This opinion piece previously published in Baptist News Global https://baptistnews.com/article/is-this-really-the-second-most-important-book-of-the-year/ December 11, 2025
I am puzzled that Christianity Today selected The Body God Gives: A Biblical Response to Transgender Theory, by Robert S. Smith, as the second most important book of 2025.
Surely we have more serious concerns than another evangelical attack on LGBTQ people.
In Genesis 2, the poet imagines a scene where God and Adam sit together to “name” all creatures: “Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.” Evangelicals have claimed the right to “name” — label, categorize and classify — everyone.
I can’t imagine the evangelical stance that somehow Christianity never has at any point during the two millennia of its intellectual tradition considered the amazing evolution, diversity and energy of a fully equipped universe. As Aquinas insisted so long ago, “Creation is ongoing,” And the best evangelicals can offer: “You male. You female. Everyone else back in the box.”
Evangelicals have a history of expecting a book to appear as messiah to save the world from evolution. In 1961, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications by Old Testament scholar John Whitcomb and hydraulics engineer Henry Morris was crowned as the messiah destined to restore creationism to its former glory. After the book fell into the wastebasket of old, useless books, Ken Ham gave evangelicals Evolution: The Lie. The most promising of the works was Of Pandas and People. Here at last was the definitive blow against evolution and the elevation of intelligent design.
Yet undeterred by the evidence to the contrary, the editors of Christianity Today have promoted another in the long line of pretentious messiahs. The editors offer a rationale for selecting Smith’s book: “Our Award of Merit goes to Robert S. Smith’s The Body God Gives: A Biblical Response to Transgender Theory. Smith critiques the central claim of transgender theory — that the sexed body is separate from the gendered self — and lucidly points readers to the truth that we receive the bodies God gives as gifts.”
Smith’s conclusion is bland but manages to pass for “common sense” in the alternate universe inhabited by evangelicals. “God’s desire for my gender — that is, whether I should perceive and present myself as a man or a woman — is revealed by the design of my body.”
Robert S. Smith
Credit his willingness to read transgender scholarship, but his conclusions are the same evangelical template. I read the book out of an obligation to fairness, but it was a tedious undertaking akin to sitting through a month of Sunday fundamentalist sermons from my childhood in a single setting.
I have read better books by the dozen than The Body God Gives. For instance, pick up any of the works of N.T. Wright or Rowan Williams and enter a far more theologically sophisticated and erudite world than the one laboring for light in The Body God Gives.
I have much greater interest in what Wright and Williams have to say about transgender people. Like Smith, these highly acclaimed scholars are Anglicans.
For example, in a recent episode of his “Ask N.T. Wright Anything” podcast, a trans female who described herself as a “lover of Christ” called in to ask: “What would the Bible have to say about someone in my case?”
Wright responded: “That whole discourse is very new,” referring to modern ideas around gender identity. “We have to remind ourselves that this is not something for which the older manuals of theology, ethics, etc., would have prepared us.”
Then he added: “Again and again, I want to say, as with Jesus in the Gospels, God meets us where we are and loves us as we are. That’s absolutely vital.”
Wright offered a generous, gospel-centered approach even as he doesn’t state what he believes about transgender identity.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has claimed a transgender person is on “a sacred journey of becoming whole” as he called for the government to cover gender confusion in its ban on conversion therapy.
But none of this matters in the evangelical campaign against transgender people.
“Evangelicals want us to read Scripture as if nothing has changed since the 17th century.”
Evangelicals want us to read Scripture as if nothing has changed since the 17th century. They are like people who thought computers were only a fad and continued to produce ornate cash registers — machines found now only in museums. As surely as I wouldn’t treat one of my children with pneumonia with the blood-draining practice used by doctors on George Washington in the 18th century, I no longer read the Bible as if we have not had more than two centuries of advancement in reading and exegeting the scared texts.
Old Testament professor Ellen Davis suggests “ethical consciousness, informed by prayerful life within the faith community, is a legitimate hermeneutical tool.” New information about the human body, about gender roles and sexuality have become part of the canon of knowledge. These new insights, applied to Scripture, are faithful to the text without harming the text with a crude literalism.
A vast compendium of works in human sexuality exists beyond the pages of Smith’s work yet this is what evangelicals want to hear. The restrictive, closed creation story of evangelicals belongs to an earlier age. We have more exciting options now.
Creation sets up a relationship between God and what is not God. Evangelicals tend to principles over persons. When the starting point is relationship, we are no longer imprisoned by essences. We are free for diversity, change, transformation and newness.
How Christianity Today editors bought into the narrative that Robert Smith’s book about the biblical response to “transgender theory” is one of the two most important things going on in this country over the past 365 days is, as religious people often say, “a mystery.”
