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“Well, it goes back to the first book — Genesis: male and female, he made them,” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) after Congress voted to ban transgender women from women’s sports. “This is pretty clear, I mean I’m not sure there’s another interpretation, but everybody’s open to interpreting Scripture however they will. … we know it from our religious tradition, which I believe is the truth — I’m a Bible-believing Christian and make no apology about that.”
That is a confession. Not just of his faith, but of wrongdoing. Johnson, a Christian Nationalist, cites his holy book as the basis for legislation, claiming to know the truth about the physical realities of the world and biology because of his religion. He admits that other interpretations exist, but declares only his to be true and correct. The House speaker is confessing that he’s imposing his narrow religious doctrine on us all, using the law. And he’s abusing the power of a government office — an office empowered by “We the People,” all the people — to do so.
President Donald Trump’s executive order on gender, while less explicit, does precisely the same thing. The order sets up a specter — “gender ideology” — and declares that the federal government will “recognize two sexes, male and female.” Months earlier, Trump was a bit more explicit when he promised to “take historic action to defeat the toxic poison of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, male and female.”
If there were any doubt about Trump’s justification, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Director Scott Turner clarified the point in a press release: “We, at this agency, are carrying out the mission laid out by President Trump on January 20th when he signed an executive order to restore biological truth to the federal government. This means recognizing there are only two sexes: male and female. It means getting government out of the way of what the Lord established from the beginning when he created man in His own image.”
Trump himself again invoked religion in his joint address to Congress in March, telling children: “you are perfect, exactly the way God made you.” Now, I’m no Christian, but it seems to me that, if there is a god and it happens to be the Christian understanding of god, they also made people transgender. Surely that interpretation makes as much theological sense as Trump’s.
The Trump administration’s selective enforcement of religious law via the civil law is contrasted by the variety of other religions, and other interpretations of Christianity, that don’t adhere to this narrow Christian Nationalist concept of gender.
Back when I was a Grand Canyon tour guide, I spent some time on the Navajo reservation and made a few friends, including Gary, the 6’6” concierge at a Tusayan hotel who called himself, “Gary, the big gay Navajo.” Gary explained to me that gender in the Navajo culture was less dichotomous and more fluid, and that those who expressed elements of both male and female were seen as holy. Nontraditional genders and gender roles even played a part in the Navajo creation stories as Gary told them. Gender variation was not something to be otherized, but revered.
When the Catholic missions came to the American Southwest, so did the unyielding binary gender ideology. “Prior to forced conversion to Christianity and Western culture, many tribes didn’t see gender as strictly binary. Instead, they included a variety of genders we now refer to as Two Spirit,” wrote Christine Diindiisi McCleave (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) when executive director of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. These days, it’s easy to imagine conquistadors riding into a new land and imposing a conservative religious ideology about gender on people of other religions and cultures.
Other religions have similarly expansive beliefs. “Speaking from my perspective as a Hindu theologian and practitioner,” wrote Anantanand Rambachan, a professor emeritus of religion at St. Olaf College, “my tradition recognizes that human sexual orientation is diverse and not just heterosexual. Ancient texts enlarge our thinking about sexual identity with categories, like that of third-nature persons (tritiya prakriti), that go beyond the usual binaries and refute the idea that there are only two sexes. Sex diversity is regarded as a part of natural human diversity.”
I asked the Rev. Selena Fox, senior minister and high priestess of Circle Sanctuary, which is a Nature Spirituality church, Pagan resource center and nature preserve, about how Paganism or Wicca approaches gender. She replied: “Perspectives regarding gender and gender identity vary across Christianity and other world religions, including ancient and contemporary forms of Nature religion. However, widespread among Nature Spirituality communities and practitioners in the USA and around the world is the valuing of the inherent dignity and worth of human beings and the support of human rights.”
Fox is a member of AU’s Faith Advisory Council, and her likeness was used in a deep fake video by anti-trans bigots to attack Rachel Levine, then President Joe Biden’s assistant secretary for health and one of the only openly transgender federal officials.
As Fox noted, the theology of gender differs across Judaism and Christianity, too. Reform Judaism and some liberal Christian denominations are more welcoming of those who don’t conform to the gender binary.
The Rev. Dr. Shannon Fleck, the new executive director of Faithful America, explained it like this: “The gender binary has been an inaccurate social construct consistently reinforced by systems that enforce hierarchical structures in order to retain control and power; Jesus came to topple those systems. As followers of the way of Jesus, Christians are called to love our neighbor, but most especially our neighbors attacked by hierarchical structures seeking to ostracize people for power and control. As Christians, we are called to love, affirm, and uplift ALL God’s children as we have ALL been ‘made in the image of God.’”
And, of course, whatever organized religion says about an issue, in this country, its adherents are free to agree, disagree or simply change their beliefs. That’s one of the great beauties of this American experiment in religious freedom: we’re all free to change.
At the Summit for Religious Freedom, April Ajoy talked about being raised in Christian Nationalism as a preacher’s kid. She was as fervent, devout and Christian Nationalist as one can be, from attending Dallas Baptist and Regent University to singing “America Say Jesus” on the Jim Bakker Show (she showed us the clip). So when April’s spouse Beecher started openly struggling with gender dysphoria, they “didn’t have the language for it because we grew up in the church and anytime we went and talked to anybody about what this was, we were just told ‘Oh it’s just a demon, you’re going to want to pray that away.’” April and Beecher had religious gender ideals imposed on them — not by the government, but by their families, churches and religious schools.
They went a different route with their children. April explained how easy it was for their children to accept what April and Beecher had been incapable of even naming because “hate is taught.” And they didn’t teach their children to hate, so while every adult in their lives required explanations and deep conversations, the kids “were like, ‘Okay, cool.’”
The multiplicity of religious beliefs about gender is fascinating. And the freedom of people in this country to hold those divergent and opposing views is only guaranteed because we have separated church and state. It’s unclear to me how the theological diversity regarding gender compares to the diversity on other issues, but the relevant concern is that our government is selecting one belief amid the myriad options and declaring that belief to be the law because their deity or holy book declares it so. And if there’s any doubt that’s what our government is doing, please refer back to the doctrinal confessions that open this story.
Fighting for the separation of church and state — as we do every day at AU — means we are fighting a human rights battle on one of its most important fronts. We are fighting for everyone’s freedom to live as themselves and believe as they choose, so long as they don’t harm others. And when government officials abuse the limited power we have granted to the office they temporarily occupy to impose a narrow religious doctrine on people in every zip code, those officials are trampling our freedom. Not just the freedom of a small, vulnerable group of folks — which in and of itself is inadmissible — but also the freedom of each and every one of us.
That is not an abuse of power I am willing to abide.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit educational and advocacy organization that brings together people of all religions and none to protect the right of everyone to believe as they want — and stop anyone from using their beliefs to harm others. We fight in the courts, legislatures, and the public square for freedom without favor and equality without exception.
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Religious beliefs about gender vary; Christian Nationalism imposes a singular view – Americans United
ByEric Djirackor
Nov 19, 2025