet ministers have been clear that biology defines women and that anyone born male should not compete against women in sport. The church was put on the spot in one of almost 200 questions submitted to its ‘parliament’, the General Synod, in York this weekend. 

Good grief. No, complexities are not involved here. Men and women are different, and always have been. Yes, there is the case of those in the intersex condition where there can be ambiguous genitalia and the like, but that is extremely rare with intersex individuals forming a medically separate category to trans.

Exceptions do not make the rule.

Folks today have embraced self-identification in regards to gender, meanwhile we have churches that are so unsure of their basic beliefs that they are happy to go along with these declarations.

Ignoring the facts when it comes to sex, biology, and reality is destructive – as the conversation surrounding women’s sports and spaces has shown. If churches are having a hard time telling us what a woman is, that is because these same churchmen have been struggling of late to tell us what biblical Christianity is. The two seem to go together.

At this point it is worth drawing upon the significant social thinker and Catholic commentator Anthony Esolen. In his incisive 2017 volume Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, he has a chapter on the sexual revolution and the war on innate sexual differences.

This is a chapter the morally myopic, spiritually befuddled, and rather dim-witted bishops in the Church of England really need to carefully peruse. In it he has a section titled Male and Female He Created Them. Hmm, sounds sorta biblical. But long ago many of these Anglicans actually stopped believing the Bible. Anyway, here is how Esolen starts his discussion:

First, let us establish that there are such things as the sexes. Some critics say that the modern world is obsessed with sex. That is not true. The modern world is obsessed with excitations and with “identities.” It has huddled itself into deliberate ignorance as regards sex. It is not puritanical about the beast with two backs. It is a veritable shrinking flower when it comes to actually seeing and appreciating the sexes for what they are.

I mean this quite literally. We are taught from the time we enter the indoctrination centers that the only differences between men and women are trivial matters of plumbing. It is not true.

When the European missionaries came to the new world to evangelize the natives, they did not find creatures of a different species. They found human beings, male and female. They did not find any tribes in which the women met in council, hunted the large animals, smoked the peace pipe, trained up their daughters in savage displays of physical courage and endurance (the ‘sun dance’ of the Plains Indians, for example) and established elaborate hierarchies of honor. They did not find any tribes in which the men took care of small children, gathered roots and berries, made themselves up with pretty decorations to delight their women, ground corn kernels to powder to make bread or paste, carried water while the women were singing war-songs, gossiped with one another to share the news and to keep daily morals in line, and made ‘nests’, as it were, as clean and neat as possible, for the sake of the little ones, and because that is the way they liked things best.

They found men and women. That is what you will find wherever you go in the world…

Men and women are different from one another, down to the roots – down to the cells. We have merely trained ourselves not to see it or not to admit it when we see it. It is a willed stupidity. It is also a willed grimness, a willed refusal to delight in the natures God has given us. There is nothing glad or merry about it.

When our church leaders cannot or will not tell us what a woman is, then you know it is high time to get out of their churches, and find ones that do know.

Lord have mercy on the Church of England.