The Church of Iceland has raised eyebrows with a Sunday School advert depicting Jesus Christ sporting a long beard and apparently bouncing breasts.
The Scandinavian church, which is notionally Evangelical Lutheran, earned a substantial backlash for the stunt, with social media users claiming to be former congregants citing such “woke” virtue-signalling as their reason for leaving its dwindling flock.
But Petur Georg Markan, the Church’s media representative defended the advert, saying that it supports diversity and suggesting that having Jesus depicted in different ways is positive, according to MailOnline.
“In this [advert], we see a Jesus who has breasts and a beard. We’re trying to embrace society as it is. We have all sorts of people and we need to train ourselves to talk about Jesus as being ‘all sorts’ in this context,” he insisted.
“Especially because it’s really important that each and every person see themselves in Jesus and that we don’t stagnate too much. That’s the essential message. So this is okay. It’s okay that Jesus has a beard and breasts,” he added.
Church minister Guorun Karls-og Helgudottir also defended they advert, saying: “Each person interprets something in this picture. Some people interpret it as a trans Jesus, others as a woman. Some see Mary with a beard, and others see a genderqueer person. Views within the church are just as diverse as elsewhere.”
Nevertheless, the Church appears to have realised it has overreached, at least as far as Christians are concerned, by deleted the advert and issuing a statement saying that its assembly “regrets that the picture of Jesus in a Sunday school advertisement has hurt people. The goal was to emphasise diversity, not to hurt people or shock them.”
However, Mr Markan, the aforementioned Church media rep, also indicated that this would not be the end of the Church using Christ’s likeness to advance “woke” political topics, advising that “Soon, we’ll be introducing more personifications where, for example, you’ll see Jesus making a contribution to environmental issues.”
Most mainstream churches have not embraced transgenderism and the promotion of gender identities other than male and female, often citing Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
However, the Church of Iceland is not the only established church to wade into gender politics, with the Church of England also suggesting that pupils at Church schools should “be able to play with the many cloaks of identity (sometimes quite literally with the dressing-up box)” while growing up.
“Children should be at liberty to explore the possibilities of who they might be without judgment or derision. For example, a child may choose the tutu, princess’s tiara and heels… without expectation or comment”, the Church of England Education Office suggested in 2017.
The Anglican church’s senior clergy, in particular the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, have often been accused of being more interest in promoting political causes such as Black Lives Matter, mass immigration, and opposition to Brexit than sin and salvation in recent years, with its largely conservative and eurosceptic lay members increasingly ebbing away.