September 2026 – God’s Good Creation

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 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 theories² 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.³

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Mia Hughes

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

The Body Is Not an Accident

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

“Male and female he created them.”

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

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

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

Creation matters.

The Incarnation matters.

And bodily resurrection matters.

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

And Then There Are the Powers

But the biblical worldview goes further still.

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

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

The point is larger.

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

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

That pattern should sound familiar.

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

In other words: you may determine reality for yourself.

The modern version is remarkably similar:

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

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

We are dealing with anthropology.

We are dealing with creation.

And ultimately we are dealing with authority.

Who gets to say what a human being is?

Idolatry and the Autonomous Self

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

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

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

The body says one thing.

The ‘autonomous’ self says another.

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

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

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

The People Are Not the Enemy

There is one final Christian qualification that is essential.

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

The transgender person is not the Christian’s enemy.

The confused teenager is not the enemy.

The frightened parent is not the enemy.

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

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

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

Yet Christianity does not end with the powers.

It ends with Christ.

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

It is truth joined to love.

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

Sometimes love means accompanying suffering.

Sometimes it means refusing to participate in a falsehood.

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

Your body is not your enemy.

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Celebrate God’s Good Creation

Month: September 2026

Gaza, Israel, and the Christian Moral Imagination – Part 1