Heresy at the heart of Derek Webb's -"Boys will be Girls"

Watching the music video for the new song “Boys Will Be Girls” by former Caedmon’s Call lead singer Derek Webb, I experienced a strange mixture of disgust, pity, and clarity about the appeal of his message. That message, part of Webb’s new album, The Jesus Hypothesis, is anything but subtle: it’s a celebration of gender transition and drag, written in response to the coming out of a close friend. In the chorus, Webb sings,

Where sometimes, boys will be girls

Sometimes armour will be pearls

What you put on, oh, it shows the world

How hard you’re fighting

Brother, sometimes boys will be girls

Appealing to Jesus

The video is, if possible, even more in-your-face. Webb goes under the brush for his own drag makeover by (self-described) “shame-slaying, hip-swaying heathen” singer-songwriter Flamy Grant (real name: Matthew Blake). It opens with a quotation by progressive pastor Stan Mitchell that reveals something of Webb’s evolved thinking on the church and LGBT+ issues: “If you claim to be someone’s ally, but aren’t getting hit by the stones thrown at them, you’re not standing close enough.”

So Webb shows us how close he’s standing. After Blake plasters him with a wig and layers of flamboyant makeup, both appear on the stage of what looks like an empty church and sing the on-the-nose final verse:

I heard Jesus loved and spent his life with those who

Were abandoned by proud and fearful men

So if a church won’t celebrate and love you

They’re believing lies that can’t save you or them

‘Cause you’re so beautiful by any name

For a guy who grew up hearing Caedmon’s Call hits like “We Delight” on the radio and loved the band’s collaborations with and tributes to the late Rich Mullins, gut punches like this can tarnish what felt like purer years. Webb’s moral deconstruction is neither the highest profile nor the most unexpected in recent memory. But in many ways, it’s one of the most revealing for those who want to understand why LGBT+ ideology has made inroads within evangelicalism.

Musically and instinctively, there’s an appeal to Webb’s message. As he looks you in the eye and sings of love and compassion, as the instrumentals suggest the struggle of a tender soul against cruel and repressive social demands, you feel what he’s saying. 

The lyrics—despite a conspicuous f-bomb—pointedly invoke the listener’s nurturing impulses. It’s not “sometimes men will be women” but “sometimes boys will be girls.” To laugh this off, to ridicule or inwardly gag at this spectacle, feels like attacking something childlike and even pure. 

Webb may be the one caked in makeup, but his song and music video are a calculated dare to critics: Go ahead. Paint yourself as the churchy villain I’m talking about. Be the “proud and fearful” Pharisee who abandons people like me. Jesus won’t.

Webb’s moral deconstruction is one of the most revealing for those who want to understand why LGBT+ ideology has made inroads within evangelicalism.

And yet, stop and remember what we’re talking about. This song celebrates an impossible delusion that has turned society upside down and led to the physical and mental devastation of countless souls, young and old. 

Watching a grown man being painted in an absurd, offensive parody of womanhood should trigger our repulsion, and the fact that he drags Jesus into this delusion makes it sad and sacrilegious. Biblically, theologically, and morally, the claim that Christians can affirm LGBT+ identities, much less assume them ourselves, is indefensible.

Gut-Level Compassion

So why has this claim nevertheless become accepted by many Christians who used to find it indefensible? Why does it hardly feel like news anymore when another Christian artist from my youth group days becomes “affirming”? The answer, I think, is that LGBT-affirming evangelicals, and the LGBT+ movement writ large, appeal to instincts instilled in all of us by Christianity.

In The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality, Glen Scrivener identifies and describes this gut-level reflex all Westerners seem to have:

Notice the instinctive revulsion at the idea of inequality. Those who might never use the word “sacred” in any other setting begin reaching for it. When we fear that the value of equal human worth is under threat, we can’t help but move our language to a religious register. To deny it is sacrilegious. It is a transgression. 

It’s blasphemy.

But blasphemies are committed against religions and gods. What religion or god lies at the heart of LGBT+ ideology, Pride Month, and songs like “Boys Will Be Girls”? 

Scrivener argues that, in a twisted sense, even most of its adherents don’t realize the theology driving the sexual identity movement includes some Christian presuppositions. The movement’s religious-sounding appeals are implicit (and sometimes explicit, in Webb’s case) appeals to Jesus—or at least an incomplete caricature of him.

After all, Jesus taught love, compassion, and inclusion. In parables like the Good Samaritan, he taught a kind of human equality (everyone in need is my neighbour!). Much to the chagrin of his pious Jewish audience, he taught that these values were significantly applicable to despised classes and those on the social and religious margins.

Thanks to Jesus’s resurrection and the subsequent explosion of Christianity, this ethic would go on to upend the Greco-Roman world. It would shape the values of Western civilization for most of two millennia. 

And as Scrivener and authors like Tom Holland have argued, vestiges of it would stubbornly cling to Western societies long after the West had rejected the underlying theology. Whether we realize it or not, something inescapably Christian is in “the air we breathe.” Scrivener argues that our so-called culture wars can be understood as “one set of Christian-ish instincts clashing with another” so that many of our debates “involve devout believers hurling Bible verses at one another—they’ve just forgotten the references.”

Telling the Truth in Love

We have a name for half-remembered doctrines aggressively insisted upon: heresy.

As G. K. Chesterton observes in Orthodoxy, “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”

Heresy happens when the both ends of theology (e.g., Christ’s humanity and divinity, God’s love and judgment) are turned into either-ors or when certain teachings of Christ are weaponized against others.

That’s the heresy Webb promotes when he invokes biblical love commands but rejects biblical teaching on sex and gender.

Scripture and general revelation both clearly teach that God created male and female humans for marital union and procreation. Tempered by these creational truths, Christians understand that, while LGBT-identifying individuals deserve love and compassion and need the gospel, their lifestyles distort God’s plan for his image-bearers. 

Divorced from God’s design, however, the Christianity-rooted instincts toward compassion and inclusion often undermine human well-being and drive individuals—and whole societies—mad. Like cancer, these values-run-amok bear the genetic imprint of their native body. But unrestrained by that body's ultimate function and purpose, they mutate into something deadly and difficult to contain.

Divorced from God’s design, the Christianity-rooted instincts toward compassion and inclusion often undermine human well-being and drive individuals—and whole societies—mad.

As Pride Month and its demands increasingly invade all of life, Christians must understand the semireligious nature of the culture war we’re fighting. 

Homosexual behaviour and cross-dressing are nothing new, but as Scrivener, Holland, and (I suspect) Chesterton would argue, the way these things are sold today—as a matter of oppressed and outcast minorities in need of compassion and deserving of equality—is new. And that’s because of Christianity.

Understanding this can help us understand why something in “Boys Will Be Girls” tugs at us even as we recoil and why the ideology it represents persuades people from orthodoxy. 

The entire Pride movement is fueled by a twisted form of the ethic Jesus founded when he reached out to those abandoned by proud and fearful men. But Jesus’s ethic was rooted in his Father’s good design, not opposed to it.

No, boys won’t be girls. This is impossible. They will be deluded, sterilized, or surgically damaged boys. But I recognize a fragment of my faith in the movement and music that insists otherwise, which is why I believe the real Jesus, in his compassion, would tell the truth.