A person’s sex, male or female, is a bodily fact—a matter of DNA, chromosomes, and plumbing. Whereas a person’s gender (Facebook says there at least 58 different ones) is a mental construct. There’s a huge difference between the two ideas—revolutionary in fact.

Sixty years ago the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary did not list “sex” as a meaning of “gender” at all. Today it’s common to hear them used synonymously, with more and more subtle social pressure (political correctness) pushing “gender” to the forefront as the everyday personal identifier and confining “sex” solely to denote intimate relations between individuals. That didn’t just happen by accident. There’s an agenda.

You hear otherwise-thoughtful conservatives adopting this new fashion in language. I’ve even heard it from pastors who are biblically grounded in “male and female created He them” and thus certainly know better. I guess they think they’re just being polite and keeping up with the times. But they are doing much, much more. Something radical.

Why? Because the effect of inviting all persons to answer the “who am I” question according to gender, a mental construct, rather than according to sex, a bodily fact, is that everyone is told to self-invent. And self-invention destabilizes everything. Everything.

Reality-based objectivity is replaced with unbounded subjectivity. The family, the core institution of all civilization and all human flourishing, is dealt another devastating blow. No more of “It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves” (Psalms 100:3). Now we do make ourselves, each of us just as we please.

Theology, anthropology, and even biology as we have known them for millennia are out the window. Left to reign in their place are psychology, mythology—and dare we say it, demonology—for the affront to God and the harm to persons which this involves are straight from Satan himself.

The conceptual sleight-of-hand by which “gender” has been made first identical to, and now linguistically preferable to, “sex” is the work of radical antinomians who hate the Creator and His creation as the Bible—and eons of common sense—have presented them to us. It’s a symptom of the mad, debauched, rebellious chaos that St. Paul diagnoses in Romans 1.

Bottom line: “gender” is a propaganda term, a tool of mind-manipulation. Liberal revisionist Christianity, certainly including Christian Science, is gullibly susceptible to this, even eager for it. You and I as faithful, obedient biblical Christians should recognize it for the danger that it is, and resist it with all our might.