We’re facing a growing tide of harmful views about gender and sexuality. Fortunately, the gospel is good news in all situations. Author Nancy Pearcey shares encouraging and deep insights from her recent book Love Thy Body: Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality.

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and today, my conversation partner is Professor Nancy Pearcey, the author of the most recent book, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions About Life and Sexuality, so we thought, since our podcast is Questions That Matter, and her book is about hard questions, this was a perfect connection. Professor Pearcey, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me. And I appreciate your parallel there between the title of my book and the title of the program. That was great.

Coming to Faith from an Agnostic Background

Well, let me tell our listeners just a little bit about you. You have written this book, Love Thy Body, but you've also written several other books: The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, Total Truth. She is a professor and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University. She has been highlighted as one of five top women apologists by Christianity Today magazine, and The Economist has said she's America's preeminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual. And it is as an intellectual that I think you have helped the body of Christ so very, very much. You've helped us think deeply and biblically about really, really difficult issues. I've really benefited from your work, and I know that quite a few people going through our fellows programs have—you've kind of helped us see things in a larger perspective and a larger light. So we're very, very grateful for that. I know that you came to faith coming from an agnostic background, and you were influenced a great deal by Francis Schaeffer, and I just wonder if you can tell our listeners a little bit about that story, about how that took place.

Yeah. That’s an important question because that is why I came up with the Christian worldview perspective that you're talking about, which, like you said, is so broad, kind of gives a whole framework for how we think as Christians. And that is a product of having become a Christian at L’Abri, which is the ministry of Francis Schaeffer in Switzerland. And I would say I was born into a Lutheran family. I say Lutheran as opposed to Christian very intentionally there, because my parents are Scandinavian, and a lot of their Lutheranism seemed to me to be more about ethnicity. But when I was in high school, I started asking my parents, “Why are you a Christian?” And they really didn't understand my questions because their mentality was, “Well, we’re Swedish. What else are you going to be if not Lutheran?” And I even had a chance to ask a Christian college professor, “Why are you a Christian?” And he said, “Works for me.” I thought, “That's it? That's all you've got?” And I had a chance to talk to a seminary professor, a seminary dean in fact, who was also Lutheran. And all he said was, “Don't worry. We all have doubts sometimes.”

So I was about halfway through high school at this point, and I thought, “Well, if Christianity doesn't have any good reasons, then you shouldn't believe it.” I felt it was sort of a matter of intellectual honesty that you shouldn't believe anything that you didn't have good reasons for, whether it's Christianity or anything else. So I very intentionally walked away from my Christian upbringing and started actively searching for a worldview, which sounds a little ambitious for a 16 year old. But I was going to the library at the public high school I attended and pulling books off the philosophy shelf, because I thought, “Where do you find people who even talk about these things? If the adults in my life won't talk to me about it, maybe these dead guys, right? Philosophers are supposed to be handling questions like, what is truth and how do we know it? And is there a purpose to life? And is there a foundation for ethics? Or is it just true for me, true for you?

And I decided fairly quickly that, if there was no God, that the answer to all those questions was no. There isn't a foundation for ethics. There is no purpose for life. We're a product of accidental chemical reactions flying on a rock through space. So I went pretty quickly into moral relativism, skepticism, maybe even nihilism. And it was in that condition that I arrived at L’Abri. I was going to school in Europe because we had lived in Europe when I was a child, and so I had gone back to Europe, and that's why-

Okay.

That’s… Yeah. So how did you end up in Switzerland? That's how. Because I was already going to school in Germany.  People sometimes say, “Well, why would you go to a Christian place if you weren’t a Christian?” Well, the reason I went is that I had some family members who were traveling through, and they stopped at L’Abri and said, “Hey, come down and see us.” So I wasn't going to a Christian-

Oh, great. Okay.

I wasn't going to a Christian place because it was Christian. I was going there to see my family members who were going back to the States, and so I would not have a chance to see them again. And while I was there, it was very evident that I was not a Christian. And they just said, “We have a free bed. Do you want to stay?” That's how L’Abri was run back then. It was very open ended. If they had a free bed, they'd say, “You have questions? You want to stay?” And I have to tell you, I was very impressed by L’Abri, first of all because they did have answers to my questions. They had read the same philosophers that I was reading by this time. They had thought through the questions of moral relativism and skepticism and determinism, and that was one of my isms, too. I thought science showed that we were just complex biochemical machines anyway and had no free will. And the staff at L’Abri had thought through all of these things. That’s the first time I had ever met Christians who had actually thought through these questions and had answers. And not only that, but-

How long were you there altogether? Oh, sorry.

Right. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, not only that, but Schaeffer is very well known for his support for the arts, and I was studying music at the conservatory in Heidelberg, so that impressed me as well.

So the first time I was there, I stayed only a month, and the reason I stayed only a month was that I was afraid I might become a Christian. I was afraid I might because it was so attractive. It was so appealing. I was afraid I might give in before I was truly convinced, and I didn’t want to do that. Christianity had already let me down once.

So I left. I went back to the States. And just strictly on my own, reading apologetics—through L’Abri, I discovered there was such a thing as apologetics. So just through my own reading, I eventually decided I was intellectually convinced it was true. And so, a year and a half later, I went back. I wasn't connected to a church or anything. So once I became a Christian just from reading apologetics, I said, “Okay, where do I find other Christians?” Well, I knew some back at L’Abri. So I went back to L’Abri a year and a half later and stayed for four months. And so that's where I really got grounded in Christian worldview and apologetics. That’s been my life ever since, is trying to help other young people who have questions like I did.

I love it! Boy, this is great. I did not know this story. I mean I'd read some things, that you had come to faith through L’Abri, but how wonderful. Two things stand out there: One is they respected your questions. They didn't just dismiss them. Or they didn't give non answers.  And then to then give really good, thoughtful answers. So it's both. We need to be really careful that we don't just dismiss questions. When people are asking good questions, if in fact they are sincere, we need to respect those. And obviously that played out very, very well for you.

Right. Schaeffer used to say, “We need to give honest answers to honest questions.” And I have to tell you, I teach apologetics courses at HBU, Houston Baptist University, and I get students sometimes who do dismiss non-Christian’s questions, and then they say things like, “Well, it's really just a moral issue,” or, “They're really just rebellious,” or they're really this or really that. And I say, “No. God made everyone in His image with a mind. And even if they do have moral issues, we still have to respect their mind. We still have to respect the questions that they do have.” Often, you have to go through the intellectual questions they have before you can get to the underlying moral or emotional issues, and I had to do that, too. I did have, after growing up in the church, some emotional negative feelings towards the church as well, but I couldn't deal with those until I was first convinced intellectually that it was true. That was first.

Well, there's so much there, and we still need to keep learning from Schaeffer, I think. He was very helpful for me when I read his books as a fairly young believer. And again, there was this dual thing of, “Here are answers,” but there was also this reassurance of, “It's okay to ask these questions. In fact, it's good to ask these questions. And, yes, there are reasons why you are drawn to art and music and beauty. And these are not things that take you away from God. They can. But they should actually be tremendous pointers.” So I'm so very grateful for that. Well, let's turn things just a bit now.

You were really trained to think biblically and worldview about truth and about art and beauty. Your book about Saving Leonardo is taking the same kind of mindset and pointing it toward art and beauty. And now you've written this book because of all of the issues that are being raised today about sexuality, so things like abortion and homosexuality and transgender. And again, you've helped us think biblically and from a worldview. I don't think I need to ask you, “Why did you write this book?” Because I have a feeling these issues, they've just been coming up so quickly and disturbingly. But you say in your book that these issues that may seem kind of unrelated are tremendously related and tied together. You say that abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, they're all kind of woven together under a worldview. Can you help us understand that?

Yes. And I'll tie it back to Schaeffer, too. Schaeffer's main message was that the reason Christians have a difficult time talking to their non-Christian neighbors, and even their own children, is that the concept of truth has changed. Historically, virtually all civilizations have known that there's a natural order and a moral order, moral/spiritual order. And they thought that the two were integrated into a single cosmic whole. And therefore truth would also be integrated into a single, coherent, internally consistent whole. And it was really only in the modern age—with the rise of modern science, many people began to say, “No, no, no. The only real reliable knowledge we have is of the scientific realm, of empirical facts, what can be tested in the laboratory.” Well, in that case, what happens to moral and theological truths? People began to say, “Well, they're not really truths then. They’re just personal preference, personal feelings, expression of your personal experience.” So they're just relativistic and private and personal.

Schaeffer is not the only one who uses metaphor, but he used the metaphor of two stories in a building where what we know scientifically is in the lower story and what we just believe about theology and morality and so on, about the spiritual realm, is in the upper story, where it is no longer even considered a matter of truth. I thought—that was when I was there, when I was at L’Abri—that was one of the most important themes that Schaeffer wrote about. And of course, as a result, the concept of truth has been split apart. That's what the two story metaphor means. What used to be considered a coherent whole has been split apart. And if your concept of truth is split, well, that will affect everything. So I picked up these moral issues, not necessarily expecting to find it there, but I found that, if you read the secular bioethicists, they have split the human being into two parts, which basically fit into the upper story and the lower story. Schaeffer’s division.

So if you read the key bioethicists on abortion, for example, modern bioethicists all acknowledge that the fetus is human. That's really not an issue anymore. It's clear that human life begins with conception. The evidence from DNA and genetics is too strong to deny it. So how then do they get around that to support abortion? They say, “Well, genetically, biologically, physiologically, the fetus is human,” in other words, what we know about the fetus scientifically, in the lower story, “but it doesn't become a person until sometime later.” And personhood is not a scientific fact. Personhood is a matter of how we assign value to the fetus’s life, whether we give it any sort of legal protection, whether we give it any moral status. So in a sense that fits into Schaeffer's upper story, because that's a matter of personal feelings about what we value in terms of the fetus’s life.

So Peter Singer, for example, a bioethicist at Princeton University, has written about this perhaps the most clearly and of course the most influentially. And he basically says that… He uses the language of body-person dualism. As long as the fetus is in early stages, where we can say it's biologically human, it's a body. And then when it jumps into the upper story at some point, some arbitrary point, since it's not objective, at some point we're going to call it a person and give it moral status and legal protection. So he calls it the body-person dualism. See how neatly that fits into what Schaeffer was talking about? That even the way that we treat humans now is in this upper/lower story divide. And what's the problem with that? The most obvious problem is the upper story, the realm of value, is completely separate from anything that we know objectively. And so it's completely arbitrary. Every bioethicist draws the line at a different place. So some will say the fetus becomes human before birth. Some will say no. Some influential bioethicists now say no after birth. And Peter Singer has an essay where he even says three years of age is a gray area, because how much cognitive functioning does a toddler have?

So that's where we are now, where the concept of personhood is completely in the upper story, completely subjective and completely arbitrary, and therefore the law is completely arbitrary. The law basically says whatever the Supreme Court says is a person is a person, with no grounding in biology or anything. It's purely by fiat.

Offering Good News but Delivering Very Deadly Bad News

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As I listen, I think our world… Well, in some ways, this is so very, very similar to the devil's lies to the man and the woman in the garden, and he came across sounding like he had good news. “Did God really say, ‘You shall not surely die?’ So it sounded like, “No, no, no, this is better. You’ll know good and evil.” But in fact, he was offering good news but delivered very, very, very deadly bad news. And I think that our world offers, “Well, you can be free, and you don't have to be strapped down by this child.” You can be free, but then it becomes this terribly evil bad news that scars people for life, and it ends the life of the baby. How does the same thing about truth, worldview then shape people's thinking and living about homosexuality and transgender lifestyle?

Yeah. I’ll start with transgenderism because it's easier to see there. It's very evident in the rhetoric from transgender activists themselves. They themselves say your body has nothing to do with your gender identity. Your biological sex is completely separate from your gender identity. So their own rhetoric is basically saying there's a split between who we are biologically, genetically, chromosomally, and who we are in terms of our internal sense of self. And so the BBC has a documentary on the subject, where they literally said, at the heart of the debate is the idea that your mind can be at war with your body. And in that war, of course, it's the mind that wins. And so kids going to kindergarten today are being taught that their body tells them nothing about who they are, that it's not part of their authentic self. I would say that, as Christians, our response should be, “Why accept such an extreme devaluation of the body?

Christianity teaches that the body is the handiwork of God and has great value and dignity. You talk about good news? That's genuinely good news, that our bodies do have value and dignity. And even some secular people are starting to see that this is the issue. I saw an interview—it was after my book came out. There was an interview with a 14-year-old girl who had lived as a Trans boy for three years, from the age of eleven, and who had reclaimed their identity as a girl at age 14. And she said, “The turning point came when I realized,” and this is a direct quote, “it's not conversion therapy to learn to love your body.” And that would have been a great quote for a book titled Love Thy Body. But this was on a very secular, liberal website. And what it means is that even secular people are beginning to see that the issue in the transgender controversy is the view of the body. In fact, you'll see this sometimes: They'll say transgenderism is “body hatred.” Body hatred. Even secular people are starting to see that that's the issue.

And so we're in a position, as Christians, to be able to say, “Hey, we've always said that the body is the handiwork of God and has great value because it represents the purpose of a loving Creator.” And so, as Christians, we should always have a very high view of the body. Yes, the world is fallen, but that doesn't negate the beauty and dignity that was there. It's like if you deface a beautiful masterpiece, artistic masterpiece, you can still see the beauty shining through, and that's the Christian view of The Fall, is that you can still see the beauty of God's handiwork shining through. And Christians should be out there being the ones who are communicating a very high view of the material world as the creation of a loving Creator.

Well, I love the fact that the title of your book is a very, very positive statement. And you show us many times in the book that we're the ones with the positive statement about the physical body. We're the ones with the positive view. We're the ones with the unified view of what it means to be a whole person. We don't divide up our physical body from our mind or our emotions. No, God created us a unified person. Now sure, there are aspects. When you're treating a broken bone, well, okay, but that Hebrew word nephesh, of soul, it's a very broad, all-encompassing thing about our unified nature. The biblical teaching about the heart. It's the center of our whole being, physical and emotional and intellectual. And so I think that that’s part of what we want to say is… Again, because our world is wanting to tell people, “You can be set free. You can be who you want to be or who you create to be.” And we want to say, “You know, that's really not a good offer. A much better picture, much better offer, is God's view of our body and our personhood as a unified person.”

Yeah. The same thing applies to homosexuality, which you asked about as well. And again, it rests on a low view of the body, rests on a denigration of the body. Even my gay friends will agree with me. They'll go with me this far. No one really denies that, on the level of biology, physiology, anatomy, chromosomes, males and females are counterparts to one another. That is how the human sexual and reproductive system is designed. To embrace a same-sex identity, then, is to contradict that design. It's to implicitly say, “Why should my body inform my identity? Why should my biological sex as male or female have any say in my moral choices?” So what we have to help people to see is this is a profoundly disrespectful view of the body, and it pits the mind against the body, so it leads to internal fragmentation and alienation. And so again our message can be positive. We can be saying to people, “Why accept such a demeaning view of the body?” And, like you said, in my book, Love Thy Body, I argue for a holistic view.

The Christian ethic is incarnational, meaning that our mind and emotions are meant to be in tune with our body. They're meant to align with our body. They meant to be in harmony with who God created us to be. I tell a lot of stories in the book, and one of my favorite ones is in the chapter on homosexuality. And it's a young man named Sean Doherty who grew up in what he called a gay-affirming family and attended a gay-affirming church. And he was exclusively attracted to other men, but he thought that was perfectly okay, so he wasn't driven by shame or guilt. I should say today he's married to a woman and has three children. By the way, he's also a Christian ethics professor in London.

So what changed for him? He says, “I decided to stop defining myself by my sexual feelings, and I started regarding my physical body as central to who I was.” He said, “I wasn't trying to change my feelings directly, which rarely works, but what I did is I started to acknowledge what I already had, which was a male body, as a good gift from God, and eventually my feelings started to follow suit.” So this is really the heart of this debate.

Amazing! I love it.

Yes, yes.

… where somebody said, “My homosexual feelings changed when I started to respect my body, when I started to treat it as a good gift from God.”

Amazing.

And what I tell people then, especially non-Christians, is that this is really the question at the heart of this debate: Are we products of blind material forces and can do whatever we want with our bodies? Or are we the product of a loving Creator Who had a purpose for creating us this way and that therefore we're morally obligated to respect that purpose?

What Is Our Identity?

You know, that was a feature of your book that I was really grateful for, of the many stories in there. So you spend a good amount of time explaining things in theory, but then you don't leave them there. It’s, and so here's how this worked out in a person's life. And you're right. I do love that story about Sean, because it’s going from the, “Let me start with the reality of this physical body that I have. And what does that tell me about how I should live?” It does seem to me one of the greatest tragedies of the current very, very pro-homosexual movement… Well and not just homosexual, but all of these, is that the claim that your identity is your gender, that your gender is what makes or gives you an identity. And I think that's a terribly reductionist view of what it means to be a person, what our identity is. It also puts an amazing amount of pressure on gender and sexuality to fulfill all that is wrapped up in identity, and, as Christians, we want to say, “No, our identity is so much bigger. We’re persons created in the image of God, and we look to God for our identity,” and then that works itself out with all sorts of things.

Yeah, I like the word reductive. I think that's a very good word. It's reductive because it reduces identity to one dimension, to use Schaeffer’s upper and lower story again. It’s the upper story. You totally disregard the lower story, who I am biologically. There's a transgender website that actually says, “The phrase biological sex is a hate term-

Yeah, I've heard that.

… and harmful to trans people.” They're trying to completely deny the lower story of who we are biologically and so on. I’m going to give you a quote. This is another one of my favorite quotes from the book Love Thy Body. And you probably know her. There's a well-known public intellectual named Camille Paglia.

Yes, yes.

Yeah. A lot of Christians actually read her stuff because she's kind of an iconoclastic feminist. She does not believe that gender is purely a social construction. She says, “No, no, no, we are male and female. Humans are a sexually reproducing species.” But then you say to her, then… She identifies as a lesbian. In fact, my most recent interview, I heard she's now calling herself transgender. So you ask her, “Well, how is it then that you can be gay or trans?” And here's how she argues it: She says our bodies are part of nature, and nature is a product of mindless, purposeless forces, and therefore the body has no intrinsic purpose that we are morally obligated to respect, and the mind is free to use it any way it wants. And let me give you her exact words: She says, “Nature made us male and female, but why not defy nature? 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, in other words, what she's saying is my mind is separate from my body, kind of like the way I'm separate from a machine, and I can use this machine however I want to, because there's no operating manual. There's nothing that says that I have to use it one way rather than another. And this is really at the heart of this debate. Does nature itself…. The body is part of nature. Does nature itself exhibit any sort of design or plan or order? To which Christians should be saying, “Of course it does.” Of course nature exhibits a purpose. On a very fundamental level, eyes are made for seeing, ears are made for hearing, wings are made for flying, and fins are made for swimming. In fact, the smoking gun, I think, is DNA, that the whole development of the organism is directed by an inbuilt plan or blueprint. So really what Christians are saying is that, if you live in harmony with that purpose, you will be happier and healthier.

Detransitioned?

Right. And that's the good news in this, that this is by design and by a purposeful, personal Designer. And a good and loving Designer.

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Well, you tell a couple of stories, or at least one that I can remember, where you use the term… I'm not sure if I got it exactly right, but someone who identified as transgender and then came back Detransitioned?  Is that the word? Tell us that story.

Yes. Well, there were a couple of them. The one I mentioned already, the girl who said, “I learned to love my body.” That would be the word for what she did. She detransitioned.

Okay.

I tell a story about a young boy who had gender dysphoria from a very young age. I should stop and say there's two kinds of gender dysphoria these days. True gender dysphoria has always been evident from a very young age. Transsexualism is what it used to be called before it was called transgenderism. And it was primarily male, primarily applied to men, and always appeared at a young age. These days, what we're having is, if you look at the charts, there's this huge, sudden steep spike in the number of girls that are claiming a transgender identity. And many of them, it's when they're teenagers, or at least adolescents, and they have never shown any sign of gender dysphoria before. Apparently, for all the parents can tell, they've been totally happy being a girl. And so, because this is so new and it's not the typical pattern, it's being called rapid-onset gender dysphoria.

Oh my!

It's coming out of nowhere.

I’m sorry. It’s not funny.

No. But I do tell the story of a young boy who, while he was crawling, before he was even walking, it was evident that he fit the stereotypes for a little girl much more than a little boy. His babysitter told his mother, “He's too good to be a boy,” by which she meant he's quiet, he's compliant, he's gentle, and all the things that you expect more of a girl. When he was in preschool, when his mother picked him up every day, he was playing with the little girls and not the little boys. And already in elementary school, he was coming to his parents weeping repeatedly and saying, “I think the way girls do. I feel the way girls do. God should have made me a girl.” And by age 14, he was on the internet looking for sex reassignment surgery.

So what did his parents do? First of all, his parents made sure he knew they loved him just the way he was. They did not try to change him. And I think this is important, because often people do try to change these kids. I had a friend when I was in seminary who was a former homosexual, and he said, “When I was little, I loved art and poetry, and my dad was baffled and kept trying to toughen me up by pushing me into more masculine things, like sports.”

So this little boy… By the way, I called him Brandon in the book. Brandon’s parents did not do that. They said, “It's perfectly okay for you to be a gentle, sensitive, relational boy. It does not mean you're a girl. It probably means that God has equipped you for one of the caring professions, like psychologist, counselor, health care worker.” And they showed him the gifts of the Spirit. The gifts of the Spirit are not divided by sex. Teaching and prophecy are not male, as we might expect. And service and mercy are not female. They even took him through… His parents took him through personality tests like the Myers-Briggs personality test, and showed him that, according to Myers-Briggs, the whole spectrum is open to both sexes. You can be very much on the gentle, sensitive side and be a male or a female. And you can be more on the rational, take charge, assertive side and be a female. It’s perfectly possible, and there's nothing wrong with you. His parents’ favorite line was, “It's not you that's wrong. It's the stereotypes that are wrong.”

Yeah. And, boy, does that need to be pronounced and proclaimed all over. These are very, very limiting stereotypes, instead of allowing for the diversity that God creates in people.

Yes. If you look at bell curves of male and female, they very closely overlap. We're far more alike than we are different, men and women. I should say that the end of this story was-

Yes, please.

By late teens, I think, Brandon had decided to embrace his identity as a boy. Here’s how he put it: “I realized that even surgery would not give me what I wanted. It wouldn't make me a girl.” Every cell has a sex. There's a very famous Ted Talk by a cardiologist, and the title is “Every Cell Has a Sex” because every cell of your body is either male or female. It's got the DNA for male or female. Of course, as a cardiologist, her concern was health. Symptoms of an impending heart attack are different in men and women. And doctors were being trained only to see the male symptoms. They were sending women home, and the women were having heart attacks. The Ted Talk is about how we have to have more health care geared towards women. But, well, it's a very popular one. You can go watch it online, watch it on YouTube. But underneath, I started reading the comments, and underneath there were all these comments saying, “She's so transphobic!” And you would say, “What? She never even talked about transgenderism.” But the very fact that she had argued for a gender binary, or really a sexual binary, because she's talking about the biology, the biological binary, that there were men and women, had people saying, “Oh, that's transphobic.” And as I kept reading the comments, finally there was one wise person who said, “Look, she's not transphobic. She's just saying that, when you get sick and the doctors put you on the operating table, they need to know your original biological sex to give you the best quality medical care.”

Well, boy, these stories… You ride an emotional roller coaster because some of the stories are deeply discouraging. And, oh, my goodness, where are we heading? And then you hear stories like Sean and like Brandon and others, and those are the stories that don't get told too often. So I'm really glad you tell them in your book. And we need more and more of those stories for people to hear.

I want to just point out one other thing for our listeners that your book does that I was so thankful for: You have this study guide at the back of the book, and very often people ignore the study guides, I'm sorry to say, but yours are filled with, “Here's how you can answer these questions,” or, “Here are some things you can say.” “When someone says this to you, here’s how you can respond.” So the book is helpful on several different levels, and I was so grateful to see that, because sometimes we finish reading these great books and we're still stuck with, “Okay, but I don't know what I'm going to say.” So you really help us with that. And I was really very grateful for that.

Yeah. When I speak publicly, that's often the question: “But what do we do now?” And I realized, you know what? A lot of what you do is just learn how to speak differently. I like the way you emphasize that. What do I say? And so now I really emphasize how to have a positive message that will be appealing, like the Sean Doherty story. He says, “I learned to accept my body as a good gift from God.” Well, that’s a positive message. It's saying, “My body is good. It's a good gift.”

Another story, by the way, that I tell in the book is about a young woman who lived as a lesbian for many years and then eventually became a Christian, is married now with two children. And 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.” Isn't that beautiful?

It is beautiful.

“I wanted to honor my body by living in accord with the Creator's design.” And so this is the language we need to learn how to speak: “Honor my body.” “Live in accord with the Creator’s design.” “Live in harmony with my biological sex.” “Respect my body that God gave me, who He made me to be.”

One more story, a shorter one, was a woman named Rebecca who lived as a lesbian for about ten years, about a decade. Well, this is important, too. Not everybody has an instantaneous turnaround. Rebecca is an example of a woman who got married and still was having homosexual temptations. It's like anything. You can be tempted long afterwards. And so she was still being tempted. She was still having girl crushes, so to speak, even after she was married. And her husband said to her, “Whatever your feelings are, because God made you female, you can be certain that you will ultimately be more fulfilled by a relationship with a man.” And of course, he said, “It goes both ways. Because I'm a male, I can be absolutely certain that I will be more fulfilled by a woman.” For Rebecca, that made sense. I mean, it was logical. It was an appeal to the mind. And that was the beginning of the turnaround. It took a couple more years, but that was the beginning of the turnaround, when she said, “Well, that makes total sense. If God made me female, I will ultimately be more fulfilled living as a female.” And so, again, it's the positive message, not shame and guilt.

I was talking to a psychologist who is a Christian, but who's kind of gone off the rails on the question of homosexuality. And he was kind of scolding me and saying, “You can't heap more guilt on these people.” And I'm like, “Wait! Look at the message! That's the whole point is I'm giving them the language of honoring their body, respecting their body, honoring the Creator’s design, living in harmony with who God made you to be.” These are all positive language, and we will do a lot if all we do is train ourselves to use that positive language.

Well, I want to keep talking for hours, but I think we need to bring this to a close. But that's a good place to bring it to a close. I kept underlining words you were saying: Honor, respect, love, living in harmony, fulfill. And it all fits under this umbrella of trusting a good and loving God who created us with physical bodies for a purpose. This is such a very important message, or set of messages.

I'm going to give you a chance for a last word, so to speak, but I want to say thank you for doing the difficult work of this kind of research. It's a lot of work, first of all. It’s a lot of emotionally difficult work, and you serve the body of Christ well by giving us data and information and stories to help us take on these very, very difficult challenges. So I'm very, very grateful for that. Any last story or statement you want to make before we sign off, so to speak?

Once in a while, when I speak on these subjects, especially with younger people, college and high school, they'll say, “This would have more impact if we knew you'd been there.” And so I want to say that… You say it was a lot of work writing this. Well, the real work was working with people in my family, people close to me who are themselves struggling with these issues. None of this is just from books. A lot of this is from books. But a lot of the emotional intensity of reaching out to people comes from the fact that a lot of these… You notice that I don't give the real names for most of the people in the book. It's because they're very close to me in some way or another. And I find myself having to reassure audiences that I've been there personally. This isn't just academic. And if somebody asked me, “Why did you write this?” I’d go, “Well, let me tell you about the people in my life.” It's very personal wrestling, and I can't say who they are because they're not my stories, right? But they are people very close to me, and I've walked very closely with a lot of these people struggling with homosexuality and transgenderism or having had abortions. All of these are people that I've known personally.

And so I think that is helpful for the reader, because most readers these days, I'm finding, are not reading it just for academic purposes. They're reading it because their daughter has just announced that she's trans. Or their son has just announced that he's gay. Or their daughter has just had an abortion. A grandson has just come out as trans. It's amazing. Even in my classroom now, almost everybody has a personal relationship with somebody who's struggling with this. Or my students themselves are.

Yes, yes.

I should say.

Right, right.

One boy was in my class for a whole semester and never said anything, and then at the end of the final, I actually went out into the hallway to say goodbye to him because he was walking out of my classroom, and I wouldn't see him again. And that's when he told me, “The reason I took this class is because I've been struggling with homosexuality for the past several years.” I kind of wish I had known at the time. I might have been able to talk to him more. Another student said, “I'm bisexual.” Another student had just gone through a euthanasia crisis, where her whole family decided to pull the plug on her grandmother. And she thought it was wrong, but she was overruled. And so she had this horrendous sense of guilt that she hadn't been able to live by her convictions because she was overruled by her family. So, again and again, this is what we have to keep in mind when we talk about these issues. They are never purely academic. Everybody pretty much these days has a personal relationship with somebody who's struggling with these issues.

Well, you have really helped us a lot, and I'm so very, very grateful for your time on our podcast, and I'm going to really encourage people, please check out Nancy Pearcey's book, Love Thy Body, and her other books as well. Total Truth, Saving Leonardo. There's a great deal of wisdom and very, very practical help in the midst of that. So we hope this podcast, like all of our resources at the C.S. Lewis Institute, are helpful for you as you seek to love the Lord Your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Bye for now.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman.