When Bodies Don’t Matter: The Gnostic Temptation of Our Age

In recent years, I started to notice a common thread running through several major cultural flashpoints: homosexuality, transgenderism, AI, and Covid. At first glance, these topics seem disconnected. But the more I examined them, the more I saw a hidden connection—a way of thinking that undergirds them all. That underlying theme is an ancient Christian heresy: Gnosticism.

What Is Gnosticism?

Gnosticism teaches that salvation comes through secret knowledge (gnosis) and that the physical world is flawed or even evil. In this view, the true self is immaterial, and our bodies are little more than prisons. Early Christians rejected this heresy forcefully. The Apostle John, for instance, insisted that anyone who denies Jesus came in the flesh is not of God (2 John 7).

Today, Gnosticism hasn’t disappeared. It’s just morphed into new forms.

Gnosticism and the Sexual Revolution

Take homosexuality and transgenderism. The underlying belief here is that our bodies don’t matter—or at least, they shouldn’t have the final say in who we are. If someone’s desires conflict with their biology, then biology must yield. In transgenderism especially, the body is treated not just as irrelevant but as an obstacle to overcome. It’s a mindset that says, “What I feel on the inside is who I truly am—my body just hasn’t caught up yet.”

This isn’t a scientific outlook. Ironically, it clashes with Darwinian evolution, which says our physical traits exist for a reason. Our anatomy speaks to our purpose. Even noted biologist-atheist Richard Dawkins has made similar observations, emphasizing that male and female bodies evolved for reproduction, and that denying the biological basis of sex is anti-scientific. He certainly doesn’t frame this as a critique of Gnosticism—but the resonance is striking. 

Gnostic thinking rejects the biological basis entirely. It tells us that truth is found in the internal self, not the external form.

Virtual Reality, AI, and the Disembodied Future

This disembodied way of thinking also shows up in technology. Virtual reality is now marketed not just as entertainment but as an alternative to real life. Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley’s top voices, once argued that those who value the physical world are simply enjoying their “reality privilege.” For most people, he claims, the digital world offers more meaning, more justice, and more joy. In a widely shared 2021 interview, Andreessen framed virtuality as a more equitable frontier than physical reality, arguing that investing in digital life is not only desirable but ethically necessary for those lacking “reality privilege.”

Mary Harrington, a feminist critic of transhumanism, connects this to the rise in trans identities. Kids who grow up immersed in virtual spaces—from Minecraft to Instagram—come to believe that the body is endlessly editable. If you can modify your online avatar, why not your real one?

She labels this phenomenon “Meat Lego Gnosticism”, vividly depicting a mindset where our bodies are deconstructed and reassembled, like LEGO blocks, at our own discretion rather than respected as integral, given wholes.

Artificial intelligence takes this logic even further. Some experts now openly ask whether unplugging an AI that claims to be conscious would be morally equivalent to killing a human. Why? Because if humans are just biological computers, then a silicon-based computer might be a person, too. Once again, embodiment is dismissed as unnecessary—or even oppressive.

Christianity Is Embodied

The problem is that this is profoundly anti-Christian. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible insists on the goodness of the body. Creation was called “very good.” Adam and Eve were given bodies with sexual differentiation and purpose. The Law regulated food, clothing, and ritual purity—bodily matters. Circumcision, anointing, sacrifices, baptisms—these are not incidental to the faith. They are expressions of it.

And then came the Incarnation. After creating bodies, and calling them good, God took on a body. He didn’t just give us ideas or a philosophy—He lived, suffered, bled, and died. He rose again with a body, and He gave us bodily sacraments: bread and wine, water and oil.

Christianity is not a disembodied information exchange. It is a flesh-and-blood, incarnational way of life. When we start treating livestreams as a sufficient replacement for church, or when we reduce Christian teaching to mere data transfer, we’re slipping into a Gnostic mindset.


Many in the tech world find the very idea that our nature has been given to us—rather than designed by us—to be a kind of offense. Yuval Harari, for example, boldly declares, “Organisms are algorithms,” and envisions a future where human life is no longer shaped by divine design but by human reengineering: “Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design—not the intelligent design of some God above the clouds, but our intelligent design.”

For the modern mind, it’s galling to be told that our identity, limits, and even our flesh have been handed to us. The Christian worldview says we are fearfully and wonderfully made; the new Gnosticism says we are merely constructed—and ought to be reconstructed at will.

Why It Matters Now

Covid accelerated this shift. We were suddenly told that human bodies were dangerous. The ideal became disembodied—stay home, go virtual, avoid touch. What shocked me most was how quickly many Christians accepted this. The body, once central to Christian worship and community, became an afterthought.

But this wasn’t a new temptation. Gnosticism has always haunted the Church. What’s new is how persuasive it’s become in the age of digital technology and identity politics.

When Christians start believing that the body is incidental to the faith—or to being human—we’re not just making a theological mistake. We’re surrendering to the spirit of the age. We’re forgetting that Jesus rose with a body, that the Church is a Body, and that salvation is not just for our souls but for our whole selves.

Embodied Discipleship

What does it mean, then, to resist the Gnostic pull? It means leaning into our createdness. It means honoring our bodies as gifts. It means worshipping in person when we can, serving one another physically, and refusing to reduce faith to a collection of doctrines floating in the cloud.

To be Christian is to be human in the fullest sense—mind, soul, and body. Our world doesn’t need more clever ideas. It needs the witness of embodied lives: people who live out truth in their flesh and bones, who love with their hands and feet, and who follow a Savior who did the same.

Gnosticism says salvation is found in escaping the body. The Gospel says it’s found in the Word made flesh.

And that makes all the difference.

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Speaking for the Body: Medicine, Identity, and the Voice of the Flesh

What is medicine for?

This deceptively simple question sits at the heart of a fierce debate currently playing out in courts, clinics, and the conscience of a culture. A recent case—U.S. v. Skrmetti—confronts this head-on. The lawsuit challenges Tennessee’s law banning medical gender transition procedures for minors. But beneath the legal arguments lies a deeper philosophical fault line:

Is medicine the art of healing a disordered body, or the tool of sculpting a desired identity?


Two Models of Medicine

During oral arguments, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson asked provocative questions: If a teenage girl says, “I don’t want breasts,” is that enough to justify medical suppression of puberty?

That question exposes two competing visions of medicine:

  • The Service Provider Model: The physician delivers treatments to match the patient’s internal sense of self.
  • The Restorative Model: The physician diagnoses and treats real pathologies based on the body’s design and function.

If patient discomfort becomes the metric for medical intervention, anything can be labeled disease—including normal puberty.


Desire Is Not Diagnosis

In her article on Fairer Disputations, Leah Libresco Sargeant argues clearly: wanting something gone does not make it a disease.

A young girl may dislike her breasts due to dysphoria—or due to social pressure, trauma, or confusion. The physician’s job is to discern the difference. A culture that teaches self-avoidance should not be allowed to weaponize medicine against the body itself.

“A good doctor must attend to the body, not simply the feelings about it.” – Leah Libresco Sargeant

Feelings matter, but they are not the final diagnostic authority. Medicine must balance compassion with truth.


Listening to the Body’s Voice

Sargeant reflects personally on her own medical journey. As a teenager, signs of PCOS1PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) is a common hormonal disorder affecting women of reproductive age. It involves a combination of symptoms related to hormonal imbalance, metabolism, and ovarian function. were dismissed as normal. It wasn’t until later—after multiple miscarriages—that the condition was diagnosed.

Her body was speaking clearly. No one listened.

This isn’t just a case of delayed treatment. It’s a paradigm failure. Medicine did not fail to affirm her identity—it failed to honor her body’s reality. True healing requires both discernment and humility.


Medicine Must Be Rooted in Reality

When medicine drifts from diagnosis and healing into affirming personal desires, it risks becoming a mirror of cultural confusion rather than a defender of bodily truth.

We see this elsewhere:

  • Athletes pushed toward surgeries or eating disorders.
  • Cosmetic procedures driven by media-filtered ideals.
  • Adolescents offered radical interventions in response to passing anguish.

The question isn’t just what someone wants—but why they want it. And whether medicine should say yes.


Final Word: Healing, Not Hacking

The body is not a blank canvas. It is not raw material for existential expression. It is a living testimony, created with meaning and wisdom. Our job—especially in medicine—is to listen, learn, and heal.

When medicine speaks for the body, it fulfills its sacred calling.

When it speaks against the body, it becomes something else entirely.


SOURCE: “Speaking for the Body” by Leah Libresco Sargeant on Fairer Disputations.

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Stay Human, Speak the Truth

Progressive Feminism vs Body: A False Escape

Why Escaping the Body Isn’t Liberation


There’s a strange twist happening in progressive feminist circles today. In their fight to liberate women, many have ended up sounding eerily like ancient Gnostic heretics—(oh no, he used the H word!) those early critics of Christianity who claimed the material world (especially the body) was evil, and that salvation meant escaping the flesh. Only now, instead of mystical secret knowledge offering the way out, we have the turgid prose of Professor Judith Butler, postmodern gender theory, and a growing discomfort with the stubborn reality of biological sex.

Victoria Smith, in her insightful piece “Why Progressives Fear the Female Body” published on Fairer Disputations, makes this connection powerfully clear. She argues that modern progressivism, in its attempts to reject oppressive gender norms, has ended up rejecting the female body itself. Her critique is not only culturally relevant—it is theologically resonant. It echoes the warnings of early Christian thinkers like Irenaeus and the modern affirmations of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. All three—Smith, Irenaeus, and John Paul II—sound the alarm against a mindset that sees the body, especially the sexed body, as a problem to solve rather than a gift to receive.

This post brings their voices together, not to bury feminism, but to redeem it from the disembodied dead-end it’s wandered into.


Victoria Smith’s Bold Call to Re-Embodiment

Smith begins by analyzing how the female body has been treated historically and culturally. From The Taming of the Shrew to 21st-century think-pieces, femininity has been associated with softness, emotion, and fragility—qualities that society often devalues. Feminists rightly rebelled against the idea that biology is destiny. But somewhere along the way, a noble resistance to stereotypes morphed into a rejection of biology itself.

Enter Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley), the godmother of modern gender theory. Her claim? That not only is gender a performance, but sex itself is socially constructed. The body is no longer a given—it’s a canvas onto which culture, power, and preference paint whatever identity suits the moment. This erasure of biological sex, Smith argues, has led to a bizarre and self-defeating place: a feminism that can no longer define what a woman is, let alone defend her rights.

Smith writes:

“It is not the social role alone that has been rejected, but the female body itself, now portrayed as a problem to be solved, a site of oppression that must be transcended or reshaped.”

This isn’t liberation. It’s the ancient Christian heresy of Gnosticism in new clothes. 


Meet One of the Original Anti-Gnostics: Irenaeus of Lyons

In the second century, Irenaeus of Lyons—bishop, theologian, and one of the most important early defenders of orthodox Christianity—battled a similar set of ideas. He had been a student of Polycarp, who in turn had been a disciple of the Apostle John. That connection gave his theological arguments both apostolic weight and deep spiritual insight. Irenaeus wrote extensively against the Gnostic sects of his time, who believed that the physical world was made by a lower, evil god, and that the human body was a trap from which the soul must escape. For them, salvation was about becoming pure spirit, free from the so-called corruption of matter. Sound familiar??

Based on the biblical evidence, Irenaeus said no. God created the world, and He called it good. More than that, God Himself entered creation—took on human flesh—in the person of Jesus Christ. Far from escaping the body, salvation happens in and through it.

“The glory of God is a living man, and the life of man is the vision of God.” (Against Heresies, IV.20.7)

This is not metaphorical. Irenaeus believed in the resurrection of the body. Not just Jesus’ body, but ours too. Bodies matter—not just now, but forever. To deny the body, or to see it as irrelevant to our identity, is to deny the Incarnation, the hope of resurrection, and the very doctrine of Creation—that the material world, including our bodies, was made good by God and is essential to who we are.

And not only Creation past, but the New Creation promised in Scripture, of which the resurrected Jesus is considered the “first fruits.” As Paul says, God is “uniting all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10), and again, “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption” (Romans 8:21). Paul adds in 1 Corinthians 15:20, “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Revelation echoes this hope with a vision not of souls floating in the clouds, but of a renewed, embodied world: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth… and I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:1–2).

And why is the New Jerusalem “coming down”? Because it has always been God’s desire to dwell with His creation, not whisk it away. Revelation 21:3 makes this abundantly clear: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man (i.e. humans). He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” The biblical story does not end with escape from the body, but with its redemption, glorification, and the permanent presence of God with His people in a renewed creation.

Irenaeus—as well as all biblically grounded Christians—would look at today’s “gender is just a social construct” mantra and shake his head. The human person is a unity of body and soul. Tear the two apart, and you don’t get freedom. You get fragmentation. You get the good-book definition of Death.  


John Paul II: The Body as Theology

Fast forward to the late 20th century. Enter Pope John Paul II and his revolutionary Theology of the Body. Drawing on Scripture, philosophy, and personalist ethics, he declared something radical in its simplicity: The body reveals the person.

What does that mean? It means that our bodies aren’t just containers or tools or costumes. They are expressive of who we are. They are not incidental—they are essential.

John Paul II insists that sexual difference is not a mistake or a social accident. It’s part of the divine plan for communion and love. Male and female bodies point to something beyond themselves—they are sacraments of self-gift and relationship.

“The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine.” (TOB, Feb. 20, 1980)

Smith’s analysis finds a powerful echo here. When progressives treat the female body as a problem to be solved—something to downplay, flatten, or escape—they are rejecting the very grammar of our humanity.

John Paul II does not romanticize the body or deny its vulnerability. But he insists that it is the stage on which love, meaning, and redemption are played out. To erase the sexed body in favor of some abstract “identity” is to reject the stage altogether.


Feminism at a Crossroads: Recovering the Body

Here’s the great irony. In trying to liberate women from oppressive stereotypes, progressive feminism has come to mirror the very Gnostic impulse the Church condemned: the desire to be pure mind, unencumbered by our material selves.

But real liberation doesn’t come from denying the body. It comes from understanding it rightly. Smith, Irenaeus, and John Paul II all offer that path. They call us back to an older wisdom—one that affirms the goodness of creation, the dignity of embodiment, and the integrity of the person.

This doesn’t mean going back to 1950s gender roles or pretending sexism doesn’t exist. It means refusing to fight injustice by erasing the very thing we’re supposed to be defending: the reality of being women and men.

For feminism to have a future, it must reclaim the body—not as a problem, but as a promise.


Conclusion: Bodies Are Not Obstacles—They’re the Path

We live in a moment where it’s increasingly difficult to say something as basic as “women are adult females.” In fact, some have lost jobs, been deplatformed, or publicly vilified for affirming this seemingly obvious truth—often branded as hateful, transphobic, or fearful of inclusion. It’s not bigotry being expressed but biology, not malice but clarity. Yet we live in a cultural moment where empathy—especially toward ‘the marginalized’—has been weaponized. A false empathy now demands affirmation of delusion as love, confusing emotional validation with moral truth. In this framework, to question someone’s self-identification is seen not as conscientious objection but as cruelty. But empathy divorced from reality is not compassion—it’s capitulation to an ancient deception. And without the courage to speak the truth—‘women are adult females’—our ability to advocate for women’s rights and protections is seriously jeopardized. Sisterhood, safety, fairness in sport, and integrity in health care all depend on recognizing the reality of the sexed body.

Victoria Smith is doing brave work by naming this reality. She’s not alone. Irenaeus, centuries ago, and John Paul II, decades ago, also stood against the spirit of disembodiment in their time. We would do well to listen.  

Below are some helpful links to the teachings of Irenaeus and JPII.  Those teachings will require a sustained, yet rewarding commitment.  At a minimum, please read Smith’s important article.  

Because if we’re ever going to move forward—spiritually, culturally, politically—we’ll need our bodies to come with us. After all, they’re not the problem. They’re the very place where the Spirit-empowered purposes of God are meant to unfold—in flesh and in history, not in abstraction or escape.

[Sources: Victoria SmithWhy Progressives Fear the Female Body“; John Paul II Theology of the Body; Irenaeus, Against Heresies.]


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Honor the Body