Editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle welcome Professor Nancy Pearcey. She is professor of apologetics and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University and author of several books, most recently Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. Prof. Pearcey's books also include Total Truth, Finding Truth, The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo and How Now Shall We Live? (co-authored with Chuck Colson). They talk about sexuality, gender, abortion, and Christianity's high view of the human body. Pre-order the new Babylon Bee Best-Of Coffee Table Book coming in 2020! Topics Discussed Abortion... scientific human life vs modern Personhood Theory Biological Sex vs Gender The Christian's high view of the material world and the human body due to belief in the incarnation of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the new heaven & earth. Trusting in a design vs individual revolt against nature and biological realities Language as a front in the culture war All of our actions endorse a worldview What about people who identify as "gay Christians" or some other adjective placed before the word Christian? Nudity in medieval Christian art Subscriber Portion (Begins at 00:48:21) The entire interview is available for Babylon Bee subscribers only… Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee interview show.
We are now doing our interview show.
And I got to say that when Ethan first started writing for the Babylon B, he wrote this piece that was, it was about an atheist who doesn't accept the, he accepts the multiverse theory, but not the biblical.
Like any universe.
There's all possible universes except for the biblical.
Except the biblical one.
And then Ethan, you know, he, that was my very first article.
And I just got, you know, I just kind of met Ethan and he texts me all giddy and excited because his article got shared by Nancy Piercy.
And now here she is.
And now here she is.
We are interviewing her.
So welcome.
Thank you for coming on.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
I also, so Nancy is a professor at Houston Baptist University.
What is the actual title of what you are a professor of?
I'm actually a professor of apologetics.
Wow.
And scholar in residence.
Scholar in residence means that I get to continue writing and speaking, and then I teach apologetics.
Nice.
That sounds like a pretty sweet gig.
It's very sweet.
I love it.
It's a perfect fit.
And one reason it's so perfect is that HBU, the apologetics department, is cultural apologetics.
It's the only university that does cultural apologetics.
I don't know if you know, but the term was coined to describe what Francis Schaefer did, because instead of just doing abstract arguments for the existence of God or the problem of evil, he looked at how ideas percolate down to ordinary people through cultural means, like art and music and movies and books and so on.
And so that's why it was called cultural apologetics.
He was the first person to look at how ideas come to ordinary people through cultural means.
And so that's our focus here at HBU.
Yeah, that was actually, I discovered you in, man, it was around the time of the second time George Bush Jr. got elected.
And I remember I had this run-in with this crazy hippie who I thought was like a really nice guy until I told him that I had voted for George Bush Jr.
And this is my first time having this happen to me, but he turned into like, he turned demonic on me.
It was shocking to me because I just thought everybody was cool and he understood I'm a Christian and this is why I'm voting.
And I had not thought a whole lot about like why some of my ways of thinking had shifted.
You did a book with Chuck Coulson called How and How Shall We Live.
And that was, it was a really comprehensive, big book.
And you went into everything from creationism to abortion and you really tied it all together.
And I assume that's what you're talking about, cultural, like the ideas that permeate our culture.
Why do we believe them?
Why do we think this way?
And that was a book, one of the books in my life I read like two times all the way through.
And then I taught some other guys out of it because selfishly, I wanted to learn it more.
And so when you teach something, you learn it better.
So thank you for that book.
I really.
Thank you.
Yes.
And that book was, it is comprehensive.
And we kind of took the, we couldn't figure out how to structure it at first.
And then, and my husband kept saying, well, structure it by creation, fall, redemption.
Because that's kind of the structural form of a Christian worldview, right?
How things were created, what was their original purpose, how have they been distorted by the fall and sin.
And then how can we, you know, cooperate with God in redemption, in bringing them back to their original purpose.
So that's what made it so comprehensive is we then we took my husband's advice and we organized it by creation, fall, redemption.
Well, we want to get into, you have your new book is called Love Thy Body, Answering Hard Questions About Life and Sexuality.
And this topic of transgenderism, gay marriage, I think a lot of us just try to just steer clear of it nowadays.
We're just scared to talk about it.
And you've boldly written a book on it.
So I would love to just start diving into this whole topic and see if we can figure anything out on how to approach it as Christians, because I think it's something we want to talk about.
Like, for instance, I'm a parent.
I have a 13-year-old daughter.
And one of the things that I've noticed happening that never happened when I was a kid, it's way more normal for kids to, like within friendship groups, to like get crushes on each other, even though they're the same sex.
It's becoming more, it's like a, you know, in her own friend circles, it's happening with girls.
And the girls don't know what that, you know, it's just, it's creating all this confusion.
There's all this confusion.
And I don't even know how to approach that as their parent.
So I don't know if that's a good leaping off point, but that's a personal anecdote.
It is, it is.
And I too know a young girl.
She's a relative of mine.
At age 11, she had a classmate ask her to be her girlfriend.
And so it's true our young people are being exposed to this at younger and younger ages.
So what I do in Love Lay Body is I show how to, where is the secular view coming from?
There are more and more Christian books on these subjects, but they kind of limit themselves part to, okay, what does the Bible say?
Well, that's great, but it doesn't help us talk to non-Christians.
And it doesn't help our young people know how to talk to their non-Christian friends.
So in Love Lay Body, what I do is I first unpack what it is, what is the underlying worldview that's driving the secular ethic.
And interestingly enough, the underlying worldview is a separation between the body and the person.
In fact, maybe we could start with abortion because it's actually easier to see there.
In abortion, it's actually called personhood theory.
And what it means is the fetus can be human, biologically human at one point, but not a person until sometime later.
I don't know if you realize this, but professional ethicists today agree that life begins at conception.
There's no major bioethicist today who denies that life begins at conception.
The evidence from science, from genetics and DNA is just too strong to deny it.
So how do they get around that and support abortion?
Well, what they say is, okay, the fetus is human, but being human is not enough to qualify for legal protection.
The fetus has to earn the right to life by becoming a person, defined in terms of mental abilities, a certain level of self-awareness, cognitive functioning, and so on.
But notice the implication.
If you can be human at one point, but not a person until sometime later, then these are two different things.
And so the secular ethic rests on a division, dividing up the human being into these two parts, that you can be biologically human, but not a person with legal standing, with moral status, until sometime later.
In fact, it's a very low view of what it means to be human, because if being human is not enough to qualify for human rights, what does it mean to be human?
Well, here they're taking their idea of being human from a secular, materialist, evolutionary point of view, where they say, well, a human, biologically speaking, is really just a disposable piece of matter, right?
The fetus can be killed for any reason or no reason.
It can be used in research and experiments.
It can be tinkered with genetically.
It can be picked through for sellable body parts, as Planned Parenthood does.
And then it can be tossed out with the other medical waste.
And that's exactly how it's described in medical articles, medical journals.
They talk about it as medical waste.
So this is called personhood theory.
And notice that they have a very dehumanizing view of what it means to be a person.
It's not only a very divided view, but also it denigrates who we are as human beings.
All right.
It reminds me of the weird divide that going from a person, oh, yeah, human, but then there's also person.
It reminds me of with, yeah, there's sex, but there's also gender.
They've created like a second term.
They're like, yeah, I'll grant you that, that it's a human, which that's always been the argument.
Like, oh, there's tons of books on abortion arguments that tell you how to prove that a fetus is a human being.
And it's pretty much impossible to deny it.
So they've created this new term.
Yes, exactly.
And that's where pro-life arguments have fallen short.
Because still today, most of the time, we're arguing that the fetus is human.
And we don't realize secular bioasis have gone past that now.
Now the question is personhood.
And you're right.
The same thing that applies to gender, you know, who I am biologically versus what my gender identity is.
And that's easiest to see in the transgender movement because transgender activists argue explicitly that your body, your biological sex, has nothing to do with your identity.
In fact, there's a BBC documentary on the subject, and it says, at the heart of the debate is the idea that your mind can be at war with your body, at war with your body.
And of course, in that war, it's the mind that wins.
And that's why kindergarten, you know, kids down to kindergarten today are being taught that their body tells them nothing about who they are.
It's not part of their authentic self.
To which we should say, why accept such an extreme devaluation of the body?
As Christians, we have a high view of the body as God's handiwork.
And today, for a long time, people thought, well, Christians are otherworldly.
They don't think this world has much value.
Well, today, it's very clear that Christians have a much higher view of this world, that we think biology, biological sex, your body, these are part of God's creation, and they are intrinsically good.
And it's interesting to me that even secular people are starting to recognize this.
I read an interview with a 14-year-old girl who had lived as a trans boy for three years from age 11 and then had reclaimed her identity as a girl.
You talk about this happening at younger ages.
And what is fascinating is that she said the turning point came when I realized, and this is an exact quote, it's not conversion therapy to learn to love your body.
So the interview came out after my book, but it would have been a great quote for a book titled Love Thy Body.
It's fascinating that even secular people are starting to say that the trans movement is driven by body hatred, by hatred of your body.
So even secular people are starting to recognize that that's at the core of the trans movement.
Yeah, it's interesting because for so many years it was like, learn to love yourself, learn to love who you are.
And then it's like, learn to love who you are, but get this expensive surgery to become this other mythical person that you're supposed to be.
Yeah, mutilate yourself.
Right.
And you started out with an example from homosexuality when you said, you know, young girls, young girls are starting to ask each other, you know, will you be my girlfriend?
It's a little bit trickier to see there because they're not actually mutilating their bodies.
But it's the same worldview.
Even my homosexual friends will agree that on the level of biology, physiology, anatomy, chromosomes, males and females are counterparts to one another.
That's how the human sexual and reproductive system is designed.
To embrace a same-sex identity then is implicitly to contradict that design.
It's to say, well, why should my body inform my identity?
Why should my biological sex as male or female have any say in my moral choices?
And what we have to help people realize is this is a profoundly disrespectful view of the body.
And by pitting the mind against the body, it leads to fragmentation and to inner self-alienation.
And again, our message should be as Christians, you know, we're kind of known for having a negative message, right?
It's wrong.
Don't do it.
It's a sin.
And there's something wrong with you if you do it.
No, our message should be, why are you accepting such a demeaning view of your own body, of your own biological identity?
And what we should be helping people to recognize is that a Christian ethic is holistic.
It's saying our mind and emotions are meant to be in tune with our body.
It's saying we should respect our biological identity.
We should be taking our morality, our moral cues from who we are biologically.
And when we do, we will, instead of self-alienation, we will experience self-integration.
We will be happier and healthier.
Yeah.
I mean, Kyle, I feel like I keep taking Kyle's chance to talk.
This is like, I'm trying to think who my idol would be.
You know, and it's like if I was interviewing someone and you would just sit there and let you go ahead.
It's not my idol.
No, no, no.
Sorry.
Sorry, that was.
Yeah, that wasn't a good metaphor.
But no, it's interesting to me that so much of this war is waged on the linguistic battlefield.
Right.
You know, and I wonder why that is.
But, you know, it's like people have this knowledge that they have to dehumanize before they can move on to the second stage of what they're trying to accomplish.
And you see this with genocide, where the people that you want to commit genocide against, you can't say, oh, we're going to kill a bunch of people.
It has to become a number.
It has to become something other.
You have to dehumanize and marginalize.
And we see that with abortion and we see that with genocide.
It's interesting to me, though.
I guess I don't really have a question other than just to say that I think that's an interesting observation, and that's where it starts, is language.
Well, and it's deeper than language, too.
I mean, it is the concepts as well.
Like we've been talking about how transgenderism, homosexuality, abortion all rest on a denigration of who we are biologically, you know, as the human, being a human being person or our body versus our gender.
And so the question then is, why does the secular ethic have such a low view of the body?
And the answer is, your view of the body depends on your view of nature because our bodies are part of nature.
And so the liberal secular ethic derives from the theory that nature is a product of mindless, purposeless forces.
And therefore, the body has no intrinsic purpose that we're morally obligated to respect.
And the mind is free to use it any way it wants.
So that's the logic behind it.
If our bodies are the product of mindless material forces, then there's nothing there that we need to respect.
And the mind is free to invent its own definition.
In fact, that is exactly how an outspoken lesbian named Camille Paglia.
Do you guys know Camille Paglia?
Heard her name around.
Right, right.
A lot of Christians hear her name because she's a little bit of an iconoclast.
But that's how she defends homosexuality.
She identifies as a lesbian.
And she basically, the reason people kind of like her is that she's not your typical feminist.
She does not agree that gender is just a social construction.
She says, no, no, no, no.
Nature made us male and female.
Humans are a sexually reproducing species.
But then she asks, and these are her words, she says, why not defy nature?
She says, fate, not God, has given us this flesh.
We have absolute claim to our bodies and may do with them and may do with them as we see fit.
So do you catch the logic there?
If God has not given us, but logical, I mean, if God has not given us this flesh, this body, then why should we be limited by it?
Why not?
We are naturally oriented, you know, male to female, but why be limited to that if God didn't create us and our bodies have no intrinsic purpose or meaning, do with it as we want.
Or the transgender, you know, why should I be limited to the gender identity I was born with?
It's the Christian worldview that says, wait, wait, no, no, wait.
Nature does exhibit a design, a plan, an order, a purpose.
It's evident to observation that living things are designed for a purpose, that eyes were made for seeing, ears were made for hearing, wings were made for flying, and fins were made for swimming.
So, and even the development of the entire organism is driven by an inbuilt plan or blueprint, you know, DNA, the genetic code.
And so, science itself underscores the idea that nature and our bodies have a plan and a purpose.
And what Christians are saying is that when we live in harmony with that purpose, we are going to be happier.
We are going to be more fulfilled.
I tell a lot of stories in Love Thy Body.
It's not just moral arguments.
It's lots and lots of stories.
And one of my favorite was a woman named Jean who lived as a lesbian for several years.
And today she's married to a man.
You have to say that these days.
She's married to a man and has two children.
And in an article she wrote, she said, The turning point came when I finally 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 again, this is the language we should be using instead of just it's wrong, don't do it.
Trusting that I'm a female or a male for a reason, that God has a purpose in creating me this way, and that our call is to honor our bodies, to live in accord with the creator's design.
So the positive language that she's using there helps us to communicate to secular people that Christian ethic is based on a high view of the dignity, value, and significance of the human body.
Yeah, that reminds me of, I like the quote early in your book, I saved here.
I'll just read your own words back to you.
Back to you.
The problem is that, and I like this because it talks about a propensity we all have to pick and choose morals and then use them as rules to kind of use as a cudgel to kind of hit people over the head with.
You say the problem is that many people treat morality as a list of rules.
But in reality, every moral system rests on a worldview.
In every decision we make, we are not just deciding what we want to do.
We are expressing our view of the purpose of human life.
In the words of theologian Stanley Harwas, a moral act cannot be seen as just an isolated act, but involves fundamental options about the nature and significance of life itself.
Some moral acts come out of something.
Well, and you go on.
There's a good section.
You quote Suisse Lewis in a little bit here.
He said, the Christian and the materialist hold different beliefs about the universe.
They can't both be right.
The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn't fit the real universe.
So yeah.
Do you like that quote?
Do you like that quote?
I like it.
I think so, yeah.
But it's also one of the hardest things to convey to people.
I think even Christians get it wrong a lot.
But then even attempting to get into that with somebody who is in this kind of postmodern way of thinking, how do you even start to open that box?
Right.
I get a lot of questions from people saying, you know, how do I talk to my secular friend who's homosexual or trans or whatever.
And it is hard to get people to get beyond just, well, these are my feelings.
I'm just following my feelings.
And we have to help them to see, no, you are implicitly endorsing a worldview, that all of our actions implicitly endorse a worldview.
Let's go back to abortion.
So I was talking to a secular person saying that it implies a very low view of what it means to be human.
And she said, well, I can feel that life has value and still support abortion.
And I said, no, no, look at the built-in logic of the act itself.
If you say abortion is okay, you are implicitly saying at some point, this fetus that is human has no value.
It can be killed for a reason.
It can be killed for no reason.
That's a pretty low view of human life.
No matter what your feelings are, if you think it can be killed with no consequence, with no moral implications, you are saying that it has no value, no dignity, no significance.
And then you say, at some point, and people differ when that point is, at some point it becomes a person.
And after that, it has such high value that you can't kill it without it being murder.
Again, everybody's different on when that point is.
Again, apparently it happens instantly, like day 32.
I don't even know how many, many weeks in, or it could be the moment it's out of the birth code.
What you see from like Planned Parenthood, their messaging is always the mom decides when this is now a human or now a person.
And that's that personhood idea bestowed upon them.
Yeah, it's like this just random declaration, today I have decided this baby is now a human.
No, at some point she loses that privilege, right?
Because once the baby's out, then there's a point where the mother killing it is murder.
Well, even, but even then, that's up for debate.
That's up to you.
Yes, even that is up for debate now because Peter Singer, who's a bioethicist at Princeton University, says even three years of age is a gray area because toddlers don't have a lot of cognitive functioning.
The famous discoverers of the DNA code, the double helix, Crick and Watson, have both said we should allow several days of genetic testing after birth because some genetic problems don't show up until after birth.
And therefore, we should allow parents and doctors to test the child.
And only then does it acquire personhood.
So you have well-known leading bioethicists today who are arguing for basically infanticide that the baby doesn't become a person until after birth.
But the point is the act of abortion itself then has a logic.
It implies that division of the human being into two parts.
You know, as really human, it's okay to kill.
As a person, it has so much value that to kill it would be murder.
So there's an example where you have to help people realize I'm not just following my feelings.
There is a logic to the act itself that implies a worldview.
And that's why I said with homosexuality too, transgenders and both of them.
If it's perfectly okay for me to counter my natural biology, I am implicitly saying my biology is meaningless, purposeless, and is not an intrinsic part of my identity.
Whether I am feeling that or not, I think I'm just feeling my sexual, you know, my sexual attraction.
But that's why we have to help people back up and say, no, it's not just a feeling.
If I choose to embrace a homosexual relationship, I am implicitly saying my body is not important to my identity.
And the postmodernists, they understand this.
Judith Butler is considered sort of the guru of queer theory, the founder of queer theory.
And she says it quite openly.
She says, most people think there's a natural connection between my body, my sexual orientation, my gender identity.
She says, no, we're products of random forces.
So why should we see any natural connection?
So she quite openly says, ignore your biology, ignore your body, ignore your natural orientation, and just go with your feelings.
So essentially, that is what, that is the worldview that is being endorsed.
Let me give you the positive side again, though.
And I'll do it to another story.
This is one of my favorite stories in Love A Body.
It's in the chapter on homosexuality.
And it's a young man named Sean, who identified as homosexual growing up.
And today he is married to a woman and has three children.
And the interesting thing about his story is that he grew up in a quote-unquote gay affirming family and attended a gay affirming church.
So he didn't think there was anything wrong with being gay, morally speaking.
And he so that's that's where you say, well, why in the world would he change then?
He said, I started to realize that I should take my body into account as part of my identity.
Or as he put it, I stopped defining my identity by my sexual feelings.
And I started to regard my physical body as who I was.
He said, I didn't try to change my feelings directly, which rarely works.
But he said, my goal was to acknowledge what I already had.
I had a male body as a gift from God.
And eventually he said, my feelings started to follow suit.
So that's really the worldview question at the core of this debate.
Do we live in a cosmos operating by blind material causes?
Or do we live in a cosmos created by a loving creator, which is therefore intrinsically good?
So that a man like Sean can look at his body and say, this is a good gift from God.
And therefore, I should be taking it into account in framing my sexual identity, my sexual orientation.
And again, you notice the positive language.
This is what I find when I speak in churches and other Christian groups, Christian schools, I'm finding this is the toughest barrier for them to get over.
They're so used to framing the Christian worldview in negative terms.
You know, you're a sinner.
This is wrong.
And that's true, of course.
But it's not the first step out when you're talking to non-Christians.
When you're talking to non-Christians, you have to help to see that the Christian affect is based on this very positive, affirming view of who we are as good products of a good creator.
Right.
That's the hardest thing to convey on this topic, especially when it comes to gay marriage and people who feel that way.
It's a very personal, deep feeling to say anything negative about it.
It comes off mean.
That's why we get called hateful, partly.
But we care about the overall picture of everything and that we see that person as a puzzle piece that's never going to fit into their lone skin, their own life, their own body.
And we don't see how just completely affirming that and saying, oh, yeah, that's great.
You do you.
We don't see that putting them on a good trajectory.
You know, there's another story in Lovely Body that sort of ties in with what you're saying.
It's a young woman named Rebecca who found that she was attracted to the same sex when she went off to college.
And even after she got married to a man, even after she got married to a man, she would have girl crushes.
She was having unwanted same-sex attraction.
And so she finally discussed it with her husband.
And his response was this.
No matter what your feelings are right now, you know that God made you a female.
And therefore, you can be utterly sure, utterly convinced, utterly certain that you will ultimately be more fulfilled by a man.
And of course, he said it goes both ways.
I mean, I'm a man.
And so no matter what my feelings may be, I can be sure that I will be more fulfilled by a woman.
And Rebecca said, well, that makes sense.
That's logical.
And that was a turning point.
You know, when it made sense to her mind, interestingly enough, eventually her feelings followed suit.
And so after about a decade, same-sex attraction, it pretty much left.
Now, we have to realize, you know, it's like any sin.
You're never completely over it.
Right.
For a lot of people.
Speak for yourself.
I am.
A lot of people continue to struggle.
We have to be careful not to overpromise in this life.
In this life, it's likely that we will never be completely free.
Francis Schaefer used to say, this side of heaven, so he put it, this side of heaven, we're likely to never be completely free of sins and weaknesses and emotional dysfunctions.
He said, if you aim, if it's all in this thing, you're likely to end up with nothing.
So he called it substantial healing.
In this life, we should be able to see substantial healing if we have a robust relationship with God.
But substantial healing so that you don't get discouraged if you don't see complete and total healing.
The stories I tell in Loving Body is a mix.
It's a mix of people who've had substantial healing and some homosexuality, for example, and some who haven't, and some who may never in this life completely overcome it.
So that's it's an important point, just because in the past, Christians have tended to oversell the healing that we can get in this life.
And it's left several people discouraged and sometimes even leaving the faith, leaving the Christian faith behind because, quote unquote, it didn't work.
Yeah, and some of that is just you have to recognize that God is going to work differently with each person.
Because, you know, there's people who, you know, alcoholics, they get saved and they never take another drink, you know.
But then, but then a lot of people, it's just sanctification is a slower process.
I'm wondering how you, what, what you feel about within Christianity, there's kind of a debate on Christians who do struggle with same-sex attraction.
And I think this is also a linguistics question because people will say, you know, that you shouldn't identify as a gay Christian or an LGBTQ Christian or, you know, what language should we use to refer to that?
I'm just curious.
I don't know where you land on this, but SSA, you know, same-sex attracted, is that something that a Christian should identify as?
Or something that do we speak of it in terms of struggle?
Or what's a good way, a good compassionate way maybe, to deal with that?
Yeah, I think it's more of a prudential question.
And I know I have friends who will call themselves gay Christian.
And for them, it's a, like you said, a linguistic shortcut.
It's a way of letting people know: look, this is an ongoing attraction that I have.
It's a big part of my life.
And I just want you to know that from the beginning.
And I understand that that's kind of a shortcut sometimes in letting people know who you are.
I tend to think it's not a good idea.
I tend to think it's not a good idea to have an adjective in front of your Christianity.
You know, I'm an American Christian or I'm a white Christian.
I'm a black Christian.
I don't think it's a good idea to do that because it does tend to this.
It does tend, in many cases, the adjectives tend to override the noun.
And there are other Christians, you probably know Christopher Yuan and Losaria Butterfield.
These are people who, what's interesting to me is that people who are most opposed to using the term gay Christian are the ones who are most deeply embedded in the homosexual culture before they converted.
And so they are the most, they're the most eager to be completely free and liberated from that.
The people who use gay Christian, and we'll name names, Wesley Hill, for example, you know, he's well known, and he's well known as a person who says, I'm a gay Christian, and I want to use that term.
But he was never actually active within the homosexual subculture.
He never experienced it.
Christopher Yuan was deeply involved in the homosexual culture.
He would go to gay nightclubs and experience several sexual encounters in a single night, drug-fueled.
He was using drugs.
He was selling drugs.
He knows that subculture from the belly of the beast.
And the same was Losaria Butterfield.
She was teaching gay and lesbian studies at Cornell, Syracuse University, and being the faculty advisor to the gay and lesbian student groups.
These were people who are deeply in the belly of the beast.
And when they get liberated, they want nothing to do with it.
And I tend to take their perspective more seriously because they know what they're talking about.
And so I tend to agree with them.
Yeah, I always found it weird, like, because when I think about even myself, and I know that people that are in like gender studies and things like this might balk at this, but every man, most men have a sexuality that doesn't match being married to one woman and having children.
Like if you asked a man, what is just his sexuality?
Sexuality generally is to go out and have as much sex as he can with however many women he can get his hands on.
Like that's like a, or, you know, and that's why porn is huge.
You know, like men are, men have that.
Most men have that sexuality.
It'd be weird if I said, I am a polyamorous, orgy-inclined.
I'm a porn Christian.
Yeah.
I'm an orgy amorous Christian.
Every words.
I got to invent some words too.
Identities.
You're essentially defining yourself by your sin.
That's how Osario puts it.
Why would you define yourself by your sin?
You know, our goal is to help people recover who God originally created them to be.
That's what Christian ethics is based on.
What Christian ethic is saying is, no, you're not naturally polyamorous.
You know, that's your sin speaking.
You are naturally oriented toward monogamy because that's how God created you.
You are naturally oriented from Genesis 1, right?
That's why a man will leave his mother and cleave to his wife.
So what we're helping people is to get away from identifying themselves by their sin, by their brokenness, by their fallenness, and get back to who God originally created them to be.
Because as you yourself said, you're going to be more in harmony with yourself when you live according to who you really are.
And that's, again, that's the positive message is that we're helping people become who they really are.
We're not asking them to be something they're not.
By the way, let me give you one more story on this.
One of the things that I have found difficult in getting across to people that the Christian message is positive is I've actually had people disagree with me on this.
And there was even a Christian philosopher, who shall go unnamed, who wrote a review of Lovely Body, which was basically positive.
But he said, no, no, Nancy's wrong about that point when she says Christians have a higher view of the material world than the secular person does.
He said, the materialists have a higher view.
And my students have asked me this too.
They said, wait a minute, materialism says matter is all that exists.
So don't they actually have a higher view of the material world?
And that's a misunderstanding.
If the materialist is really saying that the material world, the physical world, is a product of blind, random, purposeless, mindless forces, that's a very low view of matter.
It's saying that matter doesn't have any purpose or value and dignity.
And so it's really the Christian worldview that has a higher view of matter.
Just because you think that matter is all that exists does not mean you have a high view of matter.
It's Christianity that has a high view of matter, the physical world, and our bodies.
Right.
The materialist basically thinks that this universe is kind of like, at best, like a smoothie, like everything just kind of whirled around and ended up this way.
But we see it as artwork.
It's all artwork.
I mean, it's all created with a story and a purpose behind it.
Well, a smoothie could be artwork, depending on.
Yeah, but at best, a smoothie sitting in an art museum.
Taped to the wall.
A banana tape smoothie.
This world is a banana tape to the banana smoothie taped to the wall.
You know, one way that I found that has helped people understand the issue better is the argument from environmentalism.
And you say, whoa, what's the connection?
Hold on.
I was talking to a secular person about transgenderism.
And I said, look, here's the analogy.
What we have learned from the environmental movement is that to avoid pollution and ecological disasters, we need to respect the structure of nature.
When we intervene, we need to work with the natural order, not against it.
To use the phrase from Camille Paglier, when she said, we can do with it as we see fit.
Well, that's not true when it comes to the environment.
And so in the same way, what Christians are saying is that we should respect our own biological nature, that the correspondence between male and female is not some evolutionary accident.
It is part of the original creation that God pronounced very good.
And so when, and by the way, I found both Christians and non-Christians really resonate with that argument.
To my surprise, I didn't make it a major argument in the book.
It's there, but it's not a major argument.
And yet, again and again, I find people saying, oh, that one really clicks, especially on the West Coast.
When people wrote reviews or customer reviews on Amazon, the most common response was something like this.
I picked up your book to learn handy answers to current issues.
But what I discovered is it's transforming me because it's teaching me the dignity and the worth that Christianity gives to the physical realm.
And by the way, what also surprised me is that many people have been using it for things other than the moral issues in the book.
I hear all the time from people who are using it with the kids who have their daughters who have eating disorders.
It started with one of my students, a grad student who had a teenage daughter.
And she said, I'd never told her to value her body.
I never told her that her body was a beautiful part of God's, you know, God's handiwork.
I had never, I've always been, yeah, I was one of those otherworldly Christians who basically treated the body as if it doesn't matter.
I've had people with sexual abuse issues who learn to hate their body read my book.
I've had people with obesity issues who learn to hate their body.
So it's fascinating.
It's turning out that it's much more applicable across the board than I would have ever guessed when I wrote the book.
Yeah, I think you talk about it here on our list here.
But Christians get accused of being too afraid of sex or puritanical about the body.
That's held in very negative regard in our culture.
And it's almost like secular culture is the gatekeeper to really, really enjoying the body because we're too stuffy over here.
How do you respond to that whole thing?
Yeah, that's true.
A lot of people, including Christians, the problem is we have this sacred secular split, which tells us sacred things are good.
So that's God, that's prayer, that's church, that's the spiritual world.
And secular things are just not as important or sometimes even bad, maybe even evil, the source of sin.
And the problem is that we have lost touch.
Many Christians have lost touch with our own heritage.
The early Christian church was born into an ancient Greek and Roman culture that devalued the material world, just like modern secularism does, though for very different reasons.
The early church was facing philosophies like Platonism and Gnosticism.
You know, a lot of the New Testament books are written against Gnosticism.
And what it did is it treated this world as a realm of death, decay, and destruction.
Gnosticism even taught that it was a low-level deity.
They had several levels.
And it was an evil God who created this world because no good God, no self-respecting God would demean himself mucking about with matter.
Yeah, create the tarantula wasp.
What kind of psycho-God creates that?
Well, and matter itself, any matter, not even the, you know, not just the snakes and the spiders.
In fact, Gnosticism called the body the prison house, the soul.
And the goal of salvation was to escape the material world altogether and to reunite with a spiritual realm.
So in this context, Christianity was nothing short of revolutionary because it taught that the material world was created by the supreme deity who was a good God, and therefore it's intrinsically good.
And the fall does not negate that.
The fault does not totally overcome the goodness of creation.
It's like an artistic masterpiece that somebody defaces by making black marks on it.
You can still see the beauty of the original painting shining through.
And in the early church, the greatest scandal, the greatest scandal of Christianity was its claim that that same supreme deity had entered into the realm of matter and had taken on a body.
So the incarnation is the ultimate affirmation of the dignity of the human body.
And what's going to happen at the end of time, God is not going to scrap the material world as if he made a mistake the first time around.
He's going to renew it and restore it and create a new heaven and a new earth.
So from the beginning, the Apostles' Creed has affirmed the resurrection of the body.
We have to help Christians to see that this is an astonishingly high view of the physical world.
I can guarantee you that there's nothing like it in any other religion or philosophy.
This is incredibly unique, and we should be so motivated by its positivism, by the positive view that we just can't hold back telling people about it because it's such good news.
You know, good news does not start only with God saves you from your sins.
Good news starts with God created the heavens and the earth.
Yeah.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
There was a lot more art that had nudity in it.
It's interesting to me, that topic that they were more comfortable with.
It seemed they were more comfortable with it.
You know, you have like the statue of David, you have all these statues that looked at the human body as a masterpiece.
Now, you and I looking at an image of a nude woman would not think, oh yeah, prudence.
But you're also a professor where you're actually dealing with kids that are, you know, like Ethan was saying, his daughter's in the trenches with this stuff.
How do you see Christian youth responding to this kind of message?
Enjoying this hard-hitting interview?
Become a Babylon Bee subscriber to hear the rest of this conversation.
Go to BabylonB.com slash plans for full-length ad-free podcasts.
Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.
Until next time, this is Dave D'Andrea, the voice of the Babylon Bee.