Introduction

A Guide to the Wasteland

Human life and sexuality have become the watershed moral issues of our age. Every day, the twenty-four-hour news cycle chronicles the advance of a secular moral revolution in areas such as sexuality, abortion, assisted suicide, homosexuality, and transgenderism.The new secular orthodoxy is being imposed through virtually all the major social institutions: academia, media, public schools, Hollywood, private corporations, and the law.

It is easy to get caught up in the latest controversy or breaking news story. But current events are merely surface effects, like waves on the ocean. The real action happens below the surface, at the level of worldviews. These are like the tectonic plates whose movements cause the roiling surface waves. In Love Thy Body, we will move beyond click-bait headlines and trendy slogans to uncover the worldview that drives the secular ethic. By learning the core principles of this worldview, you will be able to engage intelligently and compassionately on all of today’s most controversial moral challenges.

As a former agnostic, I give an insider’s road map to postmodern moral theories, showing how they devalue the human being and destroy human rights.

Dissenters to the politically correct orthodoxy are accused of intolerance and discrimination, branded as bigots and misogynists, and targeted for campaigns of shame and intimidation. Want proof? In its 2013 Windsor decision, the United States Supreme Court ruling struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a federal law recognizing that marriage is between one man and one woman. The majority opinion accused DOMA supporters of being motivated by “animus” (animosity, hostility, hatred). It claimed that their purpose was to “disparage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” “humiliate,” and “harm” people in same-sex unions . . . to brand them as “unworthy,” to “impose a disadvantage, a stigma” and to “deny them equal dignity.” In short, the Court did not just say people who support man-woman marriage are mistaken. It denounced them as hostile, hateful, and mean-spirited.

Those who disagree with the prevailing secular ethos plead a right to religious liberty. But the chairman of the US Commission on Civil Rights wrote disdainfully that “the phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any other form of intolerance.”1 Notice that the phrase religious liberty is put in sneer quotes, as though it were an illegitimate claim instead of a foundational right in a free society.

The next stage will be to deny citizens their religious liberty—and it has already begun. Those who resist the secular moral revolution have lost jobs, businesses, and teaching positions. Others have been kicked out of graduate school programs, lost the right to be foster parents, been forced to shut down adoption centers, lost their status as campus organizations . . . and the list of oppression is likely to grow.2

The same politically correct orthodoxy is being aggressively promoted around the globe through the State Department, the United Nations, the European Union, private foundations, and the media. Wealthy nations are pushing poorer nations to change their laws on abortion and sexuality as a prerequisite for aid.3 The sexual revolution is going global.

Co-Opted Churchgoers

Don’t think churchgoers are immune. Many people who identify as religious or Christian are being co-opted by the secular worldview, often without realizing it. The numbers are disturbing:

Pornography: About two-thirds of Christian men watch pornography at least monthly, the same rate as men who do not claim to be Christian.4 In one survey, 54 percent of pastors said they viewed porn within the past year.5

Cohabitation: A Gallup poll found that almost half (49 percent) of teens with religious backgrounds support living together before marriage.6

Divorce: Among adults who identify as Christians but rarely attend church, 60 percent have been divorced. Of those who attend church regularly, the number is 38 percent.7

Homosexuality and Transgenderism: These issues are dividing even conservative religious groups. In a 2014 Pew Research Center study, 51 percent of evangelical millennials said same-sex behavior is morally acceptable.8

Abortion: A LifeWay survey found that about 70 percent of women who had an abortion self-identify as Christians. And 43 percent said they attended a Christian church at least once a month or more at the time they aborted their baby.9

The problem is that many people treat morality as a list of rules. But in reality, every moral system rests on a worldview. In every decision we make, we are not just deciding what we want to do. We are expressing our view of the purpose of human life. In the words of theologian Stanley Hauerwas, a moral act “cannot be seen as just an isolated act, but involves fundamental options about the nature and significance of life itself.”10

To be strategically effective, then, we must address what people believe “about the nature and significance of life itself.” We must engage their worldview.

C. S. Lewis put it this way: “The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can’t both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn’t fit the real universe.”11 My goal in Love Thy Body is to show that a secular morality “doesn’t fit the real universe.”

True for You, Not for Me?

The first step is to recognize that the secular morality rests on a deep division that runs through all of Western thought and culture—one that blows apart the connection between scientific and moral knowledge. In the past, most civilizations held that reality consists of both a natural order and a moral order, integrated into an overall unity. Therefore, our knowledge of reality was likewise thought to be a single, unified system of truth.

In the modern age, however, many people came to think that reliable knowledge is possible only of the natural order—of empirically testable scientific facts. What does that imply for moral truths? They cannot be stuffed into a test tube or studied under a microscope. Many people concluded that morality does not qualify as objective truth. It consists of merely personal feelings and preferences.

The unified concept of truth has been exploded, split into two separate domains.

Theologian Francis Schaeffer illustrated the division using the metaphor of two stories in a building. In the lower story is empirical science, which is held to be objectively true and testable. This is the realm of public truths—things that everyone is expected to accept, regardless of their private beliefs. The upper story is the realm of morality and theology, which are treated as private, subjective, and relative. This is where we hear people say, “That can be true for you but not true for me.”12

When Schaeffer’s books were first published, most people treated his two-story image as little more than an idiosyncratic metaphor for relativism. But years later, when I was studying what in the academic world is called the fact/value split, it struck me that this is what Schaeffer was talking about, although he did not use the phrase.13 Do you see the parallels?

I described the parallels in my earlier book Total Truth, and suddenly Schaeffer’s two-story analysis became strikingly relevant to our own day. A leading Christian philosopher told me he had read Schaeffer extensively, and, as a professor, he said, “I have taught about the dangers of the fact/value split all my life . . . but I never made the connection.” By making the connection, Total Truth helped bring Schaeffer’s ideas into fresh and fruitful conversation with secular thought.

A Fragmented Worldview

Still later I realized that the fact/value split is just the tip of the iceberg—that all of modern philosophy has divided into two major streams. One stream began with the scientific revolution. It gave rise to the Enlightenment tradition, composed of philosophers who claimed to build upon science. They proposed philosophies that treat the fact realm (lower story) as the primary reality—“isms” such as empiricism, rationalism, materialism, and naturalism.

As you may remember from high school English classes, however, there was a reaction against the Enlightenment called the Romantic movement. It was composed of thinkers who sought to keep alive the value realm (upper story). They focused on questions of justice, freedom, morals, and meaning. Thinkers in this tradition proposed “isms” such as idealism, Marxism, existentialism, and postmodernism.

Today these two traditions are loosely summarized under the headings of modernism versus postmodernism, and they remain at loggerheads. The split between them has grown so wide that one philosopher says it’s almost as if Western thought has split into “two philosophical worlds.” Another worries that “we have reached a point at which it is as if we’re working in different subjects” and “shouting across the gulf.”14

Modernists claim that the lower story is the primary or sole reality—facts and science. Postmodernists claim that the upper story is primary—that even facts and science are merely mental constructs.15

Because philosophy is so foundational, this divide affects every other subject area, including morality.16 In moral questions, we are asking: What is the right way to treat people? Our answer depends on what we think people are—on what it means to be human. (Philosophers call this our anthropology.) The key to understanding all the controversial issues of our day is that the concept of the human being has likewise been fragmented into an upper and lower story. Secular thought today assumes a body/person split, with the body defined in the “fact” realm by empirical science (lower story) and the person defined in the “values” realm as the basis for rights (upper story). This dualism has created a fractured, fragmented view of the human being, in which the body is treated as separate from the authentic self.

A New Strategy

This two-story division equips us with a powerful new strategy for helping people see why a secular ethic fails, both personally and publicly. Chapter 1, “I Hate Me,” surveys all the most salient issues, highlighting the two-level view of the human being that drives them all. Even if you wish to focus on a later topic, I recommend that you start by reading chapter 1 to become familiar with the overall strategy I will be applying throughout the rest of the book. (Because these are controversial issues, not all objections can be addressed in the text. Please check the endnotes for further discussion.)

Chapter 2, “The Joy of Death,” asks how the body/person dualism undergirds secular arguments for abortion and infanticide. Chapter 3, “Dear Valued Constituent,” uncovers the devastating impact of the same dualism in arguments for euthanasia, as well as related issues such as embryonic stem cell research, animal rights, genetic engineering, and transhumanism. Chapter 4, “Schizoid Sex,” exposes the lies of the hookup culture. Contrary to its claims to liberate the body, in reality it expresses disdain for the body. Chapter 5, “The Body Impolitic,” uncovers how same-sex practice likewise demeans the body. Chapter 6, “Transgender, Transreality,” asks how to help people who think their body is at odds with their true, authentic self. The final chapter, “The Goddess of Choice Is Dead,” moves from the individual to the social realm: How is the body/person dualism destroying our most intimate relationships, especially marriage and family, leaving people lonely and isolated?

We live in a moral wasteland where human beings are desperately seeking answers to hard questions about life and sexuality. But there is hope. In the wasteland we can cultivate a garden. We can discover a reality-based morality that expresses a positive, life-affirming view of the human person—one that is more inspiring, more appealing, and more liberating than the secular worldview. To start learning how, turn to chapter 1.