When the largest Protestant denomination in the country convenes for its annual meeting, there’s a good chance it’s going to make news no matter what. When that denomination is the culturally and politically pugilistic Southern Baptist Convention, and they opt to discuss religious freedom and transgender issues, the font size of the headlines expands accordingly.
And so, as 5,000 Southern Baptist delegates met in Baltimore last week to elect a new president and debate issues large and small, a resolution affirming that “gender identity is determined by biological sex and not by one’s self-perception” attracted the most mainstream attention by far. The resolution, titled “On Transgender Identity,” explicitly opposes gender re-assignment surgery and hormone therapies, and also decries bullying and abuse of transgender people. It passed overwhelmingly. Critics online, who included many Christians, called it “deplorable,” “heartbreaking madness,” and “harmful to the idea of democracy itself.”
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