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)
“Our Goal Is Communism”: Reading the Democratic Socialists of America in Their Own Words
Part One: Beyond the Scandinavian Story
“Our goal is communism.”
—David Jenkins, Democratic Socialists of America leader
When I first heard that statement, I assumed it had been taken out of context.
After all, Christians are routinely assured that today’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is simply advocating a version of Scandinavian or Northern European social democracy: somewhat higher taxes, stronger labor protections, universal healthcare, expanded public investment, and a more generous social safety net.
One may agree or disagree with those policies, but they hardly resemble the revolutionary politics of the twentieth century.
Then I began reading.
Not conservative critiques.
Not cable news commentary.
Not campaign advertisements.
I began reading the Democratic Socialists of America’s own platform, convention documents, caucus literature, affiliated publications, and the writings of those who increasingly shape the organization’s leadership.
The deeper I read, the less David Jenkins’ statement sounded like an unfortunate rhetorical flourish.
Instead, it increasingly sounded like one of the few leaders willing to say publicly what many of the movement’s dominant factions already assume privately.
That realization prompted this essay.
Why This Matters
Readers of this blog know that I rarely write primarily about politics.
For several years I have tried instead to defend what I often call God’s Good Creation.
- Marriage.
- Family.
- The sanctity of human life.
- The meaning of the human body.
- The created distinction between male and female.
- The conviction that human beings flourish, not by inventing reality for themselves, but by gratefully receiving the created order as a gift from God.
Those concerns inevitably intersect with politics because politics increasingly attempts to redefine realities that Scripture and Christian tradition present as part of creation itself.
Politics, however, is never the starting point.
Ideas precede politics.
Worldviews shape ideas.
Theology ultimately shapes worldviews.
That is why Christians cannot evaluate political movements merely by asking whether they promise affordable housing, universal healthcare, better schools, or lower taxes.
Every political movement rests upon assumptions…
- About human nature.
- About justice.
- About authority.
- About freedom.
- About the purpose of society.
Those assumptions matter.
Perhaps they matter more than the policies themselves.
The Comfortable Story
A recent exchange with a progressive Christian friend illustrates why I believe this conversation has become necessary.
She sent me an article by Christian writer Shawn Patrick Connelly defending democratic socialism against what he regarded as unfair conservative caricatures.
He writes:
“Democratic socialism, as its current American advocates define it, keeps existing democratic institutions, elections, courts, a free press, fully intact and argues for expanding social provision within them, universal healthcare, stronger labor protections, public investment in housing and education. That’s much closer to the European social-democratic model than to anything that ran behind the Iron Curtain.”
That description is reassuring.
It is also increasingly common.
If this accurately described today’s Democratic Socialists of America, I doubt I would be writing this article.
Christians have debated the proper role of government for centuries.
Faithful believers disagree about:
- Taxation.
- Healthcare.
- Labor policy.
- Education.
- Housing.
- Immigration.
- The size of the welfare state. (See previous blog post)
Those debates are important.
But they are prudential debates.
The Church has never required Christians to embrace one particular economic system.
My concern is different.
My concern is whether Mr. Connelly’s description still accurately describes the movement currently operating under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America.
After reading its own literature, I no longer believe that it does.
Read Their Documents
Before going any further, let me make one promise.
This essay is not an attempt to resurrect Cold War rhetoric.
Nor is it an attempt to equate today’s Democratic Socialists of America with Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
History deserves better than that.
The twentieth century witnessed horrors almost beyond comprehension.
Tens of millions perished under explicitly communist regimes. (See The Black Book of Communism.)
Nothing in this essay should trivialize those atrocities through careless historical comparison.
But there is an equal and opposite error.
We sometimes become so determined to avoid exaggeration that we fail to recognize genuine ideological change when it occurs.
Political movements should be evaluated, not primarily by the reassuring language they use when appealing to the general public, but by the ideas they teach, the goals they publish, and the convictions of those who increasingly lead them.
That is what I have attempted to do.
Whenever possible, I have relied upon the
- DSA’s own documents.
- Its own platforms.
- Its own convention materials.
- Its own affiliated publications.
- Its own caucuses.
- Its own leaders.
I encourage readers—especially my progressive Christian friends—to read the original sources for themselves.
Do not trust me.
Do not trust Fox News.
Do not trust MS NOW.
Read the documents.
Then decide.
DSA Documents
My argument rises or falls on whether these documents say what I claim they say.
A Different Conversation Than Most Americans Realize
One discovery surprised me more than any other.
Most Americans—including many Christians—continue assuming the principal debate surrounding democratic socialism concerns economics.
- Capitalism versus socialism.
- Markets versus government.
- Private ownership versus public ownership.
Those questions certainly remain important.
But they are no longer the primary debate taking place inside today’s Democratic Socialists of America.
Increasingly, the debate concerns something else entirely.
It is no longer whether socialism should replace capitalism.
It is what kind of socialism should replace capitalism—and how revolutionary the movement should become.
That is a profoundly different conversation.
And it becomes obvious almost immediately once one begins reading the literature produced by the organization’s own caucuses.
Most Americans have never heard of organizations such as the Marxist Unity Group, Reform & Revolution, Red Star, Bread & Roses, or Socialist Majority.
Yet these organizations increasingly shape leadership elections, convention resolutions, ideological strategy, and the future direction of the Democratic Socialists of America.
More surprising still, they speak with remarkable candor.
Unlike political campaign literature written for the general public, these documents are written largely for fellow socialists.
The intended audience is not suburban swing voters.
It is committed activists.
As a result, the language becomes refreshingly honest.
Or perhaps alarmingly honest.
One caucus openly describes itself as a “revolutionary Marxist caucus.”
Another proudly traces its intellectual heritage to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik tradition.1At its core, Bolshevism refers to the ideology and program of the Bolsheviks, which advocated violent overthrow of capitalism(1). But to really understand what that meant in practice, you need to know the historical context: Lenin led the Bolsheviks, a revolutionary faction that broke away from the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ party in 1903, and they seized power in a nearly bloodless coup in November 1917(2).
What made Bolshevism distinctive wasn’t just its revolutionary goals—it was Lenin’s conviction about how revolution would happen. Lenin believed workers lacked the understanding to recognize their own interests, so they needed guidance from a disciplined “vanguard” party of revolutionaries(2). This wasn’t spontaneous uprising; it was revolution imposed from above by a committed minority.
In practice, Bolshevism became something far more totalizing than a simple economic system. It aimed to reshape the entire person through ideology, with the totality of human life as its scope, accomplished through centralized and highly organized power(3). Under Stalin, this evolved into Stalinism—notorious for totalitarianism, widespread terror, and the cult of personality surrounding Stalin as an infallible leader(2).
Interestingly, Bolshevism represents a state-centric approach to achieving social unity, grounded in what bureaucrats defined as historical necessity—essentially a rationalist interpretation of Russian communal traditions. So while it began as a response to genuine social injustice, the system that emerged became something radically different from its original ideals.
(1) Inc Merriam-Webster, in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2003).
(2) COMPTON’S ENCYCLOPEDIA, s.v. “Communism.” (Copyright 2015 Encyclopaedia Britannica)
(3) Emil Brunner, “A Fresh Appraisal: The Cleveland Report on Red China,” Christianity Today (Washington, D.C.: Christianity Today, 1960), 4:15:604.
Another argues that socialists should work toward overthrowing the capitalist state.
Another calls for building a mass socialist party capable of fundamentally transforming American political life.
These are not descriptions authored by political conservatives.
These are self-descriptions.
That distinction matters.
Because it changes the question Christians ought to ask.
The question is no longer whether Scandinavian-style social democracy is compatible with Christian political thought.
The question is whether Christians have accurately understood the movement that increasingly calls itself democratic socialist.
I am no longer convinced that many of us have.
And once I began reading those internal documents, I found myself asking a different question altogether:
Who, exactly, is steering the Democratic Socialists of America today?
That is where the story becomes considerably more interesting.
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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 to a greater or lesser extent. 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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