http://www.equip.org

A collegiate website advises young women on how to have a “happy hook-up.” Get “clear consent and mutual agreement to engage in sexual acts,” the article recommends. Then “the whole hookup experience will be more positive for everyone involved.”¹

Glancing at the author’s bio, I learned that she is a student at a conservative Christian college!

When even Christian young people are buying into the hookup culture, it’s clear that traditional ways of teaching biblical morality are no longer effective. “Just say no” is not enough. Young people don’t need simple rules; they need reasons to make sense of the rules. Which is to say, they need to be taught the worldview rationale for biblical morality. Otherwise it is possible for Christian young people to be sincere in their faith, yet thoroughly secular in their thoughts—and, consequently, in their behavior.

Every system of sexual morality depends on a prior view of nature. In Western society, until the modern age, nature was regarded as God’s handiwork, created for His purposes. To use a technical term, Christianity implies a teleological view of nature—from the Greek telos, which means a thing’s goal, purpose, or ideal state. Because humans are created in God’s image, their goal is to become true reflectors of God’s character. The moral law is simply the road map telling us how to reach that goal, the instruction manual for progressing toward God’s ideal.

That instruction manual is derived primarily, of course, from God’s communication in Scripture. But another source is creation itself. We can read signs in nature that indicate God’s original purpose—traces of God’s image that remain even in a fallen world.

For example, the biological correspondence between male and female is not some evolutionary accident. It is part of the original creation that God pronounced “very good”—morally good. Thus it provides a reference point for morality. Our physical anatomy signals a divine purpose for male and female to form covenants for mutual love and the nurturing of new life. Biblical sexual morality is not arbitrary. It reflects the purpose for which we were created.

By contrast, secular morality rests on a view of nature that rejects teleology, acknowledging only blind, material forces. Historically, the turning point was Charles Darwin. The central elements in his theory—random variations sifted out by the mechanical process of natural selection—were proposed expressly to get rid of the concept of purpose or design in biology. As cultural historian Jacques Barzun writes, the “denial of purpose is Darwin’s distinctive contention.”²

This had profound moral implications. For if nature was not the handiwork of a personal God, then it no longer bore signs of God’s good purposes—which meant it no longer provided a basis for moral truths.

The next step was crucial: because nature did not reveal God’s will, it became a morally neutral realm on which humans may impose their will. There was nothing within nature that humans were morally obligated to respect. It was merely raw material to be manipulated and controlled to serve human needs and preferences.

GETTING OFF THE GROUND FLOOR

How does this history explain the rise of liberal sexual morality? The human body is, of course, part of nature and therefore it too came to be seen as raw material subject to the choices of the autonomous self. In the words of Roger Lundin of Wheaton College, both nature and the body were recast as “essentially amoral mechanisms to be used to whatever private ends we have.”³ In other words, because the human body has no intrinsic purpose, we can use it any way we choose.

But who is this “we”—this choosing, controlling self that uses the body for its own purposes? For all its claim to be modern, liberalism has surprising affinities with the philosophy of Plato in the ancient world. Plato taught a dualism in which the soul uses the body instrumentally to affect the world—like a charioteer driving a chariot, as he put it.

An updated version of dualism stems from René Descartes. Philosopher Daniel Dennett (who himself rejects dualism) explains: “Since Descartes in the seventeenth century we have had a vision of the self as a sort of immaterial ghost that owns and controls a body the way you own and control your car.”⁴ That is, most modern people unconsciously hold a view of the human body as a form of property that can be controlled and manipulated to serve the self’s desires.

What does this dualistic view of the person mean in practice—especially in sexual practice? It has created an expectation that the self is free to use the body any way it chooses, without serious consequences. In short, it has led to the hook-up culture.

“What makes hooking up unique is that its practitioners agree that there will be no commitment, no exclusivity, no feelings,” explains an article in the Washington Post.⁵ By definition, hook-ups are purely physical encounters with no expectation of any personal relationship. Hook-up partners are referred to as “friends with benefits,” but that’s a euphemism because they are not really even friends. The unwritten etiquette is that you never meet to just talk or spend time together, explains a New York Times article. “You just keep it purely sexual, and that way people don’t have mixed expectations, and no one gets hurt.”⁶

Except, of course, that people do get hurt. The same article quotes a teenager named Melissa who was depressed because her hook-up partner had just broken up with her.

In practice, people cannot dualistically separate the self from the body. Rolling Stone magazine interviewed a college student who stated the problem succinctly: people “assume that there are two very distinct elements in a relationship, one emotional and one sexual, and they pretend like there are clean lines between them.”⁷

Do you recognize the language of dualism? Young people have come to believe that sexual relationships can be solely physical, disconnected from the mind and emotions—with “clean lines” between them.

Philosophers often illustrate dualism using the image of two stories in a building. In the lower story is the body, which since Descartes has been regarded as a biochemical machine. In the upper story is the autonomous self—with a “clean line” separating the two.

THE SELF
Mind and emotions

___________________________

 THE BODY
Biochemical machine

George Bernard Shaw recognized the problem in his 1931 play Too True to Be Good. “When men and women pick one another up just for a bit of fun, they find they’ve picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top storey as well as a ground floor,” says one character. “You can’t have the one without the other. They’re always trying to; but it doesn’t work.” Today’s young people are still trying to have one without the other. But it still doesn’t work.

Of course, the fact that it does not work ought to tell us something. It means the hook-up culture rests on an inadequate conception of human nature. People are trying to live out a worldview that does not fit who they really are.

Because humans are created in God’s image, their experience will never quite “fit” a secular view of human nature. In practice, non-Christians will always bump up against some point of contradiction between their secular worldview and their real-life experience. That contradiction provides an opening to make the case that the secular worldview is flawed. It fails to explain human life and experience.

Young people like Melissa are trying to live out a worldview that does not match their true nature—and it is tearing them apart with its pain and heartache.

DISSING THE BODY

The same destructive worldview explains the current acceptance of homosexuality. Even in churches, many young people do not “get” why homosexual activity is morally wrong. The biblical rejection of homosexuality makes more sense when we understand the implicit worldview—which is, once again, a dehumanizing dualism.

Think of it this way: biologically and physiologically, males and females are clearly counterparts to one another. The male sexual and reproductive anatomy is obviously designed for a relationship with a female, and vice versa. Homosexual practice overrides that clear design built into the structure of our bodies.

As a result, it expresses a profound disrespect for our physical anatomy.  Essentially it says that anatomy has no intrinsic purpose but is just a mechanistic system of glands and organs that one can use any way one chooses.

As a result, homosexual practice requires individuals to contradict their own biology. It disconnects a person’s sexual feelings from his or her biological identity as male or female—which exerts a self-alienating and fragmenting effect on the human personality.

Some Christians propose that God creates some people as homosexuals. But if so, says Tim Wilkins of Cross Ministry (himself a former homosexual), then “God has played a cruel joke on them. He has engineered their minds and emotions for attraction to the same-sex and yet created their physiology to be in direct opposition to that attraction.”⁸

And the logic of alienation will not stop there. Already the acceptance of same-sex relationships is leading to a full-blown postmodern conception of sexuality as fluid and changing over time. In Saving Leonardo I quote a psychotherapist addressing the problem faced by individuals who had come out of the closet as homosexual, but were later attracted to heterosexual relationships again. So what am I, they asked.

The psychotherapist’s response was, essentially to not worry; it’s okay to change your sexual identity whenever you wish. In his words, today people “don’t want to fit into any boxes—not gay, straight, lesbian, or bisexual ones.” Instead “they want to be free to change their minds.”⁹

This view of sexuality, the psychotherapist stated, is “a challenge to the old, modernist way of thinking” that you were born with a gender that does not change because it is rooted in our biological identity. Instead we are moving to a postmodern view that gender is something I can choose, independent of biology. The implication is that I might have been straight yesterday, but I can be homosexual today, and maybe bisexual tomorrow. One’s psychosexual identity is said to be in constant flux.

In fact, human nature itself is thought of as a social construction, something we make up as we go along. We can call this view liberalism, employing a definition by the self-described liberal philosopher Peter Berkowitz: “Each generation of liberal thinkers” focuses on “dimensions of life previously regarded as fixed by nature,” then seeks to show that in reality they are “subject to human will and remaking.”¹⁰

In other words, previous generations thought there was a fixed, universal human nature that expressed a God-given teleology. For example, they thought heterosexual marriage was rooted in human nature. It was the way humans were created to function.

By contrast, liberalism denies that there is any fixed or universal human nature. Humans are an accidental configuration of matter, a product of blind evolutionary forces. Marriage is a social behavior that evolved because it was adaptive at some point in evolutionary history. It is not intrinsic to human nature, however. In fact, there is no human nature. Therefore we are free to redefine marriage at will. It is open to unlimited “human will and remaking.”

WHICH GENDERS HAVE YOU BEEN?

This rejection of human nature has ever-widening implications. The cutting-edge issue today is transgenderism, a movement that rejects the distinction between male and female itself as a social construction—and an oppressive one at that.

Several universities now offer separate bathrooms, housing, and sports teams for transgender students who do not identify themselves as either male or female. The New York Times reports that some schools no longer require students to check male or female on their health forms. Instead, they are asked to “describe your gender identity history.”¹¹ That is, which genders have you been over the course of your lifetime?

The concept of gender has become fluid, free-floating, completely detached from physical anatomy. This is typically presented as liberating—a way to create your own identity instead of accepting one that has been culturally assigned. A few years ago, California passed a law requiring schools to permit transgender students to use the restroom or locker room of their preferred gender, regardless of their anatomical sex. The new law¹² defined a student’s gender as including “gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.”¹³ Notice the assumption that a person’s sex is “assigned,” as though it were purely arbitrary instead of an anatomical fact.

The law is being used to impose a postmodern concept of the person that denies any intrinsic dignity to the unique biological capabilities inherent in being male or female. Physical anatomy is treated as insignificant, inconsequential, and completely irrelevant to gender identity. An Oakland elementary school teaches young children that “gender is not inherently nor solely connected to one’s physical anatomy.”¹⁴ This is a devastatingly disrespectful view of the physical body.

It also endangers human rights. Rights are based on the recognition that there are certain nonnegotiable givens in human nature, prior to the state, which the state is obligated to respect. But if human nature itself is merely a social construction, something we make up as we go along, including our psychosexual identity, then there is nothing in the individual that is given, which the state is obligated to respect—and thus no basis for inalienable human rights.

If America accepts practices such as same-sex “marriage,” in the process it will absorb the accompanying worldview—the redefinition of human personhood as a purely social construction—which opens the door to unlimited statism, because there is no human nature that an oppressive state could possibly offend.

GOD LIKES MATTER

Ironically, Christians and others who respect the givens of human sexuality are often dismissed as prudes and Puritans because of their “repressive” sexual morality. Yet the biblical worldview actually affirms a much higher view of the body than the secular utilitarian view. It offers the radically positive affirmation that the material world was created by God, that it will ultimately be made whole by God, and that God was actually incarnated (made flesh) in a human body.

In the ancient world, these biblical claims were so astonishing that the Gnostics rejected them. They taught that Jesus was really an avatar who only appeared to have a human body. They could not accept the idea of a Creator who actually likes matter because He created it—a God who affirms our material, biological, sexual nature.

Today, in an unexpected twist of history, it is once again Christianity that is defending a high and holistic view of the human person.

Most churches, sadly, do not communicate a high view of the person. A 2007 Barna survey of adult churchgoers under the age of thirty found that about fifty percent said, “They perceive Christianity to be judgmental, hypocritical, and too political.”

These are not critics from outside the church, but young people sitting in the pews. Moreover, the study found that this generation exhibits “a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations.”

Nowhere is this more true than on hot-button issues such as sexuality. Only by digging beneath the surface and refocusing on the worldview level can we show young people why secular views of sexuality are harmful and alienating. A worldview focus gives us the tools to craft a positive approach that expresses love and concern for people caught in destructive life patterns.

Nancy Pearcey’s latest book is Saving Leonardo, on which this article is based. She is also the author of the bestselling, award-winning Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. Pearcey currently teaches at Rivendell Sanctuary.

NOTES

1. Ally Karsyn, “The Drunken Hookup Double Standard,” Her Campus, April 30, 2011.
2. Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1941), 11.
3. Roger Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 102.
4. Daniel Dennett, “The Origin of Selves,” Cogito 3 (Autumn 1989): 163–73.
5. Kathy Dobie, “Going All the Way,” Washington Post, February 11, 2007.
6. Benoit Denizet-Lewis, “Friends, Friends with Benefits, and the Benefits of the Local Mall,” New York Times Magazine, May 30, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/magazine/friends-friends-with-benefits-and-the-benefits-of-the-local-mall.html.
7. Janet Reitman, “Sex and Scandal at Duke,” Rolling Stone, June 1, 2006.
8. Tim Wilkins, “Cruel Joke or Medical Anomaly?” http://www.crossministry.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=69:cruel-joke-or-medical-anomaly-proponents-of-same-sex-qmarriageq-owe-us-an-nswer&catid=35:published&Itemid=65.
9. Bret Johnson, quoted by Laura Markowitz, “The Postmodern Queer Identity Movement,” Utne Reader, September/October 2000.
10. Peter Berkowitz, “Rediscovering Liberalism,” The Boston Book Review, March 1995.
11. Fred Bernstein, “On Campus, Rethinking Biology 101,” The New York Times, March 7, 2004.
12. http://leginfo.public.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/sen/sb_0751-0800/sb_777_bill_20070409_amended_sen_v98.html.
13. http://www.aroundthecapitol.com/Bills/AB_887/20112012/.
14. Russ Jones, “Parents Defenseless against Gender ‘Diversity Training,’” OneNewsNow, May 26, 2011.

That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which it may be said, “See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come
By those who will come after.

King Solomon’s words in Ecclesiastes 1:9–11 (NKJV) echo through the generations. There is no new thing; we only forget what has come before. For instance, we are born rebels, yet each youthful generation that rebels believes its insurrection is novel. Seeking to set ourselves apart from the majority, to impress the world with our unique style and way of living, is part of our nature. We want to stand apart from the larger group but seek acceptance from a more insular group.

Brett McCracken, a twenty-something journalist, examines these and other tensions in Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide. The self-described Christian hipster surveys his own “cool Christianity” subculture, questions whether these Christians are obsessed with being different for its own sake, and discusses the impact the quest for cool has on our faith.

The History of “Hip.” McCracken defines the hipster as a young, fashionable, and “independent-minded contrarian.” He embarks on a well-researched exploration that tracks the evolution of hip, from as far back as the Enlightenment to America’s founding to the post-World War II hipster era to 1960s hippiedom to the present-day incarnation of “a commitment to total freedom from labels, norms, and imposed constraints of any kind” (p. 52).

The seeds of Christian hipsterdom were sown in the 1960s, when teenage Baby Boomers became a cultural force. As the culture goes, so goes the Christian church. Youth ministries sprang up, but churches still faced an important question. Given the church’s square and oppressive image, and youth’s countercultural rebellion, how was the church to reach them? McCracken is critical of the church, which at times has bowed to the culture to reach young Christians. Cool, as defined by mainstream culture, collided with the church’s values.

From this flowed the unexpected rise of hipster Christianity in the form of the Jesus People and Christian rock music. Next came the cultural co-option of Christianity as a sort of retail brand. The current form of Christian hipsterism mocks and rebels against this branding. Christian hipsters typically don’t like megachurches, altar calls, the 700 Club, contemporary Christian music, or Christian movies. They like breaking taboos and getting tattoos. They tend to drink and may smoke, and they prefer the term Christ follower to Christian. Generally, they like alternative and independent secular music, movies, and books “well respected by their respective artistic communities—Christian or not.” McCracken offers examples of Christian hipster “figureheads,” such as musician Sufjan Stevens and writer Lauren Winner, author of Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity, and he lists top Christian hipster cities and churches.

The “Cool” Conundrum. What distinguishes the Christian hipster from his secular counterpart? The Christian hipster strives to live a more Christlike life, as befitting a believer, and he’s marked by “significantly less” hedonism, less cynicism, less drug use, and less premarital sex. Nevertheless, McCracken concludes that the pursuits of Christianity and cool are irreconcilable.

“Cool” trails, which include individualism, alienation, and rebellion, are problematic for the Christian, because these things tend to cause self-centeredness, loneliness, and elitism. Rebelliousness, for instance, isn’t always a bad thing. Jesus Himself was a rebel. But an attitude of rebelliousness can easily move from breaking oppressive rules to breaking rules that help us grow in grace.

When is Christian coolness authentic? When it sincerely celebrates what’s good about art and culture apart from trendiness, when it’s centered on Christ and not consumption and image, when it’s different from the world, and when it’s willing to say no to sin.

“We easily forget that our Christian beliefs are actually pretty radical, unheard of, life-changing, world-shaking, and elegant,” McCracken writes (240). Why should we fear unpopularity or being out of touch? The Christian shouldn’t concern himself with outward coolness and being different for its own sake. Our faith sets us apart. We should dare to be different as new creations in Christ.

Though Hipster Christianity adopts a tongue-in-cheek tone at times, it’s appropriate to the material. McCracken attempts to generate a serious discussion about a subculture of believers trying to set themselves apart, like generations before and generations to come. The impulse to stand out, however, is satisfied only in Christ.

—La Shawn Barber

 La Shawn Barber is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in such publications as Christianity Today, Today’s Christian Woman, the Washington Post, and the Washington Examiner. Visit her blog at lashawnbarber.com.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of the no. 1 New York Times bestseller, Eat, Pray, Love (a movie version, starring Julia Roberts, was released in August). Her new book, Committed, continues the story of her romance with Felipe,¹ the Brazilian businessman she meets at the end of her year-long healing adventure chronicled in Eat, Pray, Love. Committed tells the story of their developing love relationship and the year they are forced to spend traveling together because of an unexpected development: Felipe, whose business is based primarily in America, cannot come back to the United States except to marry Elizabeth (after the required massive amount of immigration paperwork is in order).

Felipe and Elizabeth had already vowed their love and fidelity to each other and even exchanged rings, but they had also vowed never to marry each other. Both had experienced terrible loss in painful divorces; they are completely convinced that their continued happiness (they plan to spend the rest of their lives together) depends on their not getting married. Enter the Department of Homeland Security, with its stricter post-9/11 rules. Felipe must leave the country immediately. As the Homeland Security officials lead Felipe away, he and Elizabeth whisper to each other, “I love you so much, I will even marry you” (p. 18).

Writing with a gracious sense of self-deprecation and a superb sense of humor, Gilbert tells of the research project she embarks on as she travels with Felipe. For her own sake, she has to study the phenomenon of marriage in its history as an institution, practice in several cultures, and personal application to her situation. In short, she has to make peace with the idea of marriage itself before she can marry Felipe. Committed is the result not only of her research, but also of her years of conversations about marriage, intimacy, sexuality, divorce, fidelity, family, responsibility, and autonomy” with her twenty-seven closest women friends and family (18).

Gilbert is a journalist and great storyteller who has many good and interesting things to say. She weaves into her autobiography historical and sociological insights that demonstrate her ability to read history and cultures sympathetically. Her books are important because they reflect a personal journey out of hurt and fear and into faith and love—a journey that many in our culture are making or want to make. She tells her story so compellingly that one can deeply empathize with her even while, just as deeply, questioning some of her basic assumptions and assertions.

She takes brief snapshots of marriage customs throughout the history of Eastern and Western cultures, stopping to look more closely at early Judeo-Christian concepts of marriage. She stresses the importance in ancient Near Eastern (ANE) culture of the extended family. “Those extended families grew into tribes, and those tribes became kingdoms, and those kingdoms emerged as dynasties, and those dynasties fought each other in savage wars of conquest and genocide” (56). It is worthwhile quoting the rest of her paragraph here, to provide a glimpse of her habit of overgeneralization, as well as her overriding bias against the Old Testament (OT):

The early Hebrews emerged from exactly this system, which is why the Old Testament is such a family-centric, stranger-abhorring, genealogical extravaganza—rife with tales of patriarchs, matriarchs, brothers, sisters, heirs, and other miscellaneous kin. Of course, these Old Testament families were not always healthy or functional (we see brothers murdering brothers, siblings selling each other into slavery, daughters seducing their own fathers, spouses sexually betraying each other), but the driving narrative always concerns the progress and tribulations of the bloodline, and marriage was central to the perpetuation of that story. (56)

Several of her oversimplifications show clearly here. She states, for example, the OT is “stranger-abhorring.” In terms of OT law, the people of Israel were prohibited from marrying people from surrounding nations because foreign gods would come in with the foreigners.² The underlying assumption here is that Israel was to be a nation set apart to Yahweh, not because of any merit of their own, but because Yahweh had chosen to love Abraham and his descendants, and through them to bless all peoples in all nations.³ Both in its understanding of covenant relationship with a unique, moral, covenant-making God and in its emphasis on loving one’s neighbor, the OT is unique among other known ANE literature.

In fact, the deep concern for, and protection of, the poor, including the “stranger” (i.e., alien, foreigner), a central theme in the OT, is not found anywhere else in ANE literature.⁴ Even a cursory reading of the Torah and the Prophets demonstrates how important “Love thy neighbor”—especially the poor and needy stranger, widow, and orphan—is to Yahweh and hence to the continuing well-being of early Israel. Leviticus 19:33–34 is particularly instructive here: “When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am Yahweh your God.”⁵

The OT book of Ruth is the story of King David’s great-great grandmother, Ruth the Moabitess (the Moabites were enemies of Israel). David was the greatest king in Israel’s history in the OT, and Ruth was not his only foreign-born ancestor: Rahab of Jericho also shows up in his bloodline.⁶ Likewise, the consistent portrayal of Israel’s founding patriarchs and other leaders as broken human beings capable of great evil underscores the OT’s realistic viewpoint of the “chosen people” over against the foreign nations. This realistic portrait of Israel’s key players is also unique in the ANE.

Gilbert’s treatment of Jesus, the New Testament, and early Christianity shows further bias and distortion. Immediately following her paragraph quoted above, she continues:

But the New Testament—which is to say, the arrival of Jesus Christ—invalidated all those old family loyalties to a degree that was truly socially revolutionary. Instead of perpetuating the tribal notion of “the chosen people against the world,” Jesus (who was an unmarried man, in marked contrast to the great patriarchal heroes of the Old Testament) taught that we are all chosen people, that we are all brothers and sisters united within one human family. Now, this was an utterly radical idea that could never possibly fly in a traditional tribal system. You cannot embrace a stranger as your brother, after all, unless you are willing to renounce your real biological brother, thus capsizing an ancient code that binds you in sacred obligation to your blood relatives while setting you into auto-opposition to the unclean outsider. But that sort of fierce clan loyalty was exactly what Christianity sought to overturn. As Jesus taught: “If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). (55–56, emphasis in original)

Jesus and the New Testament are indeed socially revolutionary, but not in the way she thinks they are. For the Jewish people of Jesus’ day, God is One, He is not a man, He is their only creator and redeemer and He alone is to be worshiped.⁷ Jesus is evolutionary largely because He teaches that He is the fulfillment of the Scriptures (OT), the heir of King David, the Christ (OT: Messiah), and the Hope of Israel.⁸ He goes even further, declaring Himself to be God’s unique Son, and therefore equal with God.⁹ His earliest followers see Him as the Christ, the Son of God, and the Savior of Israel and of the entire world. Jesus is worthy of worship as God’s only Son and the world’s Savior.¹⁰ Jesus receives worship and His followers have no problem worshiping Him as the God-Man, through whom all things were created and by whom all things hold together.¹¹ Now these sorts of claims may not have raised an eyebrow in other cultures that had a pantheon of deities and a plethora of gurus, but for Israel, these claims were scandalous and worthy of death.

Second, Jesus flatly did not teach, to quote Gilbert again, “that we are all chosen people, that we are all brothers and sisters united within one human family” (56). For Jesus, the “chosen” of God were those the Father had given Him, Jesus’ followers, and all who would believe in Jesus through the message of the Father and Son.¹² Jesus was kind to Gentile people, providing healing and comfort to any who needed Him, and even saying to at least a couple of them that they had faith greater than all of Israel.¹³ While He made it clear that He is the ultimate expression of God’s love, the Savior of the whole world, He also made it clear that His primary focus at that point was Israel.¹⁴ His words about “hating” father and mother, for example, were a common way to underscore the seriousness of being His disciple as one’s first and foremost priority.

It was Saul, the fierce Jewish Pharisee who persecuted the earliest Christians, until he was practically knocked off the road in his encounter with the risen Christ,¹⁵ who became the apostle Paul and more fully developed the NT theme of God’s love for the world. The conflicts that arose because Paul brought so many Gentiles into what were essentially Jewish-Christian congregations helped form some of the earliest and thorniest theological issues for the young church.¹⁶

Paul disproves, in his own thought and person, Gilbert’s assertion that, “you cannot embrace a stranger as your brother, after all, unless you are willing to renounce your real biological brother” (56). This apostle to the Gentiles, who brought the salvation of Jesus Christ to much of the known world, made one of the most radical statements ever made anywhere, when he said, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”¹⁷ But this same man could also say:

I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit—I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons, theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.¹⁸

Jesus’ goal was not to overturn fierce clan loyalty in the way Gilbert asserts. His goal was to show God’s love for the world by dying for our sins and rising from the dead, conquering death and reconciling all of us who believe in Him (Jews and Gentiles) to God.¹⁹

Gilbert also completely misses the point in her analysis of early Christianity. She states, “The early Christian plan was staggeringly idealistic, even downright utopian: Create an exact replica of heaven right here on earth. ‘Renounce marriage and imitate the angels,’ instructed John of Damascus around AD 730” (56). In two sentences, Gilbert skips from New Testament Christianity (circa AD 100) to the eighth-century views of a celibate Roman Catholic monk. An equivalent trick would be to describe early fifteenth-century Roman Catholic beliefs by quoting the viewpoints of a twenty-first-century Reformed Baptist.

From here on, all of Gilbert’s statements about early Christian beliefs are hopelessly anachronistic. She reads back into the New Testament and early Christianity the worldview and beliefs of later medieval Roman Catholicism. She states that the “new Christian paradigm as modeled by Christ’s own example” was to be “celibacy, fellowship, and absolute purity” (56). “Since there would always be more potential Christians to convert, there was no need for anybody to sully himself by generating new babies through vile sexual congress. And if there were no need anymore for babies, then it naturally stood to reason that there was no need anymore for marriage” (57). This is a terrible distortion even of Roman Catholicism. And, of course, she nowhere includes the ancient Eastern church, or even the wide variety of thought represented by the early Western church fathers.

The truth is that while some early church leaders (second-century and later) embraced celibacy as a means of gaining greater closeness to God, and while more than a few were certainly misogynists, these developments arose as Christianity increasingly lost contact with its New Testament and Jewish roots. These distortions grew out of the Western church’s increasing assimilation of Greek and pagan culture and thought, as this new faith became more influential and powerful in the Greco-Roman world.

Nowhere is Gilbert’s misrepresentation of NT Christianity more disturbing than in her treatment of Paul’s writings on marriage. She quotes Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 7:1: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman” (NASB). Then she adds, “Never, ever, under any circumstances, Saint Paul believed, was it good for a man to touch a woman—not even his own wife” (58). This is such a fundamental misrepresentation of Paul that, to be charitable, I must conclude that she has never read 1 Corinthians 7. In fact, Paul says the opposite in the very next sentences, where he instructs married men and women to have sex often and not to deprive each other in this area.

She continues, “In every possible instance, Paul begged Christians to restrain themselves, to contain their carnal yearnings, to live solitary and sexless lives on earth as it is in heaven” (60). Wrong again! Paul’s actual motivation for asking his readers to remain single, only if they could handle it, is because in their circumstances, where Christians were being persecuted, scattered, and killed, it created much more hardship for them if they married. It also allowed them to focus on their devotion to Christ in troubled times. Paul spends as much space in this passage instructing married people how to be loving and peaceful in their marriages (including his enthusiastic views on married sex!) as he does instructing the single people how best to live.

Nowhere in Paul or the New Testament is marriage and married sex regarded as sin. Nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus’ celibacy ever even brought up, much less used as a model for Christians. In fact, the New Testament teaches the opposite. Paul notes that Peter and the other apostles took their wives with them on their missionary journeys—he chose not to, though he also had the right to do so.²⁰ Since Pharisees were required to marry, Paul had most likely been married at some point, and was probably widowed.

Paul has such a high view of marriage that he describes the marriage relationship as providing a metaphor of Jesus’ relationship to the church, the bride of Christ.²¹ This passage gives us a good theological framework in which to understand Jesus’ celibacy. The reason we are not married in heaven is that, collectively, we are the bride of Christ. In other letters, Paul has detailed instructions for families—husbands, wives, and children. He writes much more frequently about marriage than he does about singleness. In one of the most telling statements of his views on marriage, Paul informs Timothy that, in the last days, false teachers will “forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth.”²² For Paul, the forbidding of marriage is the sign of a denial of the Christian faith!

I have to admit, I was astonished at Gilbert’s blatant falsehoods about Paul and disappointed with her treatment of early Judaism and Christianity. At the very least, it is clear she has read little or none of the primary sources of Judaism and Christianity, and she is evidently relying on the reports of a very few biased, apparently angry (at least in this area) historians. I hope that when Gilbert writes more nonfiction, she will do the legitimate work of historical investigation (including consulting the primary sources, as well as a much wider variety of scholars) and leave her biased, largely fictional accounts of early Judaism and Christianity behind. —Carole Hausmann Ryan

Carole Hausmann Ryan, M.Div., is a freelance writer who lives in Montana with her husband, Mark, and their two children, Timothy and Petrea.

NOTES

1. “Felipe” is a fictional name.
2. Exod. 34:15–16; Deut. 7:1–11; Ezra 9–10. Please note: I will be citing a lot of material in both Testaments to address Gilbert’s oversimplifications and false statements about the OT and NT. Issues of critical scholarship (such as source material, dates, and the progressive development of ideas in OT and NT thought) lie outside the scope of this review.
3. Deut. 7:6–8; Gen. 12:1–3; 18:18–19; 22:15–18; 26:1–5.
4. For example, compare the Mosaic Law code with the ancient Code of Hammurabi: “A law such as Ex. xx. 17; Deut. v. 21, ‘thou shalt not covet’ (which the Decalogue, with a perception of the fact that covetousness is the root of all law-breaking, places above all other earthly laws), is not to be found anywhere in the [Hammurabi] code. Hence it follows that the code does not recognize the law of neighborly love, since self-restraint is wholly foreign to it. The institutions of the Torah that protect those who are weak economically, which set bounds to the unlimited growth of wealth, and which care for the poor are peculiar to itself. The law of love to one’s neighbor (Ex. xxiii. 4 et seq.), which takes account of the stranger and even of the enemy, is nowhere discernible in Hammurabi’s code. The law of retaliation, of cold, calculating equity, ‘as thou to me so I to thee’; the revenge of the stronger on the weaker—these form a broad foundation on which the love of one’s neighbor finds no place.” The Jewish Encyclopedia, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=H&artid=182#ixzz0uvge7YtF.
5. New International Version. See also Exod. 12:48–49; 20:10; 22:21, 22; 23:9, 12; Lev. 16:29–31; 19:9, 10; 23:22; 24:22; Num. 9:14; 15:13–16; Deut. 1:16; 5:14; 10:17–19; 24:14–21: 26:12, 13, 19; Pss. 94:4–7; 146:9; Isa. 58; Jer. 7:6; 22:3; Ezek. 22:7, 29; Zech. 7:10; Mal. 3:5, etc..
6. Cf. Matt. 1:5–6. An interesting phenomenon in this “genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1) is the unusual prominence of women.
7. Cf. Exod. 20:1–7; Deut. 6:4; Isa. 40–45.
8. Luke 4:14–30; 9:18–36; 24:13–27; John 5:16–47.
9. John 5:16–47; 6:25–59; 7:33–44; 8:12–59, etc.
10. Even His own family and others, including His enemies at His birth, knew who He was. Cf Matt. 1–3; Luke 1–3. Note that the genealogies in both Matthew and Luke in these sections establish Jesus as the heir of Abraham and King David—He is regarded in the NT as the fulfillment of Yahweh’s promises to both these men. In Jesus’ birth narratives, He is regarded as the Christ, the one who is to save His people and people from all nations from their sins. Cf. Matt. 1:20–21; 2:1–6; Luke 1:30–55, 67–80; 2:25–32, 36–38. John identifies Jesus as the incarnate Word and Paul, as the wisdom of God. Cf. John 1:1–18; 1 Cor. 1:20–31. In Galatians, Jesus is portrayed as the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. Cf. Gal. 3:6–29.
11. John 20:24–31; John 1:1–18; Eph. 1; Phil. 2; Col. 1–2; Heb. 1; Rev. 5, etc.
12. John 17:1–12, 20–23. Read his whole prayer in John 17 to get the context. Jesus’ concern was for all who would believe in Him.
13. Matt. 8:5–13; 15:21–28.
14. John 3:3–21; Matt. 15:24.
15. Cf. Acts 9. After Luke, the Gentile medical doctor who accompanied Paul on several of his missionary journeys, and who wrote Luke and Acts, Paul was the most prolific NT writer.
16. Cf. Acts, Galatians.
17. Gal. 3:26–29 NIV.
18. Rom. 9:1–5 NIV.
19. Eph. 2; 1 Cor. 15; 2 Cor. 5:11–21.
20. See 1 Cor. 9:5.
21. Eph. 5:22–33. Throughout the NT, “church” refers to believers, not to an institution.
22. 1 Tim. 4:1–3 NIV.

 SYNOPSIS

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, is considered a “great hero” of that organization because of her ardent pursuit of women’s health and equality issues, especially as represented by a woman’s right to control her own fertility. From the pro-choice perspective, she was a feminist advocate for underprivileged women who sought to offer them an alternative to abortion by providing a more humane method of escaping their desperate circumstances: birth control. Conversely, prolife advocates point out the negative causes to which her work contributed, namely the abortion, eugenics, and population control movements.

Both of these perspectives are incomplete, however, if they do not address ideas that went far deeper than a superficial benevolence for the plight of poor women. Sanger believed in a humanist progressivism that saw birth control as desirable in an enlightened society because it rendered infanticide invisible. Her worldview was conceived in bizarre and difficult family circumstances and fostered in the associations she formed with some of the most influential Darwinists of the twentieth century. Her extramarital love affair with H. G. Wells served to complete her direct ideological connection with Darwin himself. Sanger embraced social evolution as the driving force in the world, and followed its tenets to their logical conclusions. Though her views were once considered radical, they have become mainstream and gone global. This may be her most enduring legacy.

Among traditional, pro-life Christians, Margaret (Higgins) Sanger’s (1879–1966) name is synonymous with an objectionable brand of sexual libertinism that has led to a free-for-all in birth control methods, unrestricted abortion, and a general indifference toward issues of human sexuality and the value of human life. While each of these connections is valid, they seem to vanish for her more liberal supporters in light of the positive contributions they perceive her to have made for improving women’s health and reproductive rights. The difference in interpretation of her work lies in how we ground our ethics.

Margaret Sanger adhered to a consequentialism in which the outcomes of personal and societal choices trumped all other considerations. There are several philosophical variations of this ethical view but, in general, they each focus on achieving desired results as opposed to the moral status of an act itself or the agent who performs it. Margaret Sanger’s bent toward a consequentialist ethic began early in her life and is evident in every project in which she later became involved.

 AN EXISTENTIAL ETHIC

When she was nineteen years old, Sanger watched her mother suffer and die of tuberculosis. The pain of that experience was forever seared into Sanger’s psyche, and the circumstances leading up to it set the trajectory of her own life mission. Sanger’s mother experienced eighteen pregnancies before her death, only eleven of which went full term (Margaret was the sixth).¹ The stressful life her mother led no doubt weakened her ability to cope with the physical and emotional strain her body endured. In Sanger’s mind, this provided existential justification both for her insistence that no woman should have to endure a life like her mother’s, and for her determination to forge a society that would never tolerate the same kind of conditions for anyone else.

Sanger’s father, Michael Higgins, was a Civil War veteran and “freethinking” socialist who barely eked out a living chiseling headstones for local cemeteries. Described as “a talker, not a doer,” Higgins made up for his financial shortcomings by involving himself in a string of radical causes based on his leftist political convictions. He revered the Socialist Party organizer, Eugene V. Debs, and promoted a utopian brand of Debs’s ideology that included vehement opposition not only toward the economic establishment, but also toward the Catholic Church hierarchy he perceived as its ally.²

Margaret later described her father’s radicalism as “the spring from which [she] drank”³ and often referred to his example as her model for reform. This was not the only impression Sanger’s father made on her, however. In one of her early autobiographical writings, Sanger related an abnormal sensual experience she recalled having with him when she was only nine years old. Margaret, sick with typhoid and barely coherent, awoke to find him pressed against her in bed. She described a sense of falling that accompanied the episode and labeled it as her first “sex awakening.”⁴

Michael Higgins’ extremism was not just political. Several days after the death of her four-year-old brother, Henry, Margaret accompanied her father on a late-night mission to the cemetery where Henry had been buried. There Higgins dug up the boy’s corpse, formed a plaster of Paris form of his head and shoulders, and used the mold to create a bust of Henry for presentation to his wife. Years later, Margaret shared the remorse she felt at finding a lock of human hair in the plaster mold.⁵

The psychological ramifications of these and other experiences are apparent in the attitudes Sanger later displayed toward men. “She would eventually learn to satisfy her own erotic strivings and court the seductions of men, but she would never allow herself to be defined by them. She would fall in love and marry twice, yet never be beholden to these relationships. She would, indeed, maintain a goal of empowering women to live independent, self-fulfilled lives as her social mission.”⁶

 GIRL MEETS WORLD

Sanger’s life experiences did nothing but reinforce her youthful predispositions. After her mother’s death, Sanger returned to work as a nurse in the slums of New York City’s Lower East Side. She was repeatedly disgusted by the health and family conditions she observed there. In 1912, she was particularly struck by the plight of one poor young woman who had pleaded with her to find a way to prevent becoming pregnant, but who later died from a failed, self-induced abortion. Her later compilation of this and other stories into an anthology, Motherhood in Bondage, led Sanger to dedicate herself to “seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were as vast as the skies.” She became determined that “birth control,” a term she personally coined, was the only way to combat what she believed to be a moral issue.⁷

In 1915, Sanger’s five-year-old daughter, Peggy, died of pneumonia. For years afterward she was haunted by dreams of infant girls and believed that she sometimes saw and spoke to Peggy through occult rituals. Peggy’s death was the trigger for Sanger’s journey into Rosicrucianism, a fashionable, cultic spiritualism that explored “the mystical principles underlying individual religious and philosophical beliefs”⁸ through meditative practices intended to connect the individual to the “god within.”⁹

This Gnostic spirituality cultivated the notion that “religion” was an experience-based, privatized system divorced from the “real” world, thereby relegating it to nothing but a personal preference. This, combined with the anti-theism she inherited from her youth, left Sanger with no objective anchor for her moral positions and thus led her to seek secular solutions in her crusade for birth control.

Sanger was one of many who believed that the Darwinian process of continuous change and adaptation was an engine of societal progress that could be directed toward majestic ends by “enlightened” state planners. This “progressive” ideology relied on a combination of faith in the scientific efficiency of Social Darwinism and an adherence to a pragmatic philosophy that championed desirable outcomes over moral reasoning. Progressives believed in a strategic combination of education, organization, and legislation as the means to initiate societal reform. Sanger simply applied progressivism to the project of managing human reproduction.

 MANAGING AN “EVOLVING” SOCIETY

During the second decade of the twentieth century, Sanger fell under the influence of several radical progressive thinkers. These included Emma Goldman, a feminist political anarchist; Havelock Ellis, a renowned British sex psychologist;¹⁰ and author H. G. Wells, one of the most influential progressives of the twentieth century.¹¹ Each of these mentors shared a devotion to Darwinism based on their common belief that “it offered secular answers to the problem of evil and death.”¹² This mindset fit perfectly with Sanger’s inspiration for reform.

In 1920, while still married to her first husband, William Sanger, Margaret began an extramarital affair with H. G. Wells. Wells was a student of Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Darwin’s notorious “bulldog.” Early on Wells’s writing, notoriously exemplified in War of the Worlds, projected the prospect of racial dominance as displayed in the Martians whose technological advancement was the result of their superior intellectual evolution.¹³ Later, as he focused more on the idyllic promises of Social Darwinism, his novels became more utopian. Aldous Huxley’s haunting dystopia, Brave New World, was actually inspired by, and written as a parody of, Wells’s 1923 novel, Men Like Gods. Wells’s ties to the eugenics movement and his expectation that progressives should become “enlightened Nazis” clearly follow from these ideas.¹⁴ Sanger’s connection with Wells and the extent of their mutual influence cannot be overestimated. Wells later described her as “the greatest woman in the world; the movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time in controlling man’s destiny on earth.”¹⁵

 Political Panacea

Sanger first gave her movement credibility with the launch of the magazine Woman Rebel in 1914. This publication promoted an ideology from which Sanger intended to push her progressive agenda. In its first issue she explained that she chose the title “because [she] believed that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary childrearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions,”¹⁶ all of which she yearned to upend.

On the magazine’s masthead, Sanger added the slogan, “No Gods, No Masters,” a phrase she co-opted from the rallying cry of the anarchic socialist labor group, International Workers of the World. The slogan became her personal and political manifesto. Though she later disassociated herself from the socialist movement in favor of an alliance with political progressives, she did so not because her philosophy had changed, but because it became strategically impractical to be connected with radical socialist causes.¹⁷

It should also be noted that this confidence in the competency of human planners to perfect society is a politically bipartisan inclination. Though we tend to equate contemporary progressivism with the left, many have also embraced it from the right. In fact, her staunch antitheism led Sanger to reject a Democratic Party she believed to be too beholden to the Catholic Church.¹⁸ She transferred her personal political alliances to, and thereby first associated the organizations that combined to form Planned Parenthood with, the Republican Party.¹⁹

THE EVOLUTION OF BIRTH CONTROL

Understanding the worldview Sanger embraced and applying it to the existential issues that had motivated her from her youth, the solutions she offered were the logical outgrowths of her ethical philosophy. Sanger melded her compassion for her mother’s circumstances with her father’s mindset toward reform to construct a project she saw as a clear moral imperative for society. This motivation was evident in her reflection on a poor family whose plight may have in some respects reminded her of her own: “Out of this family of eleven children only two are now of any use to society…. The father has become a hopeless drunkard, of whom the mother and children live in terror….All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class, and if morality is to mean anything at all to us, we must regard all the changes which tend toward the uplift and survival of the human race as moral….Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral.”²⁰

Though born of compassion, Sanger’s moral outrage was focused squarely on those who did not share her consequentialist ethic. In this instance, her discontent with the plight of the downtrodden was not directed at the drunkard father, or even toward a neighborly lack of charity for the family; her ire was reserved solely for the notion that any family should have to deal with these kinds of circumstances. It was the consequences Sanger wanted to eliminate. Thus, the distinctiveness of Sanger’s idea of the morality of birth control lay not in the method, but in her perception that society should evolve toward a more enlightened view of its power to eliminate similar family situations.

Sanger saw her updated adaptation of birth control as a reflection of humanity’s historical progress. On her view, primitive women worldwide had practiced infanticide as a way to express their “instinctual” desire for power. Because that desire could not be quelled, improving civilizations instituted the more advanced method of abortion, a practice that Sanger believed would allow “a woman [to fulfill] her ‘highest duty’ by invoking her choice to use ‘the surgeon’s instruments’ rather than sacrificing all that was ‘highest and holiest in her—her aspiration to freedom.’” In its final stage of progress, society would embrace contraception as the most highly evolved form of birth control.²¹

The “evolution” of killing the unborn became a methodological advancement achieved by simply moving the practice farther up the birth canal. Invisibility encouraged acceptability.

A PRO-LIFE INCLINATION?

Some defenders of Sanger have claimed that she should not be held liable for the modern pro-abortion stance of her offspring, Planned Parenthood, because her contraceptive ideas were actually opposed to abortion. To be fair, there is evidence that Sanger saw abortion as being morally repugnant.

When she opened the first birth control clinic in America in 1916, she explained to each group who visited “what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way…because life had not yet begun” (emphasis added).²² She even pronounced that “the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year [were] a disgrace to civilization” (emphasis added).²³

Though Sanger’s opposition to abortion seemed obvious, the context of this last statement reveals the reason she held to it—a detail her defenders often fail to acknowledge. In the very next sentence Sanger wrote, “In plain, everyday language, in an abortion there is always a very serious risk to the health and often to the life of the patient” (emphasis added).²⁴ The patient, of course, is the woman obtaining the abortion.

In light of her philosophical motivations, it is apparent that even though she did seem to harbor moral difficulties with abortion itself, Sanger’s consequentialism led her toward solutions that effectively trumped those moral misgivings. If she mentioned the unborn at all, it was usually in reference to the consequences the baby would face if it happened to survive an abortion attempt. Sanger reserved her real hostility in the abortion debate for those “who would combat abortion and at the same time assail contraceptive measures…[they] may be likened to the person who would fight contagious disease and forbid disinfection” (emphasis added).²⁵

 GOING GLOBAL

Later, Sanger expanded the same thought process she believed would eliminate difficult family circumstances to include society at large. As early as 1918, she had affirmed her belief that birth control’s “general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.”²⁶

A “cleaner” race? The echoes of the societal “enhancement” she saw in Darwinian selective methods reverberated in the ideas that led Sanger eventually to embrace the eugenics and population control movements. Wayne House has offered an excellent synopsis of her involvement in these areas in an earlier issue of the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL.²⁷ To that I can only add the observation that these commitments were nothing but the logical extension of the progressivism to which she devoted her life’s work.

Sanger’s “enlightened” view came through loud and clear in one solution she presented for the improvement of society in 1926, wherein Americans would “set a sensible example to the world by offering a bonus or a yearly pension to all obviously unfit parents who allow themselves to be sterilized by harmless, scientific means. In this way the moron and the diseased would have no posterity to inherit their unhappy condition…Ask the government to first take off the burdens of the insane and feebleminded from your backs. Sterilization for these is the remedy” (emphasis in original).²⁸

Margaret Sanger did not originate the philosophies that led her to become infamous; she simply applied them to reproduction. Today Planned Parenthood boasts that it has taken Sanger’s ideology global. Though it would be difficult to make a direct connection between them and any nation’s specific governmental policies, the same ideas she championed can be seen in the forced abortions that have stemmed from China’s “one-child” policies, in sex-selective abortion policies in China, India, and Korea, and in the plunging birth rates of both Europe and the Far East.

The Results of Sanger’s Reproductive Mindset

It is sadly ironic to compare Sanger’s lofty ideals with their actual results. She began as an advocate for poor women’s “aspiration to freedom” and later extrapolated that outlook to society in general. One hundred years later, Sanger’s outlook is deeply entrenched in the culture, and her consequentialist view of birth control has gone mainstream and global.

Today in the U.S., more than eighty percent of women of childbearing age have utilized “the pill,” while half of all pregnancies remain unplanned.²⁹ This misplaced reliance on the pill’s effectiveness, combined with an uncritical acceptance of Sanger’s consequentialism, has contributed to a widespread propensity to disregard a proper moral foundation for sexual relationships. The unintended consequence is that 40.6 percent of births occur outside of marriage. Among the poorer classes, that ratio is a mind-boggling seventy-two percent, while “the upward trend in non-marital childbearing seen in the United States is matched in most developed countries, with levels at least doubling or tripling and in some cases increasing many multiples between 1980 and the mid-2000s.”³⁰

Sanger defended infanticide in China more than eighty years ago as a simple reversion to an earlier stage in the “evolution” of birth control. She deplored the arrogance of “meddling” Christian missionaries who aimed to stop the Chinese practice of drowning their children because she believed it would only lead to food shortages.³¹ Today the abhorrent sex-selective abortion practices and “one child” policies of India and China purposefully target women and the number of baby girls being eliminated is higher among the more prosperous sectors of those countries.³²

Where Sanger feared unsustainable population growth as the greatest threat to the world’s future, an adherence to her mindset has triggered a demographic emergency brought on by imploding population numbers. In Germany and Britain, the philosophical nurseries for her ideas, reproductive freedom has “evolved” into reproductive suicide. Birth rates on the continent are well below replacement level. As political commentator Mark Steyn has put it, “for a continent of ‘family friendly’ policies, Europe is remarkably short of families.”³³

 SANGER AND THE CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN

History has shown us that Sanger’s “No Gods, No Masters” manifesto is more than a clever slogan. For her philosophical descendants, and for the societies that have effectively embraced Sanger’s consequentialism, the effect has been to disregard the intrinsic value of human life by focusing on eliminating the unpleasant realities that go with living that life. The resultant body count, the cultural apathy toward the significance of that body count, and the absence of the social benefits Sanger envisioned may be her most enduring legacy.

A century after Sanger began her contraceptive crusade, the merits of various birth control methods are still up for debate among fair-minded Christians, but the lines pro-lifers must draw are clear. First, the scientific fact that life begins at conception rules out any abortifacient contraceptive that, by definition, operates after that point. Second, and more insidiously, pro-lifers cannot allow themselves to be coaxed into debating these issues on Margaret Sanger’s terms.

When pro-life Christians attempt to defend their viewpoint with arguments such as, “Abortion may have killed the person who would find the cure for cancer,” they have just stepped directly into the mire of Sanger’s consequentialism. On those shifting grounds, one can effectively rationalize any “choice” by focusing on the consequences of the choice, whether desirable or undesirable, while failing to identify why some choices are simply, and unequivocally, wrong.

Abortion and abortifacient birth control are immoral because they take the lives of unborn human beings without justification. Though she let the power of her personal experience and the false promises of a manmade utopia suppress this obvious truth, it seems that even Margaret Sanger knew that much.

Bob Perry, M.A. (Christian Apologetics) Biola University, is a speaker with the Life Training Institute. Access his Web site and blog on Christian worldview issues at http://truehorizon.org.

NOTES:

1. Carl Jensen, Ph.D., Stories That Changed America (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), 65–76.
2. Ellen Chesler, Women of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 24–25.
3. Ibid., 26.
4. Margaret Sanger, My Fight for Birth Control (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1931), 11–12. Whether the sexual nature of the memory was real or imagined is not clear, but the sensation of falling parallels a Freudian connection with sexual defilement; cf. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams(New York: Avon, 1965), 235. The account of this event is conspicuously absent from her later autobiography.
5. Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938), 30.
6. Chesler, 28–29.
7. Jensen, 67.
8. “About The Rosicrucian Order,” http://www.rosicrucian.org/about/index.html.
9. Chesler, 134–35.
10. Ibid., 81–82, 111–12.
11. Ibid., 186–92.
12. Richard Weikart, “Eugenocide, Darwinism and the Rise of German Eugenics,” Touchstone (July/August 2004): 32.
13. “War of the Worlds,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds#cite_noteparrinder137-34.
14. Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 21.
15. Jensen, 69.
16. Chesler, 98.
17. Ibid., 13.
18. Ibid., 162, 391.
19. Ramesh Ponnuru and Kate O’beirne, “The Coming Tea Party Election,” National Review, February 22, 2010, 36.
20. Margaret Sanger, “Morality and Birth Control,” February 1918, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/documents/speech_morality_and_bc.html.
21. Anne Barbeau Gardiner, “Cruel Crusader,” Touchstone, January/February 2007, 45–46.
22. Sanger, An Autobiography, 217.
23. Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (1920), 48.
24. Ibid.
25. Margaret Sanger, The Case for Birth Control (New York: Modern Art Printing Co., 1917), 194.
26. Margaret Sanger, “Morality and Birth Control,” February 1918, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/documents/speech_morality_and_bc.html.
27. H. Wayne House, “Should Christians Use Birth Control?” Christian Research Journal 18, 3 (1995), http://journal.equip.org/articles/should-christians-use-birth-control-.
28. Margaret Sanger, “The Function of Sterilization,” Birth Control Review, October, 1926, 299.
29. Rita Rubin, “The Pill Turns 50,” USA Today, May 7–9, 2010, 1A–2A.
30. National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief No. 18, May 2009, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unmarry.htm.
31. Gardiner, 45.
32. Jeff Jacoby, “Choosing to Eliminate Unwanted Daughters,” Boston Globe, April 6, 2008,http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/04/06/choosing_to_eliminate_unwanted_daughters/.
33. Mark Steyn, “Live Free or Die,” Imprimis, April 2009, http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2009&month=04.

SYNOPSIS

Some people argue that morality is the result of blind evolutionary forces rather than an omnipotent Creator. This view is flawed because (1) it assumes a morality that transcends evolutionary “morality,” (2) it cannot explain motive and intent, (3) it denies rather than explains morality, and (4) it cannot account for the “oughtness” of morality. Given the existence of morality as well as the nature of moral claims, the existence of God seems to be the best explanation for morality.

Bongo is a chimp. He’s being punished by other members of the chimpanzee band for not sharing his bananas. Bongo is selfish. Bad Bongo. Moral rule: Chimps shouldn’t be selfish.

One of the strongest evidences for the existence of God is man’s unique moral nature. C. S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity that there is a persistent moral law that represents the ethical foundation of all human cultures. This, he says, is evidence for the God who is the author of the moral law.

Not everyone agrees. Scenarios like that of Bongo the chimp have been offered as evidence for rudimentary forms of morality among animals, especially the “higher” primates like chimpanzees. This suggests that morality in humans is not unique and can be explained by the natural process of evolution without appeal to a divine Lawgiver.

This view of morality is one of the conclusions of the new science of evolutionary psychology. Its adherents advance a simple premise: The mind, just like every part of the physical body, is a product of evolution. Everything about human personality — marital relationships, parental love, friendships, dynamics among siblings, social climbing, even office politics — can be explained by the forces of neo-Darwinian evolution.

Even the moral threads that make up the fabric of society are said to be the product of natural selection. Morality can be reduced to chemical relationships in the genes chosen by different evolutionary needs in the physical environment. Love and hate; feelings of guilt and remorse; gratitude and envy; even the virtues of kindness, faithfulness, and self-control can all be explained mechanistically through the cause and effect of chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

One notable example of this challenge to the transcendent nature of morality comes from the book The Moral Animal — Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology , by Robert Wright.

HOW MORALS EVOLVE

In his popular defense of evolution, The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins acknowledges that the biological world looks designed, but he asserts that this appearance is deceiving. The appearance of intelligent order is really the result of the workings of natural selection.

Robert Wright holds the same view regarding man’s psychological features, including morality. The strongest evidence for this analysis seems to be the explanatory power of the evolutionary paradigm when dealing with moral conduct. The argument rests on the nature of natural selection itself: “If within a species there is variation among individuals in their hereditary traits, and some traits are more conducive to survival and reproduction than others, then those traits will (obviously) become more widespread within the population. The result (obviously) is that the species’ aggregate pool of hereditary traits changes.”¹

Wright argues from effect back to cause, asking what is the simplest, most elegant solution adequate to explain the effects we see. To Wright, the evolutionary explanation is “obvious.” In order to survive, animals must adapt to changing conditions. Through the process of natural selection, naturalistic forces “choose” certain behavior patterns that allow the species to continue to exist. We call those patterns “morality.”

 Wired for Morality

An evolutionary explanation for all moral conduct requires that such conduct be genetically determined. Morality rides on the genes, as it were, and one generation passes on favorable morality to the next. Wright sees a genetic connection with a whole range of emotional capabilities. He talks about “genes inclining a male to love his offspring”² and romantic love that was not only invented by evolution, but corrupted by it.³ Consider these comments:

If a woman’s “fidelity gene” (or her “infidelity gene”) shapes her behavior in a way that helps get copies of itself into future generations in large numbers, then that gene will by definition flourish.⁴ (emphasis in original)

Beneath all the thoughts and feelings and temperamental differences that marriage counselors spend their time sensitively assessing are the stratagems of the genes — cold, hard equations composed of simple variables.⁵

Some mothers have a genetic predisposition to love their children, so the story goes, and this genetic predisposition to be loving is favored by natural selection. Consequently, there are more women who are “good” mothers.

What is the evidence, though, that moral virtues are genetic — a random combination of molecules? Is the fundamental difference between a Mother Theresa and an Adolph Hitler their chromosomal makeup? If so, then how could we ever praise Mother Theresa? How could a man like Hitler be truly guilty?

Wright offers no empirical evidence for his thesis. He seems to assume that moral qualities are in the genes because he must; his paradigm will not work otherwise.

 WRIGHT’S DOUBLE STANDARD

In a public relations piece promoting his book, Robert Wright says, “My hope is that people will use the knowledge [in this book] not only to improve their lives — as a source of ‘self-help’ — but as cause to treat other people more decently” (emphasis added).

This statement captures a major flaw in Wright’s analysis. His entire thesis is that chance evolution exhausts what it means to be moral. He sees morality as descriptive, a mere function of the environment selecting patterns of behavior that assist and benefit the growth and survival of the species. Yet he frequently lapses, unconsciously making reference to a morality that seems to transcend nature.

Take this comment as an example: “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse“⁶ (emphases mine). Wright reflects on the moral equipment randomly given to us by nature, and then bemoans our immoral use of it with words like “tragic,” “pathetic,” and “misuse.”

He writes, “Go above and beyond the call of a smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren’t likely to help you in return, and do so when nobody’s watching. This is one way to be a truly moral animal.”⁷

It’s almost as if there are two categories of morality, nature’s morality and a transcendent standard used to judge nature’s morality. But where did this transcendent standard come from? It’s precisely this higher moral law that needs explaining. If transcendent morality judges the “morality” that evolution is responsible for, then it can’t itself be accounted for by evolution.

 Social Darwinism

Like many evolutionists, Wright recoils from social Darwinism. “To say that something is ‘natural’ is not to say that it is good. There is no reason to adopt natural selection’s ‘values’ as our own.”⁸ Just because nature exploits the weak, he argues, it doesn’t mean we are morally obliged to do so. “Natural selection’s indifference to the suffering of the weak is not something we need to emulate. Nor should we care whether murder, robbery, and rape are in some sense ‘natural.’ It is for us to decide how abhorrent we find such things and how hard we want to fight them.”⁹

Wright argues that the reductio ad absurdum argument from social Darwinism is flawed. Though life in an unregulated state of nature is, as 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,”¹⁰ we’re not required to take the “survival of the fittest” as a moral guideline.

Evolutionists may be right when they argue that we’re not compelled to adopt the morality of evolution. The threat of social Darwinism, though, is not that society is required to adopt the law of the jungle, but that it is allowed to do so. The exploitation of the weak by the strong is morally benign according to this view.

What Darwinists cannot do is give us a reason why we ought not simply copy nature and destroy those who are weak, unpleasant, costly, or just plain boring. If all moral options are legitimate, then it is legitimate for the strong to rule the weak. No moral restraints protect the weak, because moral restraints simply do not exist.

 MONKEY MORALITY

Recent studies have attempted to show that animals exhibit rudimentary moral behavior. In one case, a group of chimpanzees “punished” one “selfish” member of their band by withholding food from it. Apparently, the moral rule was this: Chimps shouldn’t be selfish.

 Conduct, Motive, and Intent

There are several problems with this assessment. First of all, drawing conclusions about animal morality simply from external behavior reduces morality to conduct. Why should we accept that morality is exhaustively described by behavior? True morality entails nonbehavioral elements, too, like intent and motive.

One can’t infer actual moral obligations from the mere fact of a chimp’s conduct. One might talk descriptively about a chimp’s behavior, but no conclusion about morality follows from this. One can observe that chimps in community share food, and when they do they survive better. But one can’t conclude from this that Bongo, the chimp, ought to share his bananas, and if he doesn’t, then he’s immoral because he hasn’t contributed to the survival of his community.

Further, in fixing blame, we distinguish between an act done by accident and the very same act done on purpose. The behavior is the same, but the intent is different. We don’t usually blame people for accidents, such as in the case of the boy who didn’t intend to trip the old lady.

We also give attention to the issue of motive. We withhold blame even if the youngster tripped the old lady on purpose if the motive is acceptable: he tripped her to keep her out of a sniper’s line of fire.

Motive and intent can therefore not be determined simply by looking at behavior. In fact, some “good” behavior — giving to the poor, for example — might turn out to be tainted if the motive and intent are wrong, as when a man gives to be thought well of but has no real concern for the recipient. Indeed, it seems one can be immoral without any behavior at all, as when a woman plots an evil deed but never has the opportunity to carry it out.

Morality informs behavior, judging it either good or bad, but it’s not identical to behavior. Morality is something deeper than habitual patterns of physical interaction. Therefore, one can’t draw conclusions about animal morality simply based on what one observes in their conduct.

 Morality: Explained or Denied?

This leads us to the second problem, which runs much deeper. When morality is reduced to patterns of behavior chosen by natural selection for its survival value, then morality is not explained; it’s denied. Wright admits as much: “The conscience doesn’t make us feel bad the way hunger feels bad, or good the way sex feels good. It makes us feel as if we have done something that’s wrong or something that’s right. Guilty or not guilty. It is amazing that a process as amoral and crassly pragmatic as natural selection could design a mental organ that makes us feel as if we’re in touch with higher truth. Truly a shameless ploy”¹¹ (emphasis added).

Evolutionists such as Wright are ultimately forced to admit that what we think is a “higher truth” turns out to be a “shameless ploy,” a description of animal behavior conditioned by the environment for survival. We’ve given that conduct a label, they argue. We call it morality. But there is no real right and wrong .

Does Bongo, the chimp, actually exhibit genuine moral behavior? Does he understand the difference between right and wrong? Can he make principled choices to do what’s right? Is he worthy of blame and punishment for doing wrong? Of course not, Wright says. Bongo merely does in a primitive way what humans do in a more sophisticated way. We respond according to our genetic conditioning, a program “designed” by millions of years of evolution.

The evolutionary approach is not an explanation of morality; it’s a denial of morality. It explains why we think moral truths exist when, in fact, they don’t.

 Why Be a Good Boy Tomorrow?

This observation uncovers the most serious objection to the idea that evolution is adequate to explain morality. There is one question that can never be answered by any evolutionary assessment of ethics. The question is this: Why ought I be moral tomorrow?

One of the distinctives of morality is its “oughtness,” its moral incumbency. Assessments of mere behavior, however, are descriptive only. Since morality is essentially prescriptive (telling what should be the case, as opposed to what is the case) and since all evolutionary assessments of moral behavior are descriptive, then evolution cannot account for the most important thing that needs to be explained: morality’s “oughtness.”

The question that needs to be answered is: “Why shouldn’t the chimp (or a human being, for that matter) be selfish?” The evolutionary answer might be that when we’re selfish, we hurt the group. That answer, though, presumes another moral value: We ought to be concerned about the welfare of the group. Why should that concern us? Answer: If the group doesn’t survive, then the species doesn’t survive. But why should I care about the survival of the species?

Here’s the problem. All of these responses meant to explain morality ultimately depend on some prior moral notion to hold them together. It’s going to be impossible to explain, on an evolutionary view of things, why I should not be selfish, or steal, or rape, or even kill tomorrow without smuggling morality into the answer.

The evolutionary explanation disembowels morality, reducing it to mere descriptions of conduct. The best the Darwinist explanation can do — if it succeeds at all — is explain past behavior. It cannot inform future behavior. The essence of morality, though, is not description, but prescription.

Evolution may be an explanation for the existence of conduct we choose to call moral, but it gives no explanation why I should obey any moral rules in the future. If one countered that we have a moral obligation to evolve, then the game would be up, because if we have moral obligations prior to evolution, then evolution itself can’t be their source.

Evolution does not explain morality. Bongo is not a bad chimp, he’s just a chimp. No moral rules apply to him. Eat the banana, Bongo.

 WHERE DO MORALS COME FROM?

Darwinists opt for an evolutionary explanation for morality without sufficient justification. In order to make their naturalistic explanation work, “morality” must reside in the genes. “Good” — that is, beneficial — tendencies can then be chosen by natural selection. Nature, through the mechanics of genetic chemistry, cultivates behaviors we call morality.

This creates two problems. First, evolution doesn’t explain what it’s meant to explain. It can only account for preprogrammed behavior, which doesn’t qualify as morality. Moral choices, by their nature, are made by free agents — not dictated by internal mechanics.

Second, the Darwinist explanation reduces morality to mere descriptions of behavior. But the morality that evolution needs to account for entails much more than conduct. Minimally, it involves motive and intent as well. Both are nonphysical elements that can’t, even in principle, evolve in a Darwinian sense.

Where do morals come from? Why do they seem to apply only to human beings? Are they the product of chance? What world view makes sense out of morality?

We can answer these questions simply by reflecting on the nature of moral rules. By making observations about the effect — morality — we can then ask what are its characteristics and what might cause it.

 Four Observations about Morality

The first thing we observe about moral rules is that, although they exist, they are not physical and don’t have physical properties. We won’t bump into them in the dark. They don’t extend into space. They have no weight. They have no chemical characteristics. Instead, they are immaterial entities we discover not through the aid of our five senses, but by the process of thought, introspection, and reflection.

This is a profound realization. We have, with a high degree of certainty, stumbled on something real. Yet it’s something that can’t be proven empirically or described in terms of scientific laws. From this we learn that there’s more to the world than just the physical universe. If nonphysical things — like moral rules — truly exist, then materialism as a world view is false.

Many other realities seem to populate this invisible world, such as propositions, numbers, and the laws of logic. Values such as happiness, friendship, and faithfulness exist, too, along with meanings and language. There may even be persons — souls, angels, and other immaterial beings.

It becomes clear that some things really exist that science has no access to, even in principle. Some realities are not governed by scientific laws. Science, therefore, is not the only discipline that gives us true information about the world. It follows, then, that naturalism as a world view is also false.

Our discovery of moral rules forces us to expand our understanding of the nature of reality. It opens our minds to the existence of a host of new entities that populate the world in the invisible realm.

The second thing we observe is that moral rules ar e a kind of communication. They are propositions — intelligent statements conveyed from one mind to another. The propositions take the form of imperatives, or commands. A command only makes sense when there are two minds involved, one giving the command an d one receiving it.

We notice a third fact when we reflect on moral rules. They have a force we can actually feel prior to any behavior. This is called the incumbency of moral rules, the oughtness of morality we considered earlier. It appeals to our will, compelling us to act in a certain way, though we may disregard its force and choose not to obey.

Fourth and finally, we feel a deep discomfort when we violate clear and weighty moral rules; an ethical pain makes us aware that we have done something wrong and deserve punishment. This sense of guilt carries with it not just this uncomfortable awareness, but also the dread of having to answer for our deed. Distraction and denial may temporarily numb the pain, but it never disappears entirely.

 Narrowing Our Options

These four observations provide us with a foundation from which to answer the question, “Where do morals come from?” We need only determine the possible options and then ask which option best accounts for our observations.

Faced with a limited number of options, we must choose something. When the full range of choices is clear, rejection of one means acceptance of another. At this point our discussion becomes personal, because the ultimate answer to our question has serious ramifications for the way we live our lives. We may be tempted to abandon careful thinking when we are forced to confront conclusions that make us uncomfortable.

Our options are limited to three. One: Morality is simply an illusion. Two: Moral rules exist but are mere accidents, the product of chance. Three: Moral rules are not accidents but are the product of divine intelligence. Which option makes most sense given our four observations about morality?

Some argue that morals simply don’t exist. They are nothing but illusions, useful fictions that help us live in harmony. This is the evolutionist’s answer we’ve already found seriously wanting.

Some take the second route. They admit that although objective moral laws must exist, they are just accidents. We discover them as part of the furniture of the universe, so to speak, but they have no explanation, nor do we need one.

This won’t do for a good reason: Moral rules without grounds or justification need not be obeyed. An example may help to illustrate. One evening in the middle of a Scrabble game, one notices the phrase “do not go” formed in the random spray of letter tiles on the table. Is this a command that ought to be obeyed? Of course not. It’s just a random collection of letters.

Commands are communications between two minds. Chance might conceivably create the appearance of a moral rule, but there can be no command if no one is speaking. Since this phrase is accidental, it can be safely ignored.

Even if a person is behind the communication, one could easily ignore the command if it isn’t backed by an appropriate authority. If I stood at an intersection and put my hand up, cars might stop voluntarily, but they’d have no duty to respond. They could ignore me without fear of punishment because I have no authority to direct traffic. But if a police officer replaced me, traffic would come to a halt.

What is the difference between the officer and me? My authority is not grounded. It doesn’t rest on anything solid. Police, in contrast, represent the government, so their authority is justified. They are legitimate representatives of the state, appointed to carry out its will.

It’s clear then that a law has moral force when an appropriate authority, operating within its legitimate jurisdiction, issues it. If people violate such a law, they could be punished. The same is true of moral laws. These laws have force if a proper authority stands behind them. Moral rules that appear by chance, in contrast, have no such grounding.

Our second option fails because it doesn’t explain the three important features we observed about morality. Chance morality fails to be a communication between two minds and therefore cannot be imperative. It doesn’t account for the incumbency of moral rules, nor does it make sense of the guilt and expectation of punishment one feels when those rules are violated.

 One Remaining Answer

Only one answer remains as a possible source of morality. If morality is neither an illusion nor the product of chance, then morals must be the result of an intelligent lawgiver. Universal moral laws that have genuine incumbency require an author whose proper domain is the universe, who has the moral authority to enforce His laws, and ultimately the power to mete out perfect justice.

What best explains the existence of morality? A personal God whose character provides an absolute standard of goodness. An impersonal force won’t do because a moral rule encompasses a proposition and a command; both are features of minds. Ethicist Richard Taylor explains: “A duty is something that is owed. . . . but something can be owed only to some person or persons. There can be no such thing as a duty in isolation. . . . The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain, but their meaning is gone.”¹²

Only one option makes sense of each observation about morality: a personal God who created both the material and the immaterial realms. Moral laws suggest a moral lawgiver, one who communicates His desires through His laws. He expects His imperatives to be obeyed.

The existence of God also explains the incumbency of morality. Ethics are adequately grounded because God is a proper authority for moral rules. The universe is His possession because He created it. He has the right to rule over it; His great power undergirds that right

Ethical pain — true moral guilt — also makes sense with this explanation. Morals are not disembodied principles but personal commands, and so a violation is not just a broken rule but an offense against the person who made the rule. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard pointed out that a person could not have anything on his conscience if God did not exist.

Some attempt to argue that they don’t need God to have morality. They can live a moral life even though they don’t believe in a divine being. But no one denies that an atheist can behave in a way one might call moral. The real question is, “Why ought he?” Trappist monk Thomas Merton put it this way: “In the name of whom or what do you ask me to behave? Why should I go to the inconvenience of denying myself the satisfactions I desire in the name of some standard that exists only in your imagination? Why should I worship the fictions that you have imposed on me in the name of nothing?”¹³

A moral atheist is like someone sitting down to dinner who doesn’t believe in farmers, ranchers, fishermen, or cooks. She believes the food just appears, with no explanation and no sufficient cause. This is silly. Either her meal is an illusion, or someone provided it. In the same way, if morals really exist, as we have argued, then some cause adequate to explain the effect must account for them. God is the most reasonable solution.

 The Final Verdict

Atheistic evolution cannot make sense of morality. Neither can monistic (“all is One”) Eastern religions. If duality is an illusion, as they hold, then the distinction between good and evil is ultimately rendered meaningless. Something like the Judeo-Christian idea of God must be true to account for moral laws adequately.

Morality grounded in God explains our hunger for justice. We desire for a day of final reckoning when all wrongs are made right, when innocent suffering is finally redeemed, and when the guilty are punished and the righteous rewarded.

This also explains our own personal sense of dread. We feel guilty because we are guilty. We know deep down that we have offended a morally perfect Being who has the legitimate authority to punish us. We also know we will have to answer for our own crimes against God.

In the end, we must accept one of two alternatives. Either we live in a universe in which morality is a meaningless concept and thus we are forever condemned to silence regarding any moral issue, or moral rules exist and we’re beholden to a moral God who holds us accountable to his law. There are no other choices. As Francis Schaeffer put it, “These are not probability answers; [these] are the only answers. It is this or nothing.”¹⁴ If one is certainly false, the other is certainly true.¹⁵

Gregory Koukl is president of Stand to Reason, an apologetics organization (www. str.org), and the coauthor with Francis J. Beckwith of Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air (Baker, 1998).

NOTES

1         Robert Wright, The Moral Animal — Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 23.

2         Ibid., 58.

3         Ibid., 59.

4         Ibid., 56.

5         Ibid., 88.

6         Ibid., 13.

7         Ibid., 377.

8         Ibid., 31.

9         Ibid., 102.

10      Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668 , edited with introduction and notes by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 76.

11      Wright, 212.

12      Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 83-84.

13      Quoted in Phillip Yancy, “The Other Great Commission,” Christianity Today, 7 October 1996, 136.

14      Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, from The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer, vol. 1(Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1982), 303.

15      This article is adapted from the forthcoming book, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air, by Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1998). It can be ordered online at www.str.org.

The contents of this article are available for PDF download HERE!

First, to say all views are equally valid sounds tolerant but in reality is a contradiction in terms. If indeed all views are equally valid then the Christian view must be valid. The Christian view, however, holds that not all views are equally valid. Thus, the redefinition of tolerance in our culture is a self-refuting proposition. Moreover, we do not tolerate people with whom we agree; we tolerate people with whom we disagree. If all views were equally valid, there would be no need for tolerance.

Furthermore, today’s redefinition of tolerance leaves no room for objective moral judgments. A modern terrorist could be deemed as virtuous as a Mother Teresa. With no enduring reference point, societal norms are being reduced to mere matters of preference. As such, the moral basis for resolving international disputes and condemning such intuitively evil practices as genocide, oppression of women, and child prostitution is being seriously compromised.

Finally, in light of its philosophically fatal features, Christians must reject today’s tolerance and revive true tolerance. True tolerance entails that, despite our differences, we treat every person we meet with the dignity and respect due them as those created in the image of God. True tolerance does not preclude proclaiming the truth, but it does mandate that we do so with gentleness and with respect (cf. 1 Peter 3:15-16). In a world that is increasingly intolerant of Christianity, Christians must exemplify tolerance without sacrificing truth. Indeed, tolerance when it comes to personal relationships is a virtue, but tolerance when it comes to truth is a travesty.

For further study, see Paul Copan, “True for You, But Not for Me”: Deflating the Slogans That Leave Christians Speechless (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1998); see also Josh McDowell and Bob Hostetler, The New Tolerance (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1998).

Jude 1:22-23:
“Be merciful to those who doubt; snatch others from the fire and save them;
to others show mercy, mixed with fear–hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh.”

SYNOPSIS

Films by Pixar Animation Studios are not only entertaining, but also filled with practical wisdom that reflects classical Christian virtues. While not overtly Christian, Pixar consistently draws from the well of natural law and human experience in order to communicate timeless truths, offering depth that appeals to adults and fascinates children. Part of the task of being a well-rounded Christian apologist and thinker involves relevant and astute cultural engagement with contemporary trends that can serve as touch-points in communicating truth. To this end, Pixar films offer a multitude of opportunities to dialog with those who may have little or no interest in philosophy or theology, but are interested in discussing popular films.

“To infinity and beyond!” is the catch phrase of Toy Story character Buzz Lightyear, but it could also serve as the motto of the company that created him. Pixar Animation Studios has had an unbroken and unprecedented string of box office hits with films such as Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, and Up.¹ The studio’s success has not gone unnoticed. Not only has Pixar won multiple Academy Awards, it also has caught the attention of Disney, which bought Pixar in 2006 for the incredible sum of $7.4 billion in stock. From the perspectives of theology and apologetics, however, why should we care? In the case of Pixar, there are three reasons to take notice. First, consider the scope of Pixar’s influence. The average apologetics or theology textbook reaches thousands of individuals a year, while Pixar’s feature films reach multiple millions both in the theater and in the home. Second, while Christians have, in general, done an excellent job of producing traditional books and other resources that address typical and recurring issues in areas such as theology and apologetics, astute interaction with the various forms of popular culture such as film and television remains minimal by comparison. The call to engage culture intelligently, however, is an important one, as vast numbers of individuals live in the world of pop culture. Third, unlike many morally vacuous Hollywood film productions, Pixar offers unique elements of interest beyond simple entertainment. Specifically, its films offer insights into wisdom and virtue, while also offering an almost countercultural hope rather than the meaningless despair found in many other contemporary films.

CHRISTIANS AND CULTURE:ENTRENCH, EMBRACE, OR ENGAGE?

We all share a common culture, dwell in subcultures, and are surrounded by popular culture, which permeates all culture whether we like it or not.² Since the inception of Christianity, its followers have sought, with varying degrees of success, to remain distinct, or, as Scripture suggests, to be in the world but not of it (John 17:14-18). Although a number of approaches to understanding the relationship between Christians and culture have been posited, three broad trends tend to emerge. First, some entrench themselves in the Christian subculture, separating themselves from anything remotely smacking of pop culture, choosing instead a marked separation. Second, some embrace culture, uncritically celebrating its seeming wonders and vast positive opportunities to spread the Christian message. A third approach is preferable. This option seeks to engage culture thoughtfully, something that is unfortunately lacking in much contemporary Christian interaction with culture and popular culture. While many Christian thinkers commendably continue to engage culture, they often fail to incorporate a robust evaluation of forms of popular culture such as films. To be sure, they are quick to evaluate and critique controversial motion pictures that touch on worldview matters, but seemingly benign films such as those by Pixar are often overlooked. The well-rounded apologist, however, will seek to become involved in pre-evangelism touchpoints wherever they are found. The remainder of this article will look at three topics of interest as found in the Pixar films Toy Story (identity), A Bug’s Life (justice), and Up (love).

TOY STORY: IDENTITY

Identity is not generally considered a virtue, but it is important, particularly in relation to the Christian life. It may be said that knowing our identity precedes behavior that is meaningfully virtuous and, indeed, gives such behavior a foundation. In the 1995 movie Toy Story, one of the main characters, Buzz Lightyear, believes he is a real Space Ranger rather than a toy. Woody, a cowboy doll toy, is bothered by Buzz’s behavior, asking, “You actually think you’re the Buzz Lightyear?” The concept of identity is significant. Who we are shapes what we do, but what we do also shapes who we are. If we lack a healthy understanding of the concept of identity, we will wander through life uncertain about what to do with ourselves. Or, in the case of Buzz Lightyear, the lack of understanding of his identity is really a form of deception. Knowing the truth about who we are and what we were made for is important. Identity for the Christian is first and foremost found in God. This is so because we are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26-27). The image of God in us, the imago dei, is key to understanding our identity and purpose, as well as the restoration of our relationship with God. In the New Testament, Christ is representative of the image of God (2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15), thus providing us with an example of what God’s image means. The image of God encompasses the moral realm, which is why we are moral creatures. If our worldview has a proper foundation in God, then so should our identity. Consequently, our moral choices will reflect this fact. In the case of Buzz Lightyear, it takes an existential shock to awaken him to his true identity. Prior to this shock, Woody tries desperately to convince Buzz of his true identity: “You are a toy! You aren’t the real Buzz Lightyear…you’re an action figure! You are a child’s plaything!” It isn’t until later, however, that Buzz becomes convinced of his true nature after viewing a television commercial for Buzz Lightyear toys. Although Buzz is initially discouraged by the realization of his true identity, Woody encourages him to be what he was made to be-a great toy that can make a child happy. Identity also relates to the meaning of life. As Christians, we have a purpose that is rooted in God and His nature, with Christ as our example to follow. In John 8:14, Jesus offered an example of the power of identity in relation to a life filled with purpose: “I know where I came from and where I am going,” He said. His purpose and identity were perfectly clear to Him and, as a result, His calling fell into place. Given a firm foundation in Christ, identity helps us grow in relation to other virtues such as justice and love.

A BUG’S LIFE: JUSTICE

Pixar’s second feature film, A Bug’s Life (1998), turned its attention to the world of insects, primarily focusing on an oppressed ant colony forced to gather food for a group of grasshopper thugs. While two key themes related to virtue are present in the film-courage and justice-our focus here is on the latter. As one of the so-called cardinal virtues, justice is an important part of Christian ethics and theology, but it is a topic that resonates with everyone. From Plato’s Republic to A Bug’s Life, justice is a recurring theme in human thought. When Heimlich the caterpillar is playing the role of Little John in A Bug’s Life, he menacingly threatens a group of bullying flies with the words, “Justice is my sword and truth shall be my quiver!” The scene is played for laughs, but underlying Heimlich’s words is the thread of justice that is woven throughout the film via the plight of the ants and the grasshoppers. On one level, A Bug’s Life is an enjoyable family film about self-confidence and doing the right thing, but on another level it addresses questions of justice by telling a story filled with injustice, persecution, and oppression bordering on slavery. The deeper point is that the vice of injustice demands the virtue of justice. And so, a hero is born in Flik, a bungling member of the ant colony and budding inventor, who sets out to find warrior bugs to defend the colony against the oppressive grasshoppers. As he sets out on his adventure, Flik calls out, “Here I go. For the colony, and for oppressed ants everywhere!” In our day the outcry for justice remains, though the foundations of its reality are more often than not blurred. Justice points to a moral foundation of right and wrong, but what is its source? Because we are human and made in God’s image, part of the fabric of our being is morality, which includes justice. Like every true virtue, justice derives from God. Biblically speaking, justice is referenced or exemplified in several instances. The Golden Rule, as Christ shared, has justice as its foundation: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 7:12 ESV).

UP: LOVE

In 2009 Pixar released its first 3D feature film, Up, which, at first glance, does not particularly seem like a typical children’s film. The first computer-generated animated film to be nominated in the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Animated Feature Film,³ Up tells the story of a cantankerous elderly man, Carl Fredricksen, who seeks to honor the memory of his late wife, Ellie, by traveling to South America. He does so in quite an unconventional manner, by inflating thousands of helium-filled balloons that carry his home to Paradise Falls. Accidentally along for the ride is a young boy, Russell. Although Up contains a great deal of action and adventure, at its heart it is about love. In addition to telling the story of the love between Carl and Ellie, love is the single most driving and motivating factor that spurs Carl’s adventure. The humorous talking dog, Dug, who is capable of speaking via a special collar, exemplifies a joyous and unpretentious attitude. Upon first meeting Carl and Russell, Dug enthusiastically proclaims, “I have just met you, and I love you!” But far deeper themes of love are present in Up. Love is a theological virtue. In Christian tradition and in biblical exposition, it is a key virtue: “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13 ESV). As such, love is foundational to Christian ethics. Without love it is not an exaggeration to say that Christianity collapses, for without God’s love Christianity cannot exist as it is intended to exist. “God is love,” reads 1 John 4:8 and 16, meaning that God is not only loving, but that love is inherent in His very nature. If we are to grow in character and virtue, love is an essential part of the process. A key reason for Christianity’s profound influence on history is that Christians have repeatedly been moved to benevolent action because of God’s love. We often focus so much on the feelings of love, which are indeed admirable and joyful, but fail to look at love in broader terms. Contemporary pop culture’s understanding of love is often shallow, failing to move beyond the feelings love stirs within us. Imitating our consumer-driven culture, some begin to treat relationships like they treat fads-they come and go, they interest us for a while, then we move on to something else and dispose of them when they are no longer convenient. This approach, however, warps love, cheapening it rather than seeking to understand it more deeply. In an age of consumer-oriented relationships, the heartbreak of divorce, and misunderstandings of the meaning of love, Up is inspiring. Two people, Carl and Ellie, have joined together for a lifetime of love. They are wholeheartedly committed to one another and the only thing that ultimately separates them is death. As powerful as love is in a marriage relationship, it is merely a shadow of God’s love for us. As Paul wrote, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?…No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:35, 37-39 ESV).

ENGAGING CULTURE:”TO INFINITY AND BEYOND!”

This article has only scratched the surface of the depths of moral content in Pixar films. WALL-E, for instance, a story about a quirky robot, has much to say about philosophy of technology, while the superhero-centered tale The Incredibles highlights the virtue of courage, and Ratatouille, about a rat who likes to cook, offers many insights regarding ambition and the Christian call to contribute positively to culture. For those involved in working with youth, Pixar films provide springboards for discussion of a multitude of virtues, while parents can seek to teach children more about Christian virtues by incorporating relevant Pixar-inspired ideas and insights. Pixar films aren’t Christian parables, but they tell stories that have the power to wholly engage us-heart, soul, and mind. The characters and plots need not be overtly Christian in order to instruct us in virtue. Christ, for instance, engaged His listeners by telling parables-stories that contain practical and memorable lessons. We remember the tales of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, not because they present material as might be done in a textbook on moral philosophy, but because they resonate with us as human beings on a level that captures our interest. Pixar films show us stories that vividly come to life and are rooted in human experience and virtue. The fabric of the moral universe contains an understanding of justice, courage, love, and more, and as a result, we resonate with these ideas. Our culture, too, is full of stories. As we live, move, and have our being in God (Acts 17:28), so, too, we live, move, and have our being in culture. By thoughtfully engaging popular culture, our efforts can potentially influence many lives, to infinity and beyond.

Robert Velarde is author of The Wisdom of Pixar: An Animated Look at Virtue (InterVarsity Press), Conversations with C. S. Lewis (InterVarsity Press), The Heart of Narnia (NavPress), and Inside The Screwtape Letters (Baker, forthcoming). He received his M.A. from Southern Evangelical Seminary.

NOTES

1 Pixar has released eleven feature films, including, most recently, Toy Story 3.

2 These basic divisions of culture are articulated in more detail in T. M. Moore, Redeeming Pop Culture: A Kingdom Approach (Phillipsburg, NJ: P and R Publishing, 2003).

3 Up is only the second animated film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, the other film being Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991).

First, in Christian theology the timing and terms of death are the province of God alone (Deuteronomy 32:39). As such, a doctor is never permitted to usurp the prerogative of deity. Hastening death based on subjective judgments concerning one’s quality of life is a direct violation of Scripture (cf. Genesis 9:6; Exodus 20:13). While passive euthanasia is morally permissible in that it allows the process of dying to run its natural course, active euthanasia is morally prohibited because it directly involves the taking of human life.

Furthermore, from a biblical perspective suffering “produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Romans 5:3–4). Like suffering for our faith, physical suffering has redemptive value. It may be likened unto a furnace that rids us of the dross and fashions us more and more like unto our Lord. In the words of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, “I am certain that I never grew in grace one half as much anywhere as I have on the bed of pain.” Or as C. S. Lewis put it, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” This, of course, is not to say that there is virtue in needless suffering. To mitigate suffering through the modern medical miracle of pain management is consistent with both the Hippocratic Oath and biblical morality.

Finally, permitting voluntary active euthanasia opens the door to the greater evil of non–voluntary euthanasia. It is not difficult to imagine financial pressures coercing the diseased, disabled, and dying to surrender to doctor–assisted suicide so as not to burden their families. Worse still, doctors and nursing-home directors may take it upon themselves to euthanize patients without their consent and without the family’s knowledge (crypthanasia = “hidden death”). There is ample evidence that this is already occurring at an alarming rate in places like the Netherlands where euthanasia has slid down the slippery slope into crypthanasia.

Cultural thanatologists may urge us to accept death as a friend, but Christian theology sees death as the enemy. We are not called to come to peaceful terms with death; we are called to overcome death through resurrection. As my father told me in the final stages of his life, “Hank, though painful, every moment is precious.”

For further study, see J. P. Moreland’s two–part Christian Research Journal series on “The Euthanasia Debate” available through the Christian Research Institute (CRI) at www.equip.org;

see also Scott B. Rae, Moral Choices, ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000).

Get the Book

First, no single act is unforgivable. The unforgivable sin is a continuous, ongoing rejection of forgiveness. Those who refuse forgiveness through Christ will spend eternity separated from his love and grace. Conversely, those who sincerely desire forgiveness can be absolutely certain that God will never spurn them.

Furthermore, while suicide is not an unforgivable sin, those who take the sacred name of Christ upon their lips dare not contemplate it. Our lives belong to God and he alone has the prerogative to bring them to an end. In the words of the Almighty, “See now that I myself am He! There is no god beside me. I put to death and bring to life, I have wounded and I heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand” (Deuteronomy 32:39, emphasis added).

Finally, suicide is the murder of oneself. As such it is a direct violation of the sixth commandment— “you shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13; cf. Genesis 9:6). Indeed, suicide is a direct attack on the sovereignty of the very One who knit us together in our mothers’ wombs (Psalm 139:13).

For further study, see Hank Hanegraaff, “How can I be certain I’ve not committed the unforgivable sin?” The Bible Answer Book Volume 1 (Nashville: J Countryman, 2004): 22–25.

Get the Book