Scottish lecturers union sparks outrage over plans for transgender Jesus play

through Anugrah Kumar, Christian put up Contributor | Sunday, June 06, 2021 Trans-recognized actor Joe Clifford performs in his play, "The Gospel in accordance with Jesus, Queen of Heaven." | Screengrab: Vimeo/arts-information

A Scottish academics union's choice to promote a controversial play depicting Jesus Christ as transgender in occasion of June, what LGBT activists name "delight Month," has outraged Christians who've long hostile the play, noting that “actual biblical Christianity is becoming marginalized via political correctness.”

The union, called training Institute of Scotland, which claims to symbolize round 80% of the country’s lecturers and academics, plans to cling an LGBT event where they are going to feature excerpts of “The Gospel in line with Jesus Queen of Heaven,” because the creation is titled, according to The Christian Institute.

The play, which might be featured as a part of a "pride" event, “college’s basically Out! have fun delight,” on June 17, “invites us to think about Jesus coming lower back to Earth in the existing day as a trans woman,” the EIS says.

The play’s creator, Jo Clifford, a person who identifies as feminine and says he also identifies his religion as Christian, says the play recreates biblical stories with a “different slant.”

“The play imagines a transgender Jesus coming lower back to the world these days,” Clifford instructed BBC information in a previous interview. “She pitches a sermon and tells just a few very accepted Gospel reports.”

Clifford added, “She has a communion, shares bread and wine with the viewers, which is basically a gesture of solidarity within the face of demise, and she or he gives a blessing. So it’s a really crucial, very intimate reveal.”

In 2016, a Church of England church in Manchester hosted the controversial play a year after it featured in a publicly-funded LGBT experience in Northern ireland.

Former Church of England Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali answered to the play on the time, asserting, “it is quite clear from the Gospels that the id of Jesus is male, His ‘mum’ is Mary and he all the time refers to God as ‘Father,’ so that you could indicate otherwise is contrary to Christian teaching.”

The construction brought about sizeable controversy when it changed into performed in Scotland in 2009, with near 300 protesters rallying in opposition by means of candlelight outside a theater in Glasgow.

The demonstrators sang hymns and carried placards with messages analyzing: “Jesus, King of Kings, not Queen of Heaven” and “God: My Son is not A Pervert.”

all the way through the 2009 protest, Pastor Jack Bell of Zion Baptist Church in Glasgow mentioned a theatrical play would no longer dare use Islamic figures in the same means. “If this play had treated the [Islamic] prophet Muhammed in the same means there would have been a strong response from the Islamic community, but that just wouldn't turn up.”

Bell delivered, “that you would be able to’t blaspheme God and use freedom of speech as an excuse for that. true biblical Christianity is becoming marginalized via political correctness.”

Clifford talked about at the time that criticism become coming from people who had in no way definitely seen the play and best assumed that it would be offensive to the Church.

“As a working towards Christian myself, I have no pastime in attacking the church or mocking the church or make enjoyable of the church or in any approach being blasphemous or offensive,” the actor and playwright observed at the time. “I with ease want to assert very strongly, as strongly as i will, that Jesus of the Gospels would now not in any means are looking to assault or denigrate americans like myself.”

In 2018, when the play ran in Brazil, conservative Christians asserted in petitions that “the performance of this horrific spectacle is equal to the persecution suffered via Christians within the first centuries once they were thrown to wild animals in the arenas of Rome as a sort of leisure.”