Religion and narcissism are inherently at odds. The former says there is a God. The latter says, “I am a god.” Few things illustrate this better than Micah Louwagie, an ordained Lutheran minister in North Dakota, who claims to be “transgender” and who had some pretty interesting (and repulsive) thoughts about the shooting last week at The Covenant School in Nashville.

Once people have been on hormone treatments for a while, they don’t appear as members of the opposite of their biological sex. Instead, they all have the same epicene presentation: indeterminate voices; rounded, non-gendered faces; and bulky, gelatinous bodies that also avoid easy gender identification. They’re all “Pat,” Julia Sweeney’s brilliant androgynous character from the 1990s, when it was still okay to make fun of “gender identity.”

Micah Louwagie could be a stand-in for Pat. However, based on the short hair, I’m betting that Louwagie is a biological female who, in a saner time, would have been a manly lesbian.

Image: Micah Louwagie.

More significantly, Louwagie identifies as a Lutheran minister. And indeed, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Fargo, North Dakota, has accepted Louwagie as a “transgender” pastor. In that capacity, Louwagie gave a rather amazing sermon this past Sunday.

According to Louwagie, our compassion for those murdered at The Covenant School is misplaced. The real martyrs are transgender people, especially the shooter (whom I will not name, other than to note that she was a biological female with delusions of so-called “transgenderism”).

For Louwagie, an inanimate object is the real criminal, which means that an ideology that is obsessed with and practices violence and a mentally ill woman in thrall to that ideology cannot be at fault for what happened. They are, instead, the real victims:

Instead of focusing on ways this could’ve been prevented, such as gun control, a significant number of people have turned their attention to the shooter’s identity. Instead of focusing on the number one cause of child death in this country is now gunshot wounds. Some folks have chosen to focus on eradicating trans people as a solution because they have been waiting, just waiting, for an opportunity such as this. They have been waiting for a reason, any reason to stoke their hatred.

Marginalized folks, those of us with the least amount of privilege and power, they need those who have more privilege and power than they do to physically place their bodies between them and the people, powers, and institutions that are literally killing them. Yet so often they are betrayed with a kiss, right?

That’s all I could stomach of Louwagie’s sermon, which you can watch here:

I’ll leave it to the Daily Mail to summarize the rest:

As they continued to speak to the small congregation, the pastor went on to compare the Pharisees’ treatment of Jesus to politicians who make laws against drag shows and transgender players in sport – which has become a hot button issue across America.

‘Those leaders were looking for any excuse, valid or not, to crucify Jesus and they found that reason,’ Louwagie said.

As part of the controversial sermon, Louwagie appeared to also draw comparison between the treatment of trans people in the United States with the Holocaust and Japanese internment camps.

Factually, of course, this is all nonsense. When it comes to guns and children’s deaths, for example, she ignores that this is (a) because “children” for these purposes are defined as being under 20, which includes 18- and 19-year-olds who are legal adults, and (b) because many of these older “children” are casualties of inner city crime (especially black-on-black) which has escalated dramatically thanks to the defund the police movement. And when it comes to transgenderism, our entire social, political, educational, and military systems are obsessed with promoting it—and punishing anyone who deviates from accepting modern LGBTQI+++ orthodoxy.

More important than her factual errors, though, is the fact that Louwagie has redirected religion from God and Biblical principles to herself and her emotional needs. People who are religiously conservative look to the Bible first, and then turn to themselves to see if they are aligned with Biblical principles. Narcissists—and transgenderism is the ultimate narcissism because its practitioners take upon themselves the ability to “correct” God’s mistakes—look to themselves first and then shape religious doctrine to their needs.

Since God handed down the Noahic and Mosaic laws, the Judeo-Christian principle is for religion to be aspirational. It raises us up, providing standards of behavior that distinguish us from all other animals. Under leftism’s aegis, though, the Bible exists for self-affirmation.

That fact explains something about Louwagie’s sermon. According to the same Daily Mail article, Louwagie preached to a “small congregation.” Well, no wonder. Why drag yourself out of the house, away from the television, to hear something that you can do at your own home in front of the mirror? “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people should like me.”