1. Chairman Martin R. Castro, “Peaceful Coexistence: Reconciling Nondiscrimination Principles with Civil Liberties,” US Commission on Civil Rights, September 29, 2016.
2. For specific examples, see John Corvino and Maggie Gallagher, Debating Same-Sex Marriage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Ryan T. Anderson, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2015).
3. See Gabriele Kuby, The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015).
4. Leonardo Blair, “Nearly Two-Thirds of Christian Men Watch Pornography Monthly: They Are Watching at the Same Rate as Secular Men, Says Study,” The Christian Post, August 27, 2014.
5. Mike Genung, “How Many Porn Addicts Are There in Your Church?” Crosswalk, June 17, 2005.
6. Linda Lyons, “How Many Teens Are Cool with Cohabitation?” Gallup.com, April 13, 2004.
7. Bradley R. E. Wright, Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites . . . and Other Lies You’ve Been Told (Minneapolis: Bethany, 2010), 133.
8. Millennials were defined as those born between 1981 and 1996. Caryle Murphy, “Most U.S. Christian Groups Grow More Accepting of Homosexuality,” Pew Research Center, October 18, 2015.
9. Samuel Smith, “70% of Women Who Get Abortions Identify as Christians, Survey Finds,” The Christian Post, November 25, 2015.
10. Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 155.
11. C. S. Lewis, “Man or Rabbit?” God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 108–9.
12. Francis Schaeffer popularized the two-story metaphor in books like Escape from Reason and The God Who Is There, in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1982). He was influenced by Herman Dooyeweerd’s more scholarly analysis of dualism in Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options (Toronto: Wedge, 1979; orig., Zutphen, Netherlands: J. B. van den Brink, 1959); In the Twilight of Western Thought (Nutley, NJ: Craig, 1972; orig., Presbyterian & Reformed, 1960); and his four-volume set A New Critique of Theoretical Thought (Ontario: Paideia Press, 1984; orig. published in Dutch in 1935).
13. I first recognized the connection while writing a review of Phillip E. Johnson’s The Wedge of Truth. See Nancy Pearcey, “A New Foundation for Positive Cultural Change: Science and God in the Public Square,” Human Events, September 15, 2000. Historians typically trace the fact/value split to eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume. An extreme empiricist, Hume argued that because moral truths cannot be detected empirically, they are not real. What we think are moral facts are in reality only “sentiments and desires.” However, it was Kant who formalized the divide (as we will see in chapter 5). And it was the logical positivists who proposed a particularly virulent form of it—that moral and theological statements are not merely false but cognitively meaningless. For greater detail, see my book Saving Leonardo: The Secular Assault on Mind, Meaning, and Morals (Nashville: B&H, 2010).
14. Anthony Quinton, as cited in Simon Critchley, “Introduction,” A Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998), 7; Critchley, “Introduction,” 14. In the twentieth century, these two philosophical traditions were labeled analytic (lower story) and continental (upper story). One philosopher remarks, “It sometimes appears as if analytic and Continental philosophy are really two separate disciplines with nothing much in common.” Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 193.
15. For an analysis of why all nonbiblical worldviews must ultimately straddle the two stories, resulting in fatal internal contradictions, see my book Finding Truth: 5 Strategies for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism & Other God Substitutes (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2015).
16. To learn how the Enlightenment/Romantic split is expressed in the arts and humanities, see my book Saving Leonardo.
1. See Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual Revolution and Its Victims (San Marcos, CA: Ruth Institute Books), 2015.
2. Miranda Sawyer, “I Knew Where I Stood on Abortion. But I Had to Rethink,” The Guardian, April 7, 2007.
3. Ibid.
4. Schaeffer’s analysis of dualism dovetails with a similar analysis by former pope John Paul II. See my essay, “Evangelium Vitae: John Paul Meets Francis Schaeffer,” The Legacy of John Paul II, ed. Tim Perry (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007). I first realized that Schaeffer’s analysis of dualism could be applied to abortion arguments by reading Robert George, A Clash of Orthodoxies (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2001). See also Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (New York: Random House, 2008); Patrick Lee and Robert George, Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Gerard V. Bradley and Robert P. George, “Marriage and the Liberal Imagination” Scholarly Works (1995), paper 878.
Additional sources on dualism in abortion arguments are the writings of William E. May, such as “Philosophical Anthropology and Evangelium Vitae,” http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/may/philanthropol.htm; “What Is a Human Person and Who Counts as a Human Person?” http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/may/humanperson.htm.
5. By contrast with dualism, monism holds that reality consists of only one substance. Materialism is monistic because it holds that there is only one substance, namely, matter. Pantheism is likewise monistic because it holds that there is only one substance, namely, spirit. See J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae, Body and Soul (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000). Christian philosophers who defend dualism against materialism include Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne. See their essays in Persons: Human and Divine, ed. Peter Van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
6. Pearcey, Saving Leonardo, 85.
7. See, for example, Brian Charlesworth and Deborah Charlesworth, Evolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), chapter 5.
8. Howard A. Smith, “Does Science Suggest Humans Have a Cosmic Role? Almost in Spite of Themselves, Scientists Are Driven to a Teleological View of the Cosmos,” Nautilus, December 2016.
To read more on information in DNA, see my treatment in The Soul of Science (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), ch. 10; Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell (New York: HarperCollins, 2099). To read more on fine-tuning, see Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Latest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God, third ed. (Colorado Springs: Nav Press, 2001); Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (New York: Routledge, 2014). To read more on teleology in nature, see William Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information (New York: Routledge, 2014).
9. Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 11.
10. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1980), 5.
11. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 148–49.
12. Philosopher David West summarizes the shift in these words: When nature was considered “a manifestation of God’s will,” then the goal of knowledge was “to fulfill God’s design” and live in harmony with his purposes. But if nature does not reveal God’s purpose, then the goal of knowledge is merely to improve “our ability to predict and control nature” to serve our own needs and preferences. Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010), 15. Similarly, Roger Lundin of Wheaton College explains, “With the loss of belief in the spiritual and ethical significance of creation and the human body,” these became “essentially amoral mechanisms to be used to whatever private ends we have.” The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 102. As John Paul II explains, nature is no longer regarded as intrinsically good, revealing the goodness of its Creator, but only instrumentally good as it is used to achieve human purposes (Veritatis Splendor, §46).
13. “Peter Jennings Interviews Sen. John Kerry,” ABC News, July 22, 2004.
14. Wesley J. Smith, “Personhood Theory: Why Contemporary Mainstream Bioethics is Dangerous,” National Review, March 25, 2005.
15. See Wesley Smith, The Culture of Death (New York: Encounter Books, 2000), 73–78. In some cases, there may be good reasons not to prolong life by “extraordinary measures,” that is, painful and invasive procedures that lead to people dying hooked up to machines in sterile hospital surroundings. See chapter 3 in this book. But food and water should not be considered “extraordinary measures.”
16. Wendy Shalit, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good (New York: Random House, 2007).
17. Kathy Dobie, “Going All the Way: A Reporter Argues That Young Women Are Fooling around with Their Emotional Health,” Washington Post, February 11, 2007; Nona Willis-Aronowitz, “The Virginity Mystique,” The Nation, July 19, 2007.
18. “What Kids Want to Know About Sex and Growing Up,” Children’s Television Workshop, 1992, a “1-2-3 Contact Extra” special program. The video goes on to define homosexuality as “two people of the same gender giving each other pleasure.” In other words, if sex is so disconnected from who you are as a person, why does your gender even matter? We will discuss this topic in chapter 5.
19. Benoit Denizet-Lewis, “Friends, Friends with Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall,” New York Times, May 30, 2004.
20. Oliver O’Donovan, Transsexualism and Christian Marriage (Cambridge, UK: Grove Books, 1982, 2007), 19.
21. Jessica Savano, “I Am Not My Body,” Kickstarter, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/216830801/i-am-not-my-body.
22. Beth Felker Jones, Marks of His Wounds (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4, italics added.
23. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 2003), 301, 245. You might respond that even Paul said he “disciplined” his body and made it his “slave.” But in the biblical context, it is clear that Paul is talking about fighting against sin, which often expresses itself in physical action. The Bible is not teaching that the body itself is the source of evil. For a fuller discussion, see the second half of this chapter.
24. Joseph Fletcher, Morals and Medicine (Boston: Beacon, 1954), 218.
25. “The scientific rationalism spearheaded by Descartes is above all an attack on the body. Its first principle is that the human body, together with all matter, shall be seen as an object of power.” Michael Waldstein, “Introduction,” in John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1997, 2006), 95.
As the Ramsey Colloquium put it, secular moral views hold “the presupposition that the body is little more than an instrument for the fulfillment of desire, and that the fulfillment of desire is the essence of the self. On biblical and philosophical grounds, we reject this radical dualism between the self and the body. Our bodies have their own dignity, bear their own truths, and are participants in our personhood in a fundamental way.” The Ramsey Colloquium, “The Homosexual Movement,” First Things, March 1994.
26. Gilbert Meilander, Bioethics: A Primer for Christians, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996, 2005, 2013), 6.
27. Donn Welton, “Biblical Bodies,” Body & Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998), 255.
28. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), lix–lx.
29. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, “The Love That Brings New Life into the World,” keynote speech delivered to the Vatican, November 17, 2014, http://rabbisacks.org/love-brings-new-life-world-rabbi-sacks-institution-marriage/.
30. Cited in Brown, Body and Society, 68.
31. The word Jesus used is “the strongest Greek word for furious indignation, referring to the fury of stallions about to charge into battle in the cavalry, rearing up on their hind legs, and snorting through their nostrils and charging. That word, to snort in spirit, the strongest Greek word for anger, is the word used of Jesus.” Os Guinness, The Dust of Death (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 384–85.
32. Brown, Body and Society, lx.
33. John Donne (1572–1631), “Death, Be Not Proud (Holy Sonnet 10),” poets.org, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/death-be-not-proud-holy-sonnet-10.
34. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 28.
35. Many people raise an objection here: Didn’t Christians borrow the concept of resurrection from pagan mystery religions with their stories of dying and rising gods? No. Scholars have not found any stories that involve a resurrection prior to Jesus. Even the skeptical scholar Bart Ehrman says, “The majority of scholars agree . . . there is no unambiguous evidence that any pagans prior to Christianity believed in dying and rising gods.” Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 230. N. T. Wright says, the “denial of bodily resurrection is also there in Homer, Plato, and Pliny, and it is there consistently through a thousand years of paganism, up to and through the time of Jesus.” Craig A. Evans and N. T. Wright, Jesus: The Final Days, ed. Troy Miller (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 77, 84.
When stories of dying and rising gods do appear, they were not intended as reports of historical events but as metaphors for the yearly cycle of the seasons. “[These] cults enacted the god’s death and resurrection as a metaphor, whose concrete referent was the cycle of seed-time and harvest.” N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 80.
36. N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 50.
37. Ibid.
38. See N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters: Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 126–27.
39. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, rev. and amplified ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1952, 1980), 37.
40. For an extended discussion of why the Bible does not endorse asceticism, see Ranald Macaulay and Jerram Barrs, Being Human: The Nature of Spiritual Experience (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1998).
41. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 64. There are also liberal forms of theology that insist Jesus did not perform actual miracles in the physical world—that he did not really walk on water, heal the sick, or rise bodily from the dead—rather, those were just mythological ways of speaking that the early church came up with for expressing its faith. Liberal theology is akin to Gnosticism in its disdain for bodily life in this world.
42. Quoted in Felker Jones, Marks of His Wounds, 39.
43. Welton, “Biblical Bodies,” 250.
44. Justin Martyr (attributed), “The Dignity of the Body,” https://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/rbodb2.htm.
1. Antonia Senior, “Yes, Abortion Is Killing. But It’s the Lesser Evil,” The Times, July 1, 2010.
2. To give one example, an embryology textbook says, “A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo). . . . Human development begins at fertilization when a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoon) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell—a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” Keith L. Moore and T. V. N. Persaud, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 5th edition (2003), 2, 16. For additional textbook quotes, see Sarah Terzo, “41 Quotes from Medical Textbooks Prove Human Life Begins at Conception,” LifeNews.com, January 8, 2015.
At some point, we have all been asked: Can’t a woman do what she wants with her own body? Yes, but the fetus is not part of the mother’s body. As an obstetric nurse writes,
It’s the placenta and umbilical cord which separate the mother from the baby and prove that the fetus was never part of its mother’s body. . . . The placenta and umbilical cord exist precisely because the baby has a different and separate circulatory system from the mother and their blood must not intermingle. If something happens, such as a traumatic injury, that causes their blood to mix, it can cause serious complications. If the fetus were not a separate human being but were only another part of its mother’s body, it would not need a placenta and umbilical cord to separate them. It could simply grow inside one of her body cavities like a tumor without any barriers between the two to protect each of them. (Cynthia Isabell, “How a Formerly Pro-Choice Nursing Instructor Discusses Abortion with her Students,” The Torch, August 2, 2016)
3. Within hours, the newly fertilized ovum has a top-bottom axis (meaning that where the head and feet will sprout is established virtually from the beginning). “Even the earliest embryo, it seems, is more than just a featureless collection of cells; it is an integrated, self-developing organism.” Meilander, Bioethics, 32.
Some people caricature pro-life arguments by saying if we protect embryos, then we should protect sperm and eggs. But gametes are not whole or distinct organisms. They are parts of the male or female body. If they do happen to combine, they do not survive; rather their genetic material enters into the new organism that is created. See Robert George, Conscience and Its Enemies, updated and exp. ed. (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2016), 200–201.
4. Joseph Fletcher, Humanhood: Essays in Biomedical Ethics (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1979), 11, italics added.
5. “Hans Küng Joins Abortion Debate in Mexico,” California Catholic Daily, April 6, 2007.
6. Peter Singer, “The Sanctity of Life,” Foreign Policy, September/October 2005.
7. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
8. For Plato, the body, through its physical demands, is constantly diverting us from what really matters—the spiritual and intellectual life. In his words the body “impede[s] us in the pursuit of truth; it fills us full of loves and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery.” Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 145.
9. As Foucault points out, Descartes’s proposal that nature is mechanical is not an empirical finding but a metaphysical assumption—“metaphysical because the idea that we are physically nothing more than machines was not a scientific idea, which could be verified, but one that followed from a basic, non-verifiable view of what reality consists in and is therefore ‘metaphysical’” Quoted in John McCumber, Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 326.
10. The phrase is from Gilbert Ryle, “The Ghost in the Machine,” The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinsons, 1949).
11. Daniel Dennett, “The Origins of Selves,” Cogito 3 (Autumn 1989): 163–73. Dennett himself disagrees with this view, but he notes that it is the way most Westerners think, whether they are aware of it or not.
12. Many other adherents to the mechanistic worldview were likewise Christians, notably Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi, both members of the clergy, and the early scientists Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. They, too, saw mechanistic philosophy as a means to defend Christianity. After all, a machine requires an inventor, a designer. If the universe is like a mechanical tool, then someone must have created it and wound it up. Besides, tools are invented for a purpose, to fulfill a function. Thus a mechanistic worldview implied that the universe was created for a purpose. As historian John Herman Randall writes, “The whole form of Newtonian science practically forced men, as a necessary scientific hypothesis, to believe in an external Creator.” The Making of the Modern Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926, 1940), 276.
Even Descartes’s famous phrase “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum) was intended as a religious affirmation. Since thought is a spiritual activity, his argument served as a reply to those who denied the existence of the human spirit. And from there, Descartes built an argument for the existence of God. He argued that since God is good, he would not deceive us by creating us in such a way that we are subject to constant illusion. Thus what “I think” can be trusted. For more background on Descartes, see my book The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994).
13. T. Z. Lavine, From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 128. See also Stephen Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 30ff.
14. Jacques Maritain, The Dream of Descartes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), 179. Descartes himself may not have intended such an extreme polarization. See John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 14–15.
15. Of the many books on this subject, see, for example, Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (New York: HarperCollins, 1980).
16. What about twinning? Some argue that the phenomenon of monozygotic twinning (identical twins) proves that the embryo in the first several days of its gestation is not a human individual. But twinning can be thought of as a kind of natural cloning: At an early stage, an embryo can break off a cell or group of cells that becomes a distinct organism. But this does not mean the embryo was only an undifferentiated mass of cells before that. Think of the flatworm: Parts of a flatworm can break off and become a whole flatworm. But that does not mean the original flatworm was not a whole living member of the species. Both continue to exist as full individuals, just as identical twins continue to exist and develop as full individuals. See George, Conscience and Its Enemies, 211–12.
17. Fletcher, Humanhood, 12. Similarly, Mary Anne Warren at San Francisco State University says personhood rests on the capacity for consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, communication, and self-awareness in “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” The Monist 57, no. 1 (1973): 43–61. On the inadequacy of such functional criteria for personhood, see Francis J. Beckwith, “Abortion, Bioethics, and Personhood,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 4, no. 1 (2000): 16–25.
Some have suggested that if we determine the end of life by brain death, perhaps we can determine the beginning of life by brain birth. The problem is that prenatal brain development is too gradual and continuous to allow for a clear transition point.
Examples of the proposed milestones include the initial formation of cerebral cortex (e.g., Haring 1972) and the first detectable cortical electroencephalogram (EEG) reading (e.g., Gertler 1986). The major difficulty with this approach is that prenatal brain development is a gradual process, and lacks the kinds of punctate, qualitative transition points that would most naturally be associated with the momentous transformation from nonperson to person. Furthermore, many of the milestones that have been proposed as marking a transition depend as much on our technologies for studying fetal brain function as on the fetal brain itself. For example, if we were to measure cortical function by a more sensitive measure than EEG we might choose an earlier gestational age. If we were to measure cortical function more selectively than by EEG, that is using a method that distinguishes different types of neural activity, we might find that cortex does not begin to function as a normal human cortex until a later gestational age. As Green (e.g., 2002) has pointed out, the study of prenatal brain development has not revealed any obvious clefts separating young human nonperson tissue from young human persons or even from young human persons-to-be. (Martha J. Farah and Andrea S. Heberlein, “Personhood and Neuroscience: Naturalizing or Nihilating?” The American Journal of Bioethics 7, no. 1 [2007]: 37–48)
18. Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 53.
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), sect. 765, italics added.
20. Sawyer, “I Knew Where I Stood on Abortion. But I Had to Rethink.”
21. John Harris, “Wrongful Birth,” Philosophical Ethics in Reproductive Medicine, ed. D. R. Bromham, M. E. Dalton, and J. C. Jackson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 156–71.
22. James Watson, “Children from the Laboratory,” Prism: The Socioeconomic Magazine of the American Medical Association 1, no. 2 (1973): 12–14, 33–34. Francis Crick’s comment was reported by Pacific News Service, January 1978.
23. Quoted in Mark Oppenheimer, “Who Lives? Who Dies?—The Utility of Peter Singer,” Christian Century (July 3, 2002), 24–29.
24. Lois Rogers, “Babies with Club Feet Aborted,” The Sunday Times (May 28, 2006).
25. Floyd v. Anders, 444 F. Supp. 535, at 539 (1977).
26. “Abortion Doctor Kermit Gosnell Convicted of First-Degree Murder,” U.S. News, May 13, 2013.
27. George Will, “Johns Hopkins’s and Planned Parenthood’s Troubling Extremism,” Washington Post, April 5, 2013.
28. Quoted in Melanie Hunter, “Scarlett Johansson: ‘Abortion is a Human Rights Issue,’” CNS News, October 18, 2016. See the response by J. Richard Pearcey, “Scarlett Johansson’s Non-Inclusive, Blood-Stained ‘Human Right,’” CNS News, October 19, 2016.
29. Scott Klusendorf, “How to Defend Your Pro-Life Views in 5 Minutes or Less,” Life Training Institute, http://prolifetraining.com/resources/five-minute-1/.
What about the most common exceptions, like rape and incest? Think of it this way: Should a child be subject to capital punishment for the crime of the father? Moreover, research shows that 75–80 percent of women who become pregnant after rape choose to keep their babies rather than having an abortion. Why? Because abortion does not erase the trauma of rape. “It is an additional trauma for the woman, and so it compounds rather than ameliorates the trauma of rape.” Isabell, “How a Formerly Pro-Choice Nursing Instructor Discusses Abortion.”
Two victims of rape explain why they brought their babies to term. One gave her child up for adoption and the other kept her child. Crystal Blount, “I Became Pregnant at 14 After Rape. If You Think I Should Have Had an Abortion, Consider This,” Life News, May 14, 2015; Jennifer Christie, “My Son Was Conceived in Rape, but His Life Has Dignity and a Purpose,” Live Action News, April 3, 2016.
30. See the underground videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress at http://www.centerformedicalprogress.org/cmp/investigative-footage/. Planned Parenthood claims it is not selling fetal body parts for profit but only charging a “handling fee.” However, the handling fee is so high that the practice has become a lucrative revenue source for the organization.
31. Leon Kass, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), 17. See also page 286.
32. Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (2013): 261–63. The authors argue that: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus, that is, neither can be considered a ‘person’ in a morally relevant sense.” Neonates “might or might not become particular persons depending on our choice,” the authors argue. Until then, the newborn imposes no obligations on us “because we are not justified in taking it for granted that she will exist as a person in the future. Whether she will exist is exactly what our choice is about.” The authors use the term “after-birth abortion” rather than “euthanasia” because the best interest of the one who dies is not necessarily the primary criterion for the choice.
33. Ibid.
34. See “Lives Not Worth Living: The Nazi Eugenic Dream in Our Own Time,” no author listed, Aleteia, September 13, 2014.
35. Libby Anne, “Abortion, Heartbeats, and Souls,” Love, Joy, Feminism, February 11, 2012, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/02/abortion-heartbeats-and-souls.html. Similarly, the National Abortion Action Coalition says abortion laws are “actually a means of enforcing the religious concept that the soul is present in the body from the time of conception.” Cited in Pamela Winnick, A Jealous God: Science’s Crusade Against Religion (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005), 18.
36. Those who do talk about abortion in terms of souls tend to embrace Eastern or New Age ideas of reincarnation—and ironically they typically accept abortion. Starhawk, a leading author on feminist neopaganism and goddess worship, writes,
The Goddess religion has no hard and fast ruling on when a clump of fetal cells becomes a being. . . . Women are moral agents, and in the Goddess and Pagan traditions, we are each our own spiritual authority. We have a right to wrestle with these issues ourselves, not have them predetermined for us by government authorities. We have a right to determine what goes on inside our bodies. To deny that right to women is to invite government intrusion into all kinds of private and personal choices. (Starhawk and M. Macha Nightmare, The Pagan Book of Living and Dying [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997]; excerpts at https://www.onfaith.co/onfaith/2008/09/25
/abortion-and-the-goddess/4187)
Similarly, Erin Pavlina claims to be a psychic “who connects with your spirit guides.” She says a child is conceived when a spirit in the ether decides to reincarnate in a particular family. “Whether you lose a child through abortion, miscarriage, or early in its life . . . please rest assured there are no hard feelings, sadness, regrets, or anger on the part of the soul who goes early back to the ether. It’s all part of the circle of life. And it all works out perfectly in the end.” From her blog post, “Do Aborted or Miscarried Babies Come Back?” Erin Pavlina, http://www.erinpavlina.com/blog/2010/04/do-aborted-or-miscarried-babies-come-back/.
37. Biochemist Dianne N. Irving writes, “The question as to when a human being begins is strictly a scientific question, and should be answered by human embryologists—not by philosophers, bioethicists, theologians, politicians. . . . The question as to when a human person begins is a philosophical question.” “When Do Human Beings Begin? ‘Scientific’ Myths and Scientific Facts,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, February 1999.
38. See Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1992).
39. Dick Teresi, The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers—How Medicine Is Blurring the Line between Life and Death (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 127, 98. Teresi is the former editor-in-chief of Science Digest and Omni.
40. “Consensus Statement on Conscientious Objection in Healthcare,” Practical Ethics, August 29, 2016, http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/08/consensus-statement-on-conscientious-objection-in-healthcare/.
41. Paul Bloom, “The Duel between Body and Soul,” New York Times, September 10, 2004, italics added. For a response, see Patrick Lee and Robert P. George, “Dualistic Delusions,” First Things 150 (February 2005): 5–7.
42. Fish wrote, “A pro-life advocate sees abortion as a sin against a God who infuses life at the moment of conception; a pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs.” “Why We Can’t All Just Get Along,” First Things 60 (February 1996): 18–26.
43. Quoted in Deborah Danielski, “Deconstructing the Abortion License,” Our Sunday Visitor, October 25, 1998.
44. Sarah Knapton, “Bright Flash of Light Marks Incredible Moment Life Begins When Sperm Meets Egg,” The Telegraph, April 26, 2016.
45. Jennie Bristow, “Abortion: Stop Hiding behind the Science,” Spiked, October 22, 2007.
46. Alissa Tabirian, “MSNBC: Royal Baby? Parents’ ‘Feelings’ Say When Life Begins, ‘Not Science,’” CNS News, July 23, 2013.
47. What about the argument that if people had greater access to contraception there would be fewer abortions? No form of contraception works perfectly. Yet the false confidence created by contraception leads people to have sex more often, with the result that there are more “contraceptive failures,” thus more abortions. Jennifer Roback Morse, “The Sexual Revolution Reconsidered: The Future of Marriage,” The City (Winter 2015), 39. See also Abby Johnson, “Sorry Folks. Contraception Access Increases Abortions. And Here’s the Proof.” LifeSite News, March 11, 2015.
48. Mary Elizabeth Williams, “So What If Abortion Ends Life?,” Salon, January 23, 2013.
49. See Lydia Saad, “Generational Differences on Abortion Narrow,” Gallup.com, March 12, 2010. “A slim majority (51%) of Millennials believe that having an abortion is morally wrong, compared to 37% who say it is morally acceptable.” Daniel Cox, Robert P. Jones, Thomas Banchoff, “A Generation in Transition: Religion, Values, and Politics among College-Age Millennials,” PRRI, April 19, 2012, http://publicreligion.org/research/2012/04/millennial-values-survey-2012/. For a summary of polls, see Kelsey Hazzard, “The Pro-Life Generation: Abortion Won’t Be Around Long If Young Americans Have a Say,” Life News, January 7, 2014.
50. Jeff Jacoby, “American Millennials Rethink Abortion, for Good Reasons,” Boston Globe, June 9. Jacoby points out that only 24 percent of voters under the age of thirty still want to keep abortion legal in all cases: “More than any other age cohort, in fact, young adults are now the most likely to think abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.”
51. Yuval Noah Harrari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 108–10.
52. Ruben Navarrette Jr., “I Don’t Know If I’m Pro-Choice after Planned Parenthood Videos,” The Daily Beast, August 10, 2015.
53. Ibid.
54. Vincent M. Rue, Priscilla K. Coleman, James J. Rue, and David C. Reardon, “Induced Abortion and Traumatic Stress: A Preliminary Comparison of American and Russian Women,” Medical Science Monitor 10, no. 10 (2004): SR5–16.
55. Timothy Keller, Generous Justice (New York: Penguin, 2010), 6.
56. Exodus 21:22–25 used to be a problem passage because of an earlier translation that read, “If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she miscarries but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” This wording was interpreted to mean that the life of a pre-born child was considered of less value and warranted only a fine, but that if the mother died, then the law of “an eye for an eye” applied.
However, more recent translations do not use the word miscarries. Instead they say “If [they] hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows” (v. 22). The Hebrew word for miscarriage is shakal, which is not used here. Instead the term yasa’ is used, which is normally used in connection with a live birth. It literally means “the child comes forth.” Thus biblical scholars now believe the verse is speaking about a woman who gives birth to a living baby, but the baby sustains no injuries from being born prematurely. See Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul, 235; Greg Koukl, “What Exodus 21:22 Says about Abortion,” Stand to Reason, February 4, 2013; John Piper, “The Misuse of Exodus 21:22–25 by Pro-Choice Advocates,” Desiring God, February 8, 1989.
57. Matt Walsh, “Wake Up, Christians. There Is No Place for You in the Democratic Party,” The Blaze, July 28, 2016, italics in original.
58. Church father quotations are from O. M. Bakke, When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity, trans. Brian McNeil (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 128, 131, 132; Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 124–35. For an overview, see Michael Gorman, Abortion and the Early Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1982). Christians have sometimes disagreed about when life begins. For example, in a prescientific age, it was sometimes thought that life began with “quickening,” which is when the mother starts to feel the baby moving. But Christians have always agreed that once human life exists, killing it is immoral.
59. Stark, Rise of Christianity, 117.
60. Under Roman law, it was actually forbidden to allow a deformed newborn to live. Sarah Ruden writes, “The law forbidding the Romans to let a deformed newborn of either sex live was in the Twelve Tables, which had a status somewhat like that of the U.S. Constitution today” Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (New York: Image Books, 2010), 109.
61. M. R. Reese, “The Discovery of a Mass Baby Grave under Roman Bathhouse in Ashkelon, Israel,” Ancient Origins, December 4, 2014.
62. See Jo-Ann Shelton, As the Romans Did: A Sourcebook in Roman Social History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 28.
63. See Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011).
64. See the documentary It’s a Girl, directed by Evan Gray Davis (2012), http://www.itsagirlmovie.com/.
65. Gorman, Abortion and the Early Church, 15.
66. For a good popular-level description of the sexual hedonism in ancient Greece and Rome, see Matthew Rueger, Sexual Morality in a Christless World (St. Louis: Concordia, 2016). As Louis Crompton notes, “Opportunities were ample for Roman masters” because slaves comprised about 40 percent of the population of ancient Rome.” Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 80.
67. Brown, Body and Society, 25.
68. “In AD 428, the Christian emperor Theodosius II enacted a law banning the use of coercion in the sex industry.” Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 8, 15–16.
69. Felker Jones, Marks of His Wounds, 90.
70. Ruden, Paul among the People, 107.
71. “The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus,” Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/diognetus-roberts.html.
72. Stark, Rise of Christianity, 105, 95.
73. Jennifer Roback Morse, “Young Women Are Gambling On a Losing Game,” The Blaze, June 1, 2016.
74. Morse, “Sexual Revolution Reconsidered.”
75. Hanna Rosin, “Boys on the Side,” The Atlantic, September 2013.
76. C. Moreau et al., “Previous Induced Abortions and the Risk of Very Preterm Delivery: Results of the EPIPAGE Study,” BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 112, no. 4 (April 2005): 430–37.
77. Morse, “Young Women Are Gambling On a Losing Game.”
78. Nancy Pearcey, “Why I Am Not a Feminist (Any More),” Human Life Review, Summer 1987. For a fuller discussion, see my book Total Truth, chapter 12.
79. Morse, “Young Women Are Gambling On a Losing Game.”
80. A study of men in abortion waiting rooms found they reported feeling “guilty,” “sad,” and “afraid,” even as they strove to be “supportive” of their female partners. Arthur B. Shostak, Ross Koppel, Jennifer Perkins, “Abortion Clinics and Waiting Room Men: Sociological Insights,” Men and Abortion, 2015, http://www.menandabortion.com/articles.html#wait.
81. Quoted in Tony Reinke, “Lecrae Confesses Abortion, Invites Others into the Light,” Desiring God, January 15, 2017. See also Christina Martin, “Grammy-Winning Rapper Lecrae: I Found a Photo of the Girlfriend I Asked to Abort My Baby and I ‘Just Broke Down,’” LifeSite News, January 16, 2015.
82. Ibid. Lecrae describes his story in the track “Good, Bad, Ugly” from Anomaly (2014).
83. Danny David, “Study: Abortion Is the Leading Cause of Death in America,” Live Action News, August 11, 2016. “Abortion is responsible for . . . 61.1% of black American deaths, and a shocking 64% of Hispanic/Latino deaths—making abortion by far the leading cause of death for blacks and Hispanics/Latinos.”
84. Quoted in Reinke, “Lecrae Confesses Abortion.”
85. Julie Roys, “The Secret Shame of Abortion in the Church,” Christianity Today, February 2015.
86. Exact numbers are difficult to pin down, but even abortion advocates agree that there are roughly twice as many pregnancy centers as abortion clinics. See C. Eugene Emery Jr., “Tallies Are Too Sketchy to Say Anti-Abortion Centers Outnumber Abortion Providers 2 to 1,” PunditFact, May 17, 2016.
87. Quoted in Ben Johnson, “Under Blackmail Threat, Pro-Life Rep’s Wife Shares Moving Testimony of Regret, Healing from Past Abortion,” LifeSite News, May 25, 2016.
88. Ibid.
89. John M. Glionna, “South Korean Pastor Tends an Unwanted Flock,” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2011.
90. Quoted in Fr. Mark Hodges, “Indiana Installs First ‘Safe Haven’ Boxes to Save Abandoned Newborns,” LifeSite News, May 10, 2016.
Chapter 3 Dear Valued Constituent
1. Phillip K. Dick, “The Pre-Persons,” available online at Pro Life New Zealand, December 29, 2012, http://prolife.org.nz/the-pre-persons-phillip-k-dick/.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. “Sun Columnist Katie Hopkins Calls for ‘Euthanasia Vans’ as Britain Has ‘Far Too Many Old People,’” RT.com, July 28, 2015.
5. Daniel Callahan, Selling Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), cited in Philip Smith, “Personhood and the Persistent Vegetative State,” The Linacre Quarterly 57, no. 2 (May 1990): 49.
6. A 1993 study found that 90 percent of ICU patients die because treatment has been intentionally withheld or discontinued. See Teresi, Undead, 242.
7. Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 176. See also Wesley Smith, The Culture of Death, chapter 3.
8. Singer, “The Sanctity of Life.”
9. Tom L. Beauchamp, “The Failure of Theories of Personhood,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 9, no. 4 (December 1999): 320.
10. Cited in Richard Weikart, The Death of Humanity and the Case for Life (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2016), 272. On the eugenics movement in America, see John West, Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007), especially chapter 7.
11. Ian Dowbiggin, cited in Weikart, Death of Humanity, 274.
12. Cynthia Eagle Russett, Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response 1865–1912 (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976), 175.
13. Jack London, “The Law of Life,” McClure’s Magazine 16 (March 1901).
14. For a discussion of the impact of Darwinism on the arts and humanities, see my book Saving Leonardo.
15. Margaret Sanger, “The Wickedness of Creating Large Families,” Women and the New Race (1920), http://www.bartleby.com/1013/5.html.
16. Cited in Albert W. Alschuler, Law without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 28, 27. For more on the influence of Darwinism on Holmes, see my book Total Truth, chapter 8.
17. Clarence Darrow, Washington Post, November 18, 1915.
18. John Zmirak, “We’re Euthanizing Minors and Chemically Castrating 8-Year-Olds,” The Stream, September 19, 2016.
19. Teresi, Undead, 89–90.
20. The Uniform Determination of Death Act, adopted in 1981, states that “the entire brain must cease to function, irreversibly.” But the act fails to specify how this function is measured; hence brain death is easily misdiagnosed. In one study, 65 percent of physicians and nurses could not identify the established criteria for brain death (Teresi, Undead, 254).
21. Teresi, Undead, 252, 274.
22. Wesley Smith, “The Abandonment of Assisted Suicide,” First Things, March 4, 2008. Other studies find that “Mental illness raises the suicide risk even more than physical illness. Nearly 95 percent of those who kill themselves have been shown to have a diagnosable psychiatric illness in the months preceding suicide. The majority suffer from depression that can be treated.” Herbert Hendin, Seduced by Death: Doctors, Patients, and Assisted Suicide (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 34–35.
23. Emily Barone, “See Which States Allow Assisted Suicide,” Time, November 3, 2014.
24. Ali Venosa, “Healthy, Retirement-Aged Woman Chooses Death by Assisted Suicide Because Old Age ‘Is Awful,’” Medical Daily, August 4, 2015.
25. Susan Donaldson James, “Death Drugs Cause Uproar in Oregon,” ABC News, August 6, 2008.
26. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 192.
27. Fletcher, Morals and Medicine, 191. He also writes, “A patient who has completely lost the power to communicate has passed into a submoral state, outside the forum of conscience and beyond moral being” (201).
28. Steve Reich, “Three Tales” opera (2002). Read the libretto online here: http://www.stevereich.com/threetales_lib.html.
29. Meilander, Bioethics, 11.
30. John Wyatt, “What Is a Person?” Nucleus (Spring 2004): 10–15.
31. David Hart, “The Anti-Theology of the Body,” The New Atlantis 9 (Summer 2005): 65–73. Hart seems to be paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, who calls on Christians “to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.” C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 14–15.
32. Charles Krauthammer, “President Obama and Stem Cells—Science Fiction,” Washington Post, March 13, 2009.
33. John Zmirak, “Welcome to Our Brave New World: An Interview with Wesley J. Smith,” Godspy—Faith At the Edge, December 15, 2004.
34. As O’Donovan writes, the practice of producing embryos with the express “intention of exploiting their special status for use in research is the clearest possible demonstration of the principle that when we start making human beings we necessarily stop loving them.” Begotten or Made? (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1984), 65.
35. Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Stanford Researchers ‘Stunned’ by Stem Cell Experiment That Helped Stroke Patient Walk,” Washington Post, June 2, 2016 . Adult stem cells have also been successful in treating multiple sclerosis. See Erin Davis, “Canadian Doctors Have Successfully Reversed the Effects of MS in a Patient Using Stem Cells,” Notable, June 10, 2016. Adult cells have even been “reprogrammed” to produce pluripotent stem cells. See “Human Pluripotent Stem Cells Without Cloning or Destroying Embryos,” StemCellResearch.org, November 20, 2007.
36. “Embryonic stem cells have not yet been used for even one therapy, while adult stem cells have already been successfully used in numerous patients, including for cardiac infarction (death of some of the heart tissue).” Wolfgang Lillge, “The Case for Adult Stem Cell Research,” 21st Century Science & Technology Magazine (Winter 2001–2002).
37. Joshua Riddle, “Ben Shapiro Destroys Sarah Silverman’s Planned Parenthood Tweet,” Young Conservatives, August 4, 2015.
38. Jacob M. Appel, “Are We Ready for a Market in Fetal Organs?” The Huffington Post, April 17, 2009.
39. Cited in Scott Rae, “Commercial Surrogate Motherhood,” Bioethics and the Future of Medicine, ed. John Filner, Nigel Cameron, and David Schiedermayer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 234.
40. Julie Bindel, “Surrogacy and Gay Couples,” New Feminism, June 2, 2015.
41. Adina Portaru, “Renting Wombs Is a Human Wrong, not a Human Right,” Public Discourse, April 27, 2016.
42. Scott Rae, “Commercial Surrogate Motherhood,” 234–35.
43. John Gray, Straw Dogs (London: Granta, 2002), 6.
44. Nick Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values,” Ethical Issues for the 21st Century, ed. Frederick Adams (Philosophical Documentation Center Press, 2003); repr. Review of Contemporary Philosophy 4 (May 2005).
45. Lee Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World (New York: Avon Books, 1998).
46. Mortimer J. Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1967), 264.
47. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperCollins, 1944, 1947, 1971, 1974), 55.
48. Quoted in Gary Drevitch, “Tinkering with Morality,” Psychology Today, March 9, 2015.
49. Quoted in Lisa Miller, “The Trans-Everything CEO,” New York Magazine, September 8, 2014.
50. Cited in Wesley Smith, “Biohazards: Advances in Biological Science Raise Troubling Questions about What It Means to Be Human,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 6, 2005.
51. Cited in E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (New York: Norton, 1992, 1999), 302.
52. David King, “An Interview with Professor Brian Goodwin,” GenEthics News 11 (March/April 1996): 6–8. Goodwin is the author of How the Leopard Changed Its Spots (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, 2001).
53. John Paul II, Evangelium vitae, §19, 20.
54. I have written about this and many other ways in which Christian assumptions fostered the rise of modern science in The Soul of Science, especially chapter 1.
55. See my book The Soul of Science; also Nancy Pearcey, “Technology, History, and Worldview,” Genetic Ethics: Do the Ends Justify the Genes? ed. John F. Kilner, Rebecca D. Pentz, and Frank E. Young (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).
56. Adrian Woolfson, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Genetics (New York: Overlook Press, 2006), preface.
57. Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 77, italics in original.
58. Richard Rorty, “Moral Universalism and Economic Triage,” presented at the Second UNESCO Philosophy Forum, Paris, 1996. Reprinted in Diogenes 44, no. 173 (1996).
59. Zmirak, “Welcome to Our Brave New World.”
60. John H. Evans, What Is a Human? What the Answers Mean for Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Evans also found that those who accept personhood theory are mostly professional philosophers, scientists, and ethicists. The majority of the public does not accept the theory. However, it is not clear that they have a firm basis for resisting it.
61. Singer, Practical Ethics, 169.
62. Bakke, When Children Became People, 38.
63. See Harper, From Shame to Sin, especially chapter 1, and Brown, Body and Society. Ruden says the sexual abuse of young male slaves by their masters was common, although freeborn boys were vulnerable to being raped as well. Fathers had to keep a close watch on their children to protect them from sexual predators. Among the Greeks and Romans, the active partner was praised as virile and masculine (even when they were cruel and vicious), while the passive partner (the victim) was regarded with contempt as weak and disgusting. By contrast, in the New Testament Paul treats the active partner as equally guilty and in fact condemns homosexual relations as a form of injustice (the word for “unrighteousness” in Romans 1:18 is often translated “injustice”). Because pederasty was accepted in Roman culture, and the perpetrators even admired, “Paul’s Roman audience . . . would have been surprised to hear that justice applied to homosexuality, of all things” (Paul among the People, 71).
64. Martha Nussbaum, Philosophical Interventions (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 73.
65. Bakke, When Children Became People, 285.
66. Ibid.,163.
67. Lydia Saad, “U.S. Support for Euthanasia Hinges on How It’s Described,” Gallup.com, May 29, 2013.
68. Anne Lamott, “At Death’s Window,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2006.
69. Anne Lamott, “The Rights of the Born,” Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2006.
70. See my chapter on suffering, “Does Suffering Make Sense?” in How Now Shall We Live? (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 1999).
71. Steve Taylor, “Can Suffering Make Us Stronger?” Psychology Today, November 4, 2011.
72. Cited in Taylor, “Can Suffering Make Us Stronger?” The phrase “dark night of the soul” is from St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century Catholic mystic.
73. Ella Frech, “Me Before You: Dear Hollywood, Why Do You Want Me Dead?,” Aleteia, June 2, 2016.
74. Ibid.
75. Martin Pistorius with Megan Lloyd Davies, Ghost Boy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2013), 15. See also Peter Holley, “Meet the Man Who Spent 12 Years Trapped Inside His Body Watching ‘Barney’ Reruns,” Washington Post, January 13, 2015.
76. Teresi, Undead, 181–82, 197.
77. This tradition may also explain why Jesus waited four days before bringing Lazarus back from the dead—so no one could claim that Lazarus simply revived. See Eli Lizorkin-Eysenberg, “Resurrection of Lazarus, Jews and Jewish Tradition (John 11:1–44),” Jewish Studies, Israel Institute of Biblical Studies, November 28, 2013.
78. Personal interview. See also Joseph Banks, “One Heart, One Love,” Medium, October 17, 2015, https://medium.com/@joseph3banks/one-heart-one-love-b4de709ccdb#.lltdsyp2b.
79. Nancy Flanders, “Mother of Baby Jacen, Born with Anencephaly, Refuses Abortion,” Live Action News, April 10, 2015.
80. Marshall Shelley, “Two Minutes to Eternity,” Christianity Today, July 2011.
81. Gwen Dewar, “The Social Abilities of Newborns,” Parenting Science, http://www.parentingscience.com/newborns-and-the-social-world.html.
82. See Smith, Culture of Death, especially 23–24, 104–5.
83. Ian Haines, “I Believed That Euthanasia Was the Only Humane Solution. I No Longer Believe That,” The Age, November 20, 2016.
84. Wesley J. Smith, “Assisted Suicide and the Corruption of Palliative Care,” First Things, May 15, 2008.
85. Wesley J. Smith, “Doctor Sued for Saying No to Euthanasia,” National Review, September 27, 2015; Andy Walton, “Belgian Catholic Nursing Home Has to Pay Damages for Refusing Euthanasia,” Christianity Today, July 1, 2016.
1. Donna Freitas, The End of Sex (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 168–75. See also “Save the Date: Kerry Cronin on the Love Lives of College Students,” U.S. Catholic 77, no. 9 (September 2012).
2. Freitas, End of Sex, 31, 177, italics added.
3. Janet Reitman, “Sex & Scandal at Duke,” Rolling Stone, June 1, 2006.
4. Quoted in Laura Sessions Stepp, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both (New York: Penguin, 2007), 243.
5. Nancy Jo Sales, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse,’” Vanity Fair, September 2015. For a brief description of dualism from a Christian perspective, see Patrick Lee and Robert P. George, Conjugal Union (New York: Cambridge University Press), 74.
6. Katy Steinmetz, “Miley Cyrus: ‘You Can Just Be Whatever You Want to Be,’” Time, June 15.
7. Sales, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse.’”
8. Kate Taylor, “Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game Too,” New York Times, July 12, 2013.
9. George Bernard Shaw, “Too True to Be Good: A Political Extravaganza,” Plays Extravagant (London: Penguin, 1981), 93.
10. Freitas, End of Sex, 38. In an interview, Freitas explains how she first got interested in researching the hookup culture:
I taught a class of undergraduates where their discussions of hookup culture and how great and liberating it was had become central to the conversation. . . . Yet then about mid-semester, the students did an about face in their attitude toward hookup culture. One student openly admitted that if she were to be honest, she kind of hated hookups and didn’t know why she continued engaging in the practice—mostly because she felt she had to, she supposed. Then every other person agreed with her, and suddenly my class of juniors and seniors were reckoning with the apparent reality that, while they all knew to pretend to love hookup culture, in reality they didn’t like it at all, but had been afraid they must be the only person on campus who felt this way. This surprised me deeply—and I wondered if students on other campuses felt the same way. So I set out to find out. (Amelia Evrigenis, “Author Discusses New Book, ‘The End of Sex,’” The College Fix, July 23, 2013)
Frietas found that the only colleges that do not have a hookup culture are evangelical colleges. See Donna Freitas, Sex and the Soul (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008).
11. Singer, Practical Ethics, 2.
12. Naomi Wolf, “Casual Sex Finds a Cool New Position,” The Sunday Times, January 12, 2013.
13. Melinda Selmys, Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2009), 85.
14. Meilander, Bioethics, 20.
15. Alice Owens, “My Rape Convinced Me That Campus Hookup Culture Is Really Messed Up,” Verily, July 6, 2015.
16. Shalit, Girls Gone Mild, 85.
17. Miriam Grossman, Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student (New York: Penguin, 2007), 3.
18. Quoted in Stepp, Unhooked, 220–21.
19. Selmys, Sexual Authenticity, 83.
20. Quoted in Stepp, Unhooked, 225–26.
21. Juli Slattery and Dannah Gresh, Pulling Back the Shades (Chicago: Moody, 2014), 46.
22. Wolf, “Casual Sex Finds a Cool New Position.”
23. Gail Dines, “Is Porn Immoral? That Doesn’t Matter: It’s a Public Health Crisis,” Washington Post, April 8, 2016.
24. Belinda Luscombe, “Porn and the Threat to Virility,” Time, March 31, 2016.
25. David Schultz, “Divorce Rates Double When People Start Watching Porn,” Science, August 26, 2016.
26. German researchers studied MRI scans of sixty-four healthy men and discovered that the more porn they viewed, the less gray matter was found in the areas of their brain associated with reward and motivation. See Simone Kühn and Jürgen Gallinat, “The Brain on Porn: Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Associated with Pornography Consumption,” Journal of the American Medical Association, July 2014.
27. “Teens and Young Adults Use Porn More Than Anyone Else,” Barna, January 28, 2016.
28. Melinda Liszewski, “Sex Before Kissing: How 15-Year-Old Girls Are Dealing with Porn-Addicted Boys,” originally published as “Growing Up in Pornland: Girls Have Had It with Porn Conditioned Boys,” Collective Shout, March 8, 2016.
29. Cecilia Rodriguez, “Sex-Dolls Brothel Opens in Spain and Many Predict Sex-Robots Tourism Soon to Follow,” Forbes, February 28, 2017.
30. Theresa Crenshaw, The Alchemy of Love and Lust, cited in Morse, Sexual Revolution and Its Victims, 150.
31. Emily Morse, “Sunday Sex Tip: How to Keep It Casual without Getting Attached (Can It Even Be Done?),” Glamour, July 27, 2104.
32. For an accessible discussion of these hormones, see Joe McIlhaney Jr. and Freda McKissic Bush, Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex Is Affecting Our Children (Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 2008), especially chapter 2.
33. Grossman, Unprotected, 8.
34. Lauren F. Winner, Real Sex (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 88.
35. Peter Moore, “Young Americans Are Less Wedded to Monogamy Than Their Elders,” YouGov, October 3, 2016.
36. See William M. Struthers, Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).
37. Quoted in Shalit, Girls Gone Mild, 102.
38. Anne Maloney, “What the Hook-up Culture Has Done to Women,” Crisis, June 14, 2016.
39. Dan and Alex are both quoted in Sales, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse.’”
40. Justin Petrisek, “Gentlemen Speak: Single Guys Share What They’re Really Looking for in a Relationship,” Verily, February 17, 2016.
41. Roger Libby, The Naked Truth about Sex: A Guide to Intelligent Sexual Choices for Teenagers and Twentysomethings (Freedom Press, 2013), 142.
42. See Slattery and Gresh, Pulling Back the Shades, 99–100. One study found that “in real life, the unheralded, seldom discussed world of married sex is actually the one that satisfies people the most.” Another study found that “faithfully married people are the most sexually satisfied of any sexually active group.” Glenn Stanton, Why Marriage Matters (Colorado Springs: Piñon Press, 1997), 42, 46.
43. Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 258, 260.
44. As John Paul II explains, in materialist philosophy, the body has been “reduced to pure materiality.” “It is simply a complex of organs, functions, and energies to be used according to the sole criteria of pleasure and efficiency.” The result is that sexuality “is depersonalized and exploited.” Evangelium vitae, §23.
45. Brian Leiter, “Morality Critics,” The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 20.
46. For greater detail on the architects of the sexual revolution, see my book Total Truth, 142–46; my article “Creating the ‘New Man’: The Hidden Agenda in Sex Education,” Bible-Science Newsletter, May 1990; and my chapter “Salvation through Sex?” in How Now Shall We Live?
47. Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 59–60, 61. Freud communicated that mechanistic view even in his choice of language, referring constantly to impulses, instincts, and drives.
48. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London, UK: Penguin, 2004), 40. Freud even said the most common reason women are stupid is sexual repression: “I think the undoubted intellectual inferiority of so many women can be traced back to the inhibition of thought that is essential for sexual suppression.” “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” Sexual-Probleme (Sexual Problems), originally published in 1908; repr. Read Books Ltd., 2013, 28.
49. Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s, 1922), 232. Sanger literally believed that sexual restraint caused a vast variety of physical and psychological dysfunctions, and even mental retardation. If our sexuality were given full and free expression, she promised, we would literally become geniuses.
Modern science is teaching us that genius is not some mysterious gift of the gods. . . . Rather it is due to the removal of physiological and psychological inhibitions and constraints which makes possible the release and the channeling of the primordial inner energies of man [her euphemism for sexual energies] into full and divine expression. (Ibid., 232–33)
50. Ibid., 271.
51. Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), 263, italics added. Kinsey himself engaged in a variety of sexual encounters with students and professional associates of both sexes, experimenting with practices such as group sex and sadomasochism.
52. Paul Robinson, The Modernization of Sex, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 49–50, 85.
53. Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974), xxiii, xxvi, italics in original.
54. Quoted in Eustace Chesser, Salvation through Sex: The Life and Work of Wilhelm Reich (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 44.
55. Ibid., 67.
56. Robert Rimmer, The Harrad Experiment (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990), 157, 167. The second character is quoting the philosopher Alan Watts.
57. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1976, 1978), 78, 156. Foucault is another morality critic (see Leiter and Rosen, Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, 726–33). But he portrays both morality and science (especially the medical profession) as sources of oppression. In the nineteenth century, he says, moral issues were transformed into scientific rules for mental and physical health. Doctors, psychiatrists, and government health departments all got into the act. As Foucault writes, a scientifically based morality was presented as the means for extending “strength, vigor, health, and life.” History of Sexuality, 125.
The upshot was that moral principles were no longer enforced by the church so much as by the state and medical institutions. And they were expressed not in terms of right and wrong but in the supposedly objective language of science and medicine—normalcy and perversion. Yet this scientific discourse still functioned as moral instruction—as “a great sexual sermon,” Foucault says—and thus he denounces it as equally oppressive. He accuses those who accept it of being complicit in their own oppression. He calls on individuals to see through their complicity and resist all sexual norms and stereotypes.
What should we put in the place of a science-based morality? Sheer power and pleasure. One of Foucault’s favorite writers was the Marquis de Sade, and he followed de Sade in adopting sadomasochistic sexual practices as a means to attain allegedly higher levels of pleasure. Foucault also reveled in the drug culture of the 1970s, using mind-altering drugs like pot, hashish, opium, LSD, and cocaine. See Weikart, Death of Humanity, 254.
58. “New Survey: Taxpayer Dollars Funding Programs That Pressure Teens to Have Sex,” National Abstinence Education Association, September 24, 2015, http://www.thenaea.org/newsroom/taxes_funding_teen_pressuring_programs.html. The federal sex education budget currently sends 95 percent of funding to the type of programs that teens say pressure them into having sex by treating it as normal and expected.
59. For an explanation of how aspects of the created order are elevated into idols, see my book Finding Truth.
60. John Donne, “The Ecstasy,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44099.
61. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 96.
62. Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage (New York: Penguin, 2011), 257.
63. Quoted in John F. Crosby, “Embodiment,” Lay Witness, October 2000.
64. Wyatt, “What Is a Person?”
65. For example: “the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed” (Rom. 16:25–26 ESV); “to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things” (Eph. 3:9 ESV).
66. Alex Morris, “Tales From the Millennials’ Sexual Revolution,” Rolling Stone, March 31, 2014.
67. As summarized in John R. Crosby, “John Paul II’s Vision of Sexuality and Marriage,” The Legacy of Pope John Paul II, ed. Geoffrey Gneuhs (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 63. What about Jesus’s words that there will be no marriage in heaven? In heaven we will continue to be male and female, as we see in the example of the risen Christ, as well as Moses and Elijah. But we will express love and mutual giving in other ways, just as single persons do this side of heaven.
68. Lecrae Moore, Unashamed (Nashville: B&H, 2016), 80.
69. Amanda Marcotte, “Conservative Relatives Can’t Let the Planned Parenthood ‘Scandal’ Go? Try These Talking Points,” Salon, August 5, 2015.
70. Ruden, Paul among the People, 15.
71. Ibid., 16–18. Jesus used the word porneia in his exception for divorce: “Anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality [porneia], makes her the victim of adultery” (Matt. 5:32). Jesus does not say “except for adultery,” which is a different word in Greek. Young’s Literal Translation translates the word as “whoredom.”
72. Ruden, Paul among the People, 17. Of course, Paul would also have in mind the Jewish use of the term: “No first-century Jew could have spoken of porneia (sexual immoralities) without having in mind the list of forbidden sexual offenses in Leviticus 18 and 20, particularly incest, adultery, same-sex intercourse, and bestiality.” Robert A. J. Gagnon, “The Bible and Homosexual Practice,” in Dan O. Via and Robert A. J. Gagnon, Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 72.
73. Eusebius, The History of the Church, 184–85, as quoted in “Potamiaena 205 A.D.,” Women of Christianity, May 17, 2011, http://womenofchristianity.com/potamiaena-205-a-d/.
74. Jones, Marks of His Wounds, 80.
75. Cited in Taylor, Sources of the Self, 223.
76. Welton, “Biblical Bodies.”
77. Scott Rae and Paul Cox, Bioethics: A Christian Approach in a Pluralistic Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 104.
78. Dan Allender and Tremper Longman, Intimate Allies: Rediscovering God’s Design for Marriage and Becoming Soulmates for Life (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1999), 254.
79. Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986, 1994), 71.
80. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, 241–42.
81. Stephen Hull, “Roman Prostitutes Were Forced to Kill Their Own Children and Bury Them in Mass Graves at English ‘Brothel’,” Daily Mail, August 30, 2011.
82. See, for example, Beth Felker Jones, Faithful: A Theology of Sex (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015).
83. Julia Duin, “No One Wants to Talk About It,” Breakpoint Online, October 7, 2002, http://www.djchuang.com/sex/singles/bpsingles.htm.
84. Liuan Huska, “Cohousing: The New American Family,” Christianity Today, November 2016.
85. From an interview in Jenny Taylor, A Wild Constraint: The Case for Chastity (London, UK: Continuum, 2008), 121.
86. Jennifer Fulwiler, “How I Became Pro-Life,” January 28, 2008, http://jenniferfulwiler.com/2008/01/how-i-became-pro-life/.
87. Ibid.
88. Jennifer Fulwiler, Something Other Than God (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2014), 210.
89. G. K. Chesterton, G. K.’s Weekly, January 29, 1928.
90. Susan Berry, “Pediatricians: Abstinence on the Rise,” Breitbart.com, June 23, 2016.
91. “Sex Education Politics and the War on Young Women,” National Abstinence Education Association, http://www.thenaea.org/docs/The_War_On_Young_Women.pdf.
92. See Tim Stafford, “What’s Wrong with Sex Before Marriage?” Christianity Today, http://www.christianitytoday.com/iyf/advice/lovesexdating/whats-wrong-with-sex-before-marriage.html.
93. Nancy Pearcey, “Sex, Lies, and Secularism,” Christian Research Journal 34, no. 4 (2011).
94. Glenn T. Stanton, “CDC Study Says Teen Virgins Are Healthier,” The Federalist, November 29, 2016.
95. Sade Patterson, “Her Campus Was Teaching Students How to Have Threesomes—So She Started Her Own ‘Sex Week,’” Faithit, May 16, 2016.
96. Ibid.
97. Rene Thompson, “Battle of the UNM Sex Weeks,” ABQ Free Press, March 11, 2016.
1. The following section is based on Sean Doherty, “‘Love Does Not Delight in Evil, but Rejoices with the Truth.’ A Theological and Pastoral Reflection on My Journey Away From a Homosexual Identity,” Anvil 30, no. 1 (March 2014).
2. Some gay rights activists have rejected the term homosexual as pejorative. But Andrew Sullivan, who himself identifies as homosexual, defends it as a “clinical, neutral term” that should continue to be used. “Sticks and Stones and ‘Homosexual’,” The Daily Dish, March 25, 2014, http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/03/25/sticks-and-stones-and-homosexual/.
How many people in America identify as homosexual? The public tends to vastly overestimate the number. “A recent research synthesis by Gary Gates of the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA Law School, suggests that among adults in the United States, Canada, and Europe, 1.8 percent are bisexual men and women, 1.1 percent are gay men, and 0.6 percent are lesbians.” See Stanton L. Jones, “Same-Sex Science,” First Things, February 2012.
3. From an evolutionary perspective, same-sex attraction is clearly non-adaptive because homosexual individuals do not reproduce. Various theories have been proposed to offset the reproductive disadvantage; for example, that homosexual males contribute to the reproductive success of their sisters by being nurturing uncles. But this hypothesis is not scientifically well supported. See J. Michael Bailey et al., “Sexual Orientation, Controversy, and Science,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 17, no. 2 (2016).
4. Stanton L. Jones of Wheaton College reports on a large identical twin study using the Swedish Twin Registry. Among the seventy-one pairs of identical male twins of whom at least one twin identified as homosexual, in only seven cases (9.8 percent) did the second twin also identify as homosexual, which is not considered statistically significant:
Recent studies show that familial, cultural, and other environmental factors contribute to same-sex attraction. Broken families, absent fathers, older mothers, and being born and living in urban settings all are associated with homosexual experience or attraction. Even that most despised of hypothesized causal contributors, childhood sexual abuse, has recently received significant empirical validation as a partial contributor from a sophisticated thirty-year longitudinal study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. . . . To say that psychological and environmental variables play a part in causation does not mean that biology does not, rather just not to the extent that many gay-affirming scholars claim. (Jones, “Same-Sex Science”)
In a brochure, the American Psychological Association states, “Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors.” “Answers to Your Questions: For a Better Understanding of Sexual Orientation & Homosexuality,” 2008, http://www.apa.org
/topics/lgbt/orientation.pdf. Recent research suggests that environmental factors may play a role, though at such an early stage in life that they are not matters of choice. See Sarah Knapton, “Homosexuality ‘May Be Triggered by Environment after Birth’,” The Telegraph, October 8, 2015.
5. Francis Collins, The Language of God (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 260.
6. John Corvino, “Nature? Nurture? It Doesn’t Matter,” The Gay Moralist, August 12, 2004, http://johncorvino.com/2004/08/nature-nurture-it-doesnt-matter/, italics in original.
7. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (New York: Viking, 2014), 152.
8. Elinor Burkett, “What Makes a Woman?,” New York Times, June 6, 2015.
9. J. Michael Bailey, who conducted some of these studies, concludes, “Male sexual orientation is inborn.” See “Sexual Orientation: Nature or Nurture?,” What’s the Story? A Multidisciplinary Discussion of Same-Sex Marriage & Religious Liberty, symposium, December 11, 2007, The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law, Interdisciplinary Program in Law & Religion, Washington, DC.
10. Van der Kolk, Body Keeps the Score, 297. The fact that the amygdala can be rewired is especially relevant because some studies have focused on the role of the amygdala in sexual response. For example, see Nikhil Swaminathan, “Brain Scans Provide Evidence That Sexual Orientation Is Biological,” Scientific American, June 16, 2008.
11. Anthony Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain (New York: Ballantine, 2009); Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquill, “Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science & the Biology of Belief,” Andrew Newberg (blog), http://www.andrewnewberg.com/books/why-god-wont-go-away-brain-science-the-biology-of-belief.
12. Van der Kolk, Body Keeps the Score, 95.
13. “Children who grow up to be nonheterosexual are substantially more gender nonconforming, on average, than children who grow up to be heterosexual.” J. Michael Bailey et. al, “Sexual Orientation, Controversy, and Science,” Association for Psychological Science 17, no. 2 (2016): 45–101. Another study concludes that “childhood gender nonconforming behavior is a consistent early predictor of future nonheterosexual orientations.” Gu Li, Karson T. F. Kung, and Melissa Hines, “Childhood Gender-Typed Behavior and Adolescent Sexual Orientation: A Longitudinal Population-Based Study,” Developmental Psychology, February 20, 2017.
14. “Queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire. . . . Demonstrating the impossibility of any ‘natural’ sexuality, it calls into question even such unproblematic terms as ‘man’ and ‘woman.’” Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 3.
15. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 30–31.
16. Doherty, “‘Love Does Not Delight in Evil, but Rejoices with the Truth.’”
17. Ibid.
18. In Dooyeweerd’s diagnosis of the nature/freedom dichotomy, he suggests that, historically, the freedom ideal arose first (during the Renaissance). It was the drive for human autonomy that motivated the development of a mechanistic conception of nature, for if nature is a machine, then we need only uncover its laws in order to master and manipulate it. Inevitably, however, the mechanistic paradigm will be applied to humans as well (through psychological conditioning, social engineering, genetic manipulation, etc.). Thus, paradoxically, the ideal of freedom will eventually lead to the loss of freedom. See Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture, chapter 6. C. S. Lewis makes a similar point in The Abolition of Man.
19. Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, A Short History of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 215. E. L. Allen writes, “Kant has given us two worlds, one of freedom and the other of nature.” From Plato to Nietzsche (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1962 [1957]), 129. Dooyeweerd describes the Kantian division in these words: “Above this sensory realm of ‘nature’ there existed a ‘suprasensory’ realm of moral freedom which was not governed by mechanical laws of nature but by norms or rules of conduct which presuppose the autonomy of human personality.” Roots of Western Culture, 171.
20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, cited in T. Z. Lavine, From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophical Quest (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 197.
21. Immanuel Kant, “Preface to Second Edition,” Critique of Pure Reason, rev. 2nd ed., trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 12. Descartes had proposed a metaphysical dualism (based on who we are). Kant proposed an epistemological dualism (based on how we know).
22. Robert Solomon, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6, italics added. Kenneth Schmitz writes, “The pivotal point in the [Kantian] shift . . . is the claim to absolutism on the part of modern human consciousness”—i.e., that “human consciousness not only sets its own terms, it sets the terms for reality itself.” At the Center of the Human Drama: The Philosophical Anthropology of Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 137, 136.
23. Kant hoped that the autonomous individual would be bound by a universal moral law based on reason—what he called the “categorical imperative.” But that proved an unrealistic dream. With no transcendent source of law (no divine law), each individual makes up his own law, and morality is reduced to an arbitrary choice. Nietzsche foresaw the outcome, writing that everyone must “invent his own virtue, his own categorical imperative.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Antichrist,” The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982), 577 [11].
24. “Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying ‘there are only facts,’ I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.” Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 458.
25. John Paul II unpacks what that means: There is an “opposition,” a “dialectic, if not an absolute conflict” in modern thought between the concepts of nature and freedom. (Notice that he is using Kant’s terms.) When nature is defined as “devoid of any meaning and moral values,” then it is “reduced to raw material for human activity.” Veritatis Splendor, §48, 46.
26. Camille Paglia, “Rebel Love: Homosexuality,” Vamps and Tramps (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 71.
27. See Mark Yarhouse, Homosexuality and the Christian (Bloomington, MN: Bethany, 2010); and Mark Yarhouse, Understanding Sexuality Identity: A Resource for Youth Ministry (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013).
28. Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality.
29. For a historical account of how scientists took over the task of defining morality, see Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). In the nineteenth century, as Christian ethics lost influence, moral issues were taken up by science. Many Westerners began to hope that the biological and social sciences would provide answers to moral problems. After all, says Reuben, “These disciplines address the nature of life and human society and therefore touched on the central moral question—What is the best way to live?” Moreover, biology reveals the negative health effects of behaviors like drunkenness and sexual licentiousness. Stated positively, then, biology seemed to encourage clean living, good habits, and public health reform. As one nineteenth-century biologist wrote, “The rules of conduct . . . formulated as religious precepts, have now been established as laws of biology.” Moral issues were thus transformed into scientific rules for mental and physical health.
30. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 42, 43. For a Christian perspective on the relatively recent invention of the concept of both heterosexual and homosexual identity, see Jenell Williams Paris, The End of Sexual Identity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011).
31. “Directly contrary to the conventional wisdom that individuals with exclusive same-sex attractions represent the prototypical ‘type’ of sexual-minority individual, and that those with bisexual patterns of attraction are infrequent exceptions, the opposite is true. Individuals with nonexclusive patterns of attraction are indisputably the ‘norm,’ and those with exclusive same-sex attractions are the exception.” Deborah L. Tolman and Lisa M. Diamond, eds., APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology vols. 1 and 2 (2014): 633.
32. Lisa Diamond, “Just How Different Are Female and Male Sexual Orientation?” lecture delivered at Cornell University, October 7, 2013. See also Lisa Diamond, Sexual Fluidity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Additional data supporting fluidity is the unexpected finding that “Lesbians have significantly higher pregnancy rates than their heterosexual peers. It’s also true for teen gay males. They are substantially more likely to impregnate their sexual partners than are heterosexual males.” Glen Stanton, “Why Are So Many Lesbians Getting Pregnant?” Public Discourse, April 19, 2017.
33. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago, part III (New York: HarperCollins, 1974, 1985), 249.
34. Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Penguin, 2015), 135–36.
35. Yarhouse says those who work with teens should not assume that a teen identifies as “gay” just because he or she reports feeling same-sex attraction. In one study, “the percentage of teens who experienced same-sex attraction was almost three times as much as those who identified as gay.” Understanding Sexual Identity, 99, 104.
36. Ibid.
37. Quoted in Stephanie Simon, “A New Therapy on Faith and Sexual Identity,” Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2009. See also Mimi Swartz, “Living the Good Lie, New York Times, June 16, 2011.
38. Donna Minkowitz, “Recruit, Recruit, Recruit,” The Advocate (December 29, 1992).
39. Darrel Yates Rist, “Sex on the Brain: Are Homosexuals Born That Way?” The Nation 255, no. 12 (October 19, 1992). Similarly, in an article titled “The ‘Born That Way’ Trap,” Ms (May/June 1991), Lindsy Van Gelder labels the “we-can’t-help-it” argument a “cop-out.” She writes, “I personally don’t think I was ‘born this way.’ She estimates that about 50 percent of lesbians choose to be that way, and calls for feminists to support “a frank, unapologetic celebration of sexual choice.” Many additional quotes can be found at Queer by Choice, a website that describes itself as “a radical gathering place for people who have chosen to be queer.” See http://www.queerbychoice.com/experiquotes.html.
40. O’Donovan, Begotten or Made?, 29.
41. Diamond, “Just How Different Are Female and Male Sexual Orientation?” See also Lisa Diamond, “I Was Wrong! Men’s Sexuality Is Pretty Darn Fluid Too,” paper presented at The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) preconference, Austin, Texas, January 2014. Reported in Justin Lehmiller, “Women Aren’t the Only Ones Who Are Sexually Fluid—Men Have a Pretty ‘Flexible’ Sexuality Too,” Sex & Psychology, February 24, 2014. Diamond found that among those who had previously “come out” as homosexual, 84 percent of women and 78 percent of men reported that they had changed their sexual identity label at least once (from homosexual to bisexual, queer, unlabeled, or heterosexual).
A 2009 study of Christian therapy groups over seven years found that 23 percent of participants reported conversion from homosexual to heterosexual attraction; 30 percent reported a reduction of same-sex desire to the point of “freedom to live chaste.” The rest reported either some change along a continuum or no change. The results are summarized in Yarhouse, Homosexuality, 88–89.
42. Christopher Yuan and Angela Yuan, Out of a Far Country (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook, 2011), 187.
43. Christopher Yuan, “Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate,” book review, The Gospel Coalition, January 7, 2013.
44. Amy Riordan, “My Path to Freedom” Walking in Freedom (blog), http://walkinginfreedom.net/my-path-to-freedom-healing-from-bi-sexuality-part-1/, italics in original.
45. Amy Riordan, “When the Enemy Attacks Your Sexual Identity (It Starts with Just a Thought),” Walking in Freedom (blog), http://walkinginfreedom.net/are-you-being-lied-to-about-your-sexual-identity/.
46. Sam Allberry, Is God Anti-Gay? rev. and expanded ed. (UK: The Good Book Company, 2015), 32. Sam Allberry, along with Sean Doherty and Ed Shaw, who are quoted in this chapter, are associated with Living Out, a British ministry to those who experience same-sex attraction.
47. Tim Wilkins, “Cruel Joke or Medical Anomaly?” Cross Ministry, http://www.crossministry.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=261:cruel-joke-or-medical-anomaly&catid=65:articles-by-tim&Itemid=278.
48. The most controversial is reparative therapy or conversion therapy. Reparative therapy for minors has been outlawed in five states and Washington, DC. In those states, it is illegal for a licensed mental health provider to help a minor change their sexual orientation or gender identity, even if the client requests it. An additional twenty states have introduced similar legislation. Despite fierce public criticism, however, studies have found that therapy is not harmful. See Yarhouse, Homosexuality, 90–95.
49. Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality, in The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1988).
50. See Greg Koukl, The Story of Reality (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017).
51. Jean C. Lloyd, “The Girl in the Tuxedo: Two Variations on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity,” Public Discourse, February 5, 2105.
52. Jean C. Lloyd, “Seven Things I Wish My Pastor Knew about My Homosexuality,” Public Discourse, December 10, 2014.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 69.
56. Harper writes, “There is no natural word for male virginity in Greek or Latin. . . . The ordinary sense of parthenos was ‘maiden.’ The continent men of the incipient Christian movement searched, awkwardly, for an expression adequate to their unusual ideal. . . . Often Christians found circumlocutions for male sexual abstinence, such as eunouchia.” From Shame to Sin, 52, 104.
57. Richard M. Davidson, Flame of Yahweh: Sexuality in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 301. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus stated that Daniel, Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego were eunuchs.
58. Ed Shaw, Same-Sex Attraction and the Church: The Surprising Plausibility of the Celibate Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 112. Shaw credits Stanley Hauerwas for this insight.
59. See Sam Allberry, “Why Single Is Not the Same As Lonely,” The Gospel Coalition, July 11, 2016. See also Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2015); Eve Tushnet, Gay and Catholic (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2014).
60. Melinda Selmys, “John Paul II, Intimate Friendship, and the Fluidity of Philia and Eros,” February 15, 2016, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/catholicauthenticity/2016/02/john-paul-ii-intimate-friendship-and-the-fluidity-of-philia-and-eros/?repeat=w3tc. Some have suggested that David and Jonathan had a homosexual relationship. But in the original Hebrew, the same wording is used of Jacob’s love for his son Benjamin (his “soul” or “life” is “knit together” with the boy; see Gen. 44:30).
61. Ron Belgau, “Spiritual Friendship in 300 Words,” August 29, 2012, https://spiritualfriendship.org/2012/08/29/spiritual-friendship-in-300-words/.
62. Doug Mainwaring, “Married and Same-Sex Attracted: Are We Hiding the Light of the Gospel under a Basket?” Living the Truth in Love: Pastoral Approaches to Same Sex Attraction, ed. Janet E. Smith and Father Paul Check (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2015). See also Doug Mainwaring, “I’m Gay and I Oppose Same-Sex Marriage,” Public Discourse, March 8, 2013; Sean Doherty, “Is It Ever Responsible for People with Same-Sex Attraction to Get Married?” Living Out, http://www.livingout.org/is-it-ever-responsible-for-people-with-same-sex-attraction-to-get-married. See also NPR Staff, “Attracted to Men, Pastor Feels Called to Marriage with a Woman,” NPR, January 4, 2015. Practical advice for married couples when they learn that one spouse is same-sex attracted can be found in Yarhouse, Homosexuality, chapter 7.
63. Doug Mainwaring, “It’s Possible: Gays and Lesbians Can Have Happy Marriages,” Public Discourse, July 11, 2016.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Rosaria Butterfield, “Love Your Neighbor Enough to Speak Truth,” The Gospel Coalition, October 31, 2016.
67. S. J. Stone, “The Church’s One Foundation,” 1866.
68. O’Donovan, Transsexualism and Christian Marriage, 6. Other relationships are important to being human as well, of course, O’Donovan writes, but they “do not disclose the meaning of biological nature in this way.”
69. For example, book 3 of the Sibylline Oracles, probably written by a Jewish author living in Egypt between 163 and 45 BC, says the Jews “are mindful of holy wedlock, and they do not engage in impious intercourse with male children, as do Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Romans, specious Greece and many nations of others, Persians and Galatians and all Asia.” Quoted in David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 200 n88.
70. Preston Sprinkle, People to Be Loved (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), 67–68.
71. If the author of Leviticus had wanted to limit the application of these verses, he could have used the term for homosexual cult prostitutes, but he did not.
In the history of the interpretation of these Levitical prohibitions they are never construed as indicting only homosexual acts in the context of cult prostitution. On the contrary, they are taken in the broadest possible sense. For example, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus explained to Gentile readers that “the law [of Moses] recognizes only sexual intercourse that is according to nature, that which is with a woman. . . . But it abhors the intercourse of males with males” (Against Apion 2.199). There are no limitations placed on the prohibition as regards age, slave status, idolatrous context, or exchange of money. The only limitation is the sex of the participants. (Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics [Nashville: Abingdon, 2001], 312–32, 130)
See also Robert Gagnon, “Does Leviticus Only Condemn Idolatrous Homosexual Practice?—An Open Letter from Robert Gagnon,” guest post on Timothy Dalrymple’s blog Philosophical Fragments, March 28, 2013, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2013/03/28
/bible-condemn-idolatrous-homosexual-practice-gangnon-lee-torn/.
72. The distinction between these three types of law has its origin in the early church, when theologians sought to explain why Jewish civil and ceremonial laws were no longer binding on Christians, whereas the moral law still was. We find references in the church fathers as well as in Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. See Jonathan Bayes, “The Threefold Division of the Law,” first published in Reformation Today 177, http://www.christian.org.uk/wp-content/downloads/the-threefold-division-of-the-law.pdf.
73. Scripture makes it clear that the clean laws applied symbolically to people, not just food. Peter saw a vision of unclean foods and heard a voice from heaven saying, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” He rightly interpreted the vision to mean, “God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean” (Acts 10:15, 28).
74. See Richard B. Hayes, The Conversion of the Imagination (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).
75. In the New Testament, on the one hand, practices like slavery were radically relativized. Compared to our identity in Christ, our social, political, and economic status is far less important: “The one who was a slave when called to faith in the Lord is the Lord’s freed person; similarly, the one who was free when called is Christ’s slave” (1 Cor. 7:22). On the other hand, Paul also tells slaves, “But if you can become free, by all means take the opportunity” (v. 21 HCSB). How do these two themes fit together? The New Testament is urging Christians to follow the customs of their culture whenever possible, in order to make it clear that Christianity is not primarily a program of social revolution but of inner transformation. Yet if you find ways to express that inner transformation by changing your external circumstances, “by all means take the opportunity.”
And Christians did just that. As we saw in chapter 2, as soon as they had the opportunity to influence the laws of Rome, they outlawed sex slavery. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa wrote “the very earliest attack on slavery” (Harper, From Shame to Sin, 182). Then,
As early as the seventh century, Saint Bathilde (wife of King Clovis II) became famous for her campaign to stop slave-trading and free all slaves; in 851 Saint Anskar began his efforts to halt the Viking slave trade. That the Church willingly baptized slaves was claimed as proof that they had souls, and soon both kings and bishops—including William the Conqueror (1027–1087) and Saints Wulfstan (1009–1095) and Anselm (1033–1109)—forbade the enslavement of Christians. . . . In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas deduced that slavery was a sin, and a series of popes upheld his position, beginning in 1435 and culminating in three major pronouncements against slavery by Pope Paul III in 1537. (Rodney Stark, “The Truth about the Catholic Church and Slavery,” Christianity Today, July 1, 2003)
The sad irony is that by the time Americans began to practice slavery in the New World, there was a settled conviction, reaching back for centuries, that slavery was wrong. The slaveholders were not following Christian tradition, as critics charge. They were violating a longstanding Christian moral teaching.
76. Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (New York: HarperOne, 1996), 387. For a good popular-level discussion of biblical verses and the Greco-Roman context, see Sprinkle, People to Be Loved.
77. Some scholars argue that Paul is not condemning all homosexual relationships, only those practiced by people who are “naturally” heterosexual. The phrase “contrary to nature” is interpreted to mean the nature and inclinations of the individual person. But there is no evidence that Paul, in the first century, was using the term “nature” in the individualized, psychological sense that is common in the twenty-first century. He is much more likely to be using the term in the Stoic, Hellenistic, and Jewish sense of the created order.
78. For example, Justin Lee, in Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate (New York: Jericho Books, 2012), restricts Romans 1 to a condemnation of only a “specific group of people” who first turned to idolatry and then participated in homosexual fertility rites in pagan temples. But Paul’s point is that all non-Christian worldviews make an idol of something in the created order. See my book Finding Truth.
79. Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, 114.
80. Aristophanes’s speech is in Plato’s Symposium, in Collected Works of Plato, 4th ed., trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1953).
81. Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 33.
82. Ibid., 25, 54.
83. Ruden, Paul among the People, 53, 51, 55, 48.
84. As Dennis Prager writes, “It is probably impossible for us, who live thousands of years [later], to perceive the extent to which undisciplined sex can dominate man’s life and the life of society. Throughout the ancient world, and up to the recent past in many parts of the world, sexuality infused virtually all of society.” It started with their view of the gods:
The gods of virtually all civilizations engaged in sexual relations. In the Near East, the Babylonian god Ishtar seduced a man, Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero. In Egyptian religion, the god Osiris had sexual relations with his sister, the goddess Isis, and she conceived the god Horus. In Canaan, El, the chief god, had sex with Asherah. In Hindu belief, the god Krishna was sexually active, having had many wives and pursuing Radha; the god Samba, son of Krishna, seduced mortal women and men. In Greek beliefs, Zeus married Hera, chased women, abducted the beautiful young male, Ganymede, and masturbated at other times; Poseidon married Amphitrite, pursued Demeter, and raped Tantalus. In Rome, the gods sexually pursued both men and women. Given the sexual activity of the gods, it is not surprising that the religions themselves were replete with all forms of sexual activity [especially in the form of temple prostitutes, both male and female].” (Dennis Prager, “Judaism’s Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism [and then Christianity] Rejected Homosexuality,” Crisis 11, no. 8 [September 1993])
85. Ruden, Paul among the People, 49, 59.
86. Rod Dreher, “Sex After Christianity,” The American Conservative, April 11, 2013.
87. Bakke, When Children Became People, 144. In the ancient world, men may not have needed women for sex, but they did need women for legitimate heirs. Today men only need a reproductive clinic. “For gay couples that seek to engineer children to adorn their ‘marriages,’ the mothers of their children are discarded as soon as the child is born. . . . Women are nothing more than breeders. When in the history of humanity have women been held in greater contempt? Never.” Doug Mainwaring, “The Grand Pretension: Genderlessness and Genderless Marriage,” American Thinker, May 20, 2016.
88. Bakke, When Children Became People, 141.
89. Tertullian reported that the Romans would exclaim, “See how they love one another!” “A Love without Condition,” History of the Early Church, http://www.earlychurch.com/unconditional-love.php.
Chapter 6 Transgender, Transreality
1. How many people are affected by gender dysphoria? The most frequently cited estimate is about 0.2 to 0.3 percent of the population. See Tanya Lewis, “Bruce Jenner’s Transition: How Many Americans Are Transgender?” LiveScience, April 27, 2015. For a statement by the Christian Medical and Dental Association on transgenderism, see https://cmda.org/resources/publication/transgender-identification-ethics-statement.
2. See, for example, Nelson Chan, Jeanette Hawn, and Roya Ladan, “Clearing Up the Law on Transgender Rights,” California Labor and Employment Law Review 30, no. 4 (July 2016); Tyler O’Neil, “Massachusetts Forces LGBT ‘Accommodation’ Rules on Churches,” PJMedia, September 9, 2016.
3. “Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?” BBC, January 12, 2017.
4. “About SB 777,” Rescue Your Child, http://rescueyourchild.com/SB_777.html.
5. “Transgender FAQ,” GLAAD, http://www.glaad.org/transgender/transfaq.
6. O’Donovan, Transsexualism and Christian Marriage, 12.
7. G. G. v. Gloucester County School Board, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, No. 15-2056, decided: April 19, 2016.
8. “Colorado Transgender First-Grader Coy Mathis Wins Civil Rights Case,” comment posted by lannister80, June 24, 2013, http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/colorado-transgender-first-grader-coy-mathis-wins-civil-rights-case.1601025/.
9. Paula Johnson, “His and Hers . . . Healthcare,” TED talk, December 2013.
10. J. N. Zhou et al., “A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and Its Relation to Transsexuality,” Nature (November 2, 1995). Some speculate that the development of a baby’s brain sex can follow a different pathway from the sex of his or her body. “Sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy,” writes Dick Swaab, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam, “and sexual differentiation of the brain starts during the second half of pregnancy.” Genitals and brains are thus subjected to different environments of “hormones, nutrients, medication, and other chemical substances,” several weeks apart in the womb, which may affect sexual differentiation. Cited in Robin Marantz Henig, “How Science Is Helping Us Understand Gender,” National Geographic, January 2017.
But the truth is that, at this point, no one knows what causes transsexualism. The difficulty with genetic explanations is that the condition is so rare that the most influential studies have included only six or seven individuals. They also involved subjects who were actively involved in cross-sex–type behavior and using feminizing hormone therapy in ways that likely affected the regions of the brain being investigated. For a summary of the research, see Mark Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), chapter 3.
11. “Boy or Girl?” YouTube video, 1:40, uploaded by BBC The Social, October 24, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udI-Go8KK2Q&feature=youtu.be, italics added.
12. Glenn Stanton, “5 Reasons Target’s Trans Bathroom Policy Really Stepped In It,” The Federalist, April 29, 2016.
13. Jonah Mix, “The Body and the Lie,” Medium, September 25, 2016, https://medium.com/@JonahMix/the-body-and-the-lie-fc6b03c3ff9a#.rtgdjj6ek.
14. “I Didn’t Like Doing All the Stereotypical Girl Things,” Transgender Reality, December 14, 2015, comment by Trish, January 11, 2016, http://transgenderreality.com/2015/12/14/i-didnt-like-doing-all-the-stereotypical-girl-things/. See also Lindsay Leigh Bentley, “I Am Ryland—The Story of a Male-Identifying Little Girl Who Didn’t Transition,” Lindsay Leigh Bentley (blog), June 30, 2014, http://lindsayleighbentley.com/2014/06/30/i-am-ryland-the-story-of-a-male-identifying-little-girl-who-didnt-transition/.
15. Burkett, “What Makes a Woman?”
16. “About,” First, Do No Harm: Youth Gender Professionals, https://youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org/about/.
17. Rod Dreher, “The Cult of Transgender,” The American Conservative, August 10, 2016.
18. See Elaine Woo, “David Reimer, 38; After Botched Surgery, He Was Raised as a Girl in Gender Experiment,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2004; “Who was David Reimer?,” Intersex Society of North America, http://www.isna.org/faq/reimer; John Colapinto, “Gender Gap,” Slate, June 23, 2004. Sadly, David continued to be tormented by his childhood ordeal, and in 2004, at the age of thirty-eight, he took his own life.
19. Nuriddeen Knight, “An African-American Woman Reflects on the Transgender Movement, Public Discourse, June 4, 2015.
20. Riki Wilchins, “We’ll Win the Bathroom Battle When the Binary Burns,” The Advocate, April 29, 2016.
21. Fr. Mark Hodges, “NYC Will Fine Employers up to $250,000 for Referring to ‘Transsexuals’ by Their Natural Gender,” LifeSite News, December 23, 2015. On the thirty-one genders, see Robert Gehl, “NYC Just Released a List of Officially Recognized Genders,” The Federalist Papers, n.d., http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/us/nyc-just-released-a-list-of-officially-recognized-genders.
From the perspective of transsexuals, there are genuine concerns about bathrooms and locker rooms. Diamond Dee, a former transsexual who became a Christian, says he has a problem using the men’s locker room at the gym because his body is so feminized due to his sex change operation and years of using female hormones. However, the best way to balance these concerns with the privacy rights of the majority of the population is to offer single-occupancy rooms for transgender people, just as most gyms offer single-occupancy rooms for families with young children. On Diamond Dee, see “Yes! Jesus Loves Transgenders: The Diamond Dee Interview Part 2,” YouTube video, 2:07, uploaded by triplexchurch on July 15, 2015.
22. Butler, Gender Trouble, passim; Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel, eds., PoMoSexuals (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997).
23. Cited in Linda Markowitz, “A Different Kind of Queer Marriage,” Utne Reader, September/October 2000. Markowitz writes,
For years, lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals repeated like wind-up dolls: “Love is love, no matter what body it comes in, and we deserve equal rights.” But the new “fluidity” of sexual identity leaves us in a state of linguistic confusion. Should an out, gay man who turns around and marries a woman continue to call himself gay? Should an out lesbian who turns around and marries a man continue to call herself a lesbian? This new breed of queer people struggle with what to call themselves, and the gay and lesbian community has strong reactions, no matter what label they end up taking on.
24. Butler, Gender Trouble, 9.
25. Gay activists have been debating this question among themselves for some time under the terms essentialism versus constructivism. Sexual essentialism sees sexual identity as a natural fact, an inherent, unchanging identity rooted in biology. Constructionism sees sexual identity as a social fact, a product of culture. For a summary, see Gayle Madwin, “What Is the Difference between Essentialist and Social Constructionist Techniques for Fighting Homophobia?” http://www.queerbychoice.com/essentialism.html.
26. Jorge Rivas, “Half of Young People Believe Gender Isn’t Limited to Male and Female,” Fusion, February 3, 2015.
27. Gene Edward Veith, “Identity Crisis: College Adminstrators Encourage Some Students to Rebel against Their ‘Assigned’ Gender Roles,” World, March 27, 2004.
28. SIECUS, “Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education,” 3rd ed., http://www.siecus.org/_data/global/images/guidelines.pdf, italics added.
29. Margot Adler, “Young People Push Back Against Gender Categories,” NPR, July 16, 2013.
30. Lucy Mae Beers, “‘Some Days Annie Is a Girl, Some Days Annie Is a Boy and Some Days She’s Both’: The 12-Year-Old Whose Gender Changes on a Daily Basis Depending on How They Feel,” Daily Mail, March 23, 2016.
31. The Facebook diversity page, posted on February 15, 2014. Facebook kept increasing the number until it finally gave up trying to track the exploding number of gender identities and began to allow users to add their own gender identity.
32. Cited in John W. Kennedy, “The Transgender Moment: Evangelicals Hope to Respond with Both Moral Authority and Biblical Compassion to Gender Identity Disorder,” Christianity Today 52, no. 2 (February 2008).
33. John Maddox, What Remains to be Discovered (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 252.
34. Mark Ridley, The Cooperative Gene (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 111.
35. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, paragraph 342, https://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/class/316/pri/2-316-hegel.htm.
36. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1878), in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006), 162 [2].
37. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), http://www.lexido.com/EBOOK_TEXTS/THE_GAY_SCIENCE_FIFTH_BOOK_.aspx?S=357.
38. On historicism as Hegel’s main legacy, see John McCumber, Time and Philosophy.
39. Jean Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” (1946), in Existentialism from Dostoeyvsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman (London: Meridian, 1989).
40. Foucault died of AIDS in 1984. Butler describes herself as a “butch” lesbian and a “dyke” in “Maria Cyber Interviews Judith Butler,” http://www.scribd.com/doc/56581872/Judith-Butler-Interview#scribd. She explains that she wrote Gender Trouble specifically to defend butch-femme lesbian relationships. See “The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interviews Judith Butler,” Artforum 31, no. 3 (November 1992): 82–89.
41. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 58.
42. Butler, Gender Trouble, xxi, 31, viii, xiv, and passim.
43. Ibid., xx.
44. Carol Bigwood, “Renaturalizing the Body,” Body & Flesh, 103.
45. Maxine Sheets-Johnson, “Corporeal Archetypes and Power,” Body & Flesh, 150, 152, italics added.
46. Butler, Gender Trouble, 11, 12.
47. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, paragraph 344, cited in Robert C. Solomon, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 57.
48. Butler, Gender Trouble, 9.
49. Chase Strangio, “What Is a ‘Male Body’?” Slate, July 19, 2016.
50. See Terry Eagleton, Illusions of Postmodernism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 14, 37, 38. Eagleton comments that, ironically, postmodernism claims to be “materialist and then . . . proceeds to suppress the most obviously materialist part of human beings, their biological make-up” (58).
51. Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, (New York: Routledge, 2014), 53.
52. Susan Bordo Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 2003), 39, 245. Elizabeth Grosz says the effect of Butler’s postmodern view “is to deny a materiality or a material specificity and determinateness to bodies . . . It is to make them infinitely pliable, malleable.” Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 190. Butler herself acknowledges that the main objection raised against her theory is that it “denies the materiality of the body” (Butler, Bodies That Matter, preface).
Critics of Foucault raise similar objections. They say his writings almost create the impression that sexuality is purely a social construct, created by social and power relations, with no relationship to the actual body. As Foucault notes in History of Sexuality (151ff), his critics often ask: Aren’t you ignoring “the body, anatomy, the biological, the functional?” Don’t you “speak of sex as if sex did not exist?” Foucault’s answer is that though sex may begin with sheer anatomy and physiology, we have no access to the meaning of our bodies except through cultural constructs imposed by the structures of cultural power:
Now, it is precisely this idea of sex in itself that we cannot accept without examination. Is ‘sex’ really the anchorage point that supports the manifestations of sexuality, or is it not rather a complex idea that was formed inside the deployment of sexuality? In any case, one could show how this idea of sex took form in the different strategies of power and the definite role it played therein.
53. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 275. O’Donovan sums up this dualism as a “reductionism of the body to undifferentiated matter, on which the spirit proposed to exercise unlimited freedom.” Transsexualism and Christian Marriage, 19.
54. “International Women’s Day Protester Suddenly Realizes She’s Reinforcing Harmful Social Construct of Gender,” The Babylon Bee, March 8, 2017.
55. Laura Donnelly, “Don’t Call Pregnant Women ‘Expectant Mothers’ As It Might Offend Transgender People, BMA [British Medical Association] Says,” The Telegraph, January 29, 2017. See also Trevor MacDonald, “Transphobia in the Midwifery Community,” Huffington Post, September 15, 2016.
56. Quoted in Brandon Showalter, “Transgender Policies Cause ‘Erasure’ of Females, ‘Voyeurism,’ ‘Eugenics’ on Children, Say Women’s Rights Activists,” Christian Post, February 19, 2017.
57. Interviewed in Claire Chretien, “Bathrooms Are Just the Beginning: A Scary Look into the Trans Movement’s End Goals,” LifeSite News, May 6, 2016. See also Stella Morabito, “A De-Sexed Society Is a De-Humanized Society,” Public Discourse, May 25, 2016.
58. Andrew Malcolm, “Obama State Department deletes ‘Mother, ‘Father’ from forms for More Correct ‘Parent One, ‘Parent Two’,” Los Angeles Times, January 7, 2011. Responding to public protest, the State Department compromised and changed the form to read “Mother or Parent One” and “Father or Parent Two.” See Matthew Lee, “State Department Steps Back on Gender-Neutral Parentage, Won’t Replace Terms ‘Mother,’ ‘Father,’” Associated Press, January 9, 2011.
59. Human Rights Campaign, “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Definitions,” s.v. “Gender Identity,” http://www.hrc.org/resources/sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-terminology-and-definitions.
60. See Daniel Moody, The Flesh Made Word (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform), 2016.
61. Daniel Moody, “Why You Shouldn’t Use Transgender Pronouns,” The Federalist, October 18, 2016.
62. Eagleton, Illusions of Postmodernism,113, 116. Ironically, even Judith Butler came to see the problem. For years she rejected the concept of a universal human nature in favor of social constructivism. But while working for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, she came to realize that you cannot argue for human rights without some concept of what it means to be human—some concept of universal human nature (Butler, Gender Trouble, xviii).
63. Cited in Avery Dulles, “John Paul II and the Mystery of the Human Person,” America 190, no. 3 (February 4, 2004).
64. Tikva Frymer-Kensky writes,
The Bible presents no characteristics of human behavior as “female” or “male,” no division of attributes between the poles of “feminine” and “masculine,” no hint of distinctions of such polarities as male aggressivity-female receptivity, male innovation-female conservation, male out-thrusting-female containing, male subjecthood-female objecthood, male rationality-female emotionality, male product-female process, male achievement-female bonding, or any of the other polarities by which we are accustomed to think of gender distinctions. (Cited in Davidson, Flame of Yahweh, 221)
65. The father was an INFP (gentle, sensitive, emotional, relational) while the woman was an ESTJ (no-nonsense, take-charge, rational, assertive, organized). On the Myers-Briggs type indicator, there is only one personality trait that differs between men and women: More men test as T (rational, logical, objective) while more women test as F (emotional, sensitive, relational)—about 65 percent in each case. However, as the feminist movement made it more socially acceptable for women to be in leadership, more women began testing as T, which may suggest that this difference is at least partly cultural.
66. See also Nancy Pearcey, “A Plea for Changes in the Workplace,” Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices, ed. Gail Grenier Sweet (Toronto: Life Cycle Books, 1985); and Nancy Pearcey, “Why I Am Not a Feminist (Any More),” Human Life Review, Summer 1987.
67. Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria, 155. See also Vaughan Roberts, Transgender (UK: The Good Book Company, 2016).
68. “All of the research on gender differences . . . consistently shows that, even when there are statistically significant differences between women and men, these differences pale in magnitude beside the variations among women and among men.” Heather Looy and Hessel Bouma III, “The Nature of Gender,” cited in Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria, 37, italics added.
69. Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria, 154.
70. April Herndon, “Why Doesn’t ISNA Want to Eradicate Gender?” Intersex Society of North America, FAQ, http://www.isna.org/faq/not_eradicating_gender.
71. A report filed to the European Commission in 2011 says, “Intersex people differ from trans people as their status is not gender related but instead relates to their biological makeup (genetic, hormonal and physical features).” Cited in Emily Greenhouse, “A New Era for Intersex Rights?,” The New Yorker, December 30, 2013.
72. Megan DeFranza, Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 144.
73. Ibid., 25, 30, 31, italics added.
74. Susan Donaldson James, “Intersex Children: Boy or Girl and Who Decides?,” ABC News, March 17, 2011.
75. Lianne Simon’s story is from personal communications and various articles on her website, http://www.liannesimon.com/.
76. See Charlotte Greenfield, “Should We ‘Fix’ Intersex Children?,” The Atlantic, July 8, 2014. In some cases, individuals may not even know they are intersex because their external appearance is normal. They may not discover that their genetics are mixed until they marry and find they are infertile. For example, a woman with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) might not know that she’s XY. In Scripture, she may well be the barren woman.
77. Personal communication, April 6, 2017. LGBT means lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.
78. Sam Allberry, “What Christianity Alone Offers Transgender Persons,” The Gospel Coalition, January 10, 2017.
79. The American College of Pediatricians writes, “According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.” American College of Pediatricians, “Gender Ideology Harms Children,” updated August 17, 2016, http://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-ideology-harms-children. According to another study, when children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic, 70–80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Paul McHugh, “Transgender Surgery Isn’t the Solution,” The Wall Street Journal, updated May 13, 2016, and Paul McHugh, “Surgical Sex,” First Things, November 2004.
Tragically, many transsexuals remain severely distressed and even suicidal after undergoing a sex change operation. See David Batty, “Sex Changes Are Not Effective, Say Researchers,” The Guardian, July 30, 2004. A Swedish study from 2003 found that post-operative mortality and suicide rates for transsexuals are many times higher than the general population. (And that’s in Sweden, which has a history of being supportive of transgender individuals.) See Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria, 118.
80. “Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?” BBC. There has been little, if any, research on children whose parents are transgender. See Denise Shick, “When My Father Told Me He Wanted to Be a Woman,” Public Discourse, March 27, 2015.
81. The gender identity clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Toronto, Canada, was closed in December 2015. Many observers believe it was because the clinic supported “desisters” (helping children feel comfortable in their own bodies) instead of practicing solely an “affirmative model” (facilitating cross-gender identity), which today is considered more politically correct. See Jesse Singal, “How the Fight over Transgender Kids Got a Leading Sex Researcher Fired,” New York Magazine, February 7, 2016.
82. “Children who grow up to be nonheterosexual are substantially more gender nonconforming, on average, than children who grow up to be heterosexual.” J. Michael Bailey et. al, “Sexual Orientation, Controversy, and Science” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 17 no. 2 (2016): 45–101.
What about men who were highly masculine before coming out as transgender, such as Bruce Jenner? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) divides people with gender dysphoria into two categories. Persons with early-onset gender dysphoria are gender nonconforming from early childhood. But they are also likely to resolve their feelings by adulthood. Persons with late-onset dysphoria were typically gender conforming through their childhood. In fact, they tend to be hyper-masculine, working in professions such as the military, law enforcement, or athletics. They often marry and have children before deciding to transition, and may engage in cross-dressing first. See Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria, 96–99. Bruce (Caitlin) Jenner seems to be an example of the second category. See “‘He’d Wear Women’s Clothes, Shoes, and Lingerie’: Bruce Jenner, ‘the Secret Cross-Dresser,’” The Daily Mail, January 11, 2002.
Some people may experience cross-dressing as sexually arousing (that is, as a fetish). It may be this group that Scripture addresses when it says, “A woman must not wear man’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing; for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this” (Deut. 22:5).
83. Yuan and Yuan, Out of a Far Country, 20.
84. “Most studies report that three times more men than women seek gender realignment.” Nicola Tugnet et al., “Current Management of Male-to-Female Gender Identity Disorder in the UK,” Postgraduate Medical Journal 83, no. 984 (October 2007). Both gender dysphoria and homosexuality have historically been more common among males than females, possibly because gender standards for males are narrower and stricter. It is far more socially accepted for a girl to be a tomboy than for a boy to be a “sissy” or “effeminate.” In recent years, however, the rate of girls seeking treatment at gender clinics has skyrocketed. Several studies are summarized in this post: “Why Are More Girls Than Boys Presenting to Gender Clinics?” 4thWaveNow (blog), July 10, 2015, https://4thwavenow.com/2015/07/10/why-are-more-girls-than-boys-presenting-to-gender-clinics/.
Some have suggested that 1 Corinthians 6:9, which uses the word “effeminate,” might be applicable to transgendered persons. But Harper says the meaning of the Greek term cannot be directly translated: A malakos, “soft one,” referred to someone who indulged in excessive pleasures. As an ancient document puts it, “above all and with the least self-control” he was possessed by “a sharp and scalding madness for sex, for coition with both women and with men.” From Shame to Sin, 97–98.
85. Interview with Cari in “In Praise of Gatekeepers: An Interview with a Former Teen Client of TransActive Gender Center,” 4thWaveNow, April 21, 2016, https://4thwavenow.com/2016/04/21/in-praise-of-gatekeepers-an-interview-with-a-former-teen-client-of-transactive-gender-center/. Cari describes her detransition in this video: “Response to Julia Serano: Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation,” YouTube video, 17:02, uploaded by Cari Stella on August 9, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L2jyEDwpEw.
86. Lou adds, “I didn’t understand that the degree of disconnect from and hatred of my body could be considered a mental health problem.” See the BBC film “Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?” A 2014 study that found 62.7 percent of those diagnosed with gender dysphoria suffer from psychiatric axis 1 comorbid disorders, or mental illness—which means they should receive treatment for those mental disorders and not be fast-tracked into taking hormones or submitting to surgery. See Azadeh Mazaheri Meybodi, Ahmad Hajebi, and Atefeh Ghanbari Jolfaei, “Psychiatric Axis I Comorbidities among Patients with Gender Dysphoria,” Psychiatry Journal, August 2014.
One highly consistent—though surprising—finding is a connection between gender dysphoria and autism:
One finding in transgender research has been robust: a connection between gender nonconformity and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). According to John Strang, a pediatric neuropsychologist with the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders and the Gender and Sexuality Development Program at Children’s National Health System in Washington, DC, children and adolescents on the autism spectrum are seven times more likely than other young people to be gender nonconforming. Conversely, children and adolescents at gender clinics are six to 15 times more likely than other young people to have ASD. (Henig, “How Science Is Helping Us Understand Gender”)
87. Walt Heyer, “Transgender Characters May Win Emmys, But Transgender People Hurt Themselves,” The Federalist, September 22, 2015. Other examples of sex change regret can be found in Stella Morabito, “Trouble in Transtopia: Murmurs of Sex Change Regret,” The Federalist, November 11, 2014.
88. Walt Heyer, Perfected with Love (Maitland, FL: Xulon Press, 2009), 15.
89. See Tim Otto, Oriented to Faith: Transforming the Conflict over Gay Relationships (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014), 89.
90. Ibid., 7.
91. Mark Yarhouse and Trista Carrs, “MTF Transgender Christians’ Experiences: A Qualitative Study,” Journal of LGBT Issues in Counseling 6, no. 1 (January 2012).
Chapter 7 The Goddess of Choice Is Dead
1. Nancy Pearcey, “I Take You . . . A Review of Ted Peters’s For the Love of Children,” First Things, February 1998.
2. Contrary to Peters’s claim, “adoption is not a contract. No one signs an adoption ‘contract,’ where one party agrees to deliver the child to another, who then has rights to the child. No. Adoption confers parental status permanently onto someone.” Jennifer Roback Morse, “Privatizing Marriage Is Unjust to Children,” Public Discourse, April 4, 2012.
3. Pearcey, “I Take You . . .”
4. Ibid.
5. Martha Albertson Fineman, The Autonomy Myth (New York: The New Press, 2005). Fineman’s motive for wanting to transform family relations into contracts is to free women from caretaking tasks. She writes:
One focus for the dissatisfaction with the privatization of dependency is the continuing unequal and gendered division of family labor, which burdens women more than men. Within the family, there is also delegation of responsibility, for dependency-caretaking has traditionally been and largely remains gendered work, assigned to those in the family roles of wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, and daughter-in-law. . . . Of course, my goal in developing arguments is ultimately to compel the state and the market to assume more (some) responsibility for dependency. (Martha Albertson Fineman, “Contract and Care,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 76, no. 3, 1406–7)
Interestingly, a customer review on Amazon captures Fineman’s message quite succinctly: “[I] have gained much insight into caretaking relationship instead of marriage. . . . Marriage is outdated and we need to overhaul this institution!!!”
6. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000). Cass Sunstein, who served as President Obama’s regulatory czar from 2009 to 2012, wrote in a book coauthored by Richard Thaler, “We have argued that states should abolish ‘marriage’ as such and rely on civil unions instead”—which are covered by contract law. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2008, 2009), 212, 117–118, 224. Sunstain adds, “Under our proposal, the word marriage would no longer appear in any laws, and marriage licenses would no longer be offered or recognized by any level of government” (217).
7. See John Witte, From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997).
8. See Steven Forde, Locke, Science, and Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013). The atomistic philosophers of the scientific revolution were intentionally reviving ancient Greek atomism, especially that taught by Epicurus, who likewise applied his philosophy to social life, teaching a radical individualism in which humans are not naturally social beings but are autonomous “atoms.” See David Koyzis, Political Visions and Illusions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 48–49.
9. Locke inspired the American Revolution; Rousseau inspired the French Revolution. Today conservatives tend to follow Locke and liberals tend to follow Rousseau. See Kim Holmes, “The Great Divide: The Ideological Legacies of the American and French Revolutions,” The Heritage Foundation, August 12, 2014, http://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/the-great-divide-the-ideological-legacies-the-american-and-french.
In much of the rest of the world, what Americans call conservatism (an emphasis on individual liberties) is still denoted by the term liberalism, while what Americans call liberalism (the expansion of government under the welfare state) is called social democracy, indicating its roots in socialism. In America, however, even the welfare state is not justified by an appeal to socialism but by an appeal to individualism—as a means for maximizing individual opportunity for those who are disadvantaged. See Koyzis, Political Visions and Illusions, 60.
10. Eric O. Springsted, The Act of Faith: Christian Faith and the Moral Self (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), x.
11. The following section is based on my book Total Truth, appendix 1, “How American Politics Became Secularized.” See also Nancy Pearcey, “The Creation Myth of Modern Political Philosophy,” speech presented at the Sixth Annual Kuyper lecture, sponsored by the Center for Public Justice, 2000, http://www.arn.org/docs/pearcey/np_creationmyth0801.htm.
12. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 102.
13. John Hallowell, Main Currents in Modern Political Thought (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 102–3.
14. George Grant, English-Speaking Justice (Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press, 1974, 1975), 16, 19.
15. Michael Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 29.
16. In recent years, social contract theory was infused with new life when John Rawls proposed an influential modern version of it in A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999). Despite some new features, Rawls’s version still treats humans primarily as rational calculators of their self-interest.
17. Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
18. Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 48. Other nations, Glendon notes, have privacy laws that treat humans as having a social dimension, and thus they give greater support and protection to our social relationships. For example, many nations require a woman considering an abortion to receive counseling about alternatives that would give her services and support to continue the pregnancy and give birth. By contrast, the US Supreme Court has struck down such requirements as a violation of women’s “privacy.”
19. For statistics, see W. Bradford Wilcox, “Suffer the Little Children: Cohabitation and the Abuse of America’s Children,” Public Discourse, April 22, 2011.
20. Oliver O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 276.
21. John Hallowell, The Moral Foundation of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 85.
22. Bertrand de Jouvenal, as cited in Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 36.
23. See Jennifer Roback Morse, Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn’t Work (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2001). Similar critiques of social contract theory are made by feminist authors such as Virginia Held, Feminist Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Christine Di Stefano, Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
24. Lindy West, “I Set Up #ShoutYourAbortion Because I Am Not Sorry, and I Will Not Whisper,” The Guardian, September 22, 2015.
25. Sasharusa, “The Fetus Is a Parasite,” Daily Kos, April 15, 2012; Eileen McDonagh, Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). But Peter Baklinski counters that argument:
Science paints a vastly different picture about the actual relationship between a baby in utero and his or her mother, showing that, far from being a parasite, the unborn child can help heal his mother for the rest of her life, as beneficial cells from the child pass into the mother’s body during pregnancy. . . . One kind of fetal cells that enter into the mother’s body is the baby’s stem cells. Stem cells have what Pinctott calls “magical properties” in that they can “morph” into other types of cells through a process called differentiation. The baby’s fetal stem cells can actually become the mother’s own cells that make up her liver, heart, or brain. . . . The baby’s fetal stem cells migrate to the mother’s injured sites and offer themselves as a healing remedy, becoming part of the mother’s very body. (Peter Baklinski, “Just a ‘Parasite’? Cutting Edge Science Shows Fetal Cells Heal Mother for Life,” LifeSite News, January 4, 2012)
26. Lee and George, Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics, 147, 149. As David Crawford writes, liberalism assumes “that, when it comes to public institutions and actions, the human person is essentially without gender or family. He can be connected to these only by an act of choice, treated as entirely arbitrary from the public standpoint.” Thus liberalism “tacitly presupposes a dualistic view of man according to which the body is reduced to sub-personal matter to be privately related to the free and spiritual domain of the person by an act of choice or by a given person’s innate preferences.” “Recognizing the Roots of Society in the Family, the Foundation of Justice,” Communio 34 (Fall 2007): 409.
27. M. Galbally, A. J. Lewis, M. V. Ijzendoorn, and M. Permezel, “The Role of Oxytocin in Mother-Infant Relations: A Systematic Review of Human Studies,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 19, no. 1 (January–February, 2011).
28. Alan Boyle, “This Is Your Brain on Fatherhood: Dads Experience Hormonal Changes Too, Research Shows,” NBC Science News, June 15, 2013.
29. Nathan Rabin, “Fatherhood Killed the Cynic in Me,” Yahoo News, July 4, 2015.
30. The Magnificent Seven, directed by John Sturges (Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists, 1960).
31. Meilander, Bioethics, 13–14.
32. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality (New York: Penguin, 1984), 92.
33. Richard Posner, Sex and Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 131. In 2000, Fred Shapiro, a librarian at Yale Law School, calculated that Posner was the most cited legal scholar “of all time” by a wide margin. See Lincoln Caplan, “Rhetoric and Law, Harvard Magazine (January–February 2016).
34. Helen Croydon, “It’s Time to Ditch Monogamy,” New Republic, April 25, 2014.
35. United States Census Bureau, “Women’s Marital Status,” https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/ms-1b.pdf; “Men’s Marital Status,” https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/ms-1a.pdf.
36. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, “Sex without Strings, Relationships without Rings: Today’s Young Singles Talk about Mating and Dating,” Report of the National Marriage Project (New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 2000), 6.
37. Napp Nazworth, “Fatherlessness Harms the Brain, Neurobiologists Find,” Christian Post, December 11, 2013. See also “The Consequences of Fatherlessness,” The National Center for Fathering, http://www.fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequences-of-fatherlessness/; David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Elizabeth Marquardt, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (New York: Crown Books, 2005); W. Bradford Wilcox, ed., When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, National Marriage Project; New York: Institute for American Values, 2010); Mary Eberstadt, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012); Glenn Stanton, Why Marriage Matters (Colorado Springs: Pinon Press, 1997). A recent article sums up the findings:
Research by Penn State sociologist Paul Amato (2005) on the long-term damage to children from divorce demonstrated that, if the United States enjoyed the same level of family stability as it did in 1960, the nation would have 70,000 fewer suicide attempts in youth every year, about 600,000 fewer kids receiving therapy and 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency. . . . Adults are also vulnerable to suicidal thinking and acts after divorce. A 2010 study from Rutgers of suicide among middle-aged Americans found divorce rates have doubled for middle-aged and older adults since the 1990s, leading to social isolation. This study showed that in 2005 unmarried middle-aged men were 3.5 times more likely than married men to die from suicide and their female counterparts were as much as 2.8 times more likely to kill themselves.” (Rick Fitzgibbons, “Divorce Is Killing Our Children, but We’re Too Drowned in PC Nonsense to Talk about It,” LifeSite News, May 5, 2016)
38. For more on these and related studies, see Ryan Anderson, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2015), 30–31.
39. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandafur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 38.
40. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “The Love That Brings New Life into the World,” transcript, November 17, 2014, http://www.rabbisacks.org/love-brings-new-life-world-rabbi-sacks-institution-marriage/.
41. For more on these and related studies, see Anderson, Truth Overruled, 32.
42. For this and related studies, see Stanton, Why Marriage Matters, 81, and Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially (New York: Random House, Doubleday, 2000).
43. Cited in Mark Oppenheimer, “A Gay Catholic Voice Against Same-Sex Marriage,” New York Times, June 5, 2010.
44. For a presentation of arguments for marriage, see Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (New York: Encounter Books, 2012). A common argument is that the only difference between same-sex and opposite-sex unions is that the former are infertile—and since infertile opposite-sex couples are legally permitted to marry, it is right that same-sex couples are legally permitted to marry as well. But until the rise of the homosexual movement, no one thought the existence of infertile couples justified same-sex unions. Why not? Historically, the state has licensed the kind of union that leads to children. To inquire into the fertility of each couple presenting themselves for marriage would be massively intrusive and invasive of privacy. Moreover, most couples do not know if they are infertile until after they have been married for several years. And even if they intend not to have children when they get married, they often change their minds. Almost ninety percent of married couples do have children. So the rational course is what states have historically done: License the male-female union because it is the only kind of relationship that can lead to children, even if it does not always do so.
45. Judge Vaughn Walker, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, 591 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2009), 67.
46. Cited in Blankenhorn, Future of Marriage, 122.
47. Andrew Sullivan, “Introduction,” Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con, ed. Andrew Sullivan (New York: Vintage Books, 1997, 2004), xxiii.
48. Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality, 186–87.
49. Ibid., 187.
50. Cited in Blankenhorn, Future of Marriage, 133.
51. Johanna Dasteel, “Homosexual Activist Says Gay ‘Marriage’ Isn’t about Equality, It’s about Destroying Marriage,” LifeSite News, May 1, 2013.
52. J. Richard Pearcey, “The Revolt of Intelligence Against ‘Marriage Equality,’” The Pearcey Report, March 18, 2013. This article first appeared in American Thinker.
53. One study found that “82 percent of gay men had had sex with someone other than their main partner.” What about marital breakups? A study from Norway and Sweden, which have sanctioned same-sex partnerships since the 1990s, found that gay male relationships are 50 percent more likely to break up than heterosexual marriages, while lesbian relationships are 167 percent more likely to break up than heterosexual marriages. (No, that is not a typo.) Stanton L. Jones, “Same-Sex Science,” First Things, February 2012. See also Hanna Rosin, “The Dirty Little Secret: Most Gay Couples Aren’t Monogamous,” Slate, June 26, 2013.
54. For more information on this study, see Corvino and Gallagher, Debating Same-Sex Marriage, 136.
55. Scott James, “Many Successful Gay Marriages Share an Open Secret,” New York Times, January 28, 2010.
56. “The masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society. . . . The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), 310–11.
57. Abigail Rine, “What Is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials?” First Things, May 14, 2015.
58. Cited in Blankenhorn, Future of Marriage, 213.
59. Dawn Stefanowicz, “A Warning from Canada: Same-Sex Marriage Erodes Fundamental Rights,” Public Discourse, April 24, 2015.
60. Ibid.
61. Heather Barwick, “Dear Gay Community: Your Kids Are Hurting,” The Federalist, March 17, 2015. Katy Faust, another adult child of a lesbian and her partner, writes:
I identify with the instinct of those children to be protective of their gay parent. In fact, I’ve done it myself. I remember how many times I repeated my speech: “I’m so happy that my parents got divorced so that I could know all of you wonderful women.” I quaffed the praise and savored the accolades. The women in my mother’s circle swooned at my maturity, my worldliness. I said it over and over, and with every refrain my performance improved. It was what all the adults in my life wanted to hear. I could have been the public service announcement for gay parenting. I cringe when I think of it now, because it was a lie. My parents’ divorce has been the most traumatic event in my thirty-eight years of life. (“Dear Justice Kennedy: An Open Letter from the Child of a Loving Gay Parent,” Public Discourse, February 2, 2015)
Morabito writes, “Whenever a parent is missing—for whatever reason—a child feels a primal wound.” Same-sex parenting “requires that such children bear that burden alone and repress their primal wound in silence.” “15 Reasons ‘Marriage Equality’ Is about Neither Marriage Nor Equality,” The Federalist, June 26, 2015.
62. United Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (General Assembly resolution 217 A), December 10, 1948, http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/.
63. Douglas NeJaime, “With Ruling on Marriage Equality, Fight for Gay Families Is Next,” Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2015.
64. Jennifer Roback Morse, “4 Questions about Surrogacy for Conservatives Who Support Gay Marriage,” The Daily Caller, June 2, 2015; see also Jennifer Roback Morse, “Privatizing Marriage Will Expand the Role of the State,” Public Discourse, April 3, 2012.
65. Stella Morabito, “Bait and Switch: How Same Sex Marriage Ends Family Autonomy,” The Federalist, April 9, 2014.
66. Alberta Government, “Guidelines for Best Practices,” 2016, https://education.alberta.ca/media/1626737/91383-attachment-1-guidelines-final.pdf. For example, “School forms, websites, letters, and other communications use non-gendered and inclusive language (e.g., parents/guardians, caregivers, families, partners, “student” or “their” instead of Mr., Ms., Mrs., mother, father, him, her, etc.).”
67. Brian Mattson, “The Family’s Fair-Weather Friends, Part 2,” Dr. Brian Mattson, June 30, 2015, http://drbrianmattson.com/journal/2015/6/30/the-familys-fair-weather-friends-part-two.
68. Jean C. Lloyd, “The Wrong Kind of Rights: Same-Sex Marriage, Third-Party Reproduction, and the Sexualization of Children,” Public Discourse, May 5, 2015.
69. Rae and Cox, Bioethics, 105. See also Nancy Pearcey, “Technology, History, and Worldview,” Genetic Ethics.
70. Rickard Newman, “Journey to Baby Gammy: How We Justify a Market in Children,” Public Discourse, August 18, 2014.
71. Peters, For the Love of Children, 54, 72.
72. For example, Steven Ertelt, “Lesbian Couple Asks Surrogate to Abort Baby after Learning She Had Down Syndrome,” LifeSite News, September 2, 2014.
73. Meilander, Bioethics, 19, 21.
74. Morse, “The Sexual Revolution Reconsidered,” 47.
75. On the social implications of the Trinity, see my books Total Truth, 132–33, 138, and Finding Truth, 130–31, 209–12; and Stanley Grenz, The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001). See also John D. Zizioulas, Being As Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985); Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), especially chapter 5, “Trinity and Church.”
76. Wyatt, “What Is a Person?”
77. Cited in Taylor, Sources of the Self, 223, 224, 226.
78. Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (London, UK: Penguin, 1997), 240; Kallistos [Timothy] Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 38–39.
79. Sam R. Williams, “A Christian Psychology of and Response to Homosexuality,” October 2011, https://identifynetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/A-Christian-Psychology-and-Response-to-Homosexuality.pdf.
80. One reason the modern family is fragile is that it has lost many of its former functions, such as educating children, working together in a family industry, caring for the sick and the elderly, and so on. Today all that’s left is emotional connection, and that is not enough. Many homeschoolers are driven by a larger vision of renewing the family by recovering the family’s traditional functions. See my book Total Truth, chapter 12, and my article, “Is Love Enough? Recreating the Economic Base of the Family,” The Family in America 4, no. 1 (January 1990), http://www.arn.org/docs/pearcey/np_familyinamerica.htm.
81. Alysse ElHage, “How Could Going to Church Help My Family?” I Believe in Love, December 3, 2015.
82. Rosaria Butterfield, interviewed by Phillip Holmes, “A Safe Place for Sexual Sinners,” Desiring God, January 7, 2016. See also Rosaria Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Pittsburg: Cross and Crown, 2012).
83. According to the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services at the University of Alberta, between 20 and 40 percent of homeless youth are LGBTQ. “The number one reason for homelessness is parental rejection,” said director Kris Wells. Quoted in Erika Stark, “Calgary Parents Gather to Discuss LGBTQ Guidelines,” CBC News, March 22, 2016.
84. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 263. For an updated and detailed vision of Christians rebuilding from the local level up, see Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option (New York: Penguin, 2017).