A young man named Sean was exclusively attracted to other men, but today he’s married and has three kids. What changed? Sean said, “I stopped regarding my sexual desires as who I was and started regarding my body as who I was. Instead of trying to change my feelings, I accepted what I had, namely a male body, as a good gift from God.”

Nancy Pearcey’s new book, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, helps us understand how to respond when a Wisconsin resident born male becomes a high-school prom queen and a Missouri resident born female sues a school district. Pearcey is a professor at Houston Baptist University and the author of Total Truth and other books.

Please take us through the process by which homosexuality and transgenderism became prominent in American culture. Let’s start with an important thing you learned from Francis Schaeffer when you were a student at L’Abri in Switzerland. I learned that the concept of truth has been divided. He illustrated that using the metaphor of two stories in a building. After the rise of modern science, many people concluded that the only valid form of knowledge is science. That’s the lower story: objective facts. Morality and theology were reduced to matters of personal, private, subjective opinion. That’s the upper story, where people say, “That can be true for you but not true for me.” In secular academia, this division is called the fact/value split, and in Total Truth, I showed how it is the main barrier to communicating Christian principles: People don’t even realize you are making objective truth claims. In Love Thy Body, I show how the same split underlies today’s cutting-edge moral issues.

How does that also reflect the secular-sacred split? Tragically, many people have essentially a “Christianized” version of the fact/value split. They treat things like church, Bible study, and prayer as more important (upper story), but don’t know how to bring a holistic Biblical perspective to their jobs, professions, politics, and the rest of life (lower story). One of my grad students said, “I was always taught ‘spirit = good; body = bad.’”

Read More