Category: Christian Anthropology

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Why Puberty Blockers Are Bad Medicine: Form, Telos, and the Abuse of Consent

If you walked into a hospital and asked, “What is medicine for?”—most people would offer some version of the same answer: to heal what’s broken.

But what if medicine stopped healing and started interrupting?

What if a medical intervention didn’t restore nature, but halted it?

And what if the patients were children?

That’s the debate surrounding King’s College London’s new trial on puberty blockers for 226 kids under sixteen—a trial whose central question is not whether puberty blockers should be used, but when they should be administered.

And that, right there, reveals everything.

Today, we need to talk about why puberty blockers are not just risky, not just poorly evidenced, and not just morally incoherent—but why they are, in the deepest Christian sense, bad medicine.

TWO KINDS OF MEDICINE

Let’s begin where Mary Harrington begins in her article Why Puberty Blockers Are Bad Medicine. She distinguishes between two kinds of medicine:

1. Medicine that heals—which restores a natural process that’s gone wrong.

2. Medicine that disrupts—which interrupts a natural process on purpose.

Restorative medicine is Christian through and through. Jesus heals. The Church heals. Doctors heal. And we are thankful for all of that.

But the trial at King’s College isn’t trying to heal anything.

Puberty isn’t a disease. It’s not a malfunction. It’s not an affliction. It’s the God-designed process by which a child becomes an adult in body, mind, and soul.

Harrington notes that puberty is a “complex set of naturally occurring changes intrinsic to the human genetic template.” But the King’s College trial doesn’t ask whether halting these changes is moral or wise. It only asks:

Should we delay puberty blockers—or give them earlier?

And there’s the problem: the worldview underneath the trial has already decided that human nature is raw material—neutral matter that exists for us to re-engineer.

But Christians don’t believe in engineering the human being.

We believe in receiving what God has made.

NOTICERS VS. ENGINEERS

Harrington describes two kinds of people in this debate: Noticers and Engineers.

Engineers

Engineers look at the world the way Francis Bacon did in the 17th century:

The world is stuff. Stuff can be rearranged. And the job of science is to overpower nature “for the relief of man’s estate.”

There’s no form.

No telos. (The Greek word for ‘goal’ or ‘end’.)

No given meaning.

Puberty, therefore, isn’t a stage of creaturely development—it’s an expressive option. Something you can modify according to your inner sense of self.

Noticers

Noticers, on the other hand, see the world as Christians have always seen it:

Creation has shape.

Creation has direction.

Creation has purpose.

This is Aristotelian1Something the Greek philosopher Aristotle taught. It’s Thomistic. It’s also John Paul II. (Saint John Paul the Second.2Pope from 1978 to 2005)

It’s Genesis.  It’s Jesus. (Gen 1:26-283Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
; Matt 19:4-64[Jesus] answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”)

Our bodies are not blank canvases. They are icons—physical revelations of invisible truths. Male and female are not costumes. They are modes of being human.

And as Harrington puts it, even in the most secular scientific contexts:

“Form and ends never really go away.”  

You can deny nature only so long before it comes roaring back.

THE LIMITS OF CONSENT

One of the most powerful parts of Harrington’s argument is her explanation of how our culture replaced metaphysical limits with the single moral requirement of consent.

After the horrors of the 20th century—eugenics, forced sterilizations, and the experiments of Josef Mengele5Josef Mengele was a Nazi physician notorious for brutal experiments at Auschwitz—Western ethics focused intensely on coercion. The logic became:

As long as a subject consents, the action is morally permissible.

But this missed the deeper problem.

The Nazi doctors weren’t evil only because they coerced people. They were evil because they treated human beings as manipulable material—as lab rats.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

If your worldview treats the human body as raw material to be reshaped for psychological comfort, you’ve accepted the same metaphysical mistake that drove eugenics.

Harrington writes:

“Never mind consent, it’s an offense not just against that child, but against reality itself: an atrocity only distinguishable from those of Dr Mengele in its having manipulated the victims into seeing it as ‘medicine.’”  

That sentence should shake us.

It isn’t hyperbole.

It’s moral clarity:

If children are persuaded to view the disruption of healthy development as “care,” the wrongness isn’t lessened. It is compounded.

Children cannot meaningfully consent to the permanent interruption of their own maturation. You can’t sign a permission slip for your future self.

Consent cannot sanctify what violates nature.

THE CASS REVIEW: WHAT IT REVEALED (AND WHERE IT STOPPED SHORT)

In 2024, the Cass Review shook the UK medical establishment by revealing that the evidence base for “gender-affirming care” in minors was astonishingly weak.

It found:

• No robust evidence that puberty blockers improve mental health.

• No convincing data that blockers reduce suicide risk. (The primary concern)

• Significant concerns about bone density, cognitive development, and fertility.

• A clinical model driven more by ideology than by science.

As a result, puberty blockers were banned in the UK—but only until better data could be gathered. And there’s the rub!

King’s College London intends to gather that data.

But here’s the problem:

Cass framed the issue as uncertainty. Christian anthropology frames it as impossibility.

You don’t need “more data” to know that interrupting a child’s sexual maturation is a violation of creaturely design.

The Cass Review was a step in the right direction, but from a Christian point of view, it didn’t go nearly far enough. It never asked the foundational question:

Should we be medicalizing gender distress at all—especially through interventions that halt the very process by which a child becomes an adult?

THE METAPHYSICAL FAULT LINE

Here is Harrington’s most important passage, which I’ll read in full:

“The nub of the King’s College debate, then, isn’t over trial design, or consent. It’s a metaphysical disagreement so deep as to be irreconcilable. Is there any difference between using a drug to restore normal health in a child with cancer or premature puberty, and using the same drug to induce abnormal puberty-less-ness in a child who simply believes themselves to be the opposite sex?”  

Mary Harrington

That is a razor-sharp question.

Now to the Engineer, perhaps, there is no difference.

To the Christian—noticer, realist, creature—the difference is everything.

A cancer drug given to correct disease is medicine. A cancer drug given to abolish normal development is harm.

And Harrington continues:

“The engineers… say it’s all just ‘healthcare.’ But noticers of human nature respond: no, puberty is not an illness… It’s an aspect of our form and telos.”  

Form. Telos. Purpose.

Puberty is the God-given road by which childhood becomes adulthood.

It is ordered toward future vocation, future parenthood, future communion between male and female.

To interrupt it is not compassion.

It is, quite literally, a denial of human nature.

WHAT THE CHURCH MUST SAY

So what do we do with all of this?

First: We tell the truth.

We tell the truth about the body. We tell the truth about creation. We tell the truth about the limits of consent. We tell the truth about the dangers of engineering the human being.

Second: We care for hurting children with compassion—not affirmation of falsehood. A child in distress deserves love, stability, patient listening, and the promise that their body is not their enemy.

Third: We reject the false choice between cruelty and “affirmation.”

There is a third way: truthful love.

Love that does not lie about creation. Love that does not cooperate with gender ideology. Love that sees the child not as an identity project, but as a creature of God.

Finally: We remember that the body is an icon, a revelation.

Your body is not a problem to solve.

It is a gift to receive.

It is a form that speaks.

It is a telos that unfolds.

Puberty is one of God’s good words spoken into creation.

It is not ours to erase.

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Psalm 139 says,

“You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

To receive the body is to receive God’s work.

To reject the body is to reject His wisdom.

And to interrupt a child’s development is to tamper with what God Himself has ordained.

May the Church be a place of clarity, courage, and compassion—a place where children are protected, where truth is spoken, and where the human body is honored as the handiwork of the Creator.

Thanks for listening.

If this episode was helpful, please share it—and join me next time as we continue forming a distinctly Christian imagination for the world God made.

SOURCE: Why Puberty Blockers are Bad Medicine by Mary Harrington

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Celebrate God’s Good Creation

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When Academia Baptizes a Mountain: The Rise of the New Earth-Religion

Wesley J. Smith’s recent essay (behind the National Review paywall) exposes a remarkable—and troubling—shift inside the world’s most prestigious academic and policy institutions: the rapid ascent of the “nature-rights” movement. What began as environmental fringe activism has now won the imprimatur of Cambridge University, major law societies, scientific journals, and global U.N. networks.

The core claim? Nature itself—mountains, rivers, glaciers, ecosystems—is a living person endowed with legal rights.

Cambridge’s new policy journal, Public Humanities, is devoting an entire issue to this concept. Its call for papers is shockingly explicit:

“We urgently need to change the way we relate to nature. One of the ways to do so is to consider nature as a subject of rights, as a living entity that has the right to exist, to be respected, to fulfil its natural role without arbitrary interference and to be repaired when its rights are violated. The constitution of Ecuador… has recognized nature as a subject of rights and calls it Pacha Mama (Mother Earth)… Dozens more countries have followed… The views of nature as a being is expanding in a variety of realms from the arts, to philosophy and the natural sciences.”

This is not metaphor. It is metaphysics—and law.

The Premise: A Living, Sacred Earth

Smith notes the obvious: most of nature is not alive. Sand, granite, and air do not possess consciousness, agency, or moral standing. Yet Cambridge’s editors treat “Pacha Mama”—the Incan earth-goddess—as a model for modern law. The result is not environmental stewardship but a revival of Gaia-style mysticism 1Gaia mysticism is the belief that the Earth is a single living, divine organism—a conscious being that unifies all life. It treats natural systems as sacred and intelligent, often blending environmentalism with spiritual or neo-pagan reverence for “Mother Earth.”cloaked in academic respectability.

From a Christian vantage, this is Romans 1 in institutional form: worshiping creation rather than the Creator.

The Consequence: Human Beings Become the Problem

If nature has a “right” to exist without human “interference,” then several pillars of civilization become violations:

  • mining and resource extraction
  • large-scale agriculture
  • transportation networks
  • modern sanitation
  • energy development

Smith argues the implications are unavoidable: nature-rights law would make modern prosperity impossible.

This is not conservation; it is an attempt to curtail human exceptionalism—the biblical truth that humans, and not mountains, bear the image of God.

The Epistemology: Mysticism Over Science

The Cambridge initiative treats “indigenous lifeways” as privileged sources of knowledge about nature as a living being. Smith respects indigenous cultures, but he rightly notes:

  • these worldviews are pre-scientific
  • they cannot sustain modern economies
  • they are now selectively weaponized for ideological ends

In other words, the academy now elevates myth when it serves a preferred political religion.

The Politics: Anti-Capitalist and One-Sided

The call for papers warmly encourages scholarship on:

“the relationship between capitalism and the rights of nature.”

Conspicuously missing:

Any mention of the catastrophic environmental records of communist states—from the Aral Sea to Chernobyl to China’s ongoing ecological destruction.

When critiques run only in one direction, ideology—not science—is doing the talking.

Why This Matters: The Elites Are Converting

Smith’s final warning is stark. The nature-rights movement is advancing not because it is rational but because it is religious—an earth-religion that has seduced the institutional elite:

  • universities
  • scientific journals
  • international policy bodies
  • legal societies

People assume the movement is too absurd to gain traction. But fringe beliefs, once adopted by elite institutions, quickly become policy (e.g. transgenderism).

The Theological Stakes

The deeper issue is anthropological. When inanimate nature receives “rights,” humans lose theirs. The Creator/creature distinction collapses. Stewardship becomes theft. Human beings become intruders, not image-bearers (i.e. agents of the Creator.)

What Smith describes is not environmental ethics—it is neo-paganism with legal authority, the inversion of the Christian doctrine of creation and the dignity of the human person.

Unless scientists, policymakers, and Christians recognize what is happening inside the intellectual centers of the West, this new earth-religion will not remain symbolic. It will reshape law, limit human flourishing, and weaken the moral foundation on which human dignity rests.

Source: Academia Embraces the Unscientific Earth Religion of ‘Nature Rights’ by Wesley J. Smith, National Review Online.

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Celebrate God’s Good Creation

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When National Security Turns Against the Created Order

One of the most striking features of our cultural moment is how thoroughly gender ideology has seeped into institutions charged with safeguarding the public good. Universities, medical associations, school districts, and corporations have all been reshaped by DEI frameworks that treat gender identity as a sacred category beyond scrutiny. But the recent whistleblower report from inside the National Security Agency (NSA), published by City Journal, reveals something even more troubling: this same ideology has taken root within our intelligence community—an arena where ideological capture is not merely misguided, but dangerous.

According to the whistleblower, a “very small number” of transgender-identified employees and activists inside the NSA wield outsized power, effectively steering workplace culture, intimidating dissenters, and introducing radical ideological commitments into the agency’s operational environment. This is not simply about workplace inclusion. It is about an activist minority leveraging institutional mechanisms to impose a worldview on the nation’s top intelligence analysts.

As the whistleblower puts it:

“There is a very small number of them, but they wield an enormous amount of power. And outside of the sick stuff, you also see a prevalent Marxist philosophy going on with these people in their chat rooms. They hate capitalism. They hate Christians. They’re always espousing socialist and Marxist beliefs.”

This hatred of Christians is not a vague dislike of religion in general. It is a targeted hostility toward those who still hold to Christianity’s historic teaching that human beings are created male and female, and that Jesus Himself affirmed the creational design of marriage as one man and one woman (Gen. 1:27; Matt. 19:4). In other words, their contempt is aimed precisely at those who uphold the biblical anthropology that gender ideology seeks to overthrow.

The whistleblower recounts that when ordinary analysts raised concerns—reminding coworkers that the agency’s mission is to protect the United States and identify adversaries—they were met with instant denunciation:

“They just got hammered. They would just start coming out with ‘transphobe’ and ‘homophobe’ right away or calling you a ‘racist.’ And that’s why a lot of folks are still hesitant to say anything, because you still have people at these agencies in those key spots. It infected everything.”

This is precisely how ideological capture works: not by persuading the majority, but by ensuring that dissent is costly. When the enforcement mechanism is social punishment, accusations of bigotry, or professional marginalization, most people keep their heads down. And in a place like the NSA—where people can lose clearances or career prospects for being viewed as “hostile” to DEI priorities—silence becomes the only safe strategy.

The theological undertone here cannot be ignored. When an ideology that denies the givenness of the body also breeds contempt for those who affirm the God-given meaning of the body, the conflict is not merely cultural—it is spiritual. What the whistleblower describes is a workplace atmosphere where those who hold to Christian teaching on creation, marriage, and sexual morality are treated not as colleagues, but as enemies.

The implications are sobering. Intelligence agencies depend on clarity, objectivity, and moral seriousness. An environment where analysts fear speaking honestly, or where ideological activists dominate key positions, is an environment where national security itself becomes compromised.

What this whistleblower describes is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a larger pattern: elite institutions across the country now treat gender ideology as a non-negotiable orthodoxy, and they enforce it with missionary zeal. When even intelligence agencies are reshaped by activists who “hate capitalism” and openly disdain Christians, we are no longer dealing with neutral bureaucracies. We are witnessing the politicization of institutions that were never meant to be political.

Defend God’s Good Creation