In February 2022, President Joe Biden nominated Mrs. Ketanji Jackson Brown to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the USA. During the confirmation hearings, she was asked, “What is a woman?”
The learned graduate from Harvard Law School refused to answer on the ground that she is “not a biologist.”
Why don’t the intellectual elite know what a woman is?
Well, the only way to define a woman is to differentiate her from man: Is “female” different from “male”?
If male and female are different, then how can they be same and equal? If they are the same, how can a rationalist define a woman?
Fifty years ago, it would have sounded preposterous that a supreme court nominee could not answer a basic question about the distinction between male and female. How did the West get here? While Carl Trueman has done an admirable job of showing the western philosophical scaffolding that makes transgenderism possible, there is surprising stream of thought that has fed into the larger confusion over male and female: A stream of thought with eastern garb. In this article, I’ll briefly outline how Hindu Monism undermined male-female dualism, renunciation of marriage, and male-female inequality. Finally I’ll outline how Hinduism’s rise in the West became a factor in homosexual and transgender acceptance.
Hinduism and Transgenderism: Unlikely Allies?
Hindu Monism is a crucial factor that explains a Rationalist’s dilemma of defining a woman. The belief that All-is-One suggests that every human being may have male and female chakras (energies). Dualism of male and female—the traditional binary view of gender—may be an illusion, Maya. Monism asserts that there is only one Soul: it is God—Infinite. That divine soul incorporates both male and female within it.
Monism means that every male has female energy (Shakti) within him and every female has male (Shiva) chakra (psychic center) within her.
The Hippies of the 1970s, came to India and learnt Tantra. They were taught that the female chakra lies at the bottom of the spine, a few millimeters above the rectum. It is called Kundalini. The male chakra, Shiva, resides in the crown chakra, on top. According to Hinduism, everyone has both male (Shiva) and female (Shakti) energy centers. Salvation, Enlightenment or Self-realization dawns only when female and male energies merge to become One.
This “Enlightenment” is experienced when one awakens his feminine energy or Kundalini,. For normally it lies dormant, coiled up as a serpent. Meditation awakens the Kundalini. Tantric meditation includes manipulation of one’s genitals. That may require the expertise of a guru or a sex partner—whether male or female, the gender of the partner is irrelevant.
Once awakened, Kundalini, that is, the feminine Shakti, travels up the spine through five different chakras or psychic centers. The meditator gets different psychedelic/occult/mystic experiences when the Kundalini passes through one of these chakras. The climax comes when one’s female energy merges into male energy and the two become one. At that stage, the Enlightened soul experiences its divinity.
This mystical philosophy understands Salvation as Enlightenment, not as forgiveness of sin or a sinner’s reconciliation with his Holy Father. For a Monist, to be saved is to experience or to “Realize” one’s Divinity. It means transcending the finiteness of being male or female; becoming One with everything. Thus, it is somewhat incidental whether a romantic relationship involves a man and a woman, or two men, or two woman—since the ultimate goal is oneness with everything. If two men enter into a homosexual relationship, even in this arrangement one of them experiences himself as a female. But in Hindu Monism, the ultimate belief is that they are neither male nor female, but one with the universe.
Hindu Renunciation of Marriage
Biblical marriage presupposes that each of us is finite. I am male, not female. Therefore, in order to be complete, I need my wife—my better-half. God-likeness means being one with my spouse for the rest of my life. But what if my Self is already Infinite? What if the female is already within me? In that case, I don’t need my wife; I need to experience my own Divinity/Infinity.
It is for this reason that in Hinduism, the mystical quest for Self-Realization begins with renunciation of marriage. That ceremonial Oath of renouncing spouse and family is called taking Sannyas. Abandoning one’s wife and family is called Brahmacharya—a term wrongly translated, “Celibacy.”
In English, Celibacy connotes renunciation of sex. Brahmacharya, on the other hand, harnesses sexual energy to become God or Infinite. Osho Rajneesh (1931–1990), the guru who taught Sex for Salvation, was honest in translating Brahmacharya as neo-sannyas. It is neo-asceticism because it admits that a seeker does not renounce sex. He uses sex to transcend the finite self—the binary view of sexuality as male or female. In his blockbuster novel, Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown expounded Tantric Sex, calling it Gnostic Christianity.
To summarize: some post-Christian intellectuals that believe that male and female are interchangeable, find it difficult to make sense of the dualism of two distinct genders—male and female. They feel that Monism may be a possible explanation against the binary that the Bible enjoins. The problem is that denying the difference between male and female messes up these intellectuals’ traditional definitions of gender, sex, marriage, love, childcare, family or faithfulness. It gets to the point where a person cannot even answer the basis question of what a woman is. Their confusion ends up destroying wisdom and the family—the foundations of society. As the prophets lamented, a people without understanding condemn themselves to self-destruction (Hosea. 4:6, 14).
The “Self-Evident” Problem: Male-Female Inequality
Equality of male and female was never self-evident to any Indian philosophers. These sages invented the theories of Karma and reincarnation to explain the observable, self-evident inequality of male and female. A soul, Indian thinkers taught, was born a female because of its bad karma in previous lives. By performing her duty to serve the male, a female can earn male reincarnation in the next life.
Ask a thoughtful High School student today:
“Is it self-evident to you that all men are created equal?”
His answer is likely to be, “No one is created. We evolved.”
Then the follow up question: “So did everyone evolve equally?”
“That’s impossible! Evolution, like karma, is a theory invented to explain self-evident inequality: some organisms seem to have evolved more than others.”
Then the clincher: “In that case, why did the American Founders declare, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal’ ”?
The USA’s Founders learnt the truth that all men are created equal from the Sacred Scriptures, from George Whitfield’s (1714–1770) preaching ministry throughout the colonies. The assertion was false that it was “self-evident” that all men were created equal. This falsehood was promoted by Deists such as Thomas Paine. Benjamin Franklin got this humanist deception inserted into the Declaration of Independence.
Sadly, America’s Trinitarian theologians promoted the Deist’s error. They claimed that the first two chapters of Paul’s epistle to the Romans teach that human equality and rights are commonsense truths. But Paul knew better: he had to fight to uphold the truth of human equality because it was not self-evident to apostles Peter and James (Acts 10:9–34; Galatians 2:11–14; Acts 15:6–29). The Lord Jesus rebuked Peter’s racial prejudice and commanded him to go to gentile Cornelius’s home. We learn about this human equality from God’s word, not from self-evident truth.
Created human equality is a revealed truth. Making it a commonsense or “self-evident” truth ultimately created the philosophical scaffolding that cost the American Church its universities such as Harvard. Justice Brown’s refusal to define a woman illustrates the fact that without God’s revelation, even elite universities are incapable of teaching the truth that male and female genders are different but equal.
From Trinity To Tantra
In 1893, Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) brought Tantric Hinduism to the USA along with its secret idea that Homosexuality was spirituality. Jeffery J. Kripal’s book, “Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna” (The University of Chicago Press, 1995) is one good, academic study of young Vivekananda’s homosexual relations with his guru Ramakrishna Paramhansa (1836–1886).
Vivekananda’s teaching that human soul is not sinful but divine, appealed to some Americans because Horace Mann (1796–1859) had prepared the intellectual soil. Prior to his 1848 election to the US Congress, Mann was the Secretary for Education in the State of Massachusetts. As a Unitarian, he championed that the State ought to take over the ministry of education—a task that until this point the Church had stewarded.
Mann, a Unitarian, said that the Church should not educate because it teaches “divisive doctrines” such as the Trinity. According to Mann, children do not need to learn Truths (doctrines) such as Trinity. They need to learn Virtue (ethics): to honor parents, elders, and teachers; to not covet or steal someone’s pencil or pear. The Bible should be taught, said Mann, as the source of values, but not as the source of truth. This distinction became spiritually fatal.
Half a century later, by the time of Educationist John Dewey (1859–1952), mainstream American theology had degenerated to a point that many Christians bought the lie that public schools and universities can teach veritas and virtue without God’s revelation. Pragmatic common sense, North Americans thought, was sufficient to make citizens virtuous. Hardly anyone foresaw that without God-revealed truths such as the Trinity, American universities will make themselves incapable of defining what a woman is; education will undermine the fear of God (the true source of wisdom), individualism will weaken the family, and state education will make students immoral.
From Unitarianism to Monism
Influential thinkers from nominally Jewish backgrounds, e.g., Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and Albert Einstein (1879–1955), entertained the possibility that everything in the universe may be One—divine. Hegelian thought prepared Western universities to consider Pantheism. However, using that Monistic lens to look at Gender began with Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875–1961).
Jung rejected his mentor Sigmund Freud’s confused idea that consciousness may be a product exclusively of brain chemistry. Psyche (or soul) may not exist as a metaphysical entity. If chemistry produces the mind, then how are we able to share language and logic, mathematics and morality, ethics and aesthetics?
It was obvious to Jung that our Individual consciousness is connected to a Collective Consciousness. That line of thinking, Jung realized, was close to the Hindu concept of Brahma—the idea that one Divine Self permeates everything. He visited India in 1936 to study this matter in depth.
If ‘One Divine Consciousness’ is everything, then it is possible that everyone has male and female consciousness. Jung called the unconscious masculine side of a woman animus. He named the unconscious feminine side of every man anima.
While Carl Jung was philosophizing about the possibility that male and female energies may be present in every soul, Britain-born novelist, Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) moved into the Vedanta Society of Southern California. This is a monastery in Ramakrishna’s tradition, promoted by Swami Vivekananda. Isherwood lived openly with his homosexual partner, Don Bachardy, thirty years younger than him. He translated Hindu Scriptures such as the Bhagwad Gita with help from his guru, Swami Prabhavandana, and continued writing novels and plays promoting homosexuality, especially within Hollywood.
Do Transgenderism and Homosexuality Mean Equality?
This intellectual movement for Monism and Sexual Mysticism received a huge boost from Fritjof Capra’s 1975 book, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Capra, born in 1939, is a Physicist-turned-Mystic and Environmentalist. Influential thinkers such as Vivekananda, Carl Jung, Isherwood and Capra sowed the seeds. The harvest was gathered by sex-guru, Osho Rajneesh, who was famous for his 99 Rolls Royces, his two private planes, and his huge ranch in Oregon. Rajneesh told biblically illiterate Americans that Jesus Christ taught that a person is born again into God’s kingdom when the male and female become one in a mystical union. Dan Brown developed that myth into his powerful novel, The Da Vinci Code. In his novel, Tantric, sexual mysticism became Christian Gnosticism.
Homosexuality is Hinduism’s philosophical triumph in the West. Within India, mass celebration of homosexuality as spirituality happens during the annual pilgrimage to the shrine of god Ayyappan in Sabrimala on the banks of river Pamba, in the forests of the Western Ghats. Ayyappan was born with the union of two male gods, Shiva and Vishnu. Some versions of the myths say that god Vishnu seduced god Shiva by appearing as a beautiful, irresistible goddess, Mohini. Devotees realize, ‘Surely god Shiva knew that Mohini was, in fact, a transgender version of god Vishnu.’ The myth encourages them to see feminine beauty in their male lovers.
Every year, millions of male devotees go on pilgrimage to the Ayyappan’s shrine. They walk in groups. Females of “menstruating age” (between 10–50 years) are prohibited. For six weeks or so, every male devotee is required to abstain from sexual contact with females. Naturally, women activists see the ban on females as sexist discrimination. This male-only celebration continues to cause legal and political dramas. It has provoked civil disobedience and police action because it does not see women as being equal to men, because of their poor karma in previous lives.
Conclusion
The Bible taught the West that God is Triune. Therefore, most people did not have a problem distinguishing male and female and celebrating the equal worth of both. If the Creator exists as Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, then it is possible that He made man in His image—male and female, different, yet the same, equal and created to be one. Their union makes them three, since they have a baby and become a family. The family becomes the school that shapes our character to become like God.
Now that much of the Western mind has rejected the Bible and its teaching that God is one and exists as Father, Son and the Spirit, the Trinity is no longer its metaphysical foundation. Other ideologies, including Monism, have filled the gap. That has blurred the dualism of good and evil as well as sexes. This has compromised the very foundation of the West’s core values, including the divinely revealed truth that all people—both men and women—are created equal. One can only saw off a limb so much before the branch falls. Only a revival of biblical revelation will rescue civilization from her self-inflicted fall.
