Christian Anthropology – Page 2 – God’s Good Creation

September 21, 2026September 21, 2026

When a Culture Loses Touch with Reality

Link – Imagine walking into your child’s classroom and this person is their teacher.

Mia Hughes begins her recent essay, “Trans Is a Mental Disorder,” with a deliberately provocative observation: Western society has normalized the idea that otherwise healthy people may require hormones, surgeries, and even the removal of healthy body parts in order to become psychologically whole.

For Hughes, the question is obvious: How did something once understood as evidence of psychological distress come to be regarded as a healthy expression of personal identity?

Her answer is that transgender medicine underwent a process of depsychopathologization. Rather than locating the problem in a person’s relationship to his or her sexed body, the emerging gender-affirming model increasingly located the problem in the body—or in society’s refusal to affirm the individual’s internal identity. Hughes argues that this transformation was heavily influenced by activism and eventually institutionalized in medicine, law, education, and popular culture.

Hughes then proposes a psychiatric category she believes helps explain the phenomenon: the overvalued belief.

An overvalued belief is not quite a delusion. The person may remain intelligent, competent, and perfectly rational in most areas of life. Nor is it an obsession, because obsessive thoughts are normally unwanted. Instead, an overvalued belief is deeply embraced. It becomes intertwined with identity itself and can eventually dominate how someone interprets reality.

Hughes compares the phenomenon to anorexia or body dysmorphic disorder. The sufferer may become convinced that some aspect of the healthy body must be changed. The conviction becomes so powerful that medical alteration appears not merely reasonable but necessary.

“Imagine a group of powerful, well-connected anorexics gather and formulate a plot to reject the psychiatric framing of anorexia and turn their illness into a healthy identity. They make it discrimination and bigotry to call anorexia a mental disorder and frame access to liposuction and Ozempic as medically necessary and a human right. The whole world goes along with this. In the field of anorexia-affirming care, an anorexic receives immediate affirmation of her anorexic identity and unfettered access to the weight-loss medical treatments that her disorder demands.

No psychotherapeutic attempt is made to loosen the grip of the belief.

Then, instead of measuring success by objective outcomes such as physical health and quality of life, researchers in the field opt for self-report: in other words, after giving the anorexic the very treatments that her disorder compels her to seek, the researchers ask her if she is happy. When she says yes, this confirms that Ozempic and liposuction are beneficial and appropriate treatments for anorexia. That is the medical world’s current approach to managing the trans phenomenon. Read how this madness happened in my first essay of @Genspect’s REPATH series.”

Source: Mia Hughes

Hughes’s analogy is intentionally jarring. But that is precisely why it is useful. It forces us to ask whether compassion requires affirming a person’s interpretation of his or her body—or whether genuine compassion requires challenging that interpretation. And for Christians, this question reaches deeper than psychiatry or medicine. It takes us directly into the biblical doctrines of creation, embodiment, truth, and ultimately the nature of spiritual deception.

The Body Is Not an Accident

The biblical worldview begins somewhere very different from modern expressive individualism.¹

“Male and female he created them.”

Our bodies are not raw material handed over to an ‘autonomous’ self that stands above them. The body participates in who the person is.

Abigail Favale of Notre Dame puts the matter helpfully when she describes male and female as two embodied ways of being human. Sexual difference is not merely a collection of stereotypes about personality. It is rooted first in the body itself. Men and women are equally human, equally bearers of the image of God, yet their bodies are meaningfully different.

Christianity therefore cannot accept the idea that the deepest self is somehow trapped inside the wrong body. That anthropology is remarkably close to the ancient dualisms Christianity rejected from the beginning (Gnosticism).

Creation matters.

The Incarnation matters.

And bodily resurrection matters.

God does not rescue human beings from embodiment. He redeems human beings as embodied creatures.

And Then There Are the Powers

But the biblical worldview goes further still.

Scripture does not describe evil merely in terms of mistaken ideas, psychological dysfunction, social systems, or individual sin. It also speaks about unseen powers—“principalities,” “powers,” “rulers,” and “authorities”—that work against God’s purposes for creation.

That does not necessarily mean that a person experiencing gender dysphoria is demon possessed. Nor should Christians casually assign demonic explanations to individual psychological suffering.

The point is larger.

The Bible tells us that deception itself has a supernatural dimension.

Spiritual warfare is fundamentally “a conflict between what is true and what is false.” The serpent’s strategy in Genesis 3 is not to create an entirely imaginary world. It is subtler. He takes what God has made and reframes reality, mixing truth with falsehood until human beings begin distrusting what God has said and what God has made.

That pattern should sound familiar.

“You will be like God,” the serpent says.

In other words: you may determine reality for yourself.

The modern version is remarkably similar:

My identity is constituted by my inner consciousness,
and my body must conform to the identity I declare.

At that point we have moved beyond a debate about pronouns.

We are dealing with anthropology.

We are dealing with creation.

And ultimately we are dealing with authority.

Who gets to say what a human being is?

Idolatry and the Autonomous Self

One of the fundamental axioms of Biblical Theology is that human beings become like what they worship. Humanity was created to image God, but idolatry distorts that image. Instead of receiving reality from the Creator, fallen humanity turns toward created things—and, in the modern age, ultimately toward the self.

The modern ‘autonomous’ self can therefore become an idol.

The self no longer receives identity as gift. It manufactures identity through will.

The body says one thing.

The ‘autonomous’ self says another.

And increasingly the surrounding culture is required to declare that the self is right and the body is wrong.

That is why this controversy reaches far beyond the relatively small number of people suffering profound gender distress. It asks every one of us to embrace a particular understanding of reality: that personal identity originates primarily in subjective consciousness rather than in the created body. (See definition of expressive individualism above.)

From a biblical perspective, that reversal should trouble us deeply. (Unfortunately, this reversal does not trouble some Christian denominations!)

The People Are Not the Enemy

There is one final Christian qualification that is essential.

Paul tells us explicitly that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood.”

The transgender person is not the Christian’s enemy.

The confused teenager is not the enemy.

The frightened parent is not the enemy.

Even the activist advancing ideas we believe profoundly mistaken is ultimately not the enemy.

The Christian diagnosis of reality is simultaneously more severe and more compassionate than that.

Human beings can become caught inside lies larger than themselves. Institutions can reinforce those lies. Cultures can normalize them. And behind the biblical drama stands an older rebellion in which dark powers seek to deform God’s good creation by separating humanity from truth.

Yet Christianity does not end with the powers.

It ends with Christ.

The New Testament announces that Christ has already confronted, disarmed, and defeated the principalities and powers. The answer to deception is therefore neither hatred nor surrender.

It is truth joined to love.

We should have enormous compassion for people who experience anguish about their bodies. But compassion cannot compel us to claim that creation itself is mistaken.

Sometimes love means accompanying suffering.

Sometimes it means refusing to participate in a falsehood.

And sometimes the most compassionate sentence we can speak is very simple:

Your body is not your enemy.

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Celebrate God’s Good Creation

July 2, 2026July 6, 2026

The Vanishing Black Family—and Why Every American Should Care

What Delano Squires Teaches Us About Marriage, Fatherhood, and God’s First Institution

Audio – If you wish to both listen and read simultaneously, you will need to open two tabs in your browser. One for just the audio play and another to read the text which extends over 3 pages.

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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June 26, 2026June 26, 2026

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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