Here's Why Our Culture is Totally Confused about Gender, Sexuality, and Abortion

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] yay and happy saturday to everyone welcome to all the things and this is a show where we discuss all the things related to god the bible and real life i'm krista bontrager also known as theology mom and monique is speaking tonight at the coulson center event in austin texas so i have asked our friend elisa childers to sit in and help me co-host the show welcome elisa yay thank you this is so fun i i wanted to interview nancy piercy for a long time so this is going to be super fun so i'm sad money can't be here but i'm kind of selfishly glad that it worked out yeah and we are streaming tonight both on all the things channel as well as elisa childers youtube channel and then our normal all the things streams over on facebook so please do join in the live chat um and if you have questions for nancy that are relevant interesting and respectful we might include them um if you are off topic crazy and the like we will probably not in uh integrate your question uh and i want to say give a shout out to our moderators for tonight lisa fox and jennifer beitel uh helping us out on all the things and elise well on my youtube channel david walcott and amy burks are moderating so thank you so much to those guys for helping out definitely and helping us out tonight and every day and every night for all the media for um us and other ministries is bob bontrager there he is quickly working behind the scenes to make sure we are streaming in all the platforms we are very grateful for your service um so we want to let you know that um we're excited to to bring this interview with nancy piercy uh to you and uh just kind of a neat uh situation of co-platforms sort of partnering together maybe we should start off alisa with what's been happening with you what are you up to well well i got a lot going on right now i actually just turned in the manuscript for my next book and i'm really excited about it it's called live your truth and other lies and then the subtitle is how popular deceptions are making us anxious self-obsessed and exhausted so i'm really excited to jump into the editing on that and i hope that it's really helpful for a lot of people and then the other thing i've been working on is there is a curriculum a small group church study curriculum coming from my first book another gospel so we're going to be recording some videos for that in november and the written part is already done so that'll be coming i believe i think it's summer maybe but that'll be coming out for churches to be able to kind of utilize the book another gospel and walk through it and hopefully that will be really helpful but but krista you know aside from what's going on with me i think there's bigger things happening in the world and one of those things is the fierce showing monique made on facebook today in that hat that she had on at the coffee shop i was uh i was just like oh my look at that yeah we sent her to texas i don't know what's going on there uh her and carrie smith from the unsafe space podcast got together and went to have uh thai food or vietnamese food or something last night had a good time together because i won't go to those places with her i don't i don't care for that kind of food so it was good i'm glad she was there i was glad they were able to connect there in austin so they had a good time together good deal yeah but i mean like i guess when you're in texas you gotta you gotta do the hat but just you know i was just so impressed i was like that is that's how you wear a hat that's right that's how you do it you know it really is the monique effect because she just has a way with people doesn't she uh today she was chumming it up with carl truman and i get this picture there he isn't like i don't know what kind of pants those are that he's got on but those are academic pants those are very you got to be really smart to carry off those pants but then he's giving her bunny ears i know i mean that's like like like hashtag life goals you know like to have such a smart person photo bomb me with bunny ears is like that's a life goal for me that's it's the monique effect i don't know how she does it but she does it so she is having a great time down in austin so and we are going to have a great time tonight with nancy piercy the one and only um author of the book love thy body and uh it's a book that uh is just still so relevant even though it's been out a couple of years uh what she has put together in this book is still so relevant and increasingly so so i am looking forward to this conversation tonight i am too and i have to say something about this book because there are only a select few books that i will buy on all three platforms on kindle hard copy and audible and this is one of those books that's that important i bought it on all three of those platforms that i can cross-reference if i'm out you know walking or running i can listen i can have my highlight saved on my kindle and of course if i want to thumb through my hard copy i can so just highly recommended book when i first read this book i was so impressed with it's just i remember thinking this is an absolute takedown of the pro-abortion arguments that we hear and and it also with gender and we're going to talk about a lot of that tonight but just highly recommend this book to anybody watching us tonight who you want to sharpen your apologetic when it comes to these issues this is the book you want to get yes i i completely agree and you know we're living in this weird cultural moment now where people are shouting their abortions changing their pronouns and many of us are asking how in the world did we get here and i'm looking forward to this conversation with nancy piercy to help us kind of unravel why our culture thinks that these approaches are rational and um i think it's going to be a great conversation so let's get her on here and i want to say welcome to nancy piercy and we're going to the anticipation it is the anticipation it's all good bob's trying to juggle the zoom account there she is all right and just do a quick mic check uh if we can hear you nancy are you unmuted and everything great yes testing testing yes we are good all right so for the the two people who are watching who don't know who you are nancy uh maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wrote the book love thy body well i teach at houston baptist university i teach apologetics and i'm scholar in residence which means i get time on the job to write books which is wonderful um and the reason i wrote the book is that these issues are just so cutting edge and i'll bet everybody who's here tonight has some friend some family member some person close to them the book lovely body has a lot of personal stories um because they're personal most of them are put in as pseudonyms you know they're put in with fake names so you may not know when you read the book that they're actually very personal stories but just like myself i find more and more people are having to deal with issues like abort abortion homosexuality transgenderism euthanasia everyone now is dealing with these issues personally in the past you could have treated them as just sort of abstract act like apologetic issues right you could say okay okay as christians we need to have an answer to this issue no no nowadays you have to personally know how to deal with individuals in your life who are actually working through these uh issues you know on a very personal level so it makes you approach much different and i think you know a lot of people say um that's what's different about lovely bodies but it's very obvious i've really talked with real people who are struggling with these issues so it's it makes a big difference when you've talked to and struggled alongside somebody who's worked with this for many many years so that's kind of how i got into it is i just i couldn't avoid it in my personal life nancy i i think that's such a great point to bring out because all of us know someone who is dealing with some of these issues on one level or another and they're deeply personal these are things that uh really hit people in the deepest parts of our souls i think is issues of gender and abortion and sexuality and some of these things and you discuss a number of these issues in your book um that might seem unrelated things like transgender issues abortion even cremation the afterlife what do you see as the thread that binds all these ideas together how do these all make sense in the same context yeah i appreciate you asking that because that is another thing that's really unique about the book is that in lovely body i show that there's a common philosophical thread or a common world view thread that connects them all they you know chancellor schaefer used to say one reason christians are so ineffective is that they kind of approach each issue in bits and pieces that was his word bits and pieces instead of understanding that there's a common underlying world view but let me illustrate by just starting with the cutting edge issue of our day which is transgenderism because that's also what's easiest to see the underlying worldview for all of these issues turns out to be a divide between our body and who we feel we are as a person so transgenderism is very evident because transgender activists themselves explicitly say your gender identity has nothing to do with your biological sex no the kids kids down to kindergarten are being taught you're just because you have boy parts doesn't mean you're a boy just because you have girl parts doesn't mean you're a girl and so there's this this alienation from the body that is being taught all the way down to to kindergarten in fact there was a news article not long ago uh it was a first grader a little girl who came home from school and said mom my my teacher said just because i have girlfriends doesn't mean i'm a girl. and she was very distressed because she's you know so what am i and she she literally said to her mother please take me to a doctor so we can find out what i am and the uh the reason it was in the news is that the the parents were suing the school board for emotional distress but the point is that that the world view then that's being taught to very young children even is that there's your body is not part of your authentic self you know your body uh the bbc had a document not a documentary um it was kind of like a teen video and it showed a young girl who identified as non-binary and she said your body is just a meat skeleton a meat skeleton and you don't take your identity from your body you take your identity from your feelings so the body has been denigrated to just a meat skeleton that tells you nothing about who you are that gives you no clue to your identity that gives you no moral guidelines um and that has no intrinsic purpose that you are morally obligated to to respect so that is the underlying view surprisingly enough because we the stereotype is that christians have a low view of this world and of the body right because it's a spirit that counts and it's the spiritual realm that counts not the earthly realm so for a long time people thought it's christianity that denigrates the physical material world uh one of my students put it this way she said growing up in the church i was always taught spirit good body bad but it turns out that in comparison with the secular worldviews that are dominant today it's actually the christian worldview that promotes a very high view of the body that says you are supposed to respect your body you are supposed to honor your body when it comes to questions like transgenderism you are supposed to have a harmony between your feelings and your physical self you are meant to honor your biological sex you are meant to respect your body you you are meant to live in harmony with who god created you to be so it turns out that the the the uh the nature of the debate has actually you know that the tables have been turned and so now it's christians who are defending a high view of the body however against the secular worldview that says your body doesn't matter has no particular meaning or significance and why should you pay any attention to it anyway that's really helpful i think you know just to tease that out a little bit more that separation between the physical body and what we might call the immaterial part of us the our mind our will and our emotions our spiritual life um you've kind of illustrated how that works out in transgender issues how do you see that dynamic playing out in the abortion debate right actually that's what that's where people first noticed it um secular bioethicists say well first of all they do acknowledge that the fetus is human not everybody knows that but among professional secular bioethicists they all agree that life begins the conception uh the evidence from dna and genetics is just too strong to deny it read any embryology textbook so the question then is how do they get around that to support abortion well what they say is the fetus is biologically human physiologically chromosomally you know genetically human but it's not a person until sometime later with personhood defined usually in some form of cognitive abilities some sort of self-awareness um and um you know the ability to make choices the ability to think about the future there's all kinds of ways that that bioethics has tried to define it but it has something to do with your mental abilities and so what the bio i mean it started with roe v wade in the 1973 supreme court abortion decision he said point blank the fetus is human from conception but it's not a person until sometime later so the supreme court was giving expression to this divided view that you can be human at one point and yet not be a person until sometime later so clearly these are two different things so that's where that dualism that divide that dichotomy between body and person first was first noticed that secular bioethicists had adopted this divided fragmented viewing person so essentially what secular by office is saying today is that being human is not enough for human rights because the fetus can be human and and not have any rights being human is not enough to have any moral status it's not enough to warrant legal protection so being human is no longer the basis for human rights you don't you have to earn the right to life by becoming a person by acquiring certain mental abilities cognitive functioning and so on and so the split between body and person is right there in uh in the abortion issue as well essentially uh the the pro-abortion view is based on the notion you can be a human at one point but you don't become a person until sometime later and rights don't kick in until the state decides you're a person and not just because you're a human i have to i have to try to tell when i speak to audiences i try to tell them i try to help them see how momentous this really is i say you think you think you have rights because you just because you're a human being you know that is the traditional notion of human rights or really the christian notion because it's built into the declaration of independence right well uh we hold these used to be these uh this to be uh self-evident these truths to be self-evident uh that you have certain inalienable rights because you invaded the image of the creator well that's no longer true you do not have the inaudible right to life anymore just because you're human just because you're a member of the human race roe v wade destroyed that it said no you do not have human rights just because you're human and the logic of that then is anyone else who's human does not have human rights just on the basis of being human they have human rights only if the state decides they qualify as a person so this has really quite wide ranging implications nancy when i read your book um one of the things that really jumped out to me was a a thread that i had been thinking about all the way back from when i read saint augustine's confessions and he was talking about his time with the manichaeans and i didn't really at the time understand what they were all about until i read peter brown's biography of augustine and he explained a little more about manikins and just how that's kind of related to some of that early gnosticism i wonder if you could maybe comment on that because when i'm hearing what you're saying um you know of course gnosticism was very broad and diverse and there was a lot of beliefs that fell under those different umbrellas there were different sects and all of that but um maybe you could comment on do you think that some of that gnostic thought has influenced where our secular culture is today when it comes to this division between personhood and in body well certainly it's very similar certainly it's parallel i don't know if you can trace an exact historical connection but it's um it should encourage us that the christian church has faced the same thing before the early church faced the culture that uh an ancient greek and roman culture that also devalued the physical world the physical body and not just manicurism and narcissism also neoplatonism plato said the body is the prison of the soul and so the goal of salvation was to escape from the physical realm and to reassend the higher levels and reunite with mystic one the one as an eastern thought um so the early church faced um the same notion that the body has no particular value or dignity in fact the gnosticism actually taught it was a lower level deity an evil god gnosticism taught that there were several levels of spiritual beings and it was the lowest level who was an evil god who created this world because after all no self-respecting god would get his hands dirty mucking about with matter so christianity in this context was nothing short of revolutionary because it taught first of all that creation creation was not by an evil god it was by the supreme god who was a good god and therefore creation is intrinsically good and even though we accept the idea of the fall it does not totally negate its original goodness it's kind of like a when a child defaces a great man a great masterpiece artistic masterpiece you can still see the beauty of the original masterpiece coming through but the greatest scandal in the ancient world was the incarnation because that was the idea that that same supreme deity had actually entered into the physical world and taken on a physical body so that the incarnation was the ultimate validation of the dignity of the human body and then when you might say jesus did escape the physical realm as narcissism thought we should aspire to do when he was executed on a roman cross but what did he do then he came back in a physical body to the ancient greeks this was not spiritual progress what they their response to the to the resurrection was who would want them back to the realm of the body as paul puts it the idea of the physical resurrection was utter foolishness to the greeks that's how he puts it in uh of course at the end of time you know christians even christians tend to think end of time you know we're floating around in an immaterial spiritual realm no that's not what the bible teaches it teaches that god is going to recreate you know a new heavens and a new earth and you will be on that new earth in physical bodies all the way back to the beginning the apostles creed has affirmed the resurrection of the body so this i i try to tell people like when i have i speak to audiences i try to get get them to understand the treasure that we have here this is an extraordinarily high view of the physical realm there is no other religion or philosophy that has such a high view of the value and significance of the material realm nothing like it anywhere we should be so excited now when we talk to people we're just overflowing with the the joy of having such a wonderful message to give them professor schaefer used to say the um the biblical worldview doesn't start with jesus died for your sins it starts with in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth because the creation itself tells us of the beauty and dignity of this world and and so we need to start with that as our message i think just as a clarification i i think it's so powerful and i don't want it to pass people by of the historic christian position as being very affirming of the physical body being affirming of an integrated uh human person body soul spirit um i don't know like you said if we have a deep enough appreciation for that position and sometimes we inadvertently buy into this bifurcation between the physical body and the what our our culture calls like the most authentic part of ourself is our emotions and and how we feel about things um maybe we could talk a little bit more about how you see that playing out and then i want to get into you know the redeeming message of historic christianity and how it answers some of these questions about transgenderism so let's let's shift maybe to homosexuality and use that as our next example because that's it's the same thing it's just um like elisa said at the beginning it's a common worldview connecting all of them let me put it this way even when i talk to my homosexual friends they will agree that on the level of biology physiology chromosomes anatomy males and females that come to press to one another that's how the human sexual and reproductive system is designed to embrace a same-sex identity therefore is to implicitly contradict that design it's to say why should my body have any say in my identity why should my body inform my moral choices why should my biological sex have any say in who i am in my my authentic identity and what we have to help people to see is that's a profoundly disrespectful view of the body essentially it's saying that my body has nothing to do with who i am you know it's not it's it's very close to the transgender idea in that um you know you're not going to go into surgery and chop off body parts but you are still saying that my body has nothing to do with who i am let me give you an example um because she uh there's a well-known public intellectual who expresses this so well uh her name is camille poglia you all may know her yes yeah elisa is nodding a lot of christians read her work even though she's a lesbian by the way kalisa did you know she's now claiming to be trans for many years she was uh i did not know yeah yeah she definitely does now but for many years she claimed to be lesbian either way um but she's interesting because uh she's a little bit of an uh iconoclastic feminist because she does not accept that sex is just a social construction she says no no no nature made us male and female humans are a sexually reproducing species so you say to her well then how do you justify being a lesbian or now trans and these are her exact words okay so nature made us male and female but then she says quote why not defy nature why not defy nature and then she goes on to say quote fate not god has given us this flesh we have absolute plane to our bodies and may do with them as we see fit so you see the logic there the logic is that if our bodies are products of mindless purposeless forces then they have no intrinsic purpose that we're morally obligated to respect they give us no clue to our identity they give us no road map to our morality we may do with them as we see fit so really it comes down to your view of nature you know your body is your body is part of nature and so it turns out that your ethic ultimately depends on your view of nature so camille pogba is saying if the body is a product of mindless purpose forces you know then then they have nothing to say to us in terms of our morality whereas the christian wolf he says wait wait a minute nature itself exhibits a plan a design an order a purpose science tells us now the very simple level eyes are made for seeing hues are made for hearing fins are made for swimming and wings are made for flying and the total development of the organism is directed by an in-built inbuilt plan or blueprint so science itself tells us that that nature is built according to a design and so what christians are saying is that when we live in accord with that design we will be happier and healthier and i'll give you um just an anecdote there's a the book was a body is full of anecdotes by the way people are considering reading it it's not just moral arguments there are lots and lots of stories and one of my favorite ones is a woman who lived as a lesbian for many years and uh and today is married married to a man you have to say that now married to a man and has two two children she wrote an article on how she changed and she said um i came to trust that god had made me female for a reason and i wanted to honor my body by living in accord with the creator's design and i thought what beautiful language that's what we need to learn how to do when people say you know tell me what to do practically i always say just start with changing your language start talking about honoring your body living in accord with the creator's design respecting our biological sex as god's handiwork so that's where um you know christopher you started talking about you know where's the redemptive part that's where we start the like talking about the redemptive side of it is recovering the high value and dignity receiving our bodies as good gifts from god and it seems like you know you mentioned camille paglia it's it's like to even say you're transitioning from female to male you would have to have some sort of objective standard by which to say this is female this is male i'm moving from one to the other and in your book you write this you say to protect women's rights we must be able to say what a woman is if postmodernism is correct that the body itself is a social construct then it becomes impossible to argue for rights based on the sheer fact of being female we cannot legally protect a category of people if we cannot identify that category and i think we're seeing even from the from some secular feminists like jk rowling and some of these people that are pushing back against some of this postmodern push when it comes to gender and i wonder if you might comment a bit on how post-modernism really sort of defines and underlies some of this secular morality that we're seeing where all of these categories seem to be blended and it's like on one sense we're saying no there's no objective uh you know standard to say this is the female sex and this is the male but yet at the same time we're going to say we can move from one to the other i wonder if you could comment on that yeah i mean if you absolutely put your finger on an internal contradiction that uh it is i think it's a fatal internal contradiction but i don't i often talk about this in terms of finding allies um one of the things that people say what do we do what do we do practically what do we do and one of my answers is find allies and right now some of our best allies are radical feminists who are recognizing what you just read there that you cannot protect women's rights if you cannot define what a woman is if anybody with any anatomy can claim to be a woman then the term has no no meaning and you truly cannot defend women's rights if you cannot define what a woman is and so i actually belong to a group um it's you can find it on facebook i'm on the private version of it but there's a public version as well it's called hands across the isle and it's it's a group of very conservative christian women i'm very leftist feminist socialist many lesbian women who are very concerned about the transgender movement so um these are the women who are called turfs have you heard that term t-e-r-f turfs trans exclusionary radical feminist it's it's intended as a slur so feminists who do not accept the transgender movement are slurred as turfs so these are turfs and what we do is we get together and uh and and we support one another uh we we have written position papers together we've co-authored op-ed pieces together um you know we've we've spoken uh hearings at the state and national level and so on um and it's fascinating to see how christians and feminists have come together on this issue and on the side of the radical feminists um they're in shock because the only place that they can get published these days is in christian publications many of them are leaders of feminist movements who've been leaders for many years who are well known in the move in feminist movements who are well known you know in feminist publications and now they can't get their work published anymore because they've come out against the transgender movement and saying that you know it's going to destroy the feminist movement and so and so they're pl they're publishing in places like the christian post which i think is wonderful and public discourse and the federalists and these other christian leaning places um places like the federalists and explicitly christian like the christian post but their christian meaning um so all of us all of a sudden you know they're like they sometimes get criticized by their christian by their fellow feminists like why are you publishing in these christian conservative places and they have to say they're the only places that will take our work anymore so this has been wonderful that we've been able to build bridges with very radical uh feminists on this issue so i often raise it not only in terms of like you said um you know it's a good it's a good form of critiquing uh transgenderism because it is self-contradictory but also take it a step further go out and make allies of people that you might not have ever thought of allies before because some we are making a lot of allies with the radical feminists these days and it's it's wonderful to see these two movements coming together i'm thinking about um kind of a little bit about my own life um i am probably i don't know i i just am a tomboy who never outgrew it and you know i think that i saw an article i've seen a couple articles recently of how this this idea of the trans movement is actually wiping out people like me you know that because we can't really define what a woman is people like me where there's a comment on elisa's stream she says from a woman she says i play women's rugby and homosexuality is a huge part of that culture i'm often asked by my teammates if you know i'm a lesbian and i've gone through that too that reality and it's like no i'm happily married i've been married for 28 years i have two children um you know i'm living the dream but i enjoy sports and have enjoyed being athletic but now it seems like the so much of the messaging is you know when i was growing up i there was no part of me that ever doubted that i was a woman and that i would probably grow up one day and get married and have children um but now the messaging is is like well if you like certain things then you know you're you're probably misgendered you're probably need to be a boy and it it it does erase kind of people like me who are just a little different but i never doubted that that i was a woman and so this whole postmodern kind of con construct of gender it i can see how if i was a child growing up right now that i could easily fall into that but there was when i was growing up and i'm you know i'm older quite a bit older than alisa but you know when i was growing up there was still the strong messaging of even if i was a tomboy i was still a girl i wasn't a defective boy well it's actually gone a step further than that now my parents are reporting that even their gay and lesbian kids are under pressure from transgender activists that that's not good enough that they have to be trans don't say uh i follow some of the websites that are started by uh parents of transgender kids uh the one i like the best is that fourth wave now fourth wave now and it's uh parents whose kids came out as trans and you know band together to give each other moral support and practical support um anyway they have sometimes used the phrase gay genocide there's a gay genocide by which they mean that you know they're they're very this is a very secular liberal website so they're fine with their kids being gay they just don't want them to go trans because transgenderism is such an extremely uh large step from that in the sense of puberty blockers cross-sex hormones surgeries not just one surgery but you know the multiple surgeries um so they they're they are against their kids going up going to the trans um identifying as trans um but what they say is our beautiful gay kids are being uh being pressured by trans activists who say you're not going far enough that if you have if you are if you come out as a lesbian because you're some somewhat more masculine uh they're being bullied and pressured to admit no no you're not just gay you are really trans and you know you should be courageous enough to come out and admit it and so there are fewer and fewer kids today who are identifying as homosexual because as soon as you come out of homosexual you you're pressured to go further and identify as trans and so the pressure has changed even since you were young now uh remember keep in mind that word gay genocide these parents are complaining that their kids are being bullied if they if they come out as attracted to the same sex as that that's not enough and let me give you um uh just to give you a practical uh story um i do tell a story in lovely body of a of a young boy who had gender dysphoria there's two kinds of gender dysphoria we can talk about both if you want but traditionally gender dysphoria has has uh has appeared at a very young age you know true gender dysphoria has appeared at a very young age today we have a you know an epidemic of young girls who are just discovering that they're trans that are when they're teenagers but i um but i tell the story of a young boy who had classic gender dysphoria and i i called him brandon um and before he was even walking it was very evident that he didn't fit boy stereotypes you know his his babysitter said to his mom he's too good to be a boy by which she meant you know he's quiet and compliant and gentle on the things that we typically associate with girls when he was in preschool every day when his mother picked him up he was playing with the little girls and not the little boys already in elementary school he was coming to his parents in tears repeatedly and saying you know i don't fit in with the boys i i wait his exact words if i can remember what i think like a girl i i think the way girls do i feel the way girls do god should have made me a girl by the age of 14 he was scouring the internet for information on sex change surgery so what did his parents do first of all they made a point of letting him know that they loved him just the way he was i think parents often try to pressure their children to be different when i was in seminary i had a friend who wasn't former homosexual and he said my i liked music and art and my dad was baffled and tried to pressure me into more traditional male activities like sports and brandon's parents didn't do that they told him it's perfectly okay for you to be an emotional sensitive relational boy it does not mean that you're really a girl they um they took them through the gifts of the spirit you know in the gifts of the spirit prophecy and teaching are not masculine as you and i might think mercy and service are not feminine as we might think the the scripture says that the holy spirit gives them to individuals as he chooses his parents even took him through my uh personality details like the myers-briggs to show him it's okay you know the full spectrum of personalities is open to you you can be at this far spectrum or you can be that frustrated and still be a girl still be a boy and equally of course the girl can be at this end of the spectrum of that end and still be a girl a girl can be sort of take charge assertive um and and that's perfectly fine so the the upshot is that um oh and i should say candy dysphoria is very uh intractable it took a long time uh it wasn't really until his early 20s that brandon fully accepted his identity as a boy here's what he said he said even surgery wouldn't give me what i want it would not make me a girl which is true there's a fame there's a very famous ted talk um called his her healthcare but the most famous line from the ted talk is every cell has a sex every cell has a sex and it's by a cardiologist and the cardiologist's concern is that um as a other you know her concern is how his heart attacks and she said the symptoms of an impending heart attack are different for women than from men and most doctors are only taught you know a lot of the research is done only in men so doctors are taught what to look for based on the male symptoms so a woman comes in and the doctor doesn't recognize the symptoms because he hasn't been trained to see them he sends her home and she has a heart attack so that's the you know that's the theme of this ted talk but as i went without as i read the text uh i went on on youtube to read to to watch it and underneath all these comments saying she's so transphobic what she wasn't even talking about transgenderism the very fact that she had acknowledged a male female binary meant she was transphobic and and i i kept reading about you know i thought i got to find out what people were saying right and finally some wise person said look she's not transphobic she's just saying that when you get sick and the doctors put you on the operating table they need to know your original biological sex to give you the best medical care so every cell has a sex and that's what brandon came to see you can't change every sect every cell in the human body so surgery surgery and hormones don't do it um so yeah brandon's in his early 20s now but that's um i give lots of stories like that to help give people practical tips on how to work with young people in your family in your church in your christian school and and by the way i give some um academic academic studies academic studies have found that the most reliable predictor of non-heterosexual behavior either homosexuality or transgenderism the most reliable predictor is not any genetic or biological cause most reliable predictor is simply non-conforming behavior in childhood non-gender conforming behavior in childhood in other words kids who are acting like the opposite sex that's it that is the most by far the most reliable predictor of kids who are going to end up uh claiming a homosexual or transgender identity and so what this means is we can be on the lookout for these kids we can stand get out go out of our way to help and support them because they are going to be targeted you can be absolutely certain they will be targeted by homosexual and transgender activists and so a practical step we can take is to go out of our way to give extra support love and affirmation so the kids who don't fit in and who are prone to feeling more like brandon did you know i don't fit in anywhere i don't fit any of the stereotypes so the church can be proactive in in terms of ministering to these young people such an important point and i'm so glad that you pointed people to the stories that you write in your book because i think that's such a powerful way to help people understand on a really practical even emotional level of how this affects people and i just want to urge everybody watching if you haven't dug into some of the what's called the d transition stories it's a growing movement of people who are coming out saying look and these and by the way these are not people who are against transgenderism typically you know in in there they're actually for transition in certain cases but in their particular cases their doctors didn't question when they wanted the sex change the doctors didn't offer didn't offer to try to find out what was going on in their psyche that might be leading them to change their body when that wouldn't be necessary and so there are lots of people who are coming out now saying you know my body is now per permanently damaged and nobody like this doctor that i know was trying to help me actually hurt me and and they're being silenced people won't listen to their stories and and they get like nancy you mentioned in the comments people are saying they're transphobic or this or that but i think it's a it's a really important thing for people to dig into one another resource as well as love thy body that really highlights this is in ryan anderson's book when harry became sally he devotes an entire chapter to the transition stories so i encourage people to check that out as well but nancy and love thy body you give summaries of various thinkers throughout history from freud to sanger to kinsey um what do these thinkers all have in common and how does that relate with where you think our culture is at when it comes to things like sex and gender well can i give a really cool d transitional story first yeah you mentioned that so here's one of my favorite stories um there was a woman who um successfully passed as a man for 10 years um and then she converted to christianity and it was interesting because at first she didn't think that well you know sanctification takes some time so at first she thought it was perfectly okay for her to remain living as a man and she writes um i aspired to be a real man of god and then one day then one day when she was praying she seemed to hear god say to her you cannot claim to love me and yet reject my creation his creation being you know her body that she was physically female and so this is this is a the case we need to make that biblical morality is based on accepting who god made us um that it it's not just loving god it's loving his creation now she became a christian um this i'll give you a sec a story of a woman who didn't become a christian that would be transitioned um because this shows you that even secular liberal people are starting to see through it and again this both of these came out after my book was already published so they're not in the book um but there was a there was a girl who did an interview on on the website that i mentioned fourth wave now um she detransitioned at age 14. she had transitioned to a boy at age 11 and lived as a trans boy for three years before de-transitioning and reclaimed her identity as a girl and on the website she said the turning point came and this is a direct quote when i realized it's not conversion therapy to learn to love your body i thought whoa i wish i had that quote for a book guys love thy body so he was even a non-christian recognizing that the key issue was do you love your body um you'll start to see this now even in secular um context secular people are starting to say transgenderism equals body hatred body hatred so they're starting to recognize you know it's been three years since lovely body came out and now even succulent people are saying that core of the issue is do you love your body and that that transgenderism is about promoting body hatred um yeah in my body i talk i have a chapter on uh the fuck-up culture and that's where i talk more about sort of the architects of the sexual revolution like freud and um kinsey and margaret sanger and others and they're in a little bit different uh philosophy of other people we've been talking about essentially there's modernism and this post-modernism right and i think one of the things that's been difficult for christians in this issue is that most of our krishna apologists have been equipping us to answer the challenges from modernism they've mostly been equipping us to answer questions from materialism naturalism you know empiricism rationalism these are all modernist world views they all claim to be based on science um whereas the issues of transgenderism and homosexuality are coming from post-modernism and most of our christian apologists have not been trained in post-modernism and that's one reason that they haven't really sort of caught up you know with the foucault and people like foucault and judith butler who are coming from a very different perspective these are completely postmodern and here's the difference people like freud and kinsey and singer were all still trying to explain the human body and human sexuality in modernist terms you know the human body was still just a machine you know dawkins calls this meat machine richard dawkins um but kinsey too because he said we're just a human animal we talked about humans as just being part of the mammalian the mammalian species as he put it uh and margaret sanger if you've ever ever read any of her books she was a sold-out darwinist her whole goal is to come up with a view of sexuality that would be compatible with it based solely on darwinism so those speakers were all very modernists um and we have to have a somewhat different apologetic to them as opposed to people like foucault and butler who say who cares about the body we don't take identity from our body what counts is you know the the when we talked at the beginning when we talked about the split between body and person okay so the modern district is still stuck with the body francis schaefer used the imagery of two stories in a building and and he wasn't the only one there a lot of philosophies use that for that image but modernism is in the lower story where you care about science and you reduce humans to just complex biochemical machines post-modernists are in the upper story where they care only about the person not the body but the person so they care about the internal feelings and sense of self and your inner experiences and they're making very different arguments and and one of the things one of the challenges i think for christians is to realize you have to have different set of arguments with for modernism as opposed to post-modernism so the section in the book where i deal with um the modernists um is this is the art of the um chapter on the hook-up culture which is still very much geared towards um uh yeah as one i quote several uh of course all college students who say um sex is just a physical connection you know one one student named alyssa said hookups are very scripted you learn to turn everything off except your body you make yourself emotionally invulnerable or a drummer from austin texas and said sex is just a piece of body touching another piece of body that is existentially meaningless so you see these guys these are guys in the lower story this is the modernist mindset and sex is just a bodily function it's kind of like i call it the proverbs 31 view proverbs 31 is it it says it's talking about the woman's committed adultery and says it says she wipes her mouth and says well i've done nothing wrong in other words sex is just like a physical appetite when you're hungry you fulfill it no big deal it's no big deal for your sexuality so many of us many of the architects of the sexual revolution are still in the modern modernist mindset and they're the people who try to say uh you know like i said sex is just a matter of uh it's totally cut off it's from the rich inner life of the whole person and so that takes us a different apologetic that says that's this is is do you really think sex is fulfilling if it's just physical nobody really wants sexuality to be purely physical everyone being made in god's image really is reaching out for some level of personal connection and so our apologetic to that that mindset is different um but it's it's it's very important because it's still very influential on our college campuses and so on but that's when you ask me what about you know freud and kinsey and sanger that's their mindset and that's the apologetic we need to frame for them i think that's really helpful about hookup culture that's a very powerful uh way of thinking about it as you know another example of how we separate the physical body from you know the off what our culture calls the authentic self but you're making a point nancy that i've been making for a while and i'm so heartened to hear you say this because i i've had difficulty being pers persuading people that much of traditional apologetics is really responding to questions of modernism and i think that there's a growing set of questions that's coming out of post-modernism that apologists are trying to catch up with um and we need to do more work in in that area um i'm wondering if we could go to a couple of uh questions on the youtube streams we've got one on the all the things stream from darlene she says do you see the bioethicist views as a prelude to allowing abortion after a baby is born their definition i'm thinking of personhood leaves a lot of people in danger including senior citizens a lot of these secular bioethicists are already arguing that so some secular bioethicists think that the fetus becomes human before birth but there are some who argue that the fetus doesn't become human until after birth two of the most prominent examples are francis crick and crick and watson the two people who discovered the double helix structure of dna they're very famous scientists and both of them said you should allow for say three days of genetic testing after birth the idea being that some genetic defects don't show up until after birth and so only if the fetus passes those tests does it qualify as a person and you decide to allow it to live the another prominent bioethicist is peter singer at princeton university so that tells you he's pretty prominent peter singer has said that even three years of age is a gray area that's his words it's a gray area because after all how much cognitive functioning does a toddler have so you're absolutely right already people are secular bioethicists have been arguing that birth should not be considered you know the dividing line and uh and you talked about um elderly people too yeah um if you in in love their body i do have a section on euthanasia because you're absolutely right it's the same reasoning just applied in reverse in other words in abortion you're human until you acquire a certain cognitive function but in euthanasia if you lose certain cognitive functioning then you are no longer a person and you would become merely human you become merely a biological organism with no particular dignity or rights or moral status as one bioethicist put it you're only a body only your body and at that point your your food and water can be discontinued your medical treatment can be stopped your organs can be harvested so already we are at the point where people are arguing for euthanasia based on the same reasoning just in reverse instead of acquiring personnel you lost personhood and so you are no longer a person so that you are quite right that's why the whole concept of personhood is so dangerous is because technically anybody ultimately anyone could be declared a non-person right i mean in every culture across history we've seen some people declared non-persons and as soon as people are declared to be non-persons they became they become fair game you know for for various kinds of uh persecution and various kinds of uh you know take their rights taken away and so on every every culture has had that but now it's just that now we have all these academics giving academic support to the idea that that you can be a human and still be a non-person in fact that's what they're calling it human non-persons human non-persons is a label being used so yes you could be a human non-person in which case we've acknowledged that you you're human but you don't have any rights it seems like that extension joanne is asking kind of as a follow-up to that that if personhood has prerequisites then individuals who are maybe born handicapped possibly might not be considered persons either in some cases it seems like that would be a natural possibility there as well certainly especially mental handicap okay very good all right elisa do you have any questions from your channel yeah i've got some comments and then um i'll ask there's a question here too but there's just this really sweet comment from anna flower and she said i socially detransitioned i didn't have any surgeries and that whole ordeal was still so psychologically damaging for me i subconsciously wanted to escape my identity slash body because of trauma and she said i had rabid onset gender dysphoria and then this is where i think she's giving really good advice her she said therapists need to focus on body reconnection so so you know making the body line up with the mind rather than letting the mind lead what we do with the body and so i thought that was a great comment from anna flower there um nancy can i respond to that before you need it yes yeah yeah um thank you that's a that's a very good comment and um one thing that i wanted you know we didn't talk about backgrounds and gender dysphoria so i'm glad you brought it up um one of the things you know there was a study done in record onset gender dysphoria at brown university by lisa littman and i thought the the most significant thing to come out of this study that's the first study done of rapidance and gender dysphoria but um the most significant finding was that most people with rapid onset gender dysphoria suffer additional mental health issues some of the most common are autism anxiety depression adhd self-harm like cutting ocd etcetera the most reliable uh the most common is autism nobody quite knows why but autism has been most reliably connected with uh back even back when it's called transsexualism for a long time autism has been connected to transsexualism but anyway these teens already um let me see the uh 63 63 of these teens had been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder prior to the onset of their gender dysphoria and let me emphasize the word diagnose most teens do have some anxiety and depression but these routines whose issues were so severe that they had already received counseling and had been diagnosed and so two two takeaways from that number one is it is really medical medical malpractice to simply uh fast-track these young people into transitioning without asking any questions about the medical or the mental health history and yet that is that is the most common pattern now i i had a chance to do an interview with several parents for an article that i wrote for the federalist and it was really amazing talking you know firsthand to these parents and i got so many stories that went like this my my daughter went to see the gender clinic they talked for 30 minutes and the gender clinician said congratulations you're a boy here's how to get testosterone 30 minutes that was very common very typical so number one um that's medical malpractice because these kids need a whole lot more number two what does it mean for us you know um this is not just an apologetic issue where we want to argue the truth of the christian worldview this is where we need to realize these are very troubled kids and we need to have a ministry to them when we have evidence methodology well either one either form of gender dysphoria in our churches and our christian schools and our families we need to realize these are already very troubled kids from what i've talked to to teachers and counselors they tend to be much more troubled for example than kids who suffer from same-sex attraction much worse um so we need to think about that when they show up in our in our lives is that we need to treat them with a lot of love and support and um [Music] and not just treat this as a uh you know as an argument for a particular view of sexuality so i wanted to be sure and say that before we went on um yeah that's good and that kind of leads us into this uh maybe this will be like the final question here but this is from an account called i will not be shaken and i love how you mentioned you know we need to show love and empathy and support and all of that and the question is um so how do we recommend we deal with uh this is a specific question to this person how do you recommend that i deal with contention between my teammate who wants me to call her him i said it's against the law of god and i won't go against him um what's your advice on that you know when we're dealing in real life situations with people who are walking through this and they they want us you know to use a certain pronoun or a name or maybe there's a difference there how would you go about exploring that that topic of course the best thing is if you can really build a relationship so that you give context right so um we talked about how a lovely body has a lot of stories and actually this is one of my favorite as well um it's the story a story in the chapter on homosexuality and it's a story about a young man named sean sean dougherty who says he was exclusively same-sex attracted uh in all of his growing up years but today he's married to a woman and has three kids and by the way he's also a christian ethics professor in london um but here's the interesting thing about his story he grew up in a gay affirming family and attended a gay affirmative church so he felt like there was nothing wrong with being homosexuality sexual he he didn't he was not driven by any sense of guilt of shame and so you say well why did he change then he said i i decided to just i decided to stop defining myself by my sexual feelings and instead to define myself by my body after all our feelings can change and sometimes do but your body is an empirical noble fact it's scientifically noble it doesn't change it makes a lot more sense to base your sexual identity on your body and so he says i decided to acknowledge what i already had instead of trying to change my feelings i decided to acknowledge what i already had which was a male body as a good gift from god and then my feelings started to fall asleep so that is really the question at the core of this debate do we live in a cosmos operating by blind material causes or a cosmos created by a loving creator which is therefore intrinsically good and therefore i should be treating my body as intrinsically good and see here's where we need time to talk to our friends um as opposed to just saying well you know yes or no right or wrong we want to say well the christian ethic is based on the on the conviction that your body is a good gift from god and that he wants you to affirm your body as part of your identity he does not want to see you fragmented fractured divided between your body and your mind you know the question is if your mind and your body are uh are in contradiction to each other which one do you go with well your body is the one that actually is doesn't there's a change here that um you should memorize we should all memorize uh lisa and i lisa diamond is the senior researcher with the american psychological association and she was a person who first discovered that sexual identity is sometimes fluid you know you can hear the top the concept a lot now sexuality being fluid well all that came out of lisa diamond she was the one who first started asking people okay you identify as lesbian or gay what was the last time you had um an attraction to the opposite sex and she was discovered that for many people last week it was last month you know that many people who had come out as as uh have a non-heterosexual actually had a lot of heterosexual feelings still and that's why she came up with the notion of fluidity so here's this here's the statistic of people who come out as non-heterosexual 80 percent 80 percent change their sexual identity label at least once at least once which means sometimes it's more 80 percent who come out as non-heterosexual changes sexual identity label at least once what that means is yes your feelings definitely do change your body doesn't but even among non-heterosexuals their feelings do change and so it is rational to say well maybe maybe i should take a second look and think more about how does my body form my identity and should i maybe be giving greater emphasis to my body as something that's good and something that i should value um and and maybe i should investigate why i feel uncomfortable with my body maybe there's some psychological reasons for that and the but the message the overwhelming message should be the christian ethic is based on valuing your body your physical identity living in harmony with who god made you you want the time to talk to somebody to where you can give that context that it's the reason for the christian ending that's the only way you're going to bring people over but that will win people a positive message like that the body you know we live in a cosmos created by a loving god and our body is therefore intrinsically good nobody else is telling them that so the christian view you know if we rephrase our language so it's positive and uh affirming like that i think then we'll get a hearing in a postmodern world that's so helpful i'm thinking about your piece there about you know what monique and i often call our creation identity that part of the way that god has created us he's created us in his image he's created us to rule and reign over the creation it's also made us male or female and that is something that god has put in us from the beginning and and that's the thing that we can look to to say this is how god made me my emotions might change cultural message messages might be pressuring me but i can always kind of come back to all right what is god's created design for me what is is his plan and purpose and then ask him for help to bring my emotions my thoughts my practices into alignment with what he's created that's kind of what i hear you saying as the christian answer to to these issues yes that's a good paraphrase exactly um and here's here's what i found you know i speak a lot of churches and christian schools and colleges and i was a little surprised to find out how much i have to how much i have to emphasize this that just changing your language is an awfully big hurdle for a lot of people do you remember i said one of my students that she grew up always hearing body spirit good body bad it's very hard the message that we're known for okay the message christians are known for is it's wrong it's a sin don't do it and there's something wrong with you right that's the message we're known for and i have found that in the audiences that i speak to the first and hardest thing for them to do is to start changing their language to where they talk to somebody saying uh your body is good your body is a gift from god so after one talk for example a young teenage boy came up and said how do i talk to my friend who's who says she's a lesbian now and i said you know just start talking about how sh you know the way she's experienced the contradiction between her feelings and her body you know she does she really want to live with that sort of dichotomy that sort of fragmented inner life you know god doesn't want her to have that sort of fragmentation god wants us to have wholeness and integration and uh living living in harmony with who he created us to be so just changing the language when you're talking to your friends and you know he's just a teenage boy just change your language in the very way you talk about it i have found for many people that's the biggest hurdle for them to get over it very good well thank you nancy for being with us thank you for doing this elisa do you have any final words for nancy no just thank you so much this was such a joy to get to talk with you and uh just so appreciative of your work and your book and everybody needs to go follow nancy on twitter and on social media and get the book love thy body and i i think it's going to really enrich your understanding of some of these topics so definitely go pick up those books and nancy thank you so much it's uh it was really a joy to get to talk to you and i look forward to hearing to see your new book as well oh thank you yeah it's about to go into editing so you know who knows maybe it's a big mess we'll find out in a minute i don't know i i've seen some of you writing it's not going to be a big mess it's going to be good ah thank you wow thank you well thank you so much nancy this has just been such an honor to be able to talk to uh a pioneer in apologetics and thank you for all of your work that you've done over the decades um just thanks for being with us and bringing your wisdom i know based on the comments so you've really been an encouragement to a lot of people and helped helped us think this through thank you so much well thank you it's a good interview i always appreciate thoughtful thoughtful questions and you guys that you guys did have really good thoughtful penetrating questions and so it was a lot of fun oh good well thank you so much good night good night all right alicia yes what fun look what look what we got to do we got to interview a living legend yeah i i i didn't want to completely embarrass nancy but like i remember when i was in seminary in a long time ago you know there really weren't any women apologists who were out there you know that they're i was the only woman in my theology program at my seminary and i remember the mid-90s coming across nancy's stuff and i was like oh my word there's some other woman who's like me and likes these nerdy topics and and is is biblically conservative um what an encouragement she has been to me um just she she i'm sure has no knowledge of that but just it's it's such an encouragement to know that that she's out there and has been working so long well and one of my favorite books of all time now i loved love thy body and i recommended that to everybody and like i said i got it on all three platforms but possibly one of my favorite books ever is a book nancy wrote called saving leonardo a call to resist the secular assault on mind morals and meaning uh i i have just about every page of that book there's a highlight of just it is so quotable and it's it's just like she she goes through the art history and shows how the philosophies of the time influenced what was going on but at the same time it's like she's just taking down theological liberalism and all of this uh false ideologies and anyway that's a great one if anyone's watching saving leonardo one of my favorite books of all time yeah and she borrows a lot from um francis schaefer's ideas and i heard her say in one interview that she actually became a christian at labrie which was francis schaefer's ministry in switzerland to students and uh that that was how she came to faith but i believe she also worked with chuck colson um on doing some doing some projects co-authored a book with him so just really an amazing woman um so we want to encourage people to go interact with her content and and her books and ideas she's an important voice out there and um doesn't do a ton of media appearances so it's just really honored to to have her on and be able to talk to us tonight yeah and we can we need to credit monique monique is the one who secured the interview yeah and didn't even get to be here we're just sort of riding along yeah we're grateful though yeah look what we got to do so well thank you for doing this with me tonight it's been fun and being able to do a stream together and we will see you soon and we look forward to hearing more about your book as it continues to develop so all right well always thanks so much for letting me let me jump in on this yeah it's been fun all right my friends that is it for this week uh we are dark next week because monique will be speaking at the reality tour which moni uh which elisa spoke out last year um so monique's gonna be on the reality tour so make a way out of no way if you live in southern california get your kids to the stand to reason conference the reality tour um next friday and saturday night can't miss it that's right elisa it's a great conference it's so fun and i was so bummed because the year that i got to do it was like coved the coveteer so almost all of it i think we got to do two of the events and it was just so much fun all the and i'm just this year there's beckett cook there's monique there's a great lineup this year so definitely i mean it's it's geared toward teenagers so definitely get your teens there but you know i mean i i will admit that i went to the reality conference as an adult a few years ago just to go to the conference so you know i think you can can do that you know if you want to it's really a great great apologetics conference yeah it it is a one-of-a-kind but it's an absolute must if you're like within i don't know 70 to 100 miles get there get a hotel you know find a friend take their kids too you know uh figure it out because it's just not to be missed so thanks everyone have a good week and good night [Applause] [Music] me [Music] there's nothing left you

Channel: Alisa Childers

Views: 15,007

Rating: 4.8550248 out of 5

Keywords: apologetics

Id: 3befWdLGsPg

Length: 81min 45sec (4905 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021