I Got a Degree in Religious Studies, and Here I Am Still Studying Religion

Maybe it wasn’t such a useless degree after all

I’ve always said that my bachelor’s degree in religious studies was useless but that I don’t regret it. I learned a lot and I credit it with the way I think and the perspective I have on the world. Still, my degree wasn’t exactly practically applicable. I went on to become a content writer and, while going to university certainly helped improve my writing, my degree wasn’t essential to my subsequent career path.

Nowadays, it seems like all I do is talk and write about religion, specifically gender religion.

My interest in religion is likely a big part of what drove me to the debate around gender ideology in the first place. This strange new belief system with its thought-terminating mantras became fascinating to me. The day I truly realized that some people actually meant “trans women are women”—as in, really meant it and weren’t just saying it as a social nicety—my world was shattered.

How could this really be what some people believe? I thought. How could they believe it enough to think men in women’s sports, in women’s rape shelters, and in women’s prisons were good ideas?

I instantly recognized this as magical thinking, but it took a long time for me to start seeing it as religious or at least quasi-religious thinking. I actually have a great deal of respect for religion. I didn’t study it because I hate it, after all. I found it to be a gateway to philosophy, history, culture, psychology, and humanity itself. I was exposed to religious texts and ideas that sought to answer or at least explore some of the deepest questions about life and existence. I didn’t have to take a single course in the actual philosophy department itself to be exposed to some of humanity’s foundational philosophical works, so tied they are with religious thought.

It almost hurts my heart to compare gender ideology to the remarkable human endeavor I devoted my studies to.

Sure, it's easy enough to make parallels between the magical incantation, “trans women are women,” and beliefs like transubstantiation, when the bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Christ. But gender ideology and its meaningless clichés and empty beliefs lack anything as profoundly resonating as the Bible, whatever you might think and believe about it, or the centuries of religious and deeply philosophical works Christianity produced.

Parallels can be drawn with other religious traditions as well. I’ve come to see a very surface-level similarity to Buddhist ideas of the self, wherein the illusory individual can’t be separated from the skandhas, or aggregates, that constitute one’s being and personality. Consider the reliance on external affirmation of “gender identity,” and on external factors like a haircut, makeup, and choice of clothing and accessories for expressing one’s “gender expression.”

But to compare gender ideology any further to Buddhism and its astronomical breadth of thought and written works would be to do Buddhism a criminal disservice.

And sure, gender ideology hasn’t had the thousands of years of other religions to build out a similar corpus, but could it ever? Could silly ideas about humans changing sex by virtue of self-declaration or about sex not even being real ever make the human soul sing and aspire to produce what religion has in the world? No—I don’t think it could hold a candle to them. Even if you think little of religious stories and myths, these silly ideas can’t compare to the idea that God came and died for our sins so that we might have salvation, that the Buddha taught the path to end suffering, or that the 330 million gods of Hinduism are all manifestations of Brahman, the ultimate ground of reality.

Gender ideology doesn’t offer any kind of transcendence, not to mention anything akin to forgiveness or salvation. However, I believe that part of its appeal is that it at least pretends to offer a type of transcendence in the form of counterfeit mysticism.

As I wrote in a previous piece, Woman Undefined, gender ideology often uses faux-mystical language, especially when talking about what it is to be a woman, but this is a problem because:

A real-life woman is not a transcendental and ineffable entity. Pretending that a woman is something which can’t be defined doesn’t elevate or liberate women in the here and now of physical reality.

On the contrary—treating womanhood as a transcendental experience denigrates and subjugates actual female human beings. The idolization of what it means to identify as female requires us to dehumanize what it means to literally be one.

The physical needs, safety, privacy, and dignity of female human beings pale in comparison to the mystical wonder and power of the mystical woman.

I don’t believe that the obtuse language gender ideology uses to talk about women is comparable to the real mystical traditions of the world, which point to something beyond but tend not to make the mistake of demanding we live according to it in the physical here and now. By demanding that everyone else comport themselves to an individual’s inner, quasi-mystical knowing, it is esoteric rather than truly mystical.

My friend and editor Matt Osborne explores this thread in his excellent piece 'Gender Identity' Is A New Gnostic Gospel, where he states:

“Trans women are women, trans men are men” is a gnostic statement. It presupposes a division of the body from the thinking being — the definitive sophistry of esotericism.

And

Blank slates. Microidentities. Neogenders. Cartesian dualism of the gendered soulbeing. All brought to you by the incredible power of ‘the new printing press’ to bring people together, sure, but not always for good reasons, or with good ideas. All the estimable aspects of religion — forgiveness, mercy, conscience, empathy — are absent, or else weaponized. Our new social justice priesthood demands sacrifices, obedience, silence of all doubt, or else.

Gnosticism was one area that my studies didn’t cover in any great depth. I remember learning about it for one or two days in a course on early Christianity, but that’s about it. Matt’s writing in this area is endlessly fascinating to me and well worth reading, if you haven’t already.

To be clear, I’m not saying that religion is all good and wonderful. As acutely as I am aware of and admire the positives of religion, I know all about its negatives, and with a broader scope than many. While we here in the West love to denigrate Christianity, no faith has a clean record. People acting on religious convictions have been responsible for atrocities. When fired up by religious fervor humans, are very effective at dehumanizing others. Through religion, humanity often shows its darkest side.

As Matt points out, this is where gender ideology seems to truly mirror religion, in its many negative aspects: sacrifice, obedience, silence. Its adherents, fired up with fervor against “bigots” and “transphobes,” dehumanize these perceived enemies to a shocking degree. Women caged with violent male rapists don’t matter, and speaking up for them makes you a fascist. In fact, women trying to speak at all deserve to be mobbed by a violent crowd.

And let’s not forget that in the name of Holy Gender, we are sacrificing a generation of children. When the spirit of Gender Identity is recognized in children who are gender non-conforming and disproportionately autistic, they become something akin to little prophets. Their words and declarations of identity become sacred utterances, not to be questioned.

There are parallels to draw here between “trans kids” and the Dalai Lama, which is exactly what Matt did in his piece A God-Child At 87:

Tibetan god-children can be chosen as young as 2, or about the same age that children learn to say “no” and use pronouns, because the spirit of the dead Lama has entered the mother’s womb during pregnancy, which is a bit rapey but makes some rational sense.

If I seem flip, it is only because the outcome for the child, in the form of a childhood, is so horrific. Upon selection, using the ascribed personality characteristics of the previous Lama as a subjective guide, the new Lama is no longer even a human child at all, any more, but a little Buddha.

In my opinion, gender ideology is rightly termed as an ideology, but it definitely begins to step over into the dark side of religious territory, especially in its completely dehumanized view of children. “Gender identity”—that bastardized version of the eternal soul—is valued over everything else, even the healthy body of a growing child.

At best, gender ideology is a husk of religious thought, presenting itself as something to fill the hollow core many people, especially young people, find themselves with today. Unfortunately, that shambling husk has nothing of real substance to offer.