Changing times

As regular readers here know, although I am decidedly not an Evangelical Christian (I'm of the Episcopalian flavor of believer), I try to track how political and social trends are roiling my frequently estranged co-religionists.

There's a rather nice survey article in the New York Times today about how matters of sex and gender are vexing Evangelical educational institutions. If interested, it's here.

But just as I got into reading it, this almost throwaway sentence grabbed my attention:

Moody [Bible Institute], like many evangelical and fundamentalist schools, adheres to a “complementarian” theology of gender — meaning that God created men and women for separate, complementary roles in family and church life.

Yikes! -- we apparently now live in a world in which a particular, by implication contestable, definition of "gender" has to be spelled out to ensure the reader knows just what is being discussed. Twenty, or certainly forty, years ago what is spelled out here would have been simply the nature of "reality." But no longer.

That makes me glad. Our broad social understanding of "gender" is becoming inexorably enlarged, even among people who are neither much thinking about the matter and/or who feel no personal need for changes. That's how change works.