[Audio script] "We have to draw the connection here, between what we are seeing in these crisis pregnancy centers, what we are seeing in other..um..Christian Nationalist policy imposition on ability for Trans individuals to receive health-care and gender-affirming care. We see what is happening in our schools with the so-called Parents Bill of Rights and all of the ways in which LBGTBQ issues, like book-banning, and other issues across healthcare, across all the issues that deeply impact North Carolinians. This agenda is front and center, and the majority party in this moment, is the one that is, are the architects of those impacts. So we have to tell the truth about the ways in which all of the issues we are dealing with in the General Assembly, across Education, Health-Care and beyond are all tied to this central agenda of Christian Nationalism."
Recently, I watched the above press conference held by several female ministers and clergy leaders at North Carolina’s legislative building in Raleigh. During the event, one pastor argued that crisis pregnancy centers1 A crisis pregnancy center (CPC) is a place for people facing an unexpected pregnancy to get counseling and support. Many CPCs offer free services such as: pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, baby supplies, parenting classes, counseling or referrals. However, most CPCs are Pro-Life organizations, which is apparently for these ministers, problematic., restrictions on so-called “gender-affirming care,” parental rights legislation, curriculum transparency, and book policies are all connected expressions of a broader “Christian Nationalist agenda” affecting North Carolinians.
That’s what they say.
I disagree.
But about one thing they are certainly correct: these issues are connected.
Why the “Trans Issue” Matters
Some of my progressive Christian friends ask why I consider the transgender issue so important. Here is one example of why. And it has nothing to do with “Christian Nationalism,” as these clerics insist.
Feebly following Jesus’ lead, I increasingly reserve my sharpest criticism for religious leaders—especially ministers who appear to have bypassed the very first article of the Christian creed: belief in God the Creator. And, no doubt, several other articles as well, including the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Given what I know about the theological formation many ministers now receive in certain seminaries and divinity schools, it is an educated guess that some of these clergy do not actually believe the creeds they publicly recite every Sunday.
Just a hunch.
Yet they still claim to speak liberating “gospel truth” to power.
The False Gospel of Liberation from the Body
Now let me be clear: there is true freedom in Christ—from God our Creator. That is the freedom human beings were made for.
But part of the modern false-liberationist worldview—astonishingly embraced by some theologians, preachers, and denominations—is the idea that human beings can and should be liberated from their bodies, especially from the perceived “constraints” of bodily reality itself.
That is a lie.
In fact, it is a very old lie.
The Early Church Fathers regarded this way of thinking as a theological five-alarm fire. They fought vigorously to cast it into the Gehenna of theological discourse and history.
It was called Gnosticism. (You can read more about Gnosticism at this link.)
Unfortunately, despite their efforts, it always seems to be hangin’ ’round the house.
The New Gnosticism
Today’s Gnostics tell us that the body does not really matter—not ultimately, anyway.
They say it does not matter how sexual behavior is expressed, so long as it is called “love.”
They say that if a person possesses XY chromosomes, male reproductive anatomy, and produces the small gametes characteristic of the male sex—but internally identifies as female—then that person “really” is female in the truest sense.
And society, they insist, must affirm this inner identity above biological reality itself.
Not only affirm it, but increasingly enforce it—through language codes, institutional mandates, and legal pressures compelling others to participate in the fiction.
Bodies, after all, do not really matter, according to this new spiritualist vision.
Or, at least, not very much.
[Yoda voice: “Mary Baker Eddy disciples, they are.”]
And accordingly, they will support the chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of minors in pursuit of these self-expressive and supposedly liberating ends.
All of this, mind you, is done in the name of compassion, liberation, and “gospel truth.”
Creation, Resurrection, and Reality
But as someone who believes in God the Creator—the One who raised the dead body of Jesus into new creation life—I fail to see the Ordo Amoris in any of this.
Ordo amoris is a Latin phrase meaning “the order of loves.” In Christian theology—especially in Augustine of Hippo and later thinkers—it refers to the proper ordering of our loves, desires, and affections according to God’s created design and moral reality.
The basic idea is this:
Sin is not merely loving bad things, but loving good things in the wrong order.
So, for example:
* Loving pleasure more than truth,
* Self more than God,
* Desire more than reality,
* Or autonomy more than creation itself,
would all represent a disordered ordo amoris.
By contrast, a rightly ordered life loves God our Creator first and then loves all other things—people, body, sex, family, nation, freedom, possessions—in their proper place and proportion.
I hope my brothers and sisters in Christ, especially our leaders, will come to the same conclusion.
Christians cannot surrender the goodness of creation without eventually surrendering Christianity itself.
The biblical faith is not a religion of escape from the body. It is a religion of incarnation, resurrection, and new creation.
Non-Christians may continue drifting into this technologically assisted Gnosticism. But the Church must not.
We must remain firmly rooted in God’s created order and design, come what may.
Because societies built upon lies about human nature eventually collapse.
And denominations built upon those same lies eventually die as well.
+++
Love God First, Then Your Neighbor
