Disregarding The Body – Podcast
The Crisis of our Time
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art
Companion Posts
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Starting Again
I was born in the sixties. But I am not a child of the 60’s. My family was lower-middle class, and by the standards of the time, traditional in most every way. Dad was a minister. If he or mom had lived into their 90’s they would not have imagined the social changes we have witnessed in the last 20 years. It would be too easy to say the sexual revolution of the 60’s caused all this change, as some conservatives maintain. But the roots of this change go back much further than the swinging 60’s.
So I’m embarking with some misgivings on a survey of cultural history. There are deep intellectual and cultural traditions that have shaped our everyday lives. We’ve come to a point in the Western world where the statement “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” is comprehensible to many public leaders, at least in public. That phrase would be completely incomprehensible to my parent’s generation, in public or private, not to mention every preceding generation. It is still incomprehensible to many, if not most people today. But if you express your bewilderment in public, say at many workplaces in the Western world, increasingly the odds are you will be regarded as stupid, immoral or worse. You may be reprimanded for your irrational “phobia.” You might even have your career derailed. If you broadcast your view on a public forum, say Twitter, expect the Twitterati to pounce with the ferocity of a caged unfed Tiger. In certain parts of the world you may even be charged with a hate-crime for your expressed incredulity at the latest massive cultural shift. (See the following posts, here & here.)
As a 60’s poet might say, “The times they are a changin.”
The tectonic cultural shift in the last 20 years is quite breathtaking. Regardless of what you think about gay marriage, we have gone from year 2000 where the majority of Americans were opposed to gay marriage to today where normalization of Transgenderism is fast approaching.
A long and winding road brought us to this point. I want to offer a thoughtful and hopefully generous exposition, from a Classic Christian point of view, of how we got here. As I go, I’ll be documenting some disturbing current events. (Read my next post). I hope that even those who disagree with Classic Christianity will find here a fair and readable assessment of our state of affairs. (post continues page 2)
Gaza, Israel, and the Christian Moral Imagination – Part 1
Response to a Christian friend. (Footnotes provided for key terms.)
I’ve been thinking more about our exchange concerning Gaza, and I want to give you a more substantial response. But I don’t want to fire something off quickly, because the questions you’re raising—civilian casualties, proportionality, genocide, Hamas’s responsibility, humanitarian aid, and Israel’s conduct of the war—deserve something more careful than a few paragraphs.
So I’m working on a longer response that will become an extended blog post with links to supporting data. For now, here’s the short version.
The Civilian Death Toll—and What It Does Not Prove
First, I never said the Palestinian death toll isn’t extraordinary or horrifying. It is. Where I disagree with you is about what follows from that fact. The aggregate Gaza Health Ministry number, for example, is not simply a count of “Palestinian civilians killed by Israel.” It does not distinguish civilians from Hamas and other combatants in its headline total, nor, even if we accept the aggregate figure, does the raw number establish responsibility for every death.
More importantly, a horrific civilian death toll does not by itself establish genocide. Genocide is a much more specific charge involving an intention to destroy a people as such. That is why I think Connelly1’Progressive’ Christian writer Shawn Patrick Connelly is much too confident simply calling Gaza a genocide. One can believe that particular Israeli strikes were excessive, disproportionate, and misguided, without concluding that Israel’s purpose was to destroy the Palestinian people.
Hamas Cannot Disappear from the Moral Accounting
Second, I think Hamas too often gradually disappears from the moral accounting.
October 7 wasn’t merely an attack in which 1,200 civilians unfortunately died. Human Rights Watch concluded after interviewing scores of witnesses and examining hundreds of photographs and videos that the Hamas-led assault was designed to kill civilians and take hostages. The deliberate killing and hostage-taking were central features of the planned attack. [Source: Human Rights Watch]
Amnesty’s later investigation likewise concluded that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, hostage-taking, and sexual violence. [Source: Amnesty International]
And much of October 7 was documented on video—including material recorded by the attackers themselves. [Video documentation in my next post.] I don’t think we should sanitize that reality or allow October 7 to become merely the subordinate clause preceding everything Israel subsequently did.
The Kind of War Hamas Chose to Fight
Nor does Hamas’s responsibility end on October 7. The kind of war it chose to fight matters: an entrenched armed organization operating from within an extraordinarily dense civilian environment, with documented military use of civilian areas and facilities—like hospitals & schools. That doesn’t give Israel permission to ignore proportionality or civilian protection. But neither can Hamas’s method of warfare be erased when assigning moral responsibility for the terrible civilian consequences.
The Oppressor/Oppressed Lens
There is another, broader question I want to explore: the interpretive framework through which much of the contemporary political Left—including portions of the ‘Progressive’ Christian Left—approaches conflicts like this one.
I think much of the contemporary political Left has absorbed an oppressor/oppressed framework from contemporary critical theories2Critical theory emerged from twentieth-century epistemological shifts, rooted in Marxist philosophy and associated with the Frankfurt School thinkers Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. The approach rests on the conviction that all theories are human constructions shaped by specific contexts and interests, and critical theory’s task is to expose theories that justify oppressive practices and demand their reconsideration. It functions as an intellectual instrument of liberation. and then sometimes uses that framework as the first interpretive lens through which complicated political, cultural and moral questions are viewed.
Once the categories are assigned—colonizer/colonized, powerful/powerless, privileged/marginalized—the moral conclusions can begin to seem almost predetermined.
That can produce some very strange alliances. “Queers for Palestine” is perhaps the most obvious example: Western sexual-progressive movements aligning themselves symbolically with a society whose actual cultural and religious assumptions concerning sexuality are radically different from their own.
When Biblical Principles Become Political Programs
It’s related to the concern I raised in my recent Politics with a Proof Text piece. We begin with something Christians certainly affirm—love the stranger, protect the vulnerable, care about the poor—and then quietly import an entire political philosophy involving colonialism, oppression, reparations, redistribution, immigration policy, borders, and the Global North versus the Global South. At some point we have moved from biblical moral principles into prudential political judgments, while continuing to speak as though Scripture itself settled the policy question.
That’s something I want us to examine rather than simply assume.
Why I Support Israel
One other clarification about my own support for Israel. I’m not supporting Israel because I hold the dispensationalist or end-times theology common among many evangelical Christians. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, for example, has repeatedly grounded his support for Israel in biblical promises to Abraham and the Jewish people, and that broader Christian Dispensationalist tradition.3Dispensationalism places Israel at the absolute center of God’s redemptive timeline. The system holds that Old Testament covenantal promises to Abraham and David will be fulfilled literally in a future age, with modern Israel’s 1948 establishment representing the fulfillment of God’s land promise to the Jewish people. This conviction fundamentally shapes how dispensationalists interpret prophecy and understand contemporary events.
The entire dispensational prophetic scheme depends on Israel’s existence as a nation-state; without it, the entire framework collapses. Dispensationalists maintain that God maintains separate purposes for national Israel and the church, a distinction that remains central to their theological system.
Since Israel’s modern establishment, dispensationalists view the rapture of the church as the next prophetic event on God’s timeline. The tradition is often tied to a particular eschatological reading of the modern state of Israel.
I don’t share that theology.
The Facts on the Ground
My support for Israel rests much more on the facts on the ground: Israel’s comparative religious pluralism, the rights afforded to religious minorities, the political participation of its Arab and Muslim citizens, freedom of worship, and the striking contrast between the continued presence of a large Muslim minority inside the Jewish state and the tiny or nonexistent Jewish communities across much of the surrounding Muslim-majority world. None of that makes Israel above criticism. But it does matter when I’m trying to decide what kind of society Israel is, what kind of societies surround it, and how Christians should think morally about the conflict.
Gaza, then, becomes an especially important case study in how we apply these moral categories.
The Larger Christian Question
The same larger question runs through a lot of what I’ve been writing about lately—Israel and Gaza, immigration and poverty, gender ideology, and our obligations toward vulnerable people:
What does a genuinely Christian understanding of the human person require of us—and where have we perhaps confused Christian moral teaching with a particular contemporary political ideology, one often deeply influenced—knowingly or not—by strains of cultural Marxism?
That’s the discussion I’m really interested in having with you.
The longer version is going to take me a little time. But that’s where I’m headed.
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When a Culture Loses Touch with Reality
Mia Hughes begins her recent essay, “Trans Is a Mental Disorder,” with a deliberately provocative observation: Western society has normalized the idea that otherwise healthy people may require hormones, surgeries, and even the removal of healthy body parts in order to become psychologically whole.
For Hughes, the question is obvious: How did something once understood as evidence of psychological distress come to be regarded as a healthy expression of personal identity?
Her answer is that transgender medicine underwent a process of depsychopathologization. Rather than locating the problem in a person’s relationship to his or her sexed body, the emerging gender-affirming model increasingly located the problem in the body—or in society’s refusal to affirm the individual’s internal identity. Hughes argues that this transformation was heavily influenced by activism and eventually institutionalized in medicine, law, education, and popular culture.
Hughes then proposes a psychiatric category she believes helps explain the phenomenon: the overvalued belief.
An overvalued belief is not quite a delusion. The person may remain intelligent, competent, and perfectly rational in most areas of life. Nor is it an obsession, because obsessive thoughts are normally unwanted. Instead, an overvalued belief is deeply embraced. It becomes intertwined with identity itself and can eventually dominate how someone interprets reality.
Hughes compares the phenomenon to anorexia or body dysmorphic disorder. The sufferer may become convinced that some aspect of the healthy body must be changed. The conviction becomes so powerful that medical alteration appears not merely reasonable but necessary.
“Imagine a group of powerful, well-connected anorexics gather and formulate a plot to reject the psychiatric framing of anorexia and turn their illness into a healthy identity. They make it discrimination and bigotry to call anorexia a mental disorder and frame access to liposuction and Ozempic as medically necessary and a human right. The whole world goes along with this. In the field of anorexia-affirming care, an anorexic receives immediate affirmation of her anorexic identity and unfettered access to the weight-loss medical treatments that her disorder demands.
No psychotherapeutic attempt is made to loosen the grip of the belief.
Then, instead of measuring success by objective outcomes such as physical health and quality of life, researchers in the field opt for self-report: in other words, after giving the anorexic the very treatments that her disorder compels her to seek, the researchers ask her if she is happy. When she says yes, this confirms that Ozempic and liposuction are beneficial and appropriate treatments for anorexia. That is the medical world’s current approach to managing the trans phenomenon. Read how this madness happened in my first essay of @Genspect’s REPATH series.”
Source: Mia Hughes
Hughes’s analogy is intentionally jarring. But that is precisely why it is useful. It forces us to ask whether compassion requires affirming a person’s interpretation of his or her body—or whether genuine compassion requires challenging that interpretation. And for Christians, this question reaches deeper than psychiatry or medicine. It takes us directly into the biblical doctrines of creation, embodiment, truth, and ultimately the nature of spiritual deception.
The Body Is Not an Accident
The biblical worldview begins somewhere very different from modern expressive individualism.1Expressive individualism is the modern conviction that our deepest identity is found within our inner psychological self, and that authentic living requires expressing that inner identity outwardly and having it recognized by others. This helps explain contemporary sexual and gender ideology because the inner self is granted greater authority than the body. If the body and the psychological self appear to conflict, expressive individualism tends to say that the body must yield to the self.
“Male and female he created them.”
Our bodies are not raw material handed over to an ‘autonomous’ self that stands above them. The body participates in who the person is.
Abigail Favale of Notre Dame puts the matter helpfully when she describes male and female as two embodied ways of being human. Sexual difference is not merely a collection of stereotypes about personality. It is rooted first in the body itself. Men and women are equally human, equally bearers of the image of God, yet their bodies are meaningfully different.
Christianity therefore cannot accept the idea that the deepest self is somehow trapped inside the wrong body. That anthropology is remarkably close to the ancient dualisms Christianity rejected from the beginning (Gnosticism).
Creation matters.
The Incarnation matters.
And bodily resurrection matters.
God does not rescue human beings from embodiment. He redeems human beings as embodied creatures.
And Then There Are the Powers
But the biblical worldview goes further still.
Scripture does not describe evil merely in terms of mistaken ideas, psychological dysfunction, social systems, or individual sin. It also speaks about unseen powers—“principalities,” “powers,” “rulers,” and “authorities”—that work against God’s purposes for creation.
That does not necessarily mean that a person experiencing gender dysphoria is demon possessed. Nor should Christians casually assign demonic explanations to individual psychological suffering.
The point is larger.
The Bible tells us that deception itself has a supernatural dimension.
Spiritual warfare is fundamentally “a conflict between what is true and what is false.” The serpent’s strategy in Genesis 3 is not to create an entirely imaginary world. It is subtler. He takes what God has made and reframes reality, mixing truth with falsehood until human beings begin distrusting what God has said and what God has made.
That pattern should sound familiar.
“You will be like God,” the serpent says.
In other words: you may determine reality for yourself.
The modern version is remarkably similar:
My identity is constituted by my inner consciousness,
and my body must conform to the identity I declare.
At that point we have moved beyond a debate about pronouns.
We are dealing with anthropology.
We are dealing with creation.
And ultimately we are dealing with authority.
Who gets to say what a human being is?
Idolatry and the Autonomous Self
One of the fundamental axioms of Biblical Theology is that human beings become like what they worship. Humanity was created to image God, but idolatry distorts that image. Instead of receiving reality from the Creator, fallen humanity turns toward created things—and, in the modern age, ultimately toward the self.
The modern ‘autonomous’ self can therefore become an idol.
The self no longer receives identity as gift. It manufactures identity through will.
The body says one thing.
The ‘autonomous’ self says another.
And increasingly the surrounding culture is required to declare that the self is right and the body is wrong.
That is why this controversy reaches far beyond the relatively small number of people suffering profound gender distress. It asks every one of us to embrace a particular understanding of reality: that personal identity originates primarily in subjective consciousness rather than in the created body. (See definition of expressive individualism above.)
From a biblical perspective, that reversal should trouble us deeply. (Unfortunately, this reversal does not trouble some Christian denominations!)
The People Are Not the Enemy
There is one final Christian qualification that is essential.
Paul tells us explicitly that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood.”
The transgender person is not the Christian’s enemy.
The confused teenager is not the enemy.
The frightened parent is not the enemy.
Even the activist advancing ideas we believe profoundly mistaken is ultimately not the enemy.
The Christian diagnosis of reality is simultaneously more severe and more compassionate than that.
Human beings can become caught inside lies larger than themselves. Institutions can reinforce those lies. Cultures can normalize them. And behind the biblical drama stands an older rebellion in which dark powers seek to deform God’s good creation by separating humanity from truth.
Yet Christianity does not end with the powers.
It ends with Christ.
The New Testament announces that Christ has already confronted, disarmed, and defeated the principalities and powers. The answer to deception is therefore neither hatred nor surrender.
It is truth joined to love.
We should have enormous compassion for people who experience anguish about their bodies. But compassion cannot compel us to claim that creation itself is mistaken.
Sometimes love means accompanying suffering.
Sometimes it means refusing to participate in a falsehood.
And sometimes the most compassionate sentence we can speak is very simple:
Your body is not your enemy.
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Celebrate God’s Good Creation
Politics with a Proof Text
A Thought Experiment
At this point, I would like to ask my progressive Christian friends a few questions.
Not rhetorical questions, actually.
I sincerely want to know where they draw the line.
Suppose we could accurately identify every noncitizen who is unlawfully present in the United States.
Would it be morally permissible for a Christian to support the removal of those who have committed serious crimes?
Surely the answer must be yes.
And if such a person is already sitting in a county jail, is it really more Christian for local authorities to refuse cooperation with ICE—thereby requiring federal agents later to locate that person somewhere in the community?
Why?
Would it not be more humane, safer, and more orderly for immigration authorities to take custody at the jail once the criminal case permits it?
Would supporting that policy make me insufficiently concerned about “the stranger”?
I don’t see how.
Now suppose the person being removed has a wife and children.
Family separation raises serious moral concerns. But does that make removal morally impermissible? What if assistance is provided so the family can remain together by returning together?
Would Christians still be prohibited from supporting removal?
If so, why?
Let’s go further.
What about a noncitizen who entered unlawfully, has no valid claim to remain, and openly rejects the laws and civic obligations of the country whose hospitality he is demanding?
Does “love the stranger” require that he remain indefinitely?
Again: why?
And here I want to make an important distinction.
I am not arguing that government should deport people merely because they criticize America, wave a Mexican flag at a protest, advocate socialism, practice Islam, or hold political opinions I dislike.
My question is more fundamental:
Does Christian hospitality impose no reciprocal obligation upon the person receiving that hospitality?
Does the stranger have duties as well as rights?
Must he obey the laws?
May the host country expect him to accommodate himself to its civic order?
May it refuse admission—or terminate permission to remain—when the conditions of its lawful immigration system have not been satisfied?
And may the state consider national security, public safety, capacity for assimilation, and the welfare of its existing citizens when deciding whom to admit?
If the answer to all of those questions is still, “No, Christian love requires us to let them remain,” then I think the biblical proof-texting needs to be examined very carefully.
Ancient Israel certainly did not understand “love the stranger” to mean that the stranger entered a community without obligations.
The ger (stranger) was protected.
He was not to be exploited or oppressed.
He was to receive justice.
But he also lived within an ordered community governed by laws that applied to him as well as to the native-born.
That part of the biblical picture tends to disappear when “welcome the stranger” is lifted out of its literary and historical context and dropped directly into a twenty-first-century immigration debate.
So here is the question I really want my progressive Christian friends to answer:
Is there any immigration restriction or deportation policy that you would regard as morally legitimate?
If the answer is yes, then good. We are no longer debating whether Christians may enforce immigration laws. We are debating which laws, under what circumstances, enforced how, and with what degree of mercy and prudence.
That is a political and prudential argument.
Scripture informs it.
Scripture constrains it.
Scripture certainly forbids cruelty and injustice.
But Scripture does not settle every policy question simply by giving us the phrase “love the stranger.”
And if the answer is no—if practically every meaningful attempt to exclude, remove, or restrict unlawful immigration is condemned as unchristian—then I begin to suspect that something other than exegesis is doing much of the work.
Perhaps a political philosophy is being smuggled into the biblical text and then handed back to us as though it were simply “what Jesus requires.”
That is precisely the kind of proof-texting Christians of every political persuasion should resist.
The Political Philosophy Beneath the Proof Text
I suspect there is sometimes another political philosophy operating beneath this biblical argument—one that should be brought into the open and debated on its own merits.
It goes roughly like this:
The wealthy nations of the “Global North”—the old “First World”—became wealthy in significant measure through colonialism, slavery, exploitation, extraction, and domination of the poorer nations of the “Global South” or “Majority World.”
Therefore, today’s enormous disparities in wealth are not merely differences in economic development. They are, at least in significant measure, the accumulated consequences of historical injustice.
And from that premise follows a reparative obligation.
Wealthy Western nations are therefore expected to redistribute wealth, accept more migrants from poorer nations, relax immigration restrictions, and in some versions of the argument treat migration itself as a form of reparation for colonialism.
That line of reasoning is not something I am inventing. Serious contemporary political theorists explicitly argue for “migration as reparation.”
Now, that is a political and historical argument worth having.
But notice what has happened.
We have moved a very long way from:
“You shall love the stranger.”
We are now talking about colonial guilt, global redistribution, reparations, and the moral legitimacy of national borders.
Those are not the same argument.
And that is precisely why I object when the entire package is presented to Christians as though it simply falls out of a few biblical verses about “the stranger.”
It doesn’t.
If someone wants to argue that the modern West owes the developing world reparations because its prosperity was produced principally through exploitation, make that historical case.
If someone wants to argue that present-day Americans inherit a moral debt for the acts of previous empires or generations, make that philosophical case.
If someone wants to argue that immigration should function as a mechanism of global wealth redistribution, make that economic case.
But don’t simply quote Leviticus and imply that Christians who reject those conclusions have somehow rejected Scripture.
That is exactly the move I am objecting to.
And I reject much of the underlying premise anyway.
The prosperity of the modern West cannot plausibly be reduced to colonial plunder.
Institutions matter.
The rule of law matters.
Property rights matter.
Scientific and technological development matter.
Markets matter.
Political stability, education, cultural habits, and human capital matter.
History certainly includes exploitation, conquest, slavery, and genuine injustices for which moral reckoning may be necessary.
But the simplistic morality play in which the rich world became rich primarily because it stole from the poor world—and therefore now owes the poor world access to its borders and accumulated wealth—is an historical and economic thesis, not a biblical commandment.
And that is the crucial distinction.
Once again, the danger is that a modern political ideology gets smuggled into the biblical text and then emerges wearing a clerical collar.
That is not exegesis.
That is politics with a proof text.
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