Live No Lies Podcast | Episode 4 with Dr. Nancy Pearcey

hey everybody john mark here before we get started i just want to give you a heads up that today's interview is with dr nancy piercy who is a professor and christian intellectual who's written a brilliant book called love thy body which is hands down one of the best books and resources i have come across on the world view behind the sex revolution that we have been living through in western culture but in this interview we go right into it and we address subjects like abortion transgenderism gender dysphoria sexual assault and i just want to give you a heads up to make sure that you're ready to hold space for this conversation and i still want to put this on the internet even at the cost to myself because this is an important conversation it's not just about our sexuality it is about our humanity so i hope you find this conversation as helpful as i did actually the secular liberal view that has a low view of the human being and especially of the human body one of my students put it this way once she said growing up in the church i was always taught spirit good body bad and i reverse that in a lovely body i show that no it's actually christianity that has a very high view of the body [Music] dr piercy thank you so much for your time it is my honor to sit down with you how you doing today thank you john mark i appreciate you inviting me yeah it's really a joy to have you on i quote you in my most recent book as saying what christians do with their sexuality is one of the most important testimonies they give to the surrounding world that that quote was helpful for me um just to let you into a little bit of my back process i had as we were editing uh this book i had all these mixed emotions because i kept coming back to sexuality in particular as the best example of kind of the thesis of my book and as transgenderism in particular as really the best case study but i felt bad for like you know it kind of felt like i was harping on this issue over and over and i have a great editor who was kind of really after me to broaden my examples and i was really working at that and you know you hear the critique a lot that christians are obsessed with sex and have a negative view of sex but the more i think and reading your book was beyond helpful the more i read and research kind of where the sexual revolution came from at a philosophical level like it did not appear out of nowhere the sexual revolution did not cause the sexual revolution it came from somewhere and the more i kind of understand the origin source of it as far as the philosophers behind it and the leading thinkers the more i realize we're not the ones who are obsessed with sex it's western culture that is obsessed with culture with sex at an unprecedented level arguably in human history and you would argue if i'm reading your book right has a pretty negative view so your book was so helpful because your book does something that very few christian books on sexuality and gender do in that it's less of a biblical theology though it's shot full of biblical theology but your as i as i read your book you are working to help people understand the world view behind the sex revolution we've been living in for half a century now or more and the redefinition of kind of human sexuality and gender and so many other things so kind of opening question to you because there's so much here uh why would you write a book like this one right now in my hands like you're sticking your neck out on the line i'm sure you have it's a beautiful book it's so well written it is blisteringly smart but why would you stick your neck out on the there's so many other things you could write about and just let somebody else deal with this like why did you write this book yeah i'm glad you asked um because you're right in love thy body i do take a very different approach i look at the world view you know behind that biblical ethic it's kind of like the reasons behind the rules you know we can't not just tell people the bible says there has to be a reason behind it you know what is what is it about the human person that makes this ethic fit who we are you have to go beyond and you ask why did i pick up this particular topic um as i tell people sometimes i can't answer that question because it's too personal um in other words there were people in my life very close to me and my family who were struggling with this a lot of my readers of course it's the same thing the people who take my class at houston baptist university where i teach almost invariably the people who come and take my classes i have a class specifically on this book and invariably at least half the class it's because they have they have sons of daughters they have siblings you know brothers or sisters they have a husband or a wife who's dealing with these issues so this these are issues um i should back up and just say that my body covers cutting edge moral issues like abortion euthanasia homosexuality transgenderism uh the hookup culture and so on and so invariably people are dealing with these issues on a very personal level and that's what uh was the most unique about this book as opposed to my other books you know i've got another book on apologetics and how do we know christianity is true and what is the christian worldview and what does it mean to have a christian worldview on all of life you know every area of life not just through it's not just religious truth it's truth about all of life these are my common themes in all of my books what made this book different is that i was dealing with issues that a lot of people were having to handle on a very personal level so yeah i was very um i felt very honored that these people told me their stories the book is not just a lot of moral reasoning it's full of stories and it's it's when you got it did you notice how many times i said a student of mine yes there's a lot of students of yours for sure so you're saying it was born you know this isn't an ideological book for you is born out of your pers personal and professorial experience of working with people and even in your own family and your own story in your own life autobiography but it is an idea book not ideological but it is an idea book and one of one of the things that i had to learn the hard way as a pastor teaching who has a responsibility to pastor people in all of life including their sexuality is whenever i teach on sexuality to realize that long before sexuality is a moral issue it is an anthropological issue meaning it's not that you know the the secular world and the christian world have a different moral vision they do but they're based on radically different understandings of what it means to be a human being and so your book does a great deep dive into that you kind of frame your book with this concept from philosophy that i was ignorant of called personhood theory that you kind of identify as the through line through kind of the entire sex revolution from hookup culture and pornography to abortion euthanasia you put in there that was really interesting which made perfect sense and uh of course all things lgbtq and transgender identities explain to us what is personhood theory because most of us i'm guessing have no idea what that is and how does it apply right um so you're right this this is what precedes any moral discussion is what does it mean to be a human being and i wrote lovely body in order to help people to see um that to cut through some of the negative messages we usually associate with christianity a lot of people think um christianity is it's just about don't do it it's a sin it's wrong it's against the bible and there's something wrong with you that's the message i think a lot of people connect to christianity and so that was a a major reason i wrote the book was to turn the tables and to show that it's actually the secular liberal view that has a low view of the human being and especially of the human body which is surprising to many people because they think you know it's christians who don't care about this world you know the physical world you know our bodies all that matters is our soul our spirit uh as one of my students put it this way once she said growing up in the church i was always taught spirit good body bad and i reversed that in a lovely body i show that no it's actually christianity that has a very high view of the body and the dignity value and significance of the human body so it's sometimes easier if we make it concrete and let me just let me just jump in with uh the example where it's easiest to see and it it's also of course the most cutting edge issue of our day which is transgenderism transgender activists explicitly argue that your gender identity has nothing to do with your biological sex that your identity is male or female is not part of your authentic self a bbc documentary put it this way it said at the heart of the debate is the idea that your mind can be at war with your body and in that war it's the mind that wins right your body is not an important part of who you are uh there's been newspaper articles recently um about how schools are teaching transgenders and bounty down to kindergarten right kids are being estranged from their own bodies uh parents are reporting that kids are coming home you know you've been from kindergarten in first grade saying things like my teacher said just because you have girl parts doesn't mean you're a girl just because you have boy parts doesn't mean you're a boy so biology is being they're being taught that biology does not matter it's not really part of who they are um it's gone all the way down to um newborns have i'm sure you've heard of gender-neutral parenting gender neutral parenting is where you don't tell your your child whether they're a boy or a girl and i looked it up there's a facebook page for gender neutral parenting and it says point blank this is a direct quote there is no such thing as biological sex oh yeah sure we have bodies and chromosomes and genitals and so on but that's a social construction to call it sex as a social construction and then it warned that anybody who uh posted something about biological sex if you even referred to the phrase biological sex your post would be flags so that's where we are today is that the people can claim just outright there is no such thing as biological sex and our response to that should be you know from a christian worldview perspective is why accept such a demeaning view of the body christianity says your body is the handiwork of god it is an important part of who you are it has dignity and value because god made it what god makes is intrinsically good and so our response should be to come back with an understanding that the bible gives great dignity and value to the human body as opposed to i think you know what we're known for is having a more negative message oh something's wrong with you that's that's what you're doing is bad no we should be coming back with our goal is to help you love your body respect your body honor your body uh you know as a handiwork of a loving god so that's that's the theme of lovely body is helping people to make that shift in their in their language yeah i mean it was really arresting i mean it's in the title love thy body which almost sounds like it would be from like a secular progressive feminist or something you know and then uh culture shock it's it's very much a different kind of track chapter one is titled i hate me the rise and decline of the human body in it you write about quote the deeply dehumanizing world view at the heart of abortion assisted suicide homosexuality transgenderism and the sexual chaos of the hook-up culture dehumanizing is a really strong word that is most of the time used by progressives not by conservatives and i'm not even sure where you identify along that spectrum but i think what i'm hearing you say is that actually and this is 100 my conviction i think this goes back to paul in corinthians when the corinthians are saying you know food for the body and body for the food and you know and they have this very low view of sexuality as kind of just play for grown-ups just this biological release just hedonistic pleasure it's no different than eating or drinking or sleeping or any other bodily appetite actually paul's theology based on his reading of the book of genesis is a much higher view of human sexuality and that we are engendered creatures in the image of god and you know that sexuality is is far more than just a kind of biological release so is that what i'm hearing you say that actually even if some people growing up in certain corners of say evangelicalism kind of imbibed this message spirit good body bad that's actually not christian teaching that's a perversion of christian teaching by some christians in america and actually christian teaching has a higher view of the body whereas the western kind of secular view is a in your language dehumanizing view is that what i'm hearing you say yeah i do use the word dehumanizing i'm glad you picked up on that one um and i agree with you i i wrote also uh on how western culture tends to treat sexuality is almost like an appetite you know if you feel the appetite you fulfill it no big deal it's the it's the no big deal version of sexuality we hear that language all the time here yeah because um what's the chapter in traverse where it talks about the the woman who's committed adultery and it says she wipes her mouth and says i have done nothing wrong you know wiping her mouth having the image of you know fulfilling an appetite um and and the the irony is that yeah yep young people know the script all too well but they don't necessarily like it in love my body i quote several very poignant quotes from from college students like a young woman named alicia who said hookups are very scripted this is a direct quote hookups are very scripted you learn to turn everything off except your body you make yourself emotionally invulnerable wow and i thought and she didn't like that but she was just saying this is how it works so what should be the greatest example of intimacy vulnerability self-giving instead is dehumanized where you have to actually emotionally shield yourself and instead it just becomes this bodily you know co-opulating actually i have a quote from a uh a drummer in austin texas who literally says sex is just a piece of body touching another piece of body it is existentially meaningless so there you go this is not a high view of sexuality or as another another young college student that i quote you know i read a lot of rolling stone magazine when i was writing this book i know you do a lot of read when you're writing about stuff like this you do i did the same and nowhere near as deep as you but you do a lot of weird research i i read a lot of people that have a very different world view than my own yeah i know it's great isn't it and i'm always like open-minded like win me over and it nine times out of ten it does the exact opposite like man this if you if you follow the logic down the rabbit hole i mean you end up with nietzsche i mean this is just like a really dark place well another another rolling stone quote was from a young woman again a college student who said the mistake people make is that they think there's two there's two dimensions to a relationship one sexual and one emotional and they pretend like there are clean lines between them and so there's that dichotomy that you started out with at the beginning of the interview between the person and the body essentially that that was a good example of how even sexuality has been divided into my my body is so separate from my person you know that i i don't interact with somebody as a whole person and that's what and that's what we would have against it of course is that you like you said a minute ago you don't interact with the whole person right and i you know i i care a lot about christian spirituality and i also love the world of psychology which is all about how do you integrate or at least it used to be how do you integrate to your body how do you come to peace with your story with your past with your future how you know people that we look up to and respect are people who are integrated who are at peace we love we're drawn to people who are at home in their own bodies who are at peace with their personality and their quirks and idiosyncrasies and who find joy in living life as it actually is not as they wish it was these are the people that as human beings religious or not christian or atheist we're drawn to people like that there's a compelling beauty to people like that so just can you define in a sentence or two personhood theory we move to an example i think my understanding is i think you're saying that personhood theory is this western world view that says the person who you really are your authentic self in street language is is different from your body your body is almost just this like meat sack to carry your person hood around that's a grasp crass uh attempt to articulate but is is that give us in a sentence or two what is personhood theory yes but it's not that crass that's how some scientists talk about it there's a very famous scientist who was the head of the artificial intelligence lab at mit who wrote a book in which he said a human being is just quote a big bag of skin full of biomolecules interacting by the laws of physics and chemistry so what you said is exactly what many of our reading scientists are saying these days that your body has so little value that is just a by a complex biochemical machine um totally totally operating by you know natural laws and somehow your personhood then uh it is it's completely separate and the only the only way you can conceptualize this is almost to have a mental dichotomy and to say okay body is over here operating by natural laws and over here you know quite separate is who you are as a person and it's somehow not governed in any way by by your body or by your you know your physical sexuality but i like the way you use the word integration i use that word especially when i talk about homosexuality because it has this it has the same worldview um the same demeaning of the body the same separation um here's how i put it even my homosexual friends agree that uh when it comes to biology physiology anatomy chromosomes males and females are counterparts to one another that is how the human sexual and reproductive system is designed to adopt to embrace a same-sex identity is therefore to contradict that design it's to say in essence why should my body affect my personal identity why should my biological set biological sex as male or female have any say in my moral choices in my relationships and so we have to help people to see that that's a profoundly disrespectful view of the body it's basically saying that um my body like you said a minute ago i'm alienated from my body it's self-division it's the same war that people talk about with transgenderism there's still a war between my body and my mind and it's and it's the mind that counts it's the mind that can override your biological identity so this is extreme self-alienation self-division and we we we need to be able to commend the christian worldview then as a way of bringing unity and in a harmony and then you know wholeness um there was a one of the stories i tell in the book is a young woman named jean who lived as a lesbian for many years and today is married and has two children and she she wrote an article about her why she changed and she said and this is a direct quote i came to i came to accept trust that's how she said 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 so it's that positive language i want to honor my body i want to respect my biological sense i want to live in accord with the creator's design that's that's the language of self-self integration and wholeness that's the language that we should be using when we talk to people about sexuality i mean i can't think of a better word than your title love love thy body you know chapter two on your book is maybe another very hard to talk about um at multiple levels but an emotionally loaded but example of this in action um through abortion you know and both of us in our books quote that british journalist antonia senor who writes about her kind of story as a you know very staunch pro-choice liberal advocate to becoming a mother which which forced her at some level to admit the reality that life begins at conception so she writes this any other conclusion is a convenient lie we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life but then she goes on to say yes abortion is killing but it's the lesser evil explain to us the logic behind something like that where killing a child another human being in the moral calculus of the sex revolution is considered a lesser evil than a woman not having the quote freedom to have sex without bearing children help us understand the world view behind that yes i it really comes back again to the personhood theory that you started with um there's another story in the book again another journalist by the way and your book by the way is you are brilliant writer it is just full of it's like one part like intellectual download and the other part just story after story after story it it really brings it to life doesn't it like like this was another journalist who said she had always been proudly pro-choice as her words until she got pregnant with her first baby and then she began to struggle and she said i was i was calling i was calling the life inside me a baby because i wanted it but if i hadn't wanted it i would think of it as just a group of cells that it was okay to kill and to her credit she realized that didn't make sense you know a fetus doesn't become a baby just because somebody wants it and uh being a journalist she actually had gone to research this um and eventually she here's where she settled she said in terms of the science it's clear that life does begin at conception but she said morally speaking the fact of life is not so important it's it's what's important is whether it starts to become a person so that was a very dramatic example of the difference between human and personhood yeah so being a human yes does not make you a person according to prison it's not really human rights it's person rights it is and then comes the mother of all questions how do you decide who is a person if it's no longer well this is a human being at whatever age or stage how do you decide who is a person right it used to be biological right if you are biologically human you were in you were a person you were a person all humans were persons even if you are born with special needs or it doesn't matter you are a person right people did not used to make the distinction between being a human and being a person and the only reason people do make the distinction now it started with bioethicist you know professional bioethicist who wanted to get around the science there is people most people don't know this but you will not find really any professional bioethicists today who deny that the fetus is human from conception you know the the evidence from science from genetics and dna is just too strong to deny it just read any embryology textbook so how do they get around the science in order to support abortion they do this to this two two-story division i use the imagery of two stories in a building you know to express this dichotomy between the body and the person so in the lowest story you have the body and everyone including secular bioethicists will agree that biologically physiologically in terms of chromosomes and dna the fetus is human from conception but they say at some point it climbs up into the upper story to use the two-story metaphor and becomes a person usually defined in terms of mental capacities some level of cognitive functioning self-awareness and so on and i'm sure that already you can see what the problem is which is how do you define personhood then yeah what about elderly people what about special needs people what about people with down syndrome what about people yeah or even lower iq yes even just staying with abortion uh some bioethicists will say well the fetus becomes a human before births you know so as soon as it's born it's okay other bioethicists today will say no uh not until after birth even famous no yes peter you quote peter singer and then peter who is he's princeton seminary right like world-renowned bioethicist who's basically making a case for quote after birth abortion up to three days after because there are some three years now three days is francis francis uh quicken watson the the discoveries of the dna uh the double helix structure of dna that's frickin watson they are both on record saying three days in other words some the rationale being that some birth defects don't show up until after birth yeah you even talk about the number of people that have bought their babies due to club foot and then i didn't realize this but apparently the olympic figure skater uh who was it christie yamaguchi was born with a club foot yeah so so the logic there is you wait three days till after birth because there are some birth defects or abnormalities that don't show up until after birth and people are arguing for a legal right to terminate that shoot that body because it's not a person it's not a person yes you do three days of genetic testing in other words and who is saying if it passes three years oh yeah so peter singer said he literally on his website he had a you know uh faq um web statement on his website and he said even three years of age is a great case that's that was his words it's a great case because after all how much cognitive functioning does the toddler have so that's where we are now is that yes i mean peter singers at princeton as you noticed this these are not fringe characters and they're arguing for uh so-called after birth abortion now it's it's so hard for me to even ask you questions about this because the way and if i was a pr person and i would say this is just brilliant the way the conversation has been framed up it's been framed up as a women's rights issue that therefore not as a injustice for the vulnerable issue therefore a man in particular has no right to even comment on it what would you say to that to that framing of it to that what would you say to that yeah that's a tough call because you know i do say in lovely body that there are two people here you know there is the baby and there's the woman and we don't want to frame in such a way to ignore the that we ignore the woman but even there it's much more humane to acknowledge that she's her body is part of who she is the idea that you can just um you eliminate a pregnancy as that was just a purely mechanistic action ignores the fact that there is an organic natural connection between a woman and her baby there are arguments for abortion that literally treat the fetus as a trespassing as a somebody who's breaking the law and trespassing your body and therefore you have a legal right of self-defense to get rid of this trespassing person um instead of acknowledging that pregnancy is an intrinsic part of being female and that your body has you a mother and baby have a very natural organic connection and you know even before before i was even a christian i didn't become a christian until i was in college and um but i was against abortion even as a non-christian because it was so obviously unnatural you know i i didn't i didn't think it was a i didn't think it was respectful to a woman's body to go in there with harsh chemicals and and sharp instruments you know and interrupt the natural process it's you know it's not just a baby whose life you're taking you're also interrupting a very natural very uh a function that's very central to who you are as a woman so i'll like to say i i agree we have to make sure that we're also talking a woman is also intrinsically connected to her body yes and we need to respect her her body when she has a biological function like pregnancy yes you know it's easy to let this conversation slide into again an ideological or even just a an intellectual kind of frame but for most people this is about as deeply personal and emotional as it gets what would you say to somebody listening who is either considering an abortion or who has already had one and is just hearing this in the aftermath she had i mean if you're you're a professor you're chatting to a 21 year old in your class or somebody in your family or somebody in your church what what would you say to them well i was really happy and grateful that several women did talk to me while i was writing lovely body um because it made me it i i changed the way i wrote about it to write a whole lot more about the um the responsibility of of the church to minister to women who had abortions and there are organizations uh that are you know christian organizations that minister to women who fight abortion i had i'll tell you uh an example so one of my students one of my graduate students um we were having i have reading groups on my book manuscripts this is one way i get feedback that's why i have so many good stories i get a lot of feedback because i have reading groups and um so this she was in my reading group but she was also a graduate student and when we were discussing abortion she said uh well i haven't had one but and then she gave her opinion two weeks later she came back and said i lied i did have an abortion i've just never told anyone she never told anyone so our little reading group was the first time she'd ever admitted to anyone that she'd had an abortion and here's how it happened she was attending a christian college not not mine a different one um she was attending a christian college and she'd broken up with her boyfriend and um she was raped he came to her door and of course she let him in it was a former boyfriend she wasn't she didn't have a guard up he he put date rape drug in her drink and and raped her uh it was revenge rape basically he was mad at her for breaking up with him but she got pregnant and she said her first thought was my family will be shunned by my church that was her first thought was how could she protect her family how tragic isn't it she thought my family will be shunned that was her first thought and she signed up for the first available abortion appointment that she could get and she's literally said ever since she said i was against abortion at the time and i still am so she was so afraid of her church rejecting her family that are you know of her family paying a price that she did something that was against her own conscience so and here's what she said and this is this is sort of the punchline she said the church is more understanding and accepting of a convicted a convicted felon than they are of a woman who's had an abortion and i kind of you know was taken aback like wait are you exaggerating she said think about it think of all the prison ministries yes we've got lost dozens and dozens of prison ministries and how many ministries do we have to women who've had abortions very few i mean i managed to pick uh i managed to find a few to list in my book um but they're very small and most churches don't have them so her point was well taken the church actually has more compassion for a convicted felon than they have a woman who's not an abortion so that's where we need to work that we need to work on realizing women women like this student you know who was raped you know who's just a college student who didn't know where to turn and you know she she needs people who will reach out and support her and help her yes we in the church bear some culpability for much of this great tragedy in our time yeah you know what a good call to create a community where that's a safe place for people to come out how does this idea of abortion not to take it out of this personal place and back to the conceptual but how does this idea of abortion and personhood theory and kind of the idea matrix behind it what bearing does it have on human rights i mean you go into this in the book you quote yuval harari who's arguably the the leading atheist of our day right now you know his book sapien sold you know countless copies brilliant thinker you know he's gone on record as calling human rights a quote christian myth and it's not because he's against human rights but human rights are distinctly born out of a christian worldview rooted in genesis chapter 1 all human beings are created in the image of god it is literally the antithesis of darwinian materialism you know that this is you're just a sack of meat you're an accident and it's you know it's just about survival of the species and now that the earth is overpopulated you know do whatever you want with your body um and we evolved from the strong praying on the weak i mean that's not that is not an ideological that's not a world view that will lead you to human rights so so what what bearing does personhood have on personhood theory and these ideas have on the future of human rights in the west and by the way yeah nietzsche said it too nietzsche said all the christianity is a source of all theories of human rights by the way and uh contemporary i mean nietzsche hated christianity because he thought it was a way for the weak to manipulate the strong and he thought it was you know i just read um tom holland's book dominion which was just genius and he opened he's not a christian he's a historian and he opens by basically saying that the things that we assume is normal in the west such as the strong should not prey on the weak literally had no antecedent in the ancient greco-roman world in fact it was the opposite was assumed that if it was honorable if you were strong to prey on the weak it was a sign of just how strong you were and that you know he the subtitled his book is how the christian revolution remade the world so i mean he here as a secular agnostic historian is arguing 100 christian rights is a human i'm sorry is a christian innovation not a human one yeah and there's another by the way another british i think holland is british there's another british philosopher named john gray who's written some best-selling books as well he makes the same argument he's um he says any concept of human rights is just a derivative of christianity um but let me back up i wanted to answer that two ways i want to um let me start with the more uh abstract or philosophical side of it and then let's talk about um how it plays out in terms of human rights what um in terms of like what's the deeper worldview uh behind it your ethics always derives from your view of nature or science because after all your body is part of nature and so the secular liberal ethic derives from the theory that nature is a product of mindless purposeless causes and therefore the body has no intrinsic purpose that we are morally obligated to respect in fact and and therefore the mind can use it any way it wants which is what you just said the mind can use it any way it wants because it has no intuitive purpose of its own it's just an accident it's just meat it's just a thing do whatever you want with it yeah dawkins calls fox and calls it a what a meat skeleton um and and that's actually how homosexuality is defended by the well-known uh feminist and lesbian camille poglia who i'm sure you've probably read some of her stuff she's a bit of an iconoclastic feminist because she does not think sex is just a social construction she says no no no nature made us male and female humans are a sexually reproducing species and so then you say well then in that case how do you defend being lesbian and she says and these are her exact words she says well nature made us male and female but why not defy nature after all fate not god has given us this flesh we have absolute claim to our bodies and may do with them as we see fit so that's the logic she's basically saying if our bodies are products of mindless purposeless forces then they tell us nothing about who we are they give us no moral message and we can do with them as we see fit and so this is why it's important as christians to say okay wait a minute according to a christian world view god did create the creation with a purpose the technical term is teleol uh teleological right so that uh i mean a very fundamental level eyes are made for seeing news are made for hearing wings are made for flying fins are made for swimming and the entire development of the organism is built is is directed by a built-in plan or blueprint so what christians are saying then is that even science shows us that nature is teleological he has a design a design a plan a purpose an order and what we're saying is that when we live in harmony with that order we will be happier and healthier so so the the larger you know the larger worldview goes all the way back to your view of nature and that our bodies do have a plan or a purpose and are not like you just said not just meat machines thrown up by chance it's very important which isn't which isn't actually a scientific world view it's i mean there's a saying in portland that's on bumper stickers all over and we have you know the in our america we believe and there's kind of a list of the progressive slogans one of which is we believe science is real and that's kind of a you know reaction against some right-wing ideology around everything from vaccines to you know climate change but what's bizarre is how anti-science much of the sex revolution is yes and i mean it's anti-science full on like some of the the main statements and slogans are not only unscientifically grounded they're they're like contradicted by science so it's i'm always shocked how secular writers will talk about nature and they'll capitalize the end and they'll almost make nature sound like this you know intelligent mind because you they can't quite talk about what it means to be human and the the telos of what it means to be human because there's so much design and intention and intricacy woven into the human body without talking about nature as if it's a sentient being yeah well in some ways this is the post-modern mind you know modernism said you just you're just a complex biochemical machine but post-modernism is what focuses on no your mind is what counts your your emotions your sense of self so that postmodern view and and and i wanted to answer your question about human rights um in a little more detail too because you cannot have a free society unless you acknowledge that some rights are pre-political that means the government the state does not create them it really recognizes them and many of our pre-political rights are based in biology and so as we give like the parent the parent-child relationship which the state doesn't create it recognizes but let me show you how we're losing that though so so take abortion the right to life used to be based on the idea that anyone who's biologically human has the most fundamental right of all which is the right not to be killed but in roe v wade the abortion the supreme court abortion decision in 1973 this the court ruled that some humans namely the fetus which we acknowledge as human some humans are not persons worthy of protecting their life legally so so the state has irrigated to itself the authority to decide which humans qualify as persons not based on biology because it's not based on being biologically human but just on its own say so it's just its own legal fiat or take um don't take marriage marriage is a pre-political right because human beings men and women naturally come together and form families humans are a sexually reproducing species but in order to give same-sex people exactly the same rights as opposite-sex people the state had to deny the biological component of marriage and say it's just an emotional connection which is what it did in its obergefell this obergefell decision when it legalized same-sex marriage it says well it's just you know just an emotional connection the trouble is we have lots of emotional connections so who decides which ones count as marriage well the state basically irrigated to itself the right to decide which ones count as marriage not based on biology and so not based on anything objective just based on its own say-so or uh parenthood which you just mentioned parenthood it used to be well from time immemorial uh people thought parenthood was based on biology you know the woman who bore the child was the mother and her legal husband was considered the biological father this was called the presumption of parenthood and same-sex couples could obviously could adopt but until recently the same-sex the same-sex partner who was not biologically related to the child their name did not go on the birth certificate but same-sex advocates said that's not fair that's discrimination we should be treated exactly the same as opposite-sex couples and in 2017 the court agreed and passed a ruling saying that as long as the same-sex couple was legally married the non-violent the parent who was not biologically related still got to be on the birth certificate so now parenthood is not related to biology the legal definition of parenthood now is something that the state creates and grants so you tactically are you are not the parent of your children unless the parent unless the state says you are and then of course transgenderism again since forever people have thought that your gender was organically and naturally connected to your biological sex but the only way the state can treat a trans woman that is someone born male the same as a biological woman is to say that biology doesn't matter and that's what the state did and the supreme court did in its 2020 bostock decision it said that title vii now means uh gender and not just sex and that this they treated gender as a state of mind that has nothing to do with your biology and it says that you get legal rights based on gender not your sex so essentially and and who decides that you know the state since it's not rooted therefore it's not rooted in anything objective so one after another these three political rights that were rooted in biology rooted in science are no longer rooted in biology and they don't what they become because it's been a huge power grab by the state the state now tells you you know if you have the right to life you know if you're married if you're a parent and so on what kind of worms does that open up in the arena of human rights like what's the domino effect there if you follow it out then you don't have you don't have any ineligible rights you know the idea that we have inalienable rights was uh based on pre-political rights it's pretty it's it's inalienable because the state doesn't create it the state merely recognizes it so for example the right to life up until roe v wade basically was you have a right to life just because you're human you're a member of the human race you have a right not to be killed and the state's job was to protect that right it didn't create it it just recognized and protects it but now technically you know it hasn't worked itself all the way out yet but logically speaking the state has now said no just because you're human doesn't mean the other right to life no you don't have an ineligible right to life you now have a right to life only as the state says you do and i tell people this you know when i speak on my book i tell people you have to realize you you think you have a right to life just because you're human but technically according to the supreme court you don't you have the right to life only if the state decides you qualify as a person so that's how it impacts and again right you know you're not fear-mongering or trying to scare people or work people up into anger you're trying to help people understand the world view behind something like roe v wade or these other multiple examples and it does have implications for human rights i mean one that you point out in the book that was a new idea to me it was really interesting to have you list euthanasia in this list of the sexual evolution but it makes perfect sense if a a child in the womb or a fetus as it's called because we have to dehumanize it i think in order to emotionally detach from what it is what abortion is if that is not deserving of human rights then why wouldn't your 82 year old grandmother with dementia you know like what what is to protect her so you know you quote a number of left-leaning thinkers that are starting to publicly argue for a version of euthanasia i mean talk to us about that is that one potential human rights problem that you see on the horizon yes and i like the way you you bring it back to the logic you know that's what i want people to see that um one reason we want to talk about in worldly terms is so that you recognize that these things uh are logically connected so if abortion is based on the idea that you're human but you're not a person until you acquire certain cognitive functions euthanasia is the same reasoning just in reverse namely if you lose lose certain cognitive functioning if you are mentally disabled then you are no longer a person it's kind of like it goes backwards right it's just the reverse and so at that point you will read bioethicists who will say you are only a body that's a phrase i saw when i was doing research oh it's you know once you've lost certain cognitive function you are only a body and at that point your treatment can be withheld your food and water can be withdrawn your organs can be harvested because you are no longer considered a person so absolutely it's the same world view and the same logic just in reverse and it has the same dangers that you pointed out is that well then who decides who decides what the person is if it's no longer linked to something objectively like biology um i'm i'm preparing a talk for a political organization next weekend and so i'm i'm being a little bit more um forthright and saying christianity is pro science it's pro pro biology pro science pro facts pro truth but it's true we're the ones arguing for biology in all of these areas every one of them from abortion euthanasia transgenders and homosexuality we're all saying it's it's your biology that matters your body counts your body is a product we're arguing your body is a handiwork of god and has great value and dignity and i i have to i sometimes have to take people back to in history you know the early church faced a similar challenge the early church faced a culture that had a very low view of the body so for very different reasons you know it was because of philosophies like gnosticism and platonism and manichaeism do you remember augustine was a maniche these were all dualistic world views that treated the physical material realm as well with death decay and destruction and treated the spiritual realm as superior and we wanted the salvation was to escape from the material world plato called the body the prison house of the soul and the goal was to escape from it and so in this context christianity was nothing short of revolutionary it said uh well i should add this gnosticism teaches that there were several levels of deity and it was the lowest level deity who created this world it was an evil god who created this world because no self-respecting god would get his hands dirty mucking about with matter so it was very it was revolutionary when christians said no no it's the highest god who made this world it was a good god who made this world and so this world is intrinsically good and and then the greatest scandal actually at the time was a the incarnation the idea that that same supreme deity had actually entered into the material realm and taken on a physical body you know to to the greeks this was this was this was the greatest scandal actually of the christian message at the time and of course when jesus was executed on a roman cross we could say he did escape from the physical body as gnosticism thought we should aspire to do but what did he do then he came back to it in a physical body to the ancient greeks this was not spiritual progress it was like the ultimate validation of the human body of biology of personhood of matter of the earth of the goodness of god's creation and paul says the the idea of a physical resurrection was out of foolishness to the greeks yes first corinthians we don't always world view had massive fallout for sexuality right because i mean the more i understand greco-roman sexuality it was on one hand way farther left than anything in our country right now like as far as what was open and it was also full of sexual assault and it was full of massive abusive practices in particular toward women children and slaves and that was what was created by this ideological worldview that said the body doesn't matter material doesn't matter the body's a prison house of the soul which is diametrically opposed to the christian world view in which jesus was resurrected in a body oh and and at the end of times here's where christians sometimes are are unclear to you at the end of time what's going to happen we're not going to be floating around in the clouds in you know in the ether god says he's going to create a new her a new heavens and a new earth and we will live on that new earth in in resurrected bodies you know from the time of the apostles creed christians have affirmed the resurrection of the body for all of us so this is an extraordinarily high view of the physical world there's nothing like it in any other philosophy or religion as christians we should be so excited so happy you know that we are just you know it's just overflowing from us yes that this is such a wonderful view such a positive view such an affirming view that you know it's it's like you know you just want to give the good news you know francis schaefer used to say the gospel doesn't start with jesus died for your sins the gospel starts with in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth because that's what tells us that this earth this life has such meaning and he said it is very good and it's very good and and people say oh yeah but what about sin what about sin in the fall well but the bible never teaches that sin has totally obliterated god's original good creation we're still made in god's image and it's like uh it's as if a child took a you know a magic marker and scribbled on the mona lisa or something you could still see the beauty of the original masterpiece shining through and that's the christian view of sin is that and the fall is that you can still see the beauty of god's original creations shining through we you know we still honor god's handiwork in spite of the fault yeah we're realistic about evil and sin but that doesn't mean that we overlook the the goodness of creation you know the christian worldview is creation following redemption i'm sure you've heard that breakdown yes we acknowledge the goodness of creation we acknowledge though it was it was damaged by the fall so we're utterly realistic about sin and evil and then we look to god to show us how we can be a redemptive force and bringing it back to the way god originally created it so we a balanced christian worldview has all three we don't yes the typical revivalist message starts with the fall you're a sinner you need to get saved well yeah but if you don't start with creation you don't know what sin is you don't know why it's a problem and you lose the dignity to the human being because i i've had students i've had students said that that's what they grew up with they grew up with you're nobody you you're nothing you're evil you're corrupt you know because you're a sinner was like the starting point it's not the starting point the starting point is you have great value and beauty and dignity because you're made in god's image and if you don't have that sin isn't sin isn't even a tragedy the reason it's a tragedy is because you have such beauty and dignity to start with it's like a if you had a cheap trinket and it broke it's like so what you know throw it out but if you have a great masterpiece that gets damaged that's a tragedy yes so the only reason sin is a tragedy is because we have such value and dignity to start with wow what a beautiful starting point for the christian message in closing you know a lot of people this is on the internet so anybody can listen but a lot of the people listening to this podcast series and reading my book or are and books like yours are people who love and follow jesus and are trying to figure out how to do that in a city like portland or wherever they call home in this like increasingly secular and increasingly progressive kind of culture where this issue of sexuality and gender is it's not like a issue it's like the predominant one and we now as followers of jesus have the immoral position like i'm just old enough to remember when the christian sex ethic was weird you know it's like oh that's weird you don't sleep together before marriage or that's weird you don't live together with your girlfriend or that's weird you don't have an affair don't get a divorce even if you're not happy in your marriage that's weird now it's not weird it's immoral it's dangerous it's a example of bigotry or repression or oppression or whatever and that is a very hard like social stigma for a lot of people to carry it's not persecution in the sense of violence thank god and at this point it's not a legal discrimination but it is a hard emotional weight for a lot of people to carry to to hold to a vision of jesus and of the writers the new testament and of the orthodox global historic church of what it means to be human what it means to be engendered what it means to be sexual that i think is a compelling vision if i just had the bible and the christian worldview you know and some christian intellectuals helping to explain it to me i would just think man this is beautiful but in the wider culture that is screaming at us no that's immoral it can be hard to carry that so what in closing what would you say to those who love and follow jesus and are trying to figure out how how to hold his vision in this kind of a cultural current yeah that's a good that's a good question even more generally about the christian worldview even beyond sexuality and um i have to tell you it's something that i uh wonder about how to make real to other people i was not i was raised christian but it was um i was raised in a lutheran home i don't know if you know this but you know all all scandinavians are lutheran in the way that all irish are catholics yes right so it was very much an effort british or anglican yeah it was the state church right oh yeah reformation yeah yeah exactly uh and so that's what i was raised at where where the christianity was it wasn't that was not let me well i'll i'll say i'll it was there was no personal there was no personal personality there was no personal reality okay i'm going to talk about this in my next book my father was severely physically abusive so here i had this guy taking us taking his family to church every sunday and then beating us in the during the week i mean obviously his christianity was very much discredited in my eyes and yes and uh in high school i i walked away from my faith entirely and i i started saying well how do i need to know this stuff is true how do i know this is true and i asked my father point blank why are you a christian and he said works for me i said that's it you know and i had a chance to talk to a lutheran seminary dean and i thought i'd get a more substantial answer and all he said was don't worry we all have doubts sometimes as the psychological phase that i was going through and so eventually i decided well maybe christianity just didn't have any answers and i very intentionally walked away from my christian upbringing and started on a search for truth i decided i guess it was up to me i'd have to figure out you know i would have to survey all the religions and philosophies of the world and figure out which one was true which was a pretty big ambition for a 16 year old but i literally started walking down the hallway at the public high school i attended and pulling books off the philosophy shelf because i thought well isn't this what philosophers are supposed to say you know they don't they deal with what is truth how do we know it is there a foundation for ethics or is it just you know true for me too for you you know is there a purpose to life um and i pretty quickly decided that if if there was no god the answer to all of those questions was no no it's not a foundation of ethics uh there is a sp became a complete moral relativist i was the one in my friend group who was arguing for moral relativism you know a friend of mine speaking about uh a mutual friend i said oh she's so wrong and i jumped on her and said you can't say anyone's right or wrong um i even became a complete skeptic because i realized if all i have is my puny brain and the vast scope of time in history and space the idea that i could know absolute universal objective truth it's ridiculous that's how i thought you know as a 16 year old it seemed to me obviously ridiculous that i could know any kind of real truth so in fact i i remember doodling on my page and on a paper in a english class the whole universe as a thought bubble in my own head you know that's all i knew really what was in my own head so you can see that i was very primed to eventually end up at the ministry of francis schaefer at labrie which is in switzerland which is an apologetics ministry la bree is french for the shelter and francis schaefer was a an apolo christian apologist who had a particularly effective ministry to young disaffected young people and at that time mostly hippies we were all hippies um and a lot of his hippies were hitchhiking their way across europe trying to find themselves and i was we had lived in europe when i was a child so i had gone back and that's how i kind of ended up stumbling across labrie and switzerland anyway so the first that that was the first time i ever heard of anything any kind of christian apologetics i had no no idea that christianity could be supported by good reasons and evidence and arguments i had no idea that you could you know give good reasons you know that christians that always treated me like those it's a moral problem you don't have faith what's wrong with you and and here was a place where they welcomed questions question and you know i arrived there because obviously i was not a christian and they you know most christians would you know push me away when i started asking questions whereas labrie was like oh cool you want to stay hey i see you have a lot of questions you want to stay and that's how it was back then it was uh back in the hippie era it was very open-ended and if they had a free bed they'd just say hey you want to stay so i did so that's how i became a christian actually was was through apologetics and the the coming back to your question then is um because i went through several years as an agnostic and i did see the dead end of of atheism i did see that there's no there is no hope you know paul says people what's that verse where paul talks about people without hope in the world yeah i did see how dark it was i did see i mean even you know sean paul sartre the existentialist philosopher says you know uh there's no objective morality we're condemned to be free and people say what do you mean condemned to be free i thought freedom was a good thing no not if you're an existentialist because what it's saying is i don't have any idea if what i'm doing is right or wrong good or bad harmful or beneficial i have no guidelines i'm making it up as i go along that's a terrible darkness that was horrible that's a recipe for chronic anxiety you know isn't it so i understood exactly what sartre meant when he said you're condemned to free it was a kind of condemnation so anyway all that to say because of all that i have an appreciation for christianity yeah it's so beautiful it's such a beautiful world view it has um it's so life-giving it's so affirming that you cannot tell people you can't tell people hey you know maybe you should just leave the faith for a couple years you know you can't say that but you want to see if can you recreate this this for people can you recreate them for them some sense of how wonderful christianity is compared to the other options out there you almost people sometimes afraid i got this question just the other day about apologetics somebody asked me well you know aren't you afraid that if people study apologetics they're going to lose their faith and i'm like it's the opposite you know no you should learn about non-christian world views and you'll come to appreciate christianity so much more i've read nietzsche a few times recently and it just which is i mean i so appreciate his honesty i mean really he was the first person to call the enlightenment's bluff and basically say all this stuff about reason and human rights and some version of morality that just changed sex is nonsense like follow your worldview down and you know and it but that's where nihilism comes from i mean it's utterly dark and brutal and so yeah i mean i'm with you so often i resonate with you know what peter said to jesus after that very hard teaching where else shall we go you alone have the words of eternal life you know such a great job of capturing that well dr piercy thank you so much for being with us for all of you listening i can't recommend her book love thy body enough she's written a number of beautiful books they're all wonderful but this book in particular is so well written so full of both kind of very brilliant cultural analysis but and historical background but with stories that go to the heart so thank you for your courage for your wisdom for your intelligence i know that a mind like yours that has all of that sitting in your memory banks and you don't prep for a conversation like this it's on the fly that is the result of decades of dedication to your craft as a professor and thinker so thank you we honor you we bless you and hope to see you again [Music] thanks so much for listening to today's conversation if you want to go deeper this is just scratching the surface feel free to pick up a copy of my new book live no lies available wherever books are sold there's a link in the video notes also make sure you subscribe to this youtube channel to just stay up to date on new material coming from me with this podcast and more in the future and finally i just want to say thank you this entire podcast and video series was brought to you by our partners at world vision who are doing great work all around the world particularly with the most vulnerable but have just started to kind of move into the arena of caring for pastors pastors are man just facing a lot in the last year or two in particular with a global pandemic but so much more a lot are feeling beat up and burned out and world vision partnered with danielle strickland who's a friend of mine and a great teacher and writer and thinker to put together a new resource called soul care prayer rhythms which is kind of an intro to how do you keep your body and your soul alive in a time like the one we're living into you can follow the link in the video notes for more information to access this resource for yourself and again thank you so much to our partners at world vision who made this possible all right have a wonderful day and peace to you all [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: John Mark Comer

Views: 18,947

Keywords: John Mark Comer, Dr. Nancy Pearcey, John Mark Comer Podcast, John Mark Comer Interview, Live No Lies Podcast, Live No Lies, Love Thy Body, God Has A Name, Loveology, Garden City, My Name is Hope, Bridgetown Church, JMC Interview, JMC, Personhood Theory

Id: FPMi7uquIiw

Length: 70min 17sec (4217 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021