I was reminded of Farrow’s book this week when I read Justice Gorsuch’s opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County and surveyed the shock and outrage surrounding this Supreme Court ruling. Many of us knew in 2017 that Gorsuch was not a religious conservative, whatever his personal politics or judicial philosophy might be. That he has taken the critical theory bait and formulated his judgment in Bostock on the assumption of the stability of the gender binary, yet done so in a manner that will fatally undermine such, should be no real surprise. He’s a lawyer, not a cultural theorist; and he’s an Episcopalian layman, not a Dominican philosopher. Yet many seem to have been caught off-guard by this. It is a reminder that we Christians often tend to think symptomatically about such things.

Every now and then an important and insightful book is published almost without trace. Just as the best movies often do not win the Oscar, so it is with books: The most helpful can be those that few people pay attention to at the time of publication. One such is Theological Negotiations by the Canadian theologian Douglas Farrow. It is a rich volume, with reflections on topics such as nature and grace, justification, the atonement, and transubstantiation. A Roman Catholic, Farrow expounds his faith with clarity and power, and Protestants like myself who dissent from some of his conclusions will still find their own thinking sharpened as a result. And for a bonus, he includes a meditation on the fear of God, from which we could all benefit in this age apparently marked by fear of everything and everyone but God.

I was reminded of Farrow’s book this week when I read Justice Gorsuch’s opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County and surveyed the shock and outrage surrounding this Supreme Court ruling. Many of us knew in 2017 that Gorsuch was not a religious conservative, whatever his personal politics or judicial philosophy might be. That he has taken the critical theory bait and formulated his judgment in Bostock on the assumption of the stability of the gender binary, yet done so in a manner that will fatally undermine such, should be no real surprise. He’s a lawyer, not a cultural theorist; and he’s an Episcopalian layman, not a Dominican philosopher. Yet many seem to have been caught off-guard by this. It is a reminder that we Christians often tend to think symptomatically about such things. Mesmerized by the surface appearance of cultural phenomena in isolation, we consequently fail to see how specific breaks with previous social norms—say, views of morality or gender—are functions of much deeper cultural changes.

It is here that Farrow’s book is so singularly helpful. The essay “Autonomy: Sic transit anima ad infernum” is worth the price of the book all by itself. In it he traces with both remarkable depth and enviable conciseness the rise of the modern self: the autonomous self-creator to whom reality must bend or, better still, for whom reality is merely what works best for the individual concerned. With roots in Rousseau and Nietzsche, this self lies behind Anthony Kennedy’s oft-cited fantasy of selfhood in Casey and lurks in the background of all the subsequent Supreme Court rulings on matters involving sexuality, up to and including Bostock. Indeed, Farrow makes the necessary point:

The autonomous will really has no choice but to attack the body as well as the mind. For the body is the most obvious locus of the given, the most stubborn impediment to the power claimed by the will.

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