We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

Should Christians engage in so-called gender pronoun hospitality?

Gender pronoun hospitality refers to the concept of using someone’s “preferred pronouns” or a trans-identifying person’s transgender name despite otherwise disagreeing with LGBTQ ideology.

God’s truth about human identity and sexuality trumps anything we internally perceive for ourselves.

The idea behind gender pronoun hospitality is that using preferred pronouns or a trans name when requested by LGBTQ-identifying people preserves a relationship with that person. Not to practice gender pronoun hospitality, its practitioners argue, risks offense and, ultimately, the potential destruction of relationship, which could be a barrier between LGBTQ-identifying people and the Gospel. Bible scholar Preston Sprinkle has even described pronoun hospitality as a “common courtesy.”

But according to famed pastor John Piper, Christians should not engage in gender pronoun hospitality — and for good reason.

On a recent episode of his podcast “Ask Pastor John,” Piper answered a question he received from a concerned church elder about gender pronoun hospitality and whether Christians can use it in relationships with non-Christians in evangelism contexts.

What Piper said

At the outset, Piper spotted the problem with the phrase “gender pronoun hospitality.”

He explained that it connects a “beautiful biblical word” (i.e., hospitality) with an “unbiblical concept” (i.e., gender pronoun ideology), which renders the phrase “unhelpful and misleading.”

“We ought to be hospitable, but we ought not to be affirming of pronouns that designate a destructive choice and a false view of reality,” Piper advised. “It is possible to be hospitable and honest.”

Even more important, using “gender” in the context of LGBTQ ideology, Piper said, is a “compromise with sinful views of reality.”

Instead, Christians should use terms for biological sex because it distinguishes between male and female, whereas gender is a “reality-distorting designation.”

He explained:

Gender (as a designation for persons, not grammar) was pushed into our vocabulary by radical feminists fifty years ago, in the seventies, who believed that the givenness of sexual distinctions forever condemned women to kinds of existence they may or may not want. Therefore, to create the freedom to define their existence, “gender” was used as an alternative to “sex” because gender can be chosen and sex can’t be. Sex is bondage; gender is freedom — so it was thought. I think using the word “gender” where the right word is “sex” is like using the word “marriage” for a relationship between two men or two women. It’s not marriage. It is so-called “marriage.”

After advising Christians to be up-front about the Gospel’s “implications and purifying power” in evangelism contexts, thus undercutting one of the primary arguments for gender pronoun hospitality, Piper explained the serious issues with pronoun hospitality.

Most important, Piper said, “it defies God.”

Gender pronoun hospitality, moreover, involves endorsing lies that distort the God-designed true nature of humanity, promotes a “deeply anti-God commitment to human autonomy,” contributes to our culture’s disordered sexuality and persuades more people to become members of it, and situates sexuality as core to human nature, Piper explained.

Another major problem

Practitioners of pronoun hospitality claim not to agree with or to affirm LGBTQ ideology per se.

But here is the major problem: Using the grammar of LGBTQ ideology — like preferred pronouns or a trans-identifying person’s transgender name — affirms the legitimacy of those categories despite their incoherence with objective truth.

This is why professor Carl Trueman, in his book “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,” warns against Christians using the grammar of LGBTQ ideology.

“Societies,” Trueman explains, “have categories for thinking about people and identity, and a real problem occurs when those categories are simply not adequate or appropriate.

“That is the question the church needs to ask about sexual identity: Are the categories that society now prioritizes actually ones that are appropriate?” he asks. “If the post-Freud taxonomy represented by the acronym LGBTQ+ rests on the basic category mistake (that sex is identity), should Christians not engage in a thoroughgoing critique of such and refuse to define themselves within the framework?”

Conceding the “categories” of LGBTQ grammar, Trueman warns, leads to “unfortunate confusion.” It also creates the illusion that one legitimizes not only the categories themselves but the moral and philosophical propositions on which they are built.

That is the exact reason Piper warns against engaging in pronoun hospitality and instructs Christians to think seriously about the implications of such “hospitality” before handing it out.

God’s truth about human identity and sexuality trumps anything we internally perceive for ourselves. Christians must stand on — not compromise — God’s truth.