John Oliver Wins a Scripture Knowledge Prize

And Yet Fails to Read the Bible

File: Rural Sports Cat in a Bowl MET DP883745.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

I have so many different directions I could go this morning. I’m in the middle of three fascinating articles, am trying to catch up on a couple of podcasts, and then, you’ll be astonished to hear, have had the misfortune of coming across someone calling herself “horsegiirL” (dear heavenly saints above) while I was in the middle of watching John Oliver deciding to stake his all on the most losing-est issue of 2025—men getting to participate in women’s sports. I don’t imagine that you want to watch it, but here it is if you are casting about for ways to experience more aggravation and despair:

Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded much, in spite of losing a half hour I could have been staring disconsolately into the middle distance contemplating a dusting of snow over the drooping April daffodils, because John Oliver is funny sometimes. However, he committed three egregious rhetorical sins which I abhor—he mocked Christianity without any sense of ironic embarrassment, he insisted to his audience that it is only “the right” that is grinding its risible ideological axe rather than adopting a principled stance, and he went off about “transphobia” as if disagreeing about this particular issue is literally being hateful to people whom God has made.

John Oliver thus joins the ranks of people who appear out of the shadows to poke you in the eye and then, when you are crying in pain and wroth, is all astonishment at how “reactive” you are being. He is Lucy Steel that was. He is literally Aunt Agatha. He is basically Kristin Kobes du Mez.

So, I had better things to do than transcribe the whole thing, and therefore scrolled through the Transcript provided by the YouTubes. It’s full of curiously disjointed thoughts like:

vanishingly few trans girls competing in high school sports anywhere and even if there were more trans kids like all kids

and

The standard can't be no trans kid ever injures someone because that's an impossible standard and yes if trans kids were injuring cis kids at much higher rates then we could have safety concerns to address but there's no evidence that's the case. And at this point it is worth asking what is really behind all this vitriol because again I do believe that some speaking against trans participation are just talking about women's sports. And the truth is at the elite levels of competition this isn't a cut and dry issue.

How can I say this gently? Don’t use the term “cis.” It is a pejorative. It is a biased, ideological term used to cast the issue in a certain way while pretending that you’re not doing that. Which is to say,

Mr. Oliver is careful to use the chosen pronouns of the people trying to say they have altered their total biological realities down to the very level of the DNA, of course, which is adjusted with a few hormone blockers, no problem. A “trans girl” for Mr. Oliver is basically the same as a “girl.”

Except that, we can’t help but observe, a whole new class of youngsters called “trans kids” is being used as a cudgel to bully the American citizenry out of their sense perceptions. Real girls have to give way to “they/them” who are actually boys, or, because a certain number of girls are taught to hate themselves also, fake and ineffectual trans “men” try to join the ranks of real men and are never accepted. Thus, we have a formed class of people whose only distinguishing characteristic is heartbreak and self-hatred. And “we” want to feel good about ourselves for doing this.

Anyway, I scrolled down to the part where Mr. Oliver began nakedly to bring God into it. Instead of the usual subversive way, by just undermining the created order like it is not a big deal or anything, he got all biblical. By way of introducing this portion of the lie, he complained bitterly about Speaker Mike Johnson, who, it must be admitted, fixed upon himself a placid and alarming smile in order to announce that no men would be going into the restrooms allotted to women in the Nation’s Capitol. Picking up Mr. Oliver without any context and whatever punctuation I can cobble together on my own because YouTube’s tiny stupid AI demon doesn’t put in the commas and periods:

It is not just about denying trans women the right to play. It's about denying them the right to exist. Mike Johnson basically said as much after the House passed its ban on trans athletes when he said this we know from scripture and from nature that men are men and women are women and men cannot become women. That's right Mike, as scripture tells, us men are men and women are women. And God is his own son. And some mothers are virgins. And some mothers-in-law are pillars of salt. And some daughters are sex partners. And colorful coats are dream tellers. And brothers and murderers and also brothers are backup husbands for wives. And babies can be for splitting in half. And water is wine and also with you. Sorry and with your spirit.

Thus we may observe that Mr. Oliver is Church of England and not in a good way. He has just enough Scripture Knowledge to win a prize but not enough to know the God who made him and who would take care of him if he were not such a cotton-headed ninny muggins.

My own church went back to “with your spirit” after a multi-decade interlude of “and also with you,” and it has been so confusing. Liturgical reform is a fraught undertaking, don’t you know. Funnily enough, Speaker Johnson is not someone I look to for liturgical or theological insight, and yet, his reasoning on the matter of who might use which Loo is unassailable. “Scripture says,” he announced, and he was right. There are a lot of bits in the Bible that are hard to decipher but God creating them “male and female” is not one of them. Isn’t it funny how, to make the big lie work, you have to fib about so many smaller and inconsequential realities, like God being omnipotent and omniscient and also capable of communicating with poor sinful creatures in words and pictures they can understand? Should we be comforted that Mr. Oliver must have gone to church at some point? I don’t know. I find his mockery of the Holy Scriptures to be stomach-turning and grotesque.

Right toward the end, he adds on a heap more Bible Trivia:

What they know from scripture, that trans people are a myth. You know, the same scripture that tells us the devil is an unemployed angel, and hair is for footwashing or super strength, and two fish and some bread is a catering order.

How clever, Mr. Oliver, how clever. I am sure you have amazed the whole room. Don’t worry about what God thinks.

The trouble is, we can all readily discover what God thinks. He—God, not John Oliver—speaks plainly enough. But what he says goes to the core of the person with uncomfortable precision. It isn’t just about hormones and sports. It isn’t even just about biology, though that is so essential. It has to do with the strange reality that we are each material beings caught in time and space, tethered to our dryers that have to be turned off and then on again several hundred times a day, limited by our sense perceptions and our humiliating moments of dependence and failure. We are each made by God and yet crushed by sin. We apprehend an eternity beyond ourselves and yet know we will die.

I am not angry with Mr. Oliver for being snide and smug. I feel sorry for him. I hope he lies awake all through the night wondering about the stories he derided. There was the Person who transformed the water into wine, thus saving a young man from humiliation upon the advent of his whole life. There was the Holy Spirit who overshadowed the young woman so that she became the very place that God dwelt, thus suffering the humiliating alienation from her kindred that foreshadowed the cross. And what of the woman who let down her hair to wash the feet of the Savior of the World, the expensive love that she poured out upon him before his Passion? And, of course, the little boy who handed over his lunch for the Lord to feed the multitudes.

Mock it all you like, Mr. Oliver, but none of us are crushed by your wit. To cleanse your palate, listen to this, which is also a hymn by Horatius Bonar called “I heard the voice of Jesus say”:

Ok so, have a nice day!