Disregarding The Body – Podcast
The Crisis of our Time
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art
Companion Posts
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Starting Again
I was born in the sixties. But I am not a child of the 60’s. My family was lower-middle class, and by the standards of the time, traditional in most every way. Dad was a minister. If he or mom had lived into their 90’s they would not have imagined the social changes we have witnessed in the last 20 years. It would be too easy to say the sexual revolution of the 60’s caused all this change, as some conservatives maintain. But the roots of this change go back much further than the swinging 60’s.
So I’m embarking with some misgivings on a survey of cultural history. There are deep intellectual and cultural traditions that have shaped our everyday lives. We’ve come to a point in the Western world where the statement “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” is comprehensible to many public leaders, at least in public. That phrase would be completely incomprehensible to my parent’s generation, in public or private, not to mention every preceding generation. It is still incomprehensible to many, if not most people today. But if you express your bewilderment in public, say at many workplaces in the Western world, increasingly the odds are you will be regarded as stupid, immoral or worse. You may be reprimanded for your irrational “phobia.” You might even have your career derailed. If you broadcast your view on a public forum, say Twitter, expect the Twitterati to pounce with the ferocity of a caged unfed Tiger. In certain parts of the world you may even be charged with a hate-crime for your expressed incredulity at the latest massive cultural shift. (See the following posts, here & here.)
As a 60’s poet might say, “The times they are a changin.”
The tectonic cultural shift in the last 20 years is quite breathtaking. Regardless of what you think about gay marriage, we have gone from year 2000 where the majority of Americans were opposed to gay marriage to today where normalization of Transgenderism is fast approaching.
A long and winding road brought us to this point. I want to offer a thoughtful and hopefully generous exposition, from a Classic Christian point of view, of how we got here. As I go, I’ll be documenting some disturbing current events. (Read my next post). I hope that even those who disagree with Classic Christianity will find here a fair and readable assessment of our state of affairs. (post continues page 2)
The Vanishing Black Family—and Why Every American Should Care
What Delano Squires Teaches Us About Marriage, Fatherhood, and God’s First Institution
Last week, the New York State Legislature passed a bill replacing the words mother and father in portions of state law with the more clinical terms gestating parent and non-gestating parent.
Many people shrugged.
“It’s only language,” we’re told. “It’s simply an effort to make the law more inclusive.”
But language is never just language.
Words both reflect and shape the way a civilization understands reality. When a society no longer wishes to speak naturally of mothers and fathers, it is revealing something much deeper than a preference for inclusive terminology. It is signaling that the family itself has become negotiable.
That should concern every Christian.
According to Scripture, the first institution God established was neither government nor the marketplace. It was marriage. Before there were kings, legislatures, courts, schools, or welfare bureaucracies, there was husband, wife, and child. The family is not a social invention. It is part of the created order itself.
That is precisely why the family has become one of the primary battlegrounds of our age.
Today’s cultural revolution is not simply asking us to redefine marriage. It is asking us to redefine motherhood, fatherhood, womanhood, manhood, and ultimately what it means to be human. Once those foundations are removed, every other institution built upon them eventually begins to crack.
That is why I found myself deeply encouraged—and deeply sobered—while listening to a recent interview with Delano Squires discussing his outstanding new book, The Vanishing Black Family: How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable.
Squires is Director of the DeVos Center for Human Flourishing at the Heritage Foundation, but those credentials are not what make his argument compelling. He writes first as a Christian, a Black husband, and the father of four children who loves his own community enough to tell it difficult truths. Before becoming widely known as a public intellectual, he spent years writing for Black and Married with Kids, a website devoted to promoting healthy marriages and intact families. Looking back with characteristic humor, he remarks that he eventually became the entire title himself: “I moved from just being black to eventually being black and married with kids.”
There is, however, nothing humorous about the burden of his book.
Squires argues that the greatest crisis confronting Black America today is not primarily economic. Nor is it fundamentally political. It is the gradual collapse of marriage and family formation. More importantly, he insists that the solutions proposed by our political class have often misunderstood the nature of the problem because they begin with economics rather than anthropology—with government rather than God.
As Christians, that observation should immediately sound familiar.
For decades we have been told that broken families are primarily the result of insufficient income, inadequate government spending, systemic inequities, or unequal opportunity. Certainly those realities matter. Poverty places enormous strain upon families. Economic instability makes marriage more difficult. Squires does not deny any of that.
But he insists those explanations do not reach deeply enough.
The crisis, he argues, is first spiritual and then cultural. Marriage is God’s institution before it is society’s institution. Consequently, when a culture loses its understanding of marriage, no amount of government spending can restore what has been lost.
That is a profoundly biblical insight.
It also places Squires at odds with many of today’s dominant cultural narratives.
Yet readers should resist the temptation to assume this is merely a book about the Black community.
It is certainly that. Squires writes unapologetically as a Black man who longs to see marriage restored among his own people. He offers pointed criticisms—not only of government policy, but also of many Black political leaders, progressive activists, and even segments of the contemporary Black Church that, in his judgment, have abandoned the biblical vision of marriage and family.
Like an Old Testament Hebrew prophet, His critique comes from within.
That is precisely why it deserves to be heard.
At the same time, Squires repeatedly reminds his audience that the collapse of the Black family is no longer uniquely a Black tragedy.
It has become an American tragedy.
The patterns that first appeared in Black America have steadily spread throughout nearly every segment of our society. What was once considered an alarming exception has increasingly become the national norm.
In that sense, the Black family became America’s canary in the coal mine.
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The Body is Not the Problem
How Gender Ideology Rewrites Science—and Why Christians Must Resist It
When Every Outcome Proves the Theory
One of the hallmarks of genuine science is that it allows itself to be proven wrong.
A scientific hypothesis must make risky predictions. There must be conceivable evidence that would count against it. If every possible outcome is interpreted as confirmation, then what we’re dealing with is no longer science in the strict sense—it’s an ideology.
That is what struck me most while reading a recent analysis of new data on pediatric gender medicine in Oregon. (City Journal)
For years, advocates of the “gender-affirming” model assured the public that medical transition for minors was extraordinarily rare. Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, we were told, were reserved for a tiny number of carefully screened adolescents suffering from severe and persistent gender dysphoria.
But new statewide insurance data from Oregon complicate that narrative. Among insured 17-year-olds, roughly one in 240 girls was taking testosterone, while approximately one in 630 boys was taking estrogen. Oregon is hardly representative of the entire country, but because it has one of the nation’s most supportive legal and insurance environments for pediatric transition, it offers a glimpse of what widespread implementation of the affirming model looks like.
As biologist Colin Wright observes:
“Trans activist Ari Drennen said on X that it ‘should not be shocking’ that 0.4 percent of 17-year-old girls in Oregon are chemically transitioning. But it is shocking. If one in 240 girls aged 17 in a state were receiving any other powerful intervention for a new psychiatric diagnosis that permanently deepened their voice, caused them to grow beards, altered their sexual function, and affected their fertility, no serious person would shrug and say, ‘Sounds about right.’”
That observation gets to the heart of the issue. Before these numbers emerged, advocates frequently pointed to the rarity of pediatric transition as evidence that the medical system was exercising extraordinary caution. Now that the numbers are substantially higher than many expected, the response has shifted. Rather than prompting a reconsideration of the underlying assumptions, the higher prevalence is presented as evidence that more young people are finally receiving the care they have long needed.
Notice what has happened.
If few children transition, the model is vindicated.
If many children transition, the model is also vindicated.
No imaginable outcome appears capable of counting as evidence against the underlying theory.
The Popper Test: Can the Theory Be Proven Wrong?
This is a textbook example of what philosopher of science Karl Popper meant by falsifiability. Popper argued that scientific theories distinguish themselves from ideological systems by exposing themselves to possible refutation. A theory that can explain every possible observation ultimately explains nothing at all.
History offers many examples.
Marxist economic theory frequently interpreted both prosperity and poverty as proof that capitalism was collapsing. If workers revolted, the theory was confirmed. If they did not revolt, that too confirmed the theory because they had supposedly developed “false consciousness.”
Likewise, some Freudian interpretations treated every patient response as confirmation of unconscious motives. Agreement proved the diagnosis. Denial also proved the diagnosis because it demonstrated repression.
In each case, the theory became insulated from correction.
Medicine must never operate this way.
Every medical intervention should be open to the possibility that it is less effective than originally believed—or even harmful. That is why medicine continually revises itself through systematic reviews, replication studies, and long-term follow-up. Indeed, several European health authorities have recently reassessed the evidence for pediatric gender medicine and concluded that the quality of evidence supporting routine medical interventions remains low, leading them to adopt a more cautious approach. (PMC)
When Science Becomes an Ideology
When an idea evolves so that every possible outcome becomes evidence in its favor, we should stop asking whether the evidence supports the theory and begin asking whether the theory has become unfalsifiable.
That question extends well beyond gender medicine.
It is one of the recurring temptations of every ideology.
The healthiest intellectual traditions—whether in science, medicine, theology, or politics—retain the humility to admit what evidence would cause them to reconsider their conclusions. They recognize that truth is not protected by making contrary evidence impossible, but by welcoming honest inquiry, even when it is inconvenient.
That is how knowledge advances.
And it is also how ideologies are exposed.
The Question Science Cannot Answer
This raises an even deeper question.
As Christians, we should insist on honest science. We should welcome rigorous studies, long-term follow-up, transparent data, and the willingness to revise conclusions when the evidence demands it. Christians have nothing to fear from truth because we believe all truth is God’s truth.
But our concern with pediatric gender medicine ultimately goes beyond questions of statistical outcomes.
Medicine is never merely about producing desired psychological states. It is about restoring health according to the nature of the human person.
That is where the current gender-affirming model departs most fundamentally from the Christian understanding of humanity.
The Christian View of the Human Person
Scripture teaches that our bodies are not accidental shells housing our “real selves.” They are gifts from God, intentionally created, received rather than constructed. We are embodied souls, not minds temporarily occupying disposable biological equipment. The body is not an obstacle to our identity but an essential part of it.
This is why the Christian tradition has always understood genuine healing as bringing the person into greater harmony with reality—not altering reality to conform to our perceptions.
The Body is Not the Problem
Of course, human beings experience profound psychological suffering. Christians should never minimize the real distress experienced by those with gender dysphoria. Compassion requires that we take such suffering seriously.
But compassion and affirmation are not the same thing.
When a normally functioning body is permanently altered in order to accommodate a person’s internal perception of himself or herself, medicine has crossed a profound philosophical boundary. The body is no longer treated as something to be understood and cared for; it becomes something to be reconstructed so that it conforms to the mind’s self-understanding.
That inversion should concern everyone. But for Christians, it represents a direct contradiction of biblical anthropology.
From Genesis onward, the human body is received as a gift before it is ever experienced as a project. Our sex is not an arbitrary biological fact to be overcome but part of the good created order. The Fall has certainly introduced disorder into every dimension of human life—including our desires, our perceptions, and our experience of our own bodies—but redemption never consists in rejecting creation. It consists in restoring our lives to harmony with the Creator.
This is why sex-rejection therapy can never be the Christian answer.
The problem is not that the body has told us a lie. The problem is that, like every other part of our fallen humanity, our minds, emotions, and self-perceptions can become disordered. Christian discipleship has always involved bringing our thoughts, desires, and identities into conformity with God’s created reality—not reshaping creation to validate every inward perception.
This is precisely why the Oregon data matter.
Not because higher or lower numbers would ever determine Christian ethics, but because they reveal how difficult it has become to question an ideology that increasingly treats the healthy body as the problem. When every outcome confirms the theory, honest inquiry becomes impossible. And when the body itself is regarded as an obstacle to personal authenticity, medicine loses sight of its proper end.
Christians should resist both errors.
We should reject ideological science that refuses correction by evidence.
But we should also reject any anthropology that asks us to believe that the path to human flourishing begins by rejecting the body God has given us.
The Christian Hope
The Christian hope has always pointed in the opposite direction. It is not escape from the body, but the redemption of the whole person. We do not await liberation from our created humanity; we await the resurrection of the body.
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When Moderation Becomes Evasion: A Response to a Dear Friend
A dear friend recently responded to an Andrew Sullivan article I had sent her with a simple observation:
“It seems that most anything taken to the extreme is not good.”
As a general rule, I agree.
Political ideologies become dangerous when they become totalizing. Patriotism can become toxic (idolatrous) nationalism. Individual liberty can become selfishness. Concern for justice can become ideological fanaticism. The instinct toward moderation is often a sign of wisdom because it reminds us that human beings are prone to excess. We are finite creatures, and history is littered with examples of movements that began with legitimate concerns but ultimately became destructive because they lost all sense of proportion.
For that reason, moderation has often been regarded as a virtue. It encourages humility. It restrains zeal. It reminds us that our opponents sometimes possess insights we lack. In a deeply polarized culture, moderation can be a healthy antidote to ideological certainty.
But moderation has limits.
The problem is that some questions are not questions of degree. Some questions are questions of reality. There is no moderate position on whether the earth revolves around the sun. There is no middle ground between slavery and freedom. There is no compromise position between saying human beings possess inherent dignity and saying they do not.
Certain realities simply are what they are, regardless of our preferences. Wisdom, in such cases, consists not in finding a midpoint between competing claims but in recognizing reality and conforming ourselves to it.
And this is why I believe moderation ultimately fails as a response to the modern debate over sex and gender.
The question before us is not whether one side has become too extreme. The deeper question is whether we are willing to acknowledge realities that exist independently of our feelings, desires, and political commitments.
That observation came to mind as I read Andrew Sullivan’s recent essay, The TQ+ Threat to LGB Rights.
Before proceeding, a word of disclosure. Sullivan and I disagree on a great deal. As a Christian, I believe marriage is a covenant established by God between a man and a woman, and that children are ordinarily best served by being raised by their married mother and father. Sullivan, a gay man, was one of the most influential advocates for same-sex marriage in the modern era. I believe he was mistaken on that issue, and that redefining marriage has consequences that extend well beyond adult relationships, especially for children. But that is a subject for another day.
(For an example of what I believe are some of the terrible consequences of redefining marriage, see my post about three “married” gay men who were allowed to adopt a young girl in Canada. Polyamory and Adoption in Canada.)
But disagreement should not blind us to truth when we encounter it. And Sullivan is identifying a problem that many people—gay and straight, religious and secular—have begun to recognize.
Sullivan’s Warning
Sullivan’s central concern is not complicated. He argues that the movement which successfully persuaded much of the public to support gay rights and same-sex marriage was rooted in the following claim: gay and lesbian people are human beings deserving equal dignity and equal treatment under the law.
For decades, that argument gained support across the political spectrum. Americans who held vastly different religious, moral, and political convictions increasingly agreed that gay men and women should not be treated as “second-class citizens”—to use the language of the gay rights movement.
But Sullivan believes that movement has increasingly been overtaken by a far more radical ideology rooted in contemporary gender theory and queer theory. As a result, causes that once enjoyed broad public support have become associated with increasingly controversial claims: that biological sex is largely irrelevant, that male and female are social constructions, that children can meaningfully consent to irreversible medical interventions designed to alter their bodies, that language surrounding motherhood and fatherhood should be rewritten, that disagreement constitutes harm, and that institutions should compel affirmation of contested beliefs.
One does not need to agree with every detail of Sullivan’s argument to recognize that he is identifying a real cultural shift. His deeper concern is that this shift is generating a backlash that may ultimately undermine causes he spent decades advancing.
Whether he is right about every political consequence remains to be seen. But I think he has correctly identified something deeper than a political problem.
He has identified a crisis of reality.
The Sex Binary Is Not An Ideology
One of the strangest developments of our age is that affirming the existence of only two sexes is increasingly portrayed as some sort of extremist position. Yet the male-female distinction is not a political theory, nor is it primarily a religious doctrine. It is a biological reality.
Human beings are a sexually reproducing species. Every healthy human body is organized around one of two reproductive pathways. Male bodies are organized toward the production of sperm. Female bodies are organized toward the production of ova and the capacity for gestation. This reality is so fundamental that entire branches of biology depend upon it.
Of course, someone will immediately point to intersex conditions.
And here we need to think carefully.
Every biological system has developmental anomalies. Some people are born with congenital heart defects. Some are born without limbs. Some possess chromosomal abnormalities. Some experience disorders of sexual development (DSD’s). These individuals deserve dignity, compassion, care, and respect. Their value as human beings is not diminished in the slightest by the challenges they face.
But the existence of developmental anomalies does not erase the existence of the underlying design. In fact, the very word anomaly presupposes a norm from which it departs.
A child born with six fingers does not prove that the human hand has no standard structure. A congenital heart defect does not demonstrate that the heart lacks a normal form and function. Likewise, intersex conditions do not transform a sexually dimorphic species into a sexual spectrum.
From a Christian perspective, this is not an insult to anyone. It is simply an acknowledgment that we live in a fallen world where God’s good creation is frequently affected by disease, disorder, suffering, and brokenness. Christianity has never taught that every aspect of creation currently functions exactly as God intended. Rather, it teaches that creation itself has been subjected to frustration and decay.
Recognizing that reality is not cruelty.
It is honesty.
The Real Question: What Are Human Beings?
But the biological debate is not actually the deepest issue. The deeper question is philosophical and theological.
What is a human being?
Historically, Christianity has affirmed the goodness of the body. Genesis declares creation good. The Incarnation affirms the goodness of embodied existence. The Resurrection is not the escape of the soul from the body but the redemption of the body itself.
Our bodies are not prisons. They are not mistakes. They are not obstacles to our true selves.
They are gifts.
Modern gender ideology turns this vision upside down. Identity is relocated from the body to an internal psychological self. If the body conflicts with inner feelings, then the body must change. Subjective experience becomes authoritative. Desire becomes sovereign. The body becomes negotiable.
This is why many Christian thinkers have described gender ideology as a modern form of Gnosticism.
Ancient Gnostics believed that the material world was somehow inferior to the inner spiritual self. Modern gender ideology often treats the body in remarkably similar ways. The body becomes raw material to be reshaped according to an inner identity. The goal is no longer to live in harmony with reality but to transcend it.
What is presented as liberation often amounts to alienation from our own embodied nature.
From Tolerance to Coercion
Sullivan also highlights another reality that deserves attention.
Ideas rarely remain private. They eventually become institutional.
What began as a request for tolerance increasingly became demands for affirmation. Disagreement became discrimination. Questions became harm. Biological language became offensive. Terms such as “mother” and “father” suddenly became suspect. Professionals who questioned aspects of gender medicine found themselves marginalized. Parents expressing concern were frequently dismissed. Women objecting to male participation in female sports or private spaces were branded bigots.
Consider Sullivan’s example from New York, where lawmakers are replacing traditional parental language such as “mother” and “father” with terms like “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.” Whatever one’s views on transgender identity, it is difficult not to notice the broader pattern. Language that has described human reality for millennia is being revised, not because it is inaccurate, but because it conflicts with a new ideological framework.
Reasonable people can debate individual policies. But the larger pattern is difficult to ignore.
History repeatedly demonstrates that movements seeking freedom can become tempted to enforce conformity. No movement is immune from that temptation. Not the political right. Not the political left. Not religious movements. Not secular movements. And certainly not gender ideology.
Why Moderation Doesn’t Solve This
This brings me back to my friend’s observation.
The problem before us is not merely that a good idea has been taken too far. The problem is that reality itself is increasingly being treated as negotiable.
Moderation works when we are balancing competing goods. It works when both sides possess part of the truth. It works when the dispute concerns prudential judgment rather than objective reality.
But moderation cannot resolve questions of reality.
If one person says the earth is round and another says it is flat, the answer is not that the earth is moderately round. If one person says human beings are male and female and another says sex is whatever we declare it to be, the answer is not some compromise halfway between the two.
Reality eventually wins.
The only question is how much confusion and suffering we create before acknowledging it.
At some point, moderation ceases to be wisdom and becomes evasion. It becomes a way of avoiding the uncomfortable responsibility of saying that one claim is true and another is false.
A Better Way Forward
Sullivan fears that gender ideology may ultimately damage causes he spent decades advancing. That concern may prove justified.
My deepest concern lies elsewhere.
As a Christian, I am less worried about the future of political coalitions than I am about the future of truth. A civilization cannot flourish if objective realities are continually subordinated to subjective desires. Human freedom is not found in escaping our nature. It is found in understanding it and living faithfully within it.
The Christian vision begins with a simple but profound truth: we are creatures. We did not create ourselves. Our bodies are not accidents. They are not obstacles. They are gifts.
And genuine human flourishing begins not by transcending those gifts, but by receiving them with gratitude.
That may not sound particularly radical.
But in our present cultural moment, it has become one of the most countercultural things a person can say.
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