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)
Politics with a Proof Text
A Thought Experiment
At this point, I would like to ask my progressive Christian friends a few questions.
Not rhetorical questions, actually.
I sincerely want to know where they draw the line.
Suppose we could accurately identify every noncitizen who is unlawfully present in the United States.
Would it be morally permissible for a Christian to support the removal of those who have committed serious crimes?
Surely the answer must be yes.
And if such a person is already sitting in a county jail, is it really more Christian for local authorities to refuse cooperation with ICE—thereby requiring federal agents later to locate that person somewhere in the community?
Why?
Would it not be more humane, safer, and more orderly for immigration authorities to take custody at the jail once the criminal case permits it?
Would supporting that policy make me insufficiently concerned about “the stranger”?
I don’t see how.
Now suppose the person being removed has a wife and children.
Family separation raises serious moral concerns. But does that make removal morally impermissible? What if assistance is provided so the family can remain together by returning together?
Would Christians still be prohibited from supporting removal?
If so, why?
Let’s go further.
What about a noncitizen who entered unlawfully, has no valid claim to remain, and openly rejects the laws and civic obligations of the country whose hospitality he is demanding?
Does “love the stranger” require that he remain indefinitely?
Again: why?
And here I want to make an important distinction.
I am not arguing that government should deport people merely because they criticize America, wave a Mexican flag at a protest, advocate socialism, practice Islam, or hold political opinions I dislike.
My question is more fundamental:
Does Christian hospitality impose no reciprocal obligation upon the person receiving that hospitality?
Does the stranger have duties as well as rights?
Must he obey the laws?
May the host country expect him to accommodate himself to its civic order?
May it refuse admission—or terminate permission to remain—when the conditions of its lawful immigration system have not been satisfied?
And may the state consider national security, public safety, capacity for assimilation, and the welfare of its existing citizens when deciding whom to admit?
If the answer to all of those questions is still, “No, Christian love requires us to let them remain,” then I think the biblical proof-texting needs to be examined very carefully.
Ancient Israel certainly did not understand “love the stranger” to mean that the stranger entered a community without obligations.
The ger (stranger) was protected.
He was not to be exploited or oppressed.
He was to receive justice.
But he also lived within an ordered community governed by laws that applied to him as well as to the native-born.
That part of the biblical picture tends to disappear when “welcome the stranger” is lifted out of its literary and historical context and dropped directly into a twenty-first-century immigration debate.
So here is the question I really want my progressive Christian friends to answer:
Is there any immigration restriction or deportation policy that you would regard as morally legitimate?
If the answer is yes, then good. We are no longer debating whether Christians may enforce immigration laws. We are debating which laws, under what circumstances, enforced how, and with what degree of mercy and prudence.
That is a political and prudential argument.
Scripture informs it.
Scripture constrains it.
Scripture certainly forbids cruelty and injustice.
But Scripture does not settle every policy question simply by giving us the phrase “love the stranger.”
And if the answer is no—if practically every meaningful attempt to exclude, remove, or restrict unlawful immigration is condemned as unchristian—then I begin to suspect that something other than exegesis is doing much of the work.
Perhaps a political philosophy is being smuggled into the biblical text and then handed back to us as though it were simply “what Jesus requires.”
That is precisely the kind of proof-texting Christians of every political persuasion should resist.
The Political Philosophy Beneath the Proof Text
I suspect there is sometimes another political philosophy operating beneath this biblical argument—one that should be brought into the open and debated on its own merits.
It goes roughly like this:
The wealthy nations of the “Global North”—the old “First World”—became wealthy in significant measure through colonialism, slavery, exploitation, extraction, and domination of the poorer nations of the “Global South” or “Majority World.”
Therefore, today’s enormous disparities in wealth are not merely differences in economic development. They are, at least in significant measure, the accumulated consequences of historical injustice.
And from that premise follows a reparative obligation.
Wealthy Western nations are therefore expected to redistribute wealth, accept more migrants from poorer nations, relax immigration restrictions, and in some versions of the argument treat migration itself as a form of reparation for colonialism.
That line of reasoning is not something I am inventing. Serious contemporary political theorists explicitly argue for “migration as reparation.”
Now, that is a political and historical argument worth having.
But notice what has happened.
We have moved a very long way from:
“You shall love the stranger.”
We are now talking about colonial guilt, global redistribution, reparations, and the moral legitimacy of national borders.
Those are not the same argument.
And that is precisely why I object when the entire package is presented to Christians as though it simply falls out of a few biblical verses about “the stranger.”
It doesn’t.
If someone wants to argue that the modern West owes the developing world reparations because its prosperity was produced principally through exploitation, make that historical case.
If someone wants to argue that present-day Americans inherit a moral debt for the acts of previous empires or generations, make that philosophical case.
If someone wants to argue that immigration should function as a mechanism of global wealth redistribution, make that economic case.
But don’t simply quote Leviticus and imply that Christians who reject those conclusions have somehow rejected Scripture.
That is exactly the move I am objecting to.
And I reject much of the underlying premise anyway.
The prosperity of the modern West cannot plausibly be reduced to colonial plunder.
Institutions matter.
The rule of law matters.
Property rights matter.
Scientific and technological development matter.
Markets matter.
Political stability, education, cultural habits, and human capital matter.
History certainly includes exploitation, conquest, slavery, and genuine injustices for which moral reckoning may be necessary.
But the simplistic morality play in which the rich world became rich primarily because it stole from the poor world—and therefore now owes the poor world access to its borders and accumulated wealth—is an historical and economic thesis, not a biblical commandment.
And that is the crucial distinction.
Once again, the danger is that a modern political ideology gets smuggled into the biblical text and then emerges wearing a clerical collar.
That is not exegesis.
That is politics with a proof text.
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From Biblical Principle to Political Policy
A dear Christian friend and I have been carrying on an extended conversation about politics, Scripture, immigration, poverty, and the responsibilities of Christians in public life.
We disagree about a good many things politically. But she is a friend I love and respect, and our disagreements take place within a shared Christian faith. That matters to me. One of the purposes of these conversations is not simply to win an argument, but to understand where our differences actually lie—and, when necessary, to challenge one another.
Recently, our conversation turned to Speaker Mike Johnson. My friend expressed deep frustration with Johnson’s conservative Christianity, particularly his views on immigration and the social safety net. She questioned how someone who claims a “biblical worldview” could support policies she regards as inconsistent with Scripture’s repeated concern for “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.” In her view, those policies are not merely mistaken; they reflect a Christianity that is insufficiently compassionate, inclusive, and loving toward one’s neighbor.
I think that judgment is unfair—not only to Johnson, whom neither of us knows personally, but more broadly to conservative Christians who sincerely attempt to think biblically about these questions and nevertheless arrive at different political conclusions.
And that raises a much larger issue.
One of the recurring themes of this blog is Celebrating God’s Good Creation—receiving the world God has made as good, learning to see our neighbors as bearers of his image, and taking seriously our obligations toward the poor, the vulnerable, the foreigner, the family, the community, and the larger political order in which we live.
Christians should care about “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.”
Of course we should.
But precisely because Scripture matters, we also have an obligation to read it carefully.
Biblical ethics cannot simply be lifted out of their historical, literary, covenantal, and theological contexts and then attached to whatever contemporary political program we happen to favor. A biblical command may establish a genuine moral obligation without settling every prudential question about how a modern government should fulfill—or assist its citizens in fulfilling—that obligation.
That distinction is enormously important.
“Care for the poor” does not by itself tell us how large the federal welfare state should be.
“Love the stranger” does not by itself establish an immigration quota.
“Seek justice” does not tell us which political party’s economic program is the Christian one.
Those conclusions require additional arguments—arguments from Scripture, certainly, but also from history, economics, law, human nature, institutional competence, and the actual consequences of particular policies.
And conservatives are not exempt from that discipline. We can proof-text our politics too. Christians on the Right should be every bit as careful about turning prudential judgments into divine mandates.
But neither should progressive Christians assume that their preferred public policies simply are the biblical ethic, leaving Christians who disagree to explain why they are somehow less compassionate, less loving, or less faithful to Jesus.
That is the issue behind the following response to my friend.
I have left much of it in the conversational form in which it originated because I think that form captures something important. This is not an abstract argument with an ideological opponent. It is a disagreement between Christian friends who care about one another and are trying—sometimes rather pointedly!—to understand how our common Scriptures should inform our very different political judgments.
And if Christians are going to disagree politically, that seems to me a much healthier place to begin.
Here is what I wrote to her.
From Biblical Principle to Political Policy
I’ve given your comments about Mike Johnson more thought, because I think they raise a much larger issue than Johnson himself.
I think you’re being genuinely unfair to conservative Christians.
You’re certainly free to disagree with Johnson’s policies, his political alliances, his judgment about Trump, or his interpretation of particular biblical passages. I disagree with plenty of politicians myself.
But you moved rather quickly from disagreement with Johnson’s political judgments to describing his Christianity as “unchristian,” “exclusive,” and “unloving”—and even suggesting that he is essentially a power-hungry fool willing to kiss whatever ring is necessary. In this case, Trump’s.
That is a sweeping judgment about a Christian brother neither of us knows personally.
More importantly, I think it reflects a tendency among some progressive Christians to assume that their preferred political policies follow rather straightforwardly from Scripture.
I don’t think they do.
Liberal Christians are capable of abusing Scripture to support their political preferences every bit as much as conservative Christians are.
You rightly emphasize the biblical commands to care for “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.” So do I. Those are genuine Christian obligations.
But there is an important question between the biblical command and the political program:
What particular government policy follows from it?
That is where I think progressive Christians often make an enormous and largely unexamined leap.
The Bible tells us to care for the poor.
It does not tell us what the federal welfare budget should be, what tax rates should be, how expansive Medicaid should become, or that increasing government spending necessarily equals increasing Christian compassion.
Those are prudential political judgments.
Catholic political philosopher/theologian Michael Novak was especially helpful here. His vision of democratic capitalism was never simply “markets good, government bad.” A healthy society, he argued, rests upon mutually supporting institutions: democratic government, a free economy, and a strong moral-cultural sphere made up of families, churches, charities, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and other institutions of civil society.
There is an enormous amount of human life between the individual and Washington, D.C.
Christians therefore have to ask more than, “How much money does government spend?”
Does a policy actually help people flourish? Does it strengthen families? Encourage work, responsibility, independence, charity, and community? Does it help people escape poverty or inadvertently create dependency? Does it strengthen institutions close to the person in need—or unnecessarily replace them with distant bureaucracies?
Those are Christian questions too.
Does America Really Abandon the Poor?
Here is something else I think gets badly distorted in these conversations:
Where exactly is this supposed unconcern for the poor and marginalized?
I am not claiming that America has no poor people. Of course we do.
We have homelessness, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, broken families, elderly people who struggle, people who fall through bureaucratic cracks, and neighborhoods suffering stubborn multigenerational poverty.
All of that is real, and Christians should care deeply about it.
But poverty is not synonymous with destitution, and progressive rhetoric frequently blurs the distinction.
Listen to some progressive Christian critiques of American capitalism and you could easily conclude that masses of Americans are simply abandoned without food, medical care, shelter, or institutional support while conservative Christians stand around quoting Adam Smith and shrugging their shoulders.
Where is this America?
I’m not seeing it.
We have Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, SNAP, housing assistance, school meals, disability programs, unemployment insurance, earned-income tax credits, state and local assistance, food banks, church ministries, rescue missions, Catholic and Protestant charities, the Salvation Army, private foundations, and community organizations.
And there is another rather obvious fact that ought to complicate the claim that America simply does not care for vulnerable people:
We are approaching $40 trillion in national debt.
Obviously, the entire debt cannot be attributed to social programs. We spend enormously on defense, government operations, emergencies, and many other things—and now more than a trillion dollars annually merely servicing accumulated debt.
But a very large portion of federal spending goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, and other income- and health-support programs. Mandatory federal spending alone is projected at roughly $4.5 trillion in 2026.
Whatever else one thinks of American government (which includes both parties), the claim that we have simply decided not to care for vulnerable people is difficult to square with the evidence.
We can argue about whether these programs are well designed, whether some should be larger or smaller, about eligibility, work requirements, fraud, dependency, federal versus state responsibility, efficiency, and whether particular programs achieve what they promise.
Given a national debt approaching $40 trillion, we had better have those arguments seriously.
A society spending trillions every year on retirement security, health care, food assistance, disability, housing, and other forms of social provision cannot plausibly be described as a society that simply does not care about the poor.
That accusation is long on slogan and exceedingly short on evidence.
And fiscal stewardship is itself a moral question. Government cannot indefinitely promise benefits without asking who will pay for them, what obligations are being passed to future generations, and whether the economic system creating the necessary wealth remains healthy enough to sustain those promises.
[Source: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61882? ]
The American poor are surrounded by an enormous public and private network devoted to helping people in need.
Can those systems fail? Absolutely.
Can they be improved? Certainly.
Can people still experience genuine misery despite them? Of course.
But that is very different from saying our society simply does not care for the poor.
So let me ask an even more pointed question:
Who exactly on the conservative Christian side is advocating destitution?
Who is saying, “Let the widow go hungry”?
“Let the orphan sleep in the street”?
“If somebody cannot afford food, too bad”?
I know of no serious conservative Christian political movement advocating anything remotely like that.
Conservatives argue about how assistance should be structured. They worry about dependency, incentives, fraud, family formation, work requirements, federal versus local responsibility, and whether government programs crowd out institutions closer to the people they are intended to help.
You can disagree with those judgments.
But disagreeing about how best to help the poor is not the same thing as disagreeing about whether the poor should be helped.
To describe conservative efforts to reform, limit, decentralize, or impose conditions upon a program as evidence that conservatives do not care about “the widow and the orphan” is, frankly, polemical fantasy.
You have to establish that a proposed policy actually abandons vulnerable people—not merely demonstrate that government spends less money than you would prefer.
This is where Novak’s insight returns: the moral question isn’t simply, How large is the government program?
The question is: What actually helps human beings flourish?
Sometimes government is indispensable.
Sometimes families do it better.
Sometimes churches and local institutions do it better.
And I would argue that employment and sustained economic growth do more lasting good than another government benefit.
Christian compassion requires us to care about the result, not merely the mechanism.
When Caricature Becomes an Invitation to Socialism
There is another reason this rhetoric matters beyond whether conservative Christians feel unfairly maligned.
Ideas have consequences. Caricatures do too.
If young people are repeatedly told that capitalism leaves the poor destitute, conservatives don’t care whether vulnerable people eat, Christians on the Right ignore “the widow and the orphan,” and immigration restrictions exist because conservatives don’t love “the stranger,” we should not be surprised when some conclude that the economic and political system itself is morally corrupt.
And waiting in the wings is the Democratic Socialists of America saying, in effect:
Exactly. We have the alternative.
As a student of twentieth-century history, that concerns me enormously.
The numbers suggest this is not imaginary. In Harvard’s Fall 2025 Youth Poll of Americans ages 18–29, only 39 percent expressed support for capitalism, while 29 percent supported democratic socialism. Among young Democrats, support for democratic socialism reached 63 percent. [Source: Harvard IOP]
That does not prove progressive Christian rhetoric is causing young people to embrace socialism. But it certainly tells us the cultural soil is already fertile.
Young Americans are considerably more open to democratic socialism than many older Americans realize. So overheated rhetoric about the supposed cruelty of capitalism is not harmless theological posturing.
It helps create the moral atmosphere in which socialism can present itself as the compassionate Christian—or simply compassionate human—alternative.
If you teach a generation that our economic order is fundamentally a machine for enriching the powerful while abandoning the poor, eventually some will believe you. Once they accept that premise, greater political control of economic life, radical redistribution, weakening private ownership, and moving economic decisions away from markets can begin to sound remarkably attractive.
But what if the premise itself is badly distorted?
What if the remarkable story of the modern American economy is not mass destitution, but extraordinary prosperity coupled with enough productive wealth to sustain Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food and housing assistance, disability benefits, vast charitable institutions, churches, hospitals, universities, foundations, and countless other forms of assistance?
Then radically restructuring the wealth-producing system may not be the obvious act of compassion it is advertised to be.
A thriving market economy is not opposed to caring for the poor.
Its productive capacity is one of the things that makes sustained care for the poor possible.
Before wealth can be redistributed, somebody has to create it.
Before government can fund Medicaid, somebody has to generate the taxable economic activity that pays for Medicaid.
Before churches and charities can give generously, families and businesses must have something to give.
That doesn’t mean markets are morally self-sufficient. Novak certainly didn’t believe that. Markets require law, virtue, strong families, honest institutions, moral restraint, and a culture that understands that wealth carries obligations toward others.
But seriously impairing the productive economy in the name of compassion can eventually leave us with less ability to be compassionate.
My concern isn’t that young people care too much about the poor.
I want them to care about the poor.
My concern is that we are teaching them a false story about why poverty exists, what America already does for vulnerable people, and which economic arrangements give us the greatest capacity to help people flourish.
If progressive Christians contribute to that false story by suggesting that conservative Christians favor an economic order built upon indifference to “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger,” they bear some responsibility for the conclusions young people eventually draw.
You don’t have to convince someone explicitly to become a socialist.
Sometimes you only have to convince him that capitalism is morally indefensible.
The socialists will happily take it from there.
What Does “Love the Stranger” Actually Mean?
And that brings me to immigration.
What exactly is unchristian about restrictive immigration policies?
Another large theological leap often occurs here:
The Bible says to love the stranger; therefore restrictive immigration policies are unchristian.
But quite a bit is being smuggled into that conclusion.
We need to enter imaginatively into the world of the people to whom those biblical commands were actually given.
When the Hebrew Scriptures command Israel to care for “the stranger,” what kind of stranger are we talking about?
The ger of the Old Testament was not simply the ancient equivalent of anyone, from anywhere, who wished to enter Israel and live there on whatever terms he preferred.
He was a resident alien living within Israel’s social, legal, and religious order.
Israel was repeatedly commanded not to mistreat him, exploit him, or deny him justice. Those commands are morally serious, and Christians should take them seriously.
But that is not the entire biblical picture.
The stranger was also expected to live under the laws of the community that received him. Again and again the Torah speaks of one law applying to the native-born Israelite and the stranger living among them.
That is an important hermeneutical point.
Do we really imagine that a faithful Israelite understood “love the stranger” to mean:
Someone may enter our community, disregard our laws, reject the moral and religious convictions that define us, ignore the obligations of membership, and nevertheless insist that the community owes him all its benefits simply because he is a stranger?
I don’t think the biblical text supports that.
There is a useful Christian analogy here.
The Church welcomes people as they are.
Of course it does.
But it does not say they are expected to remain exactly as they are.
“Come as you are” does not mean “nothing about you must ever change.”
Entering a community brings obligations as well as benefits.
Israel, the Church, and the Modern State
The analogy, however, only takes us so far.
The United States is not ancient Israel, and neither is it the Church. That distinction matters enormously.
Ancient Israel was a covenant people, and the Church is the worshiping community of the New Covenant. Both are constituted by theological claims about God, truth, holiness, worship, moral discipline, and membership.
The modern American state is not.
So when Scripture speaks about receiving the stranger within Israel—or Christians speak about welcoming someone into the Church—we are speaking about communities whose identities include explicitly religious and moral obligations.
The Church welcomes the sinner as he is, but does not tell him that remaining exactly as he is constitutes discipleship. Christian community is ordered toward conversion, holiness, worship, discipline, and ultimately salvation.
Its welcome is therefore both more radical and more demanding than anything a secular state can properly require.
That is precisely why we must be careful about directly applying these biblical texts to modern immigration policy.
The United States government is not charged with making disciples, enforcing Israel’s purity code, administering sacraments, or preparing citizens for eternal life. It is a civil government governing a religiously plural population.
The biblical command to care for the ger certainly teaches enduring moral truths about justice, hospitality, protection from exploitation, and concern for vulnerable people.
But it does not follow that the institutional obligations of ancient Israel, the Church, and the American state are identical.
To pretend otherwise is not contextual biblical interpretation. It is a category mistake.
In a sense, it attempts to preserve the fruit while severing it from the root.
Human dignity, care for the stranger, concern for the poor, forgiveness, sacrificial love, and solidarity did not simply materialize from nowhere. Within the Christian moral vision they grow from deeper theological convictions about creation, the image of God, sin, covenant, redemption, and human nature.
A secular government can adopt some of those moral fruits—and I hope it does.
But when they are detached from the anthropology and moral framework that gave them meaning, policies built upon them can become confused or contradictory.
Compassion without prudence can become sentimentality.
Hospitality without law can become disorder.
And moral aspirations detached from a truthful account of human nature can fail the very people they were intended to help.
Ancient Israel itself demonstrates the broader principle.
Hospitality did not require cultural self-erasure.
Compassion did not mean lawlessness.
Protection of the stranger did not mean abolishing the distinction between Israel and the nations.
That is why it is too simplistic to take “love the stranger” and move immediately to the conclusion that restrictive immigration policies are somehow unchristian.
Scripture gives us a moral duty toward the stranger.
It does not give us an immigration quota.
It does not tell us how many immigrants a modern nation should admit, what asylum law should look like, whether someone who entered illegally must automatically be allowed to remain, or exactly how government should balance obligations toward newcomers against obligations toward existing citizens—particularly poorer citizens who may bear some of the costs of large-scale immigration.
Those are prudential questions.
A Christian can reasonably believe that a nation should welcome immigrants generously and control its borders.
A Christian can believe immigrants should be treated humanely and immigration laws should be enforced.
A Christian can care deeply about foreigners and believe government has special obligations toward its own citizens.
Those propositions are not contradictions.
Large-scale immigration also affects labor markets, schools, hospitals, housing, public budgets, and communities. Those consequences do not disappear merely because the immigrant has understandable reasons for wanting a better life.
And the working-class American has moral standing too.
Tell an American worker who loses a job or sees wages pressured by cheaper labor that his Christian obligation is simply to celebrate because the newcomer who displaced him is now economically better off.
That doesn’t strike me as a particularly sophisticated Christian social ethic either.
The poor around the world understandably want to come to America precisely because America remains extraordinarily prosperous and, compared with most societies in human history, extraordinarily generous.
That hardly proves America is an uncaring country.
Quite the contrary.
We remain a remarkably generous country—even with an admittedly unlikable President like Trump sitting in the White House. 😂
Back to Mike Johnson
Which brings me back to Mike Johnson.
You said his support for “ALL of Trump’s policies, no matter the harm” makes him unchristian, exclusive, and unloving.
But that is an enormous claim.
What evidence do we have that Johnson supports literally every Trump policy “no matter the harm”? And what specific harm are we talking about?
How do we know what he thinks privately about Trump?
How do we know whether his support on a particular issue reflects cowardice and lust for power rather than a sincere—possibly mistaken—prudential judgment about what he believes is best for the country?
You don’t know the man personally.
Neither do I.
And I’d be willing to bet he’ll be relieved when the Trump years finally end.
Until then, I’m willing to extend a Christian brother the same charity I hope I would extend to you: he can reach political conclusions with which I disagree without therefore being stupid, corrupt, unloving, or unchristian.
Criticize his policies?
Absolutely.
Show me where his reading of Scripture is wrong?
Let’s have that discussion.
Show me that a particular policy is actually harming poor people?
Let’s look at the evidence.
But “he disagrees with progressive Christian political judgments, therefore his Christianity is unloving and inconsistent” is not much of an argument.
Conservative Christians do not have a monopoly on biblical interpretation.
But neither do progressive Christians.
And perhaps all of us need to be much more careful about confusing our own prudential political judgments with the Gospel itself.
That, more than anything else, is the point I’m trying to make.
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Companion Posts
How Christians Should Evaluate Political Movements
WNBA ‘Fairness’ in a Mad World.
In a normal world, this week’s developments would expose the absurdity and internal contradiction of gender ideology. Two current NBA players have declared their intention to enter the upcoming WNBA Draft.
Of course, from a Christian perspective, the issue goes even deeper: creation is not ours to redefine. God created humanity male and female, and no amount of ideology, self-identification, or cultural pressure can rewrite what God has designed.
That’s the problem when a culture rejects the Creator but still wants the authority to redefine His creation. Eventually, self-awareness, science, biology, and basic logic all become subordinate to ideology.
Here are the details of the latest head-scratching developments….
NBA player Enes Freedom Announces for WNBA Draft
“After careful consideration and reviewing the current eligibility guidelines, I’m officially declaring myself a @WNBA prospect.
If simply declaring who you are is all that’s required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA. My team and I have carefully examined the WNBA’s eligibility criteria and governing framework surrounding self-identification and inclusion. Based on the current guidelines, I can and am officially declaring my eligibility for the upcoming WNBA draft in April 2027.
I know my presence on the court will stir up strong opinions. I am definitely not here to mock, make fun of, or disrespect any community or personal choices.
I’m simply asking that the current rules be applied equally to everyone — the rules that represent the very values many WNBA players and coaches have publicly advocated for.
My team and I are prepared to ensure these guidelines are applied equally, consistently, and without exception, and I look forward to the #WNBA honoring its stated principles. See you at training camp.“
Hats off to Enes Kanter Freedom for stepping directly into today’s confusion over sex and gender and forcing the logic of it into the open.
And major props to former NBA first-round pick Royce White. He says he’s declaring for the 2027 WNBA Draft, claiming that he identifies as transgender for the purpose of playing professional basketball.
“I’m just having a blast in my feminine era. I never thought that I was a woman. I think it’s only fair I get a chance to play with some of my queens here in the twilight of my career, my athletic prime!
“You know, I’ve always trusted the science and I thought I was a man my entire life, but you know, after further review and strong look at my personal preferences — it would appear that that I am indeed sometimes identifying as a transgender woman.“
Whether they ultimately get anywhere with it is almost beside the point. They’re forcing people to confront a basic question: If biological sex can be overridden simply by declaration, on what principled basis can a women’s professional sports league remain exclusively for women?
For Christians, there’s an even more fundamental question: Do we receive creation as something God has ordered, or do we believe we have the authority to remake it according to our own desires?
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God Made Us Male and Female
Let the games begin!