Lost in Error's Maze

On the day the Supreme Court ruled against transgender students, the LCMS published a hateful guide instructing parents to reject their transgender children.

The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod released Lost in Error’s Maze today, the same day the Supreme Court upheld restrictions excluding transgender students from school sports. Whether intentional or not, the timing places this little study guide squarely within a much larger political moment. It asks parents to respond to transgender children not with affirmation but with resistance, presenting that resistance as the truly compassionate path.

Having read the guide, I came away less struck by how little curiosity it shows. It speaks with remarkable certainty about transgender people while showing almost no interest in what transgender people, their families, or the broader medical community have actually learned over the past several decades.

1. The guide simply assumes its central conclusion.

The entire argument depends on one claim: that a transgender person’s understanding of themselves is a delusion. The guide repeatedly refers to transgender identity as “error,” “false identity,” “mental disorder,” and “distorted perception.” It insists that affirming a child’s identity is equivalent to affirming alcoholism or another mental illness.

But nowhere does it actually make that case.

Instead, it begins with the conclusion and builds everything else on top of it. It is certainly possible to make theological arguments about creation, embodiment, and human identity. Christians have done so for centuries. But those theological convictions do not, by themselves, settle empirical questions about psychology, adolescent development, or the treatment of gender dysphoria. The pamphlet simply moves from Genesis to psychiatric conclusions without acknowledging that those are different kinds of claims.

As Lutherans, we have usually been at our best when we distinguish carefully between what theology can confess and what medicine can investigate. Here those distinctions disappear. Which simply goes to show how far the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has veered from being actually Lutheran.

2. It tells parents to reject one of the strongest sources of resilience their children have.

Perhaps the most troubling advice comes when the guide tells parents not to use their child’s chosen name or pronouns because doing so would be affirming a lie.

This is where the guide parts company not only with affirming churches but also with a substantial body of psychological research. Family support consistently emerges as one of the strongest protective factors for transgender young people. Children whose parents remain connected, supportive, and affirming experience lower rates of depression, lower suicide risk, less homelessness, and better long-term mental health than those who experience rejection.

The guide never seriously engages this evidence.

Instead, it portrays affirmation as capitulation to ideology. Parents deserve better than that. They deserve to know that maintaining a trusting relationship with their child is not merely emotionally important—it is one of the most powerful predictors of that child’s well-being.

3. Compassion is impossible without listening.

The title promises “A Compassionate Guide.” Yet the document spends remarkably little time listening.

For example: Transgender people are described but never really heard, their experiences are interpreted before they are understood, parents who affirm their children are characterized as surrendering to cultural pressure, medical professionals become people who have been deceived, and entire communities of transgender people are reduced to ideological movements recruiting vulnerable youth.

What disappears is the ordinary reality that countless parents have walked this road carefully, prayerfully, and with deep love for their children. Many of them resisted at first. Many sought multiple medical opinions. Many prayed desperately that there might be another explanation. Their eventual support for their children did not arise from political fashion. It arose because they knew their child better than anyone else and because they watched what actually brought life.

That is not a story this guide seems interested in hearing.

4. One testimony cannot bear the weight of an entire theology.

The pamphlet concludes by introducing its author primarily through her story as someone who transitioned and later detransitioned. Her experience deserves to be heard and respected.

But no church should build its pastoral theology by elevating one story while effectively excluding thousands of others.

Where are the transgender Christians who continue to worship faithfully? Where are the parents who have watched their children flourish after receiving appropriate care? Where are pastors who have buried transgender youth who died after rejection, or who have baptized transgender adults who found new life in Christ without ceasing to be transgender?

The church should be capacious enough to hear all of these witnesses before announcing that one narrative alone defines reality.

5. The deepest problem is theological.

Ironically, I think the guide reflects a surprisingly small view of the Gospel.

Again and again, it treats identity as something that must first be correctly understood before grace can be received. It asks parents to defend an abstract account of creation even if doing so fractures the relationship with their child.

But the Gospel moves in the opposite direction.

Jesus does not begin by demanding that suffering people describe themselves correctly. He begins by drawing near. He listens. He asks questions. He eats with people whose lives religious authorities had already explained. He meets them where they are before leading them anywhere else.

That posture of patient accompaniment has always seemed to me closer to the heart of Lutheran theology than anxious certainty.

The tragedy of Lost in Error’s Maze is not simply that I believe it gets the science wrong, though I think it often does. It is that it mistakes judgmental certainty for any kind of actual compassion. It asks parents to distrust their child, distrust affirming physicians, distrust psychologists, distrust other Christians, and distrust the families who have found life by walking a different path.

It’s very cult-y.

I believe the church is called to something better.

The church should be the place where frightened parents are encouraged to keep loving their children, where transgender people are treated as neighbors before they become debates, and where we are humble enough to admit that listening is not a concession to the culture. It is one of the ways Christians bear witness to the One who first listened to us.

For a lot more from a better Christian perspective, see…