Should Transgendered People Be Rebaptized?
One of the topics that is coming up at the General Synod of the Church of England is the possibility of rebaptizing people who have changed genders. You can read about it here. The idea is that people who were baptized as one gender may want to be baptized again after they have changed their gender identification.
I really don’t want to get into a debate about what it means to be transgendered. I think that it is good that churches want to reach out to and welcome people who are transgendered.
I’m more interested here in a theology of baptism. I need to put out my own background. I was raised (and baptized) Anglican. After a period as an atheist, I became a Pentecostal and am now a Baptist pastor. While attending, I was “rebaptized” as a believer. That may be problematic for what I am about to say.
The problem with Anglicans rebaptizing transgendered people is not their welcoming of the transgendered. It is being inconsistent within their theology of baptism.
For Anglicans, one becomes a Christian and receives the Holy Spirit at the time of baptism. Why then would one be rebaptized after gender reassignment? When one is baptized, it is not their maleness or femaleness that is being baptized. One is baptized as a human being who is being adopted into God’s family. Rebaptizing a person because they now identify as a different gender is totally misunderstanding baptism.
If I’m against transgendered people being rebaptized, why was I rebaptized? Good question.
My reason for being baptized while in my early twenties was that I became convinced that believer’s (rather than adult) baptism was the biblical model and not infant baptism. In the Anglican tradition, it is confirmation that is supposed to address the believer’s aspect of baptism. While I was confirmed, I did it more because my friends were doing it (and I heard you got gifts) rather than because of my personal faith. When I was baptized by immersion in a Pentecostal church, I was doing it as a public statement of my personal faith.
Whether you agree or disagree with the idea of being baptized as a believer after being baptized as an infant, this is a separate subject from the idea of rebaptizing the transgendered.
Within the Anglican theological system, that transgendered person is already a Christian and has the Holy Spirit. Rebaptizing would therefore be meaningless.
