The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims

Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca McLaughlin

Published by The Gospel Coalition

The Gospel Coalition

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“Addressing five key cultural topics of the day in this vital book, Re-
becca McLaughlin deftly examines the pernicious lies that have insid-
iously infiltrated our world, including the church, and gives a solid and
biblical rebuttal to each lie. Every Christian needs to read this book.”

Becket Cook, author of A Change of Affection: A Gay Man’s In-

credible Story of Redemption and host of “The Becket Cook Show”

“In this book, Rebecca McLaughlin offers a gentle, yet powerful bib-
lical corrective that calls readers to holistic Christian love—a higher
calling than the call of the culture, and, often, a harder calling. She
examines popular cultural mantras and answers each one with the
truth and application of the gospel of Christ. In her balanced and
gracious approach, she paints our culture’s arguments in the most
compassionate light possible—and then shows the beauty of a more
excellent way!”

Jasmine Holmes, author of Mother to Son: Letters to a Black Boy

on Identity and Hope

“Rebecca McLaughlin’s first book was the best all-round defense of

the Christian faith I had read in a decade. This one is the perfect
complement. In it the author points the way to a different kind of
‘muscular’ Christianity, one that is able to flex the muscle of convic-
tion and the muscle of compassion at the same time. For a church—
and a world—too often forced to choose between smug conservatism
and acquiescing liberalism, McLaughlin recovers the genius of Jesus
Christ, showing us how to love the truth and humans with equal pas-
sion. The result is an utterly compelling and humane treatment of five
vital contemporary issues.”

John Dickson, author and historian, Distinguished Fellow in

Public Christianity at Ridley College, Australia
“This book is so powerful on a thousand levels. It’s compelling, acces-
sible, informative, captivating, convicting, and empowering. It gives
Christians understanding and language to be able to engage and not
retreat, love and not compromise, accept and not affirm, empathize
and not sympathize. It moves the conversation forward not just left
or right. This is a discipleship book, not just an apologetics book.
It’s incredible.”

Christine Caine, founder, A21 & Propel Women

“There are few whose voices I trust more in translating the claims of
Christ for a new generation than Rebecca McLaughlin. She writes
with a gospel clarity, keenness of insight, and personal winsomeness
that make her one of the best apologists of our generation. As with
her debut book, Confronting Christianity, I enthusiastically endorse
this one.”

J. D. Greear, pastor, The Summit Church, Raleigh-Durham,

North Carolina; president, Southern Baptist Convention

“Rebecca McLaughlin goes where few dare to go—head first into the
hardest questions and issues of our cultural moment, with compas-
sion, clarity, and conviction in order to show the beauty and cogency
of the Christian faith. She is one of the most important writers serv-
ing the church today. She proved this with Confronting Christianity
and has cemented that status with The Secular Creed. A potent blend
of cultural analysis and biblical reflection, this is the rare book that’s
vital for believers and skeptics alike. I’m eager to get The Secular Creed
into the hands of both my congregants and non-Christian friends.”

Claude Atcho, pastor, Fellowship Memphis in Memphis, Ten-

nessee; author of a forthcoming book on African American liter-
ature and theology (Brazos)

 
“The people around us care deeply about diversity, equality, and jus-
tice—and many think Christians stand against those values. As a pas-
tor of a diverse, urban church, I need help to wisely and winsomely
address their concerns. This is why I’m thankful for the major assist
I’ve gotten from this book. McLaughlin knows today’s issues well and
has the biblical, historical, and sociological knowledge to help us un-
derstand them and be equipped to answer them well.”

Vermon Pierre, lead pastor, Roosevelt Community Church in

Phoenix, Arizona; council member of The Gospel Coalition
 CONTENTS

Introduction1

1. “Black Lives Matter” 5

2. “Love Is Love” 25

3. “The Gay-Rights Movement Is the

New Civil-Rights Movement” 43

4. “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” 63

5. “Transgender Women Are Women” 83

Call to Loving Arms 105

 For Rachel,
and for everyone who longs for
justice, truth,
and love.
 INTRODUCTION

“What does that mean?”

My 8-year-old held a bracelet she’d found at school. Stamped on
its rim were three words: “Love Is Love.” On our drive to church,
we pass a hair salon, its windows filled with posters of George Floyd
and massive, multicolored wings proclaiming, “Trans Lives Matter,”
“Black Lives Matter,” “Love Is Love,” “Better Together.” Across our
neighborhood, yard signs declare,

In this house we believe that:

Black Lives Matter
Love Is Love
Women’s Rights Are Human Rights
We Are All Immigrants
Diversity Makes Us Stronger

Signs like this sketch out a secular creed or statement of belief. It

centers not on God, but on diversity, equality, and everybody’s right
to be themselves.
Seeing signs like this, Christians tend to grab hammers. Some
grab one to drive the sign into their lawn. They lament racial injus-
tice, they believe in diversity, they know women are equal to men,
and they’ve been taught that affirming gay relationships, trans identi-
ties, and pro-choice positions comes part and parcel with these other
things. If black lives matter (which they surely do), then love of all
kinds must be love. Others take up hammers with a different plan.
2 The Secular Creed

Knowing that the Bible rejects some things that underlie this modern
creed, they swing a hammer to flatten the sign. Perhaps not literally,
but in their hearts and minds. If these ideas stand together, they must
all be wrong.
This book will offer a third approach. Wielding a marker instead
of a mallet, it will consider five contemporary claims: “Black Lives
Matter,” “The Gay-Rights Movement Is the New Civil-Rights Move-
ment,” “Love Is Love,” “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights,” and
“Transgender Women Are Women.” Examining each claim through
the lens of Scripture and in light of culture, we’ll aim to disentangle
ideas Christians can and must affirm from ideas Christians cannot
and must not embrace. But to wield the marker well, we must get
down on our knees.
First, we must recognize that the tangling of ideas in the secular
creed has been driven not only by sin in the world out there, but also
by sin in the church in here. We must fall to our knees and repent.
The frequent failure of Christians to meet biblical ideals of fellowship
across racial difference, equal valuing of men and women, welcome for
outcasts, love for those with unfulfilled desire, and care for the most
marginalized has allowed this mixture of ideas to coalesce under the
banner of diversity. But with our heads bowed to the earth, we’ll see
that the very ground in which the yard sign stands is unmistakably
Christian. Clear that Christian soil away and you won’t find solid,
secular rock. You’ll find a sinkhole.
To our 21st-century, Western ears, love across racial and cultural
difference, the equality of men and women, and the idea that the poor,
oppressed, and marginalized can make moral claims on the strong,
rich, and powerful sound like basic moral common sense. But they are
not. These truths have come to us from Christianity. Rip that foun-
dation out, and you won’t uncover a better basis for human equality
and rights. You’ll uncover an abyss that cannot even tell you what a
human being is. Like cartoon characters running off a cliff, we may
continue a short way before we realize that the ground has gone from
underneath our feet. But it has gone. Without Christian beliefs about
humanity, the yard sign’s claims aren’t worth the cardboard on which
they are written.
 Introduction 3

So, when we pass these signs, I tell my children that in our house
we believe that black lives matter because they matter to Jesus. We
don’t believe that love is love but that God is love, and that he gives
us glimpses of his love through different kinds of relationship. We be-
lieve women’s rights are human rights, because God made us—male
and female—in his image; and for that same reason we believe that
babies in the womb have rights as well. We believe God has a special
concern for single mothers, orphans, and immigrants, because Scrip-
ture tells us so again and again. And we believe that diversity does
indeed make us stronger, because Jesus calls people from every tribe
and tongue and nation to worship him as one body together.
As you walk through this book, I hope you’ll feel both humbled
and empowered. If you’re a follower of Jesus, I hope you’ll be ready to
join with the call to loving arms at the end. If you’re not yet following
Jesus, or if you couldn’t imagine ever wanting to, I hope you’ll see the
moral soil on which you stand is more Christian than you realize. And
I hope you’ll start to wonder if the poor, first-century, brown-skinned,
Jewish man known as Jesus of Nazareth—who lived as a member of
an oppressed ethnic group and died at the hands of an imperial re-
gime—might truly be the Savior of the world: the one who showed us
what love is by laying down his life for us (1 John 3:16).
 1

“BL ACK LI V E S
M AT T E R”

In Alabama in 1985, a black man named Anthony Ray Hinton was

sentenced to death for double homicide. The conviction was based
on a faulty ballistics report, but the prosecutor believed he could tell
Hinton was guilty just by looking at him. Hinton’s story is told in
Bryan Stevenson’s bestselling book, Just Mercy (2014).1 In decades of
representing poor clients on death row, Stevenson and his colleagues
at the Equal Justice Initiative have won reversals, relief, or release for
more than 115 condemned people. Many were convicted because white
officers, lawyers, and jurors could tell they were guilty just by looking
at them.
In June 2020, I watched the film based on Stevenson’s book as
Black Lives Matter protests multiplied. George Floyd had been slow-
ly squeezed to death under the knee of a white police officer. Ahmaud
Arbery had been hunted and shot to death by white vigilantes spitting
racist slurs, and who had not initially been arrested for their crime.
Breonna Taylor had been shot in her home by officers raiding the
wrong house. Stevenson’s book was already a bestseller. But the tales

1. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel &
Grau, 2014).
6 The Secular Creed

it told struck a new chord with me. Like many others, I was moved
to tears as an elderly black man, whose mind had been wrecked by
war, was executed, while his requested song, “The Old Rugged Cross,”
blared over the prison sound system. Story after story broke my heart.
Person after person treated like their skin color made them crimi-
nals, like their lives didn’t matter. What’s more, these things had hap-
pened in my lifetime in a state recently ranked first in America for
overall religiosity.2
As a white, Christian immigrant to America, learning about the
history of race relations has disillusioned me. The bloody stain of rac-
ism that has been smeared across white churches for centuries contin-
ues to discolor Christian witness today. I understand why many of my
friends see Black Lives Matter signs in part as anti-Christian protest.
But while Just Mercy tells harrowing tales of black oppression, it also
gives us glimpses of black faith: not least the faith of Stevenson him-
self, whose own deep-seated hope in Christ has driven his pursuit of
justice.3 In the closing minutes of the film, we see footage of the real
Hinton walking free after 30 years on death row, and we hear his sister,
embracing him with tears of joy, sob out the film’s last words: “Thank
you, Jesus! Thank you, Lord!”
The question at the heart of this chapter is how Christians should
relate to the statement “Black lives matter.” We all bring different sen-
sitivities. For many black Christians, it feels like an utterly self-evi-
dent truth: a claim they are tired of having to make, three words to
voice centuries of anger, fear, and pain. For some white Christians, it
feels like a rallying cry: a way to protest the racial injustice of which
they have been keenly aware. For others, it sounds like an attack: an
accusation of racism that feels unwarranted and unfair. And for still

2. According to a 2016 survey, 51 percent of people in Alabama attend church at least weekly and
82 percent believe in God with certainty, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/
how-religious-is-your-state/?state=alabama.
3. Stevenson talks about his faith in Dominique Dubois Gilliard, “Bryan Stevenson Wants to
Liberate People from the Lie That Their Life Doesn’t Matter,” Christianity Today, January
10, 2020, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/january-web-only/just-mercy-film-bry-
an-stevenson.html. See also this dialogue with Tim Keller: “Grace, Justice and Mercy:
An Evening with Bryan Stevenson & Rev. Tim Keller Q&A,” https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=32CHZiVFmB4.
 Black Lives Matter 7

others, it feels like the spearhead of a progressive agenda: a wolf in

sheep’s clothing that must be exposed.
In this chapter, we’ll dig under the topsoil of the black lives matter
claim. We’ll see that, far from being the enemy of love across racial
difference, Christianity is its first and enduring foundation. We’ll see
that God created humans of all racial backgrounds equal, and that
God’s covenant people included black and brown folk from the first.
We’ll see that Jesus broke through every racial and cultural barrier of
his day and commanded his disciples to make disciples of all nations.
We’ll meet the first African believers, who were following Jesus cen-
turies before the gospel came to America, and we’ll see that today
Christianity is the most racially, culturally, and geographically diverse
belief system in the world. Finally, we’ll see that the reason we believe
in love across racial difference now is because of Jesus—whether we
realize it or not.

IN T HE BEGINNING
In 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, “We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” But
human equality is not self-evident at all. Israeli historian Yuval Noah
Harari explains:

The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues
that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal
before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about
God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are “equal”?4

The first chapter of the Bible claims that God made human beings
in his image (Gen. 1:26). If this is not true, then there is no basis for
equality and rights. Writing as an atheist, Harari explains that “Homo
Sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas, and chimpanzees
have no natural rights.”5

4. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper, 2015), 109.
5. Harari, Sapiens, 111.
8 The Secular Creed

We must not be naïve about the past. The painful reality is that
the founding fathers excluded enslaved Africans from their vision of
human equality. But this problem isn’t fixed by erasing the basis for
equality. In fact, the dehumanizing ways in which black people were
treated by white slaveholders were only truly wrong if human beings
are truly more than animals, if love across racial difference is right, and
if right and wrong are universal. The rational atheist can cling to none
of these things.
If the Bible is true, however, God didn’t just make our souls. He
made our bodies. He made black people and white people, Asian peo-
ple and Latino people, people from every tribe and tongue and nation,
all equally in his image. This is the soil in which the roots of human
equality grow. But the Bible doesn’t stop there. It tells a story that be-
gins with humans from all sorts of ethnicities becoming God’s people,
and that ends with people from every tribe and tongue and nation
worshiping Jesus together.

MI XED MULT I T UDE

In Genesis 12, God called a man from a city located in modern-day
Iraq. God promised to make this man, Abraham, a great nation and
that in him “all the families of the earth” would be blessed (Gen. 12:2–
3). This promise is ultimately fulfilled in Christ: the descendant of
Abraham who would open the floodgates of God’s blessing to engulf
people from every nation on earth. But even from the first, God wove
different ethnicities into his covenant people.
Abraham’s grandson Jacob had 12 sons who became the 12 tribes
of Israel. But one son, Joseph, was sold by his brothers and became
a slave in Egypt. Joseph helped Egypt survive a famine, saved his
family, and married an Egyptian woman, Asenath (Gen. 41:45). To-
gether, they had Ephraim and Manasseh. Jacob blessed these boys
and prophesied that they would grow into a multitude (Gen. 48). As
New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley puts it, “African blood flows
 Black Lives Matter 9

into Israel from the beginning as a fulfilment of the promise made to

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”6
During 400 years in Egypt, the Israelites went from being honored
immigrants to being slaves. God sent Moses to rescue them. Moses
had married Zipporah, a woman from Midian (in modern-day Saudi
Arabia), and had children with her. When he led the Israelites out of
Egypt, a “mixed multitude” left with them—likely including Egyp-
tians who had seen God act and decided to join his people (Ex. 12:38).
After the exodus (perhaps after Zipporah’s death), Moses married a
Cushite woman: in today’s terms, an Ethiopian (Num. 12:1). Centuries
of Western art have pictured God’s covenant people as white. But the
Israelites who wandered in the wilderness were from the Middle East
and Africa. As the story of God’s people unfolds, we see even more
ethnicities woven in.

JE SU S’S DN A
Thanks to a document passed down in my husband’s family, we know
that one of his ancestors was Cherokee. Her name was Eliza, and our
second daughter is named after her. In modern, Western culture, few
of us bother to trace our lineage back more than a few generations.
But when Jesus was born, genealogies were highly prized.
Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus particularly highlights the non-Is-
raelite women in his ancestry, such as Rahab, the Canaanite pros-
titute who believed the Israelites’ God was truly “God in the heav-
ens above and on the earth beneath” ( Josh. 2:11; Matt. 1:5), and Ruth
the Moabite, whose story generated a whole Old Testament book.
In Matthew’s retelling of Israel’s history, we see that non-Israelites
weren’t just squeezed in at the fringes of God’s purposes. They were
plumbed into the royal bloodline.
Jesus’s DNA was shaped by Rahab and by Ruth. He had non-Isra-
elite blood in his veins. And when he preached, it showed.

6. Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in
Hope (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020), 102.
10 The Secular Creed

S C ANDAL OF JE SU S’S FIR S T SER MON

Jesus’s first sermon in his hometown lit a fire of justice that’s been
burning ever since. He began by reading from the prophet Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18–19)

Jesus claimed to have fulfilled these words. They represent one New
Testament text among many that hammer justice for the poor, op-
pressed, and wrongly imprisoned into the heart of God’s concern
for his world. At first, the response from Jesus’s Jewish audience was
good. Living under Roman oppression, they longed for a Messiah
who would set them free and establish them politically. Maybe Jesus
was their long-awaited champion! But they also wanted proof that Je-
sus was as good as his promise. After all, they’d watched him grow up.
Instead of performing a miracle or celebrating Jewish history,
however, Jesus started showcasing how God has always cared for
Gentiles (Luke 4:25–27). Jesus’s fellow countrymen were so furious
they tried to kill him (Luke 4:28–30). His multiethnic message was
the last thing they wanted to hear. But this didn’t put Jesus off. Quite
the reverse.

S C ANDAL OF T HE GOOD S AM AR I TAN

At age 18, I spent a summer working in Manhattan. One hot evening,
I was going for dinner at a friend’s apartment, and I bought a water-
melon for dessert. When my friend opened the door, she looked un-
comfortable. She told me she’d never eaten a watermelon. “Why not?”
I asked, “They’re delicious!” My friend graciously explained to me the
long history of people associating African Americans with watermel-
 Black Lives Matter 11

on. As a black woman, she’d always avoided the fruit. I’d grown up in
England. I had no idea.
When we step into the pages of the Scriptures, we’re all immi-
grants. There are things we won’t instinctively grasp, not least about
ethnicity. We hear “Samaritan” and think, Good! But for Jews of Jesus’s
day, Samaritans were both racially and religiously despised. We don’t
feel the shock of Jesus’s famous story of the Good Samaritan. But his
first audience did.
A lawyer asked Jesus, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus asked a question in return: “What is written in the law?” The
lawyer responded, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all
your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus agreed. But then the
lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus responded with a story in
which a man, likely Jewish, is robbed and assaulted and left for dead
on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho. Two Jewish religious leaders
walk by before a Samaritan rescues the man. Jesus asked the lawyer
which of the men who came by was a neighbor to the assault victim.
The lawyer, who couldn’t bring himself to say “the Samaritan,” replied,
“The one who showed him mercy” (Luke 10:25–37).
When we read this story, we hear a call to care for strangers in
need. But Jesus’s first audience heard more. They heard a story of love
across racial, religious, and political difference, in which the moral
hero was their sworn enemy. This story isn’t just a call to love. It’s a
call to love across racial, cultural, and ideological barriers built up over
generations. It’s a call to love those we were raised to hate. It’s a call
that should have made segregation in America and apartheid in South
Africa impossible.
Luke doesn’t tell us how the crowd reacted to Jesus’s story. But if
we map the racial and political divides of his day onto ours, perhaps
we can imagine what might’ve been said. “It’s all very well Jesus telling
this idealistic story about a good Samaritan, but what about all the bad
Samaritans? Have you heard about the crime rates in Samaria? And
all the teenage pregnancies? I’d have no problem with Samaritans if
they really were good.”
If we’re honest, we all have groups we like to dismiss. Lifelong
Republicans know Democrats are immoral. Dyed-in-the-wool Dem-
12 The Secular Creed

ocrats know the same about Republicans. The white prosecutor could
tell that Hinton was guilty just by looking at him. Jews could tell the
same about Samaritans. When my non-Christian friends hear about
another celebrity pastor caught in a sex scandal, they’re not surprised:
they know Christians are hypocrites. When we hear about violence
against someone from a group we suspect, we look for evidence that
they deserved it. When we see violence from a group we trust, we look
for evidence that it was justified. But Jesus devastates our them-and-
us mentality, not just through a story about a good Samaritan, but also
through a stunning conversation with a bad one.

S C ANDAL OF T HE B AD S AM AR I TAN
In John 4, Jesus sat down by a well, while his disciples went to buy
food. A Samaritan woman came to draw water. Jesus asked her for a
drink. There are two problems with this. First, the woman is a Samar-
itan, and Jews had no dealings with Samaritans. Second, a respectable
Jewish rabbi shouldn’t be talking alone with a woman. She’s shocked.
“How is that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Sa-
maria?” But as the story unfolds, we find out there’s another problem.
This woman has had five husbands and is now living with a man she’s
not married to. By the Jewish standards of the day, she’s about as bad
as a woman could be. But what do you expect? She’s a Samaritan, after
all. Jesus should’ve known she was guilty just by looking at her. But as
their conversation progresses, we discover that he did ( John 4:4–26).
Jesus’s discussion with this sinful woman from a hated racial and
religious group is the longest private conversation he had with anyone
in the Gospels. She’s also the first person in John’s Gospel to whom
Jesus reveals his identity as the Messiah. When Jesus’s disciples re-
turn, she goes back to her town and tells her fellow Samaritans about
him. Many believe in Jesus because of her testimony ( John 4:39). Jesus
knew precisely what he was doing when he asked this woman for a
drink. He was recruiting the last person even the Samaritans would’ve
listened to and trusting her to be his messenger. Just as he made the
fictional Good Samaritan into a moral hero, so he makes this real, live
Bad Samaritan into a missionary.
 Black Lives Matter 13

Jesus tears down the racial and cultural barriers of his day and
dances on the rubble.

M AK E DIS CIP LE S OF ALL N AT IONS

Jesus’s public ministry was mostly focused on his fellow Jews. But
time and again, he commends the faith of those outside the Jewish
fold. He praises the faith of a Roman centurion (Matt. 8:5–13) and
a Syrophoenician woman (Matt. 15:21–28). When he heals 10 lepers,
the only one who turns back to thank him is a Samaritan, whose faith
Jesus commends (Luke 17:11–19). And after his resurrection, Jesus de-
clares, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”
and tells his followers, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”
(Matt. 28:18–19).
Jesus was the one through whom all things were made ( John 1:3).
He created every ethnicity, and he calls people from every tribe and
tongue and nation to himself. Centuries of colonialism have left many
people thinking that the first black Christians emerged when Euro-
pean missionaries went to Africa. But if we read the Bible, we find the
first black people coming to Christ on Day One of the church.

FIR S T BL AC K C HR IS T I ANS
When the Spirit is poured out at Pentecost, the apostles preach to
people “from every nation under heaven,” including those from mod-
ern-day Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, and Libya (Acts 2:5–11). Three thou-
sand came to Christ. This is the birthday of the church. On this day,
Middle Easterners, Africans, and Europeans started worshiping Jesus
together. Luke tells us what this looked like. These first Christians de-
voted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to breaking
of bread, and to prayer. They were selling their possessions and sharing
their money with any who had need. They were worshiping together
and eating together in each other’s homes (Acts 2:42–47). This wasn’t
just gathering at the same church on Sunday. This was life together.
But the Bible doesn’t just scan the multiethnic crowd. It also zooms
in on individuals.
14 The Secular Creed

In Acts 8, an angel of the Lord sends Philip to a highly educated

Ethiopian man, who is sitting in his chariot reading from Isaiah 53.
This passage subverts every modern stereotype. In the framework that
tried to justify slavery and segregation in America, black people were
repeatedly painted as morally, spiritually, and intellectually inferior.
But this account of the first known black Christian skewers those
ideas. In a world in which few were literate, this man is reading God’s
Word when Philip finds him. As humble as he is learned, the Ethio-
pian welcomes Philip eagerly. Beginning with the description of the
suffering servant in Isaiah 53, Philip tells him “the good news about
Jesus” (Acts 8:35). As soon as they find water this man asks to be bap-
tized (Acts 8:36). His enthusiasm leaps from the page.
Luke includes three details about the Ethiopian, in addition to
his ethnicity. First, Luke tells us he was a eunuch. Second, that he
was a court official of Candice, queen of the Ethiopians, responsible
for all her treasure. Third, that he had come to Jerusalem to worship
(Acts 8:27). This man was both honored and marginalized. He had a
position of great authority and trust. But he was also a eunuch who
had been castrated as a child and was likely technically a slave. He
was already a worshiper of God, but he hadn’t yet met Jesus. If we
read Isaiah 53 in context, we find it is the perfect entry point for this
man. We see God’s suffering servant, pierced for our transgressions,
despised and rejected by men, achieving victory through pain. And as
Isaiah’s prophecy continues, we see specific promises to foreigners and
eunuchs who trust in the Lord.7
In Acts 8, we don’t just see an individual black Christian, whose
life mattered to God so much that his angel sent an apostle to help
with his Bible study. We also see the continuity between the Old Tes-
tament and the New, as God’s promises to foreigners who trust him
are fleshed out. We see hope for those whose bodies have been vio-
lated and for those unable to have children. And we see a black man

7. “Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely separate
me from his people’; and let the eunuch not say, ‘Behold I am a dry tree.’ For thus says the
Lord: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold
fast to my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name
better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off ’”
(Isa. 56:3–5).
 Black Lives Matter 15

going on his way rejoicing because he had new life in Jesus Christ
(Acts 8:39).

MULT IE T HNIC HE AR T BE AT OF T HE NE W T E S TAMEN T

As the story of the newborn church unfolds, we hear its multiethnic
heartbeat. The church blossoms from its Jewish roots to include more
and more Gentiles. The followers of Jesus were first called Christians
in Antioch, the ruins of which lie in Turkey (Acts 11:26). Because we’re
all immigrants to the text, it’s harder for us to see the racial and ethnic
walls being demolished by the gospel wrecking ball. But that’s what is
happening. Paul wrote to the first Christians in Turkey, “Here there is
not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scyth-
ian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11).
The Jew-Gentile divide was deeply ingrained in Jewish conscious-
ness, and Paul speaks to it in two ways: Jew versus Greek, and cir-
cumcised versus uncircumcised. He also knocks down the slave-free
divide in a culture that assumed slavery was normal and in which at
least one person in three would’ve been enslaved. Unlike slavery in
America, first-century slavery was largely not race-based, so this was
not a comment on ethnicity. But Paul also speaks to racial and cultur-
al divides when he mentions barbarians and Scythians. These terms
mean almost nothing to us. We don’t turn on the news and hear about
barbarian immigrants or Scythian refugees. But writing to America
today, Paul might have said of the church: “Here there is no black
American or white American, Asian American or Latino American,
there is no rich or poor, no immigrant or native born, but Christ is all,
and in all.” Love across racial difference isn’t just a modern, progres-
sive ideal. It started as a biblical ideal. Interracial love is part of our
inheritance in Christ.
When we refuse fellowship across racial and cultural difference,
we’re tearing Jesus’s beautiful body apart.

GR E AT MULT I T UDE NO ONE C OULD NUMBER

In the biblical finale, John witnesses the greatest multiracial, multieth-
nic, multicultural gathering ever seen:
16 The Secular Creed

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could
number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languag-
es, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white
robes, with palm branches in their hands and crying out with a loud
voice, “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne and to the
Lamb!” (Rev. 7:9–10)

At Pentecost, the Spirit inspired the apostles to speak in different

languages, so all heard the message in their native tongue. Christianity
is not only multiethnic. It’s also multicultural, and we should expect
Christians to speak different languages, sing different songs, eat differ-
ent foods, wear different clothes, and bring different insights to God’s
universal, timeless Word. At the same time, we must pursue love and
fellowship across racial and cultural difference relentlessly—not be-
cause progressives tell us to, but because Jesus calls us to be one body
with people of different races and cultures and languages. Worshiping
Jesus together is our destiny. But it is also becoming our reality.
Today, Christianity is the largest and the most diverse belief sys-
tem in the world, with roughly equal numbers of Christians in Eu-
rope, North America, South America, and Africa,8 and with a rapidly
growing church in China that is expected to outgrow the church in
America by 2030, and could include half of China’s population by
2060.9 By that point, 40 percent of the world’s Christians could be
living in sub-Saharan Africa. If the experts are right, I will likely live
to see black Christians become the largest racial group within the
global church.
White progressives who dismiss Christianity because they associ-
ate it with white racism are failing to listen to black believers globally.

8. See “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050,” Pew Re-
search Center, April 2, 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-
2050, and “Projected Change in Global Population, 2015–2060,” Pew Research Center, March
31, 2017, http://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-religiouslandscape/
pf_17-04-05_projectionsupdate_changepopulation640px.
9. See Pew Research Center Global Religious Survey, 2010, cited by Eleanor Albert, “Chris-
tianity in China,” Council on Foreign Relations, March 9, 2018, https://www.cfr.org/back-
grounder/christianity-china. See also “Prison Sentence for Pastor Shows China Feels Threat-
ened by Spread of Christianity, Experts Say,” TIME, January 2, 2020, https://time.com/5757591/
wang-yi-prison-sentence-china-christianity.
 Black Lives Matter 17

They’re also failing to listen to black people in America, who are al-
most 10 percentage points more likely than their white peers to iden-
tify as Christians, and who poll higher on every measure of Christian
commitment, from churchgoing to Bible-reading to core evangelical
beliefs.10 Both globally and in the United States, black women are
the most typical Christians. As Yale Law professor Stephen L. Car-
ter writes, “When you mock Christians, you’re not mocking who you
think you are.”11
These facts don’t for a moment excuse the history of white Chris-
tians treating black people as if their lives didn’t matter. We’ll exam-
ine that problem more fully in chapter 3. But dismissing Christian-
ity because of the failure of white Christians means silencing the
voices of black believers and acting like only white voices matter in
considering Christ.

LIS T ENING T O BL AC K VOICE S

In Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an
Exercise in Hope, New Testament professor and New York Times con-
tributing author Esau McCaulley invites us to listen to the full choir
of African American Christians. Theologically liberal black authors,
who emphasize justice here-and-now at the expense of what the Bi-
ble teaches about eternal justice, are often seen by secular progres-
sives and by white evangelicals as primary voices of black faith. This
is convenient for both sides: it allows secular progressives to dismiss
full-blooded Christianity, and all too often it allows white evangelicals
to dismiss the critiques of black believers. But in reality, most black
churches in America are theologically evangelical, even if that increas-
ingly politicized word isn’t a comfortable fit. For example, 85 percent
of members of historically black churches see the Bible as the Word

10. See, for example, David Masci, “5 Facts about the Religious Lives of African Americans,” Pew
Research Center, February 7, 2018, http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2018/02/07/5-facts-
about-the-religious-lives-of-african-americans.
11. Stephen L. Carter, “The Ugly Coded Critique of Chick-fil-A’s Christianity,” Bloomberg, April
21, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-21/criticism-of-christians-
and-chick-fil-a-has-troubling-roots.
18 The Secular Creed

of God, versus only 62 percent of mainline Christians.12 Meanwhile,

82 percent of Christians at historically black churches believe in the
reality of hell: the same percentage as among self-identifying evangel-
icals.13 To listen to black voices, people on all sides must reckon with
the gospel-centered, Bible-believing stance of most black churches.
Listening will be as uncomfortable for the white Christian con-
servative as for the secular progressive. A Bible-believing Christian
himself, McCaulley explains,

It is difficult for the African American believer to look deeply into the
history of Christianity and not be profoundly shaken. Insomuch as
it arises in response to the church’s historic mistreatment of African
Americans, the Black secular protest against religion is one of the most
understandable developments in the history of the West. If they are
wrong (and they are) it is a wrongness born out of considerable pain.14

As a white evangelical, I could easily gloss over this pain. The chronic
sin of white Christian racism dishonors the name of Christ. The slow-
burn holocaust of black lives across the centuries is hard to face. To
pause here is uncomfortable. But Jesus doesn’t call us to be comfort-
able. He calls us to repentance and faith. And when we pause, we’ll
realize that the loudest voices of protest against white Christian rac-
ism have been from fellow Christians. While many white Christians
were complicit in race-based slavery, McCaulley reminds us that “the
widespread move to abolish slavery [was] a Christian innovation,”15
that “Black conversion to Christ began on a large scale during the
Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century,”16 and that “early

12. See Jeff Diamant, “Blacks more likely than others in U.S. to read the Bible regularly, see it as
God’s word,” Pew Research Center, December 16, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2018/05/07/blacks-more-likely-than-others-in-u-s-to-read-the-bible-regularly-see-it-
as-gods-word, based on 2014 Pew Forum survey data.
13. See Caryle Murphy, “Most Americans believe in heaven . . . and hell,” Pew Research Center,
November 10, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/10/most-americans-be-
lieve-in-heaven-and-hell.
14. McCaulley, Reading While Black, 135.
15. McCaulley, Reading While Black, 142.
16. McCaulley, Reading While Black, 169.
 Black Lives Matter 19

Black Christians combined a strong affirmation of the need for per-

sonal salvation with varying levels of social action and resistance.”17
Civil-rights heroes like Fannie Lou Hamer and the Reverend
Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. are rightly celebrated by secular peo-
ple. But their message was unrelentingly Christian. Like Old Testa-
ment prophets, they called out the sin of those who claimed to know
the Lord but were not living in his ways. They called for Americans to
be more Christian, not less. Today, the most celebrated black leaders
are often progressives. But they don’t represent most black Americans,
who are neither secular nor theologically liberal.
Amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, I went for a walk with
a friend who directs the children’s ministry at a multiethnic church.
She told me that in the previous few months, she’d received mes-
sages from multiple friends and acquaintances—including people she
hadn’t seen since middle school—asking how she was and what they
could do. She joked that she seemed to be lots of people’s one black
friend. But her response to each well-wisher was the same: “I’d love to
talk to you about Jesus.” One friend responded, “Do you really think
that’s the answer?” She replied that she did. And she is right, but not
in the sense that Christians sometimes think.
At times, Christians have tried to close down conversations about
racial justice by urging people to “Just preach the gospel.” They sug-
gest that pursuing racial justice is a distraction from the church’s cen-
tral mission of evangelism, and that if we preach the gospel of Jesus’s
death in our place, and the need for personal salvation, all other ills
will naturally be healed. But Jesus didn’t tell his disciples to just preach
the gospel. He told them to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spir-
it, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt.
28:19–20). As a Christian, I believe I’m saved by Jesus’s death in my
place, paying the price for my sin, and bringing me back into fel-
lowship with God. Nothing can add to or take away from this. But
because I’ve placed my trust in Christ, he is my King, and I must walk
in his ways. Living as a disciple of Jesus includes preaching the gospel
(Matt. 28:19), pursuing justice for the poor, oppressed and margin-

17. McCaulley, Reading While Black, 175.

20 The Secular Creed

alized (Matt. 25:31–46), and practicing love across racial and cultural
difference (Luke 10:25–37).

SECUL AR SINK HOLE

For most Westerners today, the alternative to Christianity isn’t an-
other religion. For all the contemporary interest in meditation, yoga,
and what we see as ancient Eastern wisdom, few are looking for a
full embrace of Buddhist or Hindu ethics. Radical Islam’s associa-
tion with violence and oppression of women tends not to appeal. And
while Jewish religious and cultural practices are deeply precious even
to avowedly atheist Jews, few curious gentiles find themselves in shul.
For a growing proportion of people in the West, not identifying with
any particular religion but retaining beliefs about human equality has
felt like a safe place to land. After all, people reason, religion has done
more harm than good and things like universal human rights, racial
justice, and care for the poor are self-evident truths.
But as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, if there is no God
who created us in his image, then human equality is a myth. Human
beings have “no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas, and chimpan-
zees have no natural rights.”18 Science cannot save this situation. As
Yuval Noah Harari points out, “belief in the unique worth and rights
of human beings . . . has embarrassingly little in common with the sci-
entific study of Homo sapiens.”19 In fact, if we look to evolution as our
only origin story and try to squeeze our ethics from its scientific husk,
we have (at best) the idea that one should sacrifice only for members
of one’s genetic group. The idea of loving those whose origins lie in
a different continent is dead in the primeval water. In fact, as atheist
psychologist Steven Pinker observes, if virtue is equated with “sacri-
fices that benefit one’s own group in competition with other groups . .
. then fascism [is] the ultimate virtuous ideology.”20

18. Harari, Sapiens, 111

19. Harari, Sapiens, 253.
20. Steven Pinker, “The False Allure of Group Selection,” Edge, June 18, 2012, https://www.edge.
org/conversation/steven_pinker-the-false-allureof-group-selection.
 Black Lives Matter 21

None of these points suggests that secular people don’t believe in

love across racial difference. Many do. But they do so on the basis of
unanchored faith, clinging (whether they realize it or not) to a raft
of Christian beliefs. In 2019, Notre Dame professor Christian Smith
published Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can’t Deliver, in which he
examined whether today’s leading atheist intellectuals provide con-
vincing reasons for their high moral beliefs. His conclusion? They
do not. An atheist can believe in human rights if she likes. She can
campaign for racial justice, volunteer at a soup kitchen, support NGOs
that combat famine, and give to charities opposing sex trafficking. But
she has no rational grounds for saying that everyone should believe
in human rights, or that racism is unquestionably wrong. In a world
without God, I may hate race-based slavery in the same sense that
I hate olives. But at the end of the day, it comes down to personal
preference.21 So why do so many people today who identify as atheists,
agnostics, or “nones” believe in universal human rights?
Historian Tom Holland explains that our basic moral beliefs about
human equality came to us from Christianity, but that they have been
deliberately rebranded as secular. In the late 1940s, with the world
reeling from the horrors of the Second World War, Eleanor Roosevelt
gathered representatives from various nations to establish a universal
declaration of rights that would work in different cultures, including
those in which Christianity was not dominant. So, Christian thinking
had to be repackaged in non-religious terms. “A doctrine such as that
of human rights,” Holland observes, “was far likelier to be signed up
for” if its Christian origins could be concealed.22
This rebranding has worked so well that even atheists now hold
some Christian beliefs to be self-evident truths. The belief that every
human life is valuable, that the oppressed and marginalized deserve
justice, that we should love those whose race or culture or country
is different from ours, that we should even love our enemies—these
beliefs all come to us from a first-century Jewish rabbi who died on

21. For a version of this argument, see Christian Smith, Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can’t
Deliver (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 49. As Tim Keller puts it, “While there can
be moral feelings without God, it doesn’t appear that there can be moral obligation.” Timothy
Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical (New York: Viking, 2016), 173.
22. Holland, Dominion, 521.
22 The Secular Creed

a cross and whose resurrection spawned the greatest movement for

diversity in history. Without Christianity, belief in human rights, in
racial equality, and in the responsibility of the powerful toward the
victimized becomes blind faith. The claim that black lives matter is at
heart a Christian claim.

‘IS T HIS A JE SU S S ONG? ’

My daughters attend a public school that celebrates diversity. But
sometimes, when they come home with a new song, I point out that
what they have learned was originally a Jesus song: “Amazing Grace”
sung in Navajo, without explanation of the words. “I’ve Got Peace
Like a River” and “We Shall Overcome” taught without reference to
their gospel origins. Now, my girls will ask me, “Mummy, is this a
Jesus song?”
Some white Christians worry that saying the specific words “Black
lives matter” signals a wholesale embrace of progressive views. This is
an understandable concern. As we will see in the next chapter, the
Black Lives Matter organization presents racial justice as a package
deal with celebrating LGBT+ romance and identity. We must carefully
disentangle these differences. Still, many theological conservatives—
including many black Christians—are glad to march under the “Black
Lives Matter” sign because these words are a statement of truth.
Given the history of white evangelical failure to recognize black
people as their equals before God, I gladly affirm that black lives mat-
ter, despite the fact an organization with that name expresses other
beliefs I cannot embrace. If there were a secular organization called
Unborn Babies Matter, I would say those words, too, even if that or-
ganization also waved a rainbow flag, because unborn babies matter.
If I were concerned people might think I affirmed everything else
that organization stood for, I’d simply add two words: “Unborn babies
matter to Jesus.”
Some respond that all lives matter. But this qualifier misses the
point. For centuries, black people have been treated like their lives
didn’t matter. That’s the problem being addressed, the truth that needs
to be upheld, just as we’d recognize that “unborn babies matter” needs
to be said. But we must also recognize that from a consistently atheis-
 Black Lives Matter 23

tic perspective, no lives ultimately matter. Human beings have no nat-

ural rights, just as spiders, chimpanzees, and hyenas have no natural
rights. Ultimately, black lives matter not because progressive people
have told us so, but because the equal value of every human, regardless
of race, walks off the pages of Scripture with the sound of a trumpet.
Black lives matter enough for the Son of God to shed his blood, so
that black men and women might have eternal life with him. Black
lives matter because Jesus says so.
Christians must work for justice for historically crushed and mar-
ginalized people, because Jesus came to bring good news to the poor
and to set at liberty those who are oppressed. Christians should be the
first to fight for racial justice and to pursue love across racial differ-
ence, not because of any cultural pressure from outside, but because of
scriptural pressure from inside. “Black lives matter” is at heart a Jesus
song, and we must sing our Savior’s songs, no matter who else plays
the tune.
As we hear the tear-stained words of Anthony Ray Hinton’s sis-
ter—“Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Lord!”—we must ask: Why would
a black woman in a state with one of the worst records on racial justice
and one of the highest levels of Christian identification thank Jesus
for her innocent brother’s release? Because she knows that Jesus is on
the side of the poor, oppressed, and falsely accused. Because she knows
that black people have been followers of Jesus from the first. Because
she knows that black lives like her brother’s matter, not because a pro-
gressive organization bearing that name has capitalized on a cultural
moment, but because black lives matter to Jesus.
 2

“ L OV E I S L OV E ”

“How do you know that what you say tomorrow will be safe?”
I was sitting in a small-town coffee shop in Missouri. A local
church had invited me to speak on gender and sexuality, and local
LGBT+ leaders had organized a protest. One leader had tweeted to
warn others about the event and said I wasn’t qualified to speak about
such topics. I replied that she was probably right and asked if she’d be
willing to meet for coffee while I was in town, so I could learn from
her. She kindly consented and asked if she could bring her partner. I
said I’d love to meet her. As we talked, I learned that these women
had met at a church youth group and were now raising two daughters.
Given the high suicide rates among LGBT+ youth, they were concerned
that what I would say might not be safe for vulnerable young people.
When the question came, I’d heard how the sexual sin of leaders
in their church had hurt and disillusioned them, and how they’d found
joy and safety in each other. I liked these women. I felt I understood
the choices they’d made. With their experiences, perhaps I would’ve
done the same. When I shared my story of having been romantically
attracted to women since childhood, but of choosing not to pursue
those attractions and ultimately to marry a man, I hoped it would
build trust. But they said my story was harmful. I hadn’t seen that
coming, and I was trying not to cry. When one woman asked, “How
do you know that what you say tomorrow will be safe?” I had nothing
26 The Secular Creed

left. “I don’t,” I replied. “Jesus said that if anyone wants to come after
him, they must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow
him. It isn’t safe.”
In this chapter, we’ll turn our attention to the mantra “Love is
love.” We’ll explore why, attractive as it sounds, it isn’t ultimately true:
we all need different kinds of love, and sexual and romantic intimacy
is only one spoke in the wheel that makes the world go around. I’ll
argue instead that “God is love” (1 John 4:8) and that he shows us what
that statement means through different kinds of human relationships.
This makes Christianity good news for same-sex-attracted people like
me. But it doesn’t make Christianity safe. Whatever our attractions,
following Jesus means denying ourselves and taking up our cross. But
if Jesus’s people are truly living in his ways, there’s room and joy and
love enough for all.

IN T HE BEGINNING
In chapter 1, we unearthed the cornerstone of human equality in the
first chapter of the Bible. God’s first words on sexuality are etched on
that same stone. In Genesis 1, God creates humans—male and fe-
male—in his image, and tells them to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen.
1:28). If you think about it, God could’ve made humans some other
way. We could’ve reproduced asexually, like amoebas—or like the py-
thon in the St. Louis Zoo that in July 2020 laid seven eggs without a
mate. Instead, God designed us so that new humans come to be when
men and women come together. This is the original diversity. Creation
of new life comes through love across this difference.
In Genesis 2, we zoom in on a particular relationship between a
paradigmatic man and woman. After calling his creation “good” and
“very good” (Gen. 1:31), God says that it’s “not good” for the man to be
alone (Gen. 2:18). He makes woman as man’s match and equal: bone of
his bone and flesh of his flesh (Gen. 1:23). And then we read these enig-
matic words: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother
and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).
Too often in church, we’ve acted like this is the end of the biblical
story on sexuality. But it’s only the beginning.
 Love Is Love 27

As we read on, we find that marriage isn’t the goal of human exis-
tence. It’s not the mountaintop. It’s not the destination. It’s a signpost.

YOU R M AK ER IS YOUR HU SB AND

In the age before smartphones, you needed a camera to snap photos.
When the little roll of film was full, you took it to be developed. Days
later, you’d pick up your prints, and in a pocket at the front of the
packet, you’d find negatives: small squares of black and white that,
when held up to the light, revealed the outlines of your images. Too
often, when Christians look at what the Bible has to say about sexu-
ality, we only see the negatives. We see the sexual boundaries we can’t
cross, and we clutch the little monochrome of human marriage to our
hearts as if it were the ultimate thing. We miss that in the Bible this
tiny negative is developed into a stunning, wall-sized print. To see that
bigger, brighter, much more beautiful vision, we must soak in a river
that starts in Genesis, swells through the prophets, bursts its banks in
the Gospels, and becomes a mighty flood in Revelation: the river of
God’s passionate love for us.
The Ethiopian eunuch we met in chapter 1 was reading from Isa-
iah 53 when Philip ran up to his chariot. If they had read further
down the scroll, they would have reached a shocking metaphor: God’s
rocky, cosmic marriage to his people. Isaiah 54 begins with a “barren
one” being called on to sing, because “the children of the desolate one
will be more than the children of her who is married” (Isa. 54:1). The
language builds and builds until we realize that God isn’t talking only
about women who are childless, widowed, or abandoned, all of whom
would’ve been vulnerable and in many cases shamed. He’s talking to
his people as a whole:

“Fear not, for you will not be ashamed;

be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced;
for you will forget the shame of your youth,
and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more.
For your Maker is your husband,
the Lord of hosts is his name;
and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer,
28 The Secular Creed

the God of the whole earth he is called.

For the Lord has called you
like a wife deserted and grieved in spirit,
like a wife of youth when she is cast off,
says your God.
For a brief moment I deserted you,
but with great compassion I will gather you.
In overflowing anger for a moment
I hid my face from you,
but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,”
says the Lord, your Redeemer. (Isa. 54:4–8)

This is one of many moments in the prophets when God presents

himself as Israel’s husband. The book of Hosea is built around this
metaphor (see Hos. 2; cf. Jer. 2; 31; Ezek. 16). God is a faithful, lov-
ing husband. Israel is a cheating, reckless wife. Time and again, she
abandons him for idols. Time and again, he woos her back. But the
marriage never seems to work. Sinful people just can’t live with a
holy God.
Enter Jesus.

T HE BR IDEGR OOM
My second visit to America was to celebrate a friend’s wedding. A
few years earlier, she had won a scholarship to study in the United
Kingdom, and the scholars had been invited to a reception. As she
walked up to the British embassy, a soldier was guarding the entrance.
That’s the man I’m going to marry, she thought. But then she shook
herself. How would she even meet this guy? Later, she noticed the
same man in the reception. He wasn’t a guard. He was a Marine ca-
det on the same scholarship. She didn’t tell him this story until their
wedding day.
Few real-life love stories happen like this. For most, there is no
writing in the sky. When Bryan and I were dating, he prayed for a sign
that he should propose. He got nothing! But when Jesus walked onto
the stage of human history, he made a bold and breathtaking claim.
He said he was the bridegroom.
 Love Is Love 29

When the Pharisees complained that Jesus was eating and drink-
ing with sinners, he replied that it wasn’t the healthy who needed a
doctor but the sick (Luke 5:31–32). Rather than realizing that they
were sick, the Pharisees observed that his disciples didn’t fast (Luke
5:33). “Can you make wedding guests fast,” Jesus replied, “while the
bridegroom is with them?” (Luke 5:34). John the Baptist spoke in
similar terms:

The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bride-
groom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s
voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. ( John 3:29)

Jesus is the bridegroom. He’s come to claim God’s wandering people.

This first-century Jewish rabbi is stepping into the shoes of God al-
mighty. Why? Because they fit. The cross is the dark room in which
the image is developed. The resurrection blows it up. But just as each
human is made in the image of God, albeit marred, each human mar-
riage has the chance to reflect this great cosmic metaphor.

HU SB ANDS, L OV E YOUR W I V E S A S C HR IS T L OV ED
T HE C HUR C H
In my first year in college, I lived next door to a talented mathematician
who was raised Hindu. We had many conversations about faith, and
he started reading the Bible. But when God commanded Abraham
to sacrifice his son in Genesis 22, my friend stopped. What kind of a
God would do that? I urged him to read on. A few verses later, God
stops Abraham the moment before he sacrifices Isaac and provides a
ram instead. If my friend had read further in the Bible, he would’ve
seen God sacrifice his beloved Son for us. Rather than seeing a cruel
and heartless God, my friend would’ve seen his overflowing, sacrificial
love. Stopping at Genesis 22:2 is like reading the first words of a note
that says “I cannot bear you” and tearing it up before seeing the rest of
the sentence: “being so far away.” But in the same year that I told my
friend he’d stopped too soon to see the overwhelming love of God, I’d
made the same mistake myself.
30 The Secular Creed

When I first read Paul’s instructions to wives, I was appalled:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is
the head of the wife even as Christ is head of the church, his body, and
is himself its Savior. (Eph. 5:22–23)

For some time, I held this fragment of the letter in my hands, turning
it over and over, shocked by its misogynistic force. But then I started
to piece it together with what came next. “Husbands, love your wives
as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25).
How did Christ love the church? By dying for her. By offering him-
self, naked and bleeding, on a Roman cross. By giving all he had to
meet her needs. By coming not to be served, but to serve and give his
life as a ransom for us. The complement to churchlike submission is
not chauvinistic rule. It’s Christlike love and sacrifice. Husbands are
called four times to love their wives (Eph. 5:25, 28, 33; Col. 3:19) and
once to honor them (1 Pet. 3:7). Christian marriage is a negative held
up to the sun.
As Paul continues, we see that the point of human marriage from
the very first was to give us a picture of Jesus’s love. Paul explains that
the “one flesh” union of husband and wife is truly fulfilled in Jesus and
his church:

In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.
He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own
flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church,
because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his
father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become
one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to
Christ and the church. (Eph. 5:28–32)

Human marriage at its very best is a little, monochrome negative of

a massive wall print. Wives are not told to submit to their husbands
because women are worse at leading than men, but because the church
submits to Christ. Husbands are not told to give themselves up for
their wives because men are less valuable than women, but because
 Love Is Love 31

Jesus gave his life for us. Husbands are told to love their wives as their
own bodies, because the church is Jesus’s body on earth.
This signpost to Christ is why marriage is male and female, and
why husbands and wives are called to different roles. Like Christ and
the church, it’s love across difference. Like Christ and the church, it’s
love built on sacrifice. Like Christ and the church, it’s a flesh-uniting,
life-creating, never-ending, exclusive love. Marriage is meant to point
us to Christ.
But it’s also meant to disappoint us.

L OOK IN T O Y OUR E YE S AND T HE SK Y ’S T HE LIMI T

In Act 1 of the musical Hamilton, Eliza remembers meeting Alexander
Hamilton. As her sister was “dazzling the room,” Hamilton walked
in, and her heart went “Boom!” When Eliza looks into Hamilton’s
eyes, “the sky’s the limit.” She’s drowning in them. Perhaps we’ve all
felt moments like this. Our breath is knocked out of us by a sudden
connection as we wonder, Do they feel the same? Eliza’s love is requited:
“If it takes fighting a war for us to meet,” Hamilton says, “it will have
been worth it.” There is something ecstatic about falling in love. Re-
sponsiveness feels heavenly.
But as the plot of the play unfolds, we see this romance flounder.
Hamilton swears to God that he will never leave Eliza feeling help-
less. But he does. He has an affair that devastates her. And even before
this, his obsession with his work leaves Eliza on the sidelines, craving
his attention. What felt like a step into a dazzling new world became a
stumble into heartbreak. By the end of the show, Hamilton is longing
for Eliza’s forgiveness: Forgiveness for his terrible affair; forgiveness
for the death of their son; forgiveness for neglecting her as he pursued
his love affair with work. Forgiveness.
What are we to make of this love story? Are we wrong to believe
in the ecstasy of love? Not quite. If we take the Bible seriously, we will
see that when romantic love consumes our hearts, when it makes us
feel helpless, when it fills us with such joy that we can’t think about
anything else, and when it crushes us so cruelly we’re lying in a pool
of tears, it’s pointing us to something else. It’s giving us a picture of
the one love that can last forever, the one romance that truly smashes
32 The Secular Creed

through death, the love that, if we miss it now, will devastate us for all
eternity. This lover invites each one of us to come to him.
In Revelation, John hears a great multitude proclaim, “the mar-
riage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready”
(Rev. 19:6–7), and we see Jesus’s marriage to his church bringing heav-
en and earth back together (Rev. 21:1–3). This is the moment of ecstasy
to which Christians are called. This is the lifetime of love into which
we are eagerly invited. This is the wall-sized print that means we can
throw away the negative. This is why Jesus says that there will be no
human marriage in his new world (Matt. 22:30). It’s not because hu-
man marriage isn’t good, but because it will have been fulfilled. Just
as Jesus is the sacrificial lamb to end all need for sacrifice, so he is the
bridegroom who ends all need for human romance. In the TV comedy
The Good Place, set in the afterlife, Chidi worries that he won’t be able
to keep his girlfriend Eleanor’s interest through all eternity. He’s right.
No merely human lover could. But then, we aren’t designed to. That
role is taken by another man.

W H AT A B OU T S AME-SE X SE XU ALI T Y?
In the story of Hamilton, we glimpse passionate love between a man
and a woman. But many other shows and songs reveal the passion of
same-sex romance. In a moving scene in the classic British comedy
Four Weddings and a Funeral, a gay character named Matthew reads a
poem by W. H. Auden at his boyfriend Gareth’s funeral:

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

After Gareth’s sudden death, the other main characters in the film,
who are all single, realize that Gareth and Matthew had effectively
been married all along. This film came out 20 years before gay mar-
riage was legalized in Britain. But like many films and songs before
and since, it fleshes out the claim that love is love: that a same-sex
romance can be just as faithful, deep, and enduring as a heterosexual
 Love Is Love 33

one, and therefore same-sex couples should be able to marry. What

does the Bible say about this?
When she was first exploring Christianity, my friend Rachel
asked some lesbian friends this question. Rachel had grown up in a
non-Christian home. At 15, she’d fallen for a beautiful senior girl. They
became close friends, and when this girl asked Rachel what she want-
ed for her 16th birthday, she asked her for a kiss. This began an on-
and-off sexual relationship that lasted into college—despite various
other relationships that convinced Rachel she was generally into girls,
not guys. When Rachel was accepted into Yale, it seemed like all her
dreams were coming true. But in the winter of her freshman year, her
girlfriend left her.
In small-town California, Rachel had been a cheerful atheist. This
attitude had translated well to student life at Yale. But in her misery at
losing the woman she loved, Rachel heard a lecture on Descartes with
a supposed proof for God. She found the argument unconvincing,
but somehow it made her curious. She’d always laughed at Chris-
tianity. It seemed intellectually weak, and she’d discovered that the
pretty Christian girls at her high school were easy to seduce, despite
their supposed morals. But as Rachel became interested and started
googling religious terms, she kept stumbling upon Jesus. She found
him surprisingly attractive. And yet she’d picked up from the culture
that Christians didn’t approve of gay relationships, so she asked the
only self-identifying Christians she knew at Yale—a lesbian couple—
what they thought.
Rachel’s friends told her it was all a big misunderstanding: if you
read the Bible rightly, it doesn’t reject same-sex marriage. But when
Rachel read the passages they claimed to explain, she was bitterly dis-
appointed. She was no Bible scholar, but she was good at reading
books. She’d wondered if this strange religion based on this intriguing
first-century Jew had room for someone like her. But the Bible’s “No”
to gay relationships was unmistakable. It felt like a door had been
opened a crack and then shut in her face.
Rachel ended up walking through that door nonetheless. Jesus’s
offer of love was too good to turn down, whatever the cost. Now, she
reads the Bible in its original Greek and Hebrew, and is studying
for a PhD in theology. Nothing she’s learned in the last 16 years has
34 The Secular Creed

changed the conclusion she drew when she first read the texts. She
now sees the beautiful, wall-sized print of Jesus’s love, but the sharp
lines in the negative remain.1
My story is different from Rachel’s. I’ve been a Christian for as
long as I can remember, and I’ve been drawn to women for that long
too. When I was 25, I met an empathetic Christian man, who knew
my story and loved me nonetheless. When gay marriage became legal
in America, we’d been happily married for eight years. But I hadn’t
told even my closest friends about my ongoing experience of same-sex
attraction. I was desperately afraid it would make them want to take a
step back: not in outright rejection, but in discomfort.
At the same time, it broke my heart that my non-believing friends
thought Christianity was hateful. Without quite coming out on Face-
book, I explained why I hadn’t turned my profile picture rainbow. One
secular Jewish friend asked why Christians pick and choose among
biblical commands. If I was OK with eating shellfish (which the Old
Testament prohibits) I should also be OK with gay relationships
(which the Old Testament also prohibits). I explained that the Old
Testament law isn’t binding on Christians, because it has been ful-
filled in Christ, and that while the New Testament clearly affirms that
Christians can eat all kinds of foods, it clearly prohibits same-sex sex.
But in my heart, I wanted to say that if I’d been picking and choosing
while exploring what the Bible said, I’d gladly have given up shrimp
to marry a woman!
So was I wrong in my reading?

F OLL OW T HE BRU SHS T R OK E S

Some argue that even if the New Testament seems to say “No” to
same-sex sex, if we look at the big picture of how the New Testament
relates to the Old, we’ll see that it pushes us toward affirming gay
marriage. They suggest that the scriptural trajectory toward love and
inclusion is like the sweep of a brushstroke, so even if the brush has
left the canvas, we can see where it was moving and continue the

1. You can read more about Rachel’s testimony in her excellent book, Born Again This Way: Com-
ing Out, Coming to Faith, and What Comes Next (Charlotte, NC: The Good Book Co., 2020).
 Love Is Love 35

stroke. But if we look closely at the passages that prohibit gay rela-
tionships, we’ll find they already fit with the broad brushstrokes of the
biblical picture.
In the Old Testament, as we have seen, God’s relationship with his
people is pictured as a marriage, and worshiping other gods as infidel-
ity. Idolatry equals adultery. In Romans 1:21–27, Paul sticks with this
theme, weaving between idolatry and sexual sin, and arguing that sex-
ual immorality in general, and homosexual relationships in particular,
are a consequence of people turning from God. This does not mean
that an individual’s experience of same-sex attraction results from re-
jecting God. Most Christians struggle at times with attractions that,
if followed, would lead them into sexual sin. In this respect, we’re all
in the same boat. But if the faithful one-flesh union of a man and a
woman pictures Christ’s marriage to his church, any sexual relation-
ship outside that model pictures idolatry. Without boundary lines,
there is no image.
The New Testament “No” to same-sex sexuality is drawn in char-
coal on the biblical big picture, but all other forms of sexual immo-
rality are also sharply excluded. Whenever Paul mentions same-sex
sexual sin, he also talks about other forms of sin—sexual and oth-
erwise. In Romans 1:28–32, he lists greed, envy, murder, strife, deceit,
malice, disobedience to parents, lack of understanding, lack of faith-
fulness, lack of love, and lack of mercy as other fruits of turning away
from God. Similarly, in 1 Corinthians 6:9–11, Paul lists idol worship,
adultery, theft, greed, drunkenness, slandering, and swindling along-
side both heterosexual and homosexual sin. And strikingly, in 1 Tim-
othy 1:10, Paul lists the sin of enslaving people right next to the sin of
homosexual sex.
Sometimes people argue that Paul supported slavery as much as
he condemned gay relationships, and since we no longer listen to Paul
on slavery, we should not listen to him on homosexuality. But while
Paul gave slaves (who formed a significant proportion of the early
church) instructions on how to live well for Jesus in their situation,
and called masters to treat their slaves well, because their master in
heaven was watching (Eph. 5:9), the idea that Paul supported slavery
falls apart in multiple places. One key text is Paul’s letter to Philemon,
when he calls an enslaved man, Onesimus, his “son” (Philem. 1:10) and
36 The Secular Creed

his “very heart” (Philem. 1:12). Paul urges Onesimus’s former master
to welcome him back no longer as a slave but as a “beloved brother”
and to receive him as he would receive Paul, Philemon’s most respect-
ed mentor (Philem. 1:17). This letter totally upends the master-slave
relationship. Meanwhile, in Paul’s letter to Timothy, we see a clear
condemnation of the very sin on which chattel slavery in America
was based.
Paul’s catalog of sinful practices in 1 Timothy 1:8–10 is built on the
Ten Commandments of Exodus 20. The fifth commandment, “Honor
your father and your mother,” pairs with “those who strike their fa-
thers and mothers.” The sixth commandment, “You shall not murder,”
pairs with “murderers.” The seventh, “You shall not commit adultery,”
pairs with both “the sexually immoral” and “men who practice homo-
sexuality.” And the eighth commandment, “You shall not steal,” pairs
with “enslavers.” Stealing human beings to enslave them is the worst
kind of stealing. It was punishable under the Old Testament law by
death (Ex. 21:16). There is no doubt from his writings that if Paul had
witnessed the race-based, man-stealing, chattel slavery practiced by
self-identifying Christians in America he would have condemned it
outright. But he would also have condemned the ways in which many
churches today condone sexual immorality for Christians, both het-
erosexual and homosexual.
Is this because Paul was a homophobic bigot with a self-righteous,
hateful heart? No. Right after the passage in which he lists gay sex
among other forms of sin, Paul writes, “The saying is trustworthy and
deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to
save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Tim. 1:15). Paul doesn’t
look down on people in gay relationships from a moral high ground.
He says he is the worst sinner he knows, saved only to prove that
someone so bad could be redeemed (1 Tim. 1:16). And every time Paul
writes about same-sex sexual sin, he reminds his readers they are sin-
ners too. In Romans 2, anyone who has read Paul’s list of sins and
come out feeling smug gets a slap in the face: “You, therefore, have
no excuse, you who pass judgement on someone else, for at whatever
point you judge another, you are condemning yourself ” (Rom. 2:1).
In 1 Corinthians 6, the apostle’s words are more tender. After listing
various sins, including gay sex, he reminds his readers, “And such were
 Love Is Love 37

some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were jus-
tified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God”
(1 Cor. 6:11). This verse proves that some of the first Christians, like my
friend Rachel, came to Christ with a history of gay relationships, and
that they were made holy by the blood of Christ just like anyone else.
Some argue that Paul didn’t realize there could be mutual love and
devotion between people in a same-sex romance, because he only saw
promiscuous and exploitative models of homosexual relationships (for
example, adult men with teenage boys, or sex with male slaves). They
say he would have affirmed gay marriage if he’d known there was such
a possibility. But while gay marriage was by no means common in the
ancient world, it was not unheard of. In fact, the notorious emperor
Nero, who ruled Rome at the time when Paul was writing, married
other men on two separate occasions. As historian and queer studies
pioneer Louis Crompton puts it, “Nowhere does Paul or any other
Jewish writer of this period imply the least acceptance of same-sex
relations under any circumstances.” In fact, “The idea that homosex-
uals might be redeemed by mutual devotion would have been wholly
foreign to Paul or any other Jew or early Christian.”2
But does this mean God’s Word is against same-sex love? Not
at all.

SENDING YOU M Y V ER Y HE AR T
The Bible calls us repeatedly to non-erotic same-sex love. While one-
flesh union is reserved for marriage, all Christians are “one body”
together (e.g. 1 Cor. 12:12–27; Rom. 12:4–5; Eph. 4:4). Paul writes of
Christians being “knit together in love” because they are “knit togeth-
er” in Christ’s body (Col. 2:2, 19). He says he was among the Thessa-
lonians “like a nursing mother with her children” (1 Thess. 2:7), and he
“yearns for” the Philippians “with the affection of Christ Jesus” (Phil.
1:8). Paul’s letters to the churches are in the truest sense love letters.
Paul also talks in the most intimate terms about his love for in-
dividual believers. He calls Epaphroditus his “brother and co-worker

2. Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003), 114.
38 The Secular Creed

and fellow soldier” (Phil. 2:25), evoking the deep bond that builds be-
tween soldiers, as they have each other’s backs. But Paul’s most affec-
tionate language for another individual comes in his letter to Phile-
mon. Onesimus and Paul had met in prison. They had become gospel
partners. Paul now calls Onesimus his child (Philem. 10) and tells
Philemon he is sending him his “very heart” (Philem. 12).
One of the cultural adjustments I had to make when I moved to
the United States was that Americans say “I love you” much more
freely. At first, it felt awkward, even hollow. Those words are used
sparingly in England, so I bristled when friends declared their love,
especially if we weren’t that close. But after 12 years in America, I
often say those words to friends. When backed with a true heart com-
mitment, a true willingness to sacrifice for each other, a true affec-
tion that goes beyond mere friendliness, I now believe they draw us
closer to New Testament norms. And while the boundaries on sexual
touching are clear, the Bible calls Christians to physical expressions
of mutual affection in Christ: the command “Greet one another with
a holy kiss” appears five times (Rom. 16:16; 1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1
Thess. 5:26; 1 Pet. 5:14).
“By this all people will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus said,
“if you have love for one another” ( John 13:35) We see this intimacy
in Jesus’s same-sex relationships. John refers to himself as “the one
whom Jesus loved” ( John 20:2). Some have tried to argue that Jesus’s
relationship with John was homoerotic. But while “love” in English is
one size fits all, the Greek word John uses is not the word commonly
used for sexual love. John also writes of Jesus loving Lazarus ( John
11:3) and records a conversation between Jesus and Peter after Jesus’s
resurrection, in which Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him, and
Peter replies three times that he does ( John 21:15–17). Like sibling love
and friend love, the love between same-sex believers is precious, deep,
and intimate. But it’s not sexual, and it’s not exclusive.
I recently watched an episode of Planet Earth in which a baby
elephant was separated from its mother in a sandstorm. The herd
was on a long, exhausting trek to find water, and after the sandstorm,
the lonely child had picked up its mother’s tracks. But as the camera
panned out on this solitary calf, the narrator told us the painful truth:
this calf was following its mother’s tracks in the wrong direction.
 Love Is Love 39

It’s not that the Bible doesn’t celebrate same-sex love. It does. But
rather than pointing us toward exclusive, sexual relationships, these
scriptural tracks lead to non-erotic, non-exclusive bonds between be-
lievers. Correctly followed, these tracks lead to a waterhole of love-
filled life in Christ. But turned to sexual sin, they lead to death.
Looking at other biblical snapshots will help us understand.

SN AP SHO T S OF L OV E
Not long ago I saw a video posted on Twitter of a dad playing a guitar
and singing the Elvis Presley’s hit “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” More
than a million people had watched the video—not because the man
was a great singer, but because he was singing to his newborn son. No
one would think this dad was expressing sexual love. If we’d thought
that, we would be repulsed. But it was a love song nonetheless, and
this man’s use of a romantic song to express his feelings for his new-
born son was moving because it showed us that a completely non-ro-
mantic love can be just as deep as a romantic one.
If we look back through the film of Scripture, we’ll find fatherly
love is a powerful picture of God’s love. Just as the best human mar-
riages give us a glimpse of Jesus’s love for us, so in the best human
fathers we see a snapshot of God’s paternal love. The Bible also uses
maternal metaphors for God, who says he gave birth to Israel and
compares himself to a nursing mother (e.g., Deut. 32:18; Isa. 45:15).
So, in the best of human mothers, we bathe in the warmth of God’s
motherly love.
Parental relationships are vital. But they are vitally different from
sexual relationships. Adding a sexual element to parental love is like
dropping lemon into milk: it spoils it instantly. This isn’t because sex is
bad, or because parental love is bad. From God’s perspective, both are
very good. But sex doesn’t belong in parent-child relationships. Both
marriage and parenthood depict God’s love for us. But superimposing
one image on the other ruins both. The Bible says the same about
same-sex love: like sexual love and parental love, it’s a spoke in the
wheel of human love that occupies its own unique and precious space
and helps us understand another aspect of God’s love for us.
40 The Secular Creed

In our culture today, it’s easy to believe that sexual love is the peak
of human intimacy, followed closely by parental love. Within this
mentality, it’s easy for Christians to believe that the nuclear family
is the locus for all real, lasting love. But Jesus torpedoes this idea:
“Greater love has no one than this,” Jesus declares, “that he lay down
his life for his friends” ( John 15:13). According to Jesus, friendship isn’t
the poor cousin of romantic love. Self-sacrificing friendship love is
just as good as any other kind.
Rather than prizing the nuclear family above all, Jesus stressed
the family of the church. One day, while he was teaching, Jesus heard
that his mother and brothers were waiting to speak with him. He re-
plied, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his
disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever
does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and
mother” (Matt. 12:46–50). Jesus isn’t denigrating the nuclear family.
He’s setting it in its proper context: the blood-bought brotherhood
and sisterhood of the church.
This is the context in which Paul lived as a single man and com-
mended singleness even over marriage (1 Cor. 7:32–35, 40). This is the
context in which same-sex-attracted Christians should be living to-
day: a loving family of faith, in which lives and food and struggles
with sin are shared between siblings in Christ. I used to fear that shar-
ing my experience of same-sex attraction with my Christian friends
would cause them to take a half-step back from me. Now I realize
that by not sharing my struggles, I was taking a half-step back from
them. For same-sex-attracted Christians, the struggle can be very real.
When my friend Rachel fell back into a sexual relationship with an-
other girl, it was the love of her Christian friends that helped her turn
around. The person who leaves a gay relationship to fall into the arms
of Christ should feel more love, not less. The arms of those who are
Jesus’s body here on earth should be his tangible embrace.
Last summer, I did a Q&A for students alongside a single pastor
many years my senior. We were each asked what we’d tell ourselves
at 18. The pastor said that at 18, he was painfully aware of his same-
sex attraction and deeply afraid he wouldn’t be able to live long-term
without pursuing it. Decades later, his patterns of attraction haven’t
 Love Is Love 41

changed. But he wanted to tell his 18-year-old self just how good and
full of love his life would be.

LE T ’S BE MOR E BIBLIC AL, NO T L E S S

Some argue that for the church to survive in a love-is-love world,
we must become less biblical. I think the opposite is true. For far too
long, we’ve bought the lie that marriage is the ultimate good. For far
too long, we’ve bought the lie that singleness is second-best. For far
too long we’ve undervalued same-sex love and bought the lie that the
nuclear family is more important than the church.
Christian marriage at its best is a beautiful picture of Jesus’s love
for us. But it’s not the only one. “By this we know love,” John writes,
“that [ Jesus] laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our
lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16). In Christ we are one body together,
brothers and sisters, comrades in arms, knit together in love. If Chris-
tians lived like this, the plague of loneliness would be over, and all of
us—single or married, same-sex attracted or straight, old or young,
widowed or newlywed—would be embraced into a family. These are
the first tremors of the earthquake of God’s love that will remake the
world when Jesus returns.
When I left the coffee shop in Missouri, I hugged the women
I’d been talking with, and we laughed together. But they warned me
that nothing I had said had changed their support for the next day’s
protest. Afterward on Twitter, one of the women said kindly that she
felt sorry for me that I had “never experienced love and passion with
another woman.” I texted my friend Rachel, who replied, “She’s wrong
about the love.”
 3

“ T H E G AY- R I G H T S
M OV E M E N T I S T H E
NEW CI V IL -RIGH TS
M OV E M E N T ”

“Can you untangle this for me?”

My daughter’s hands were filled with wool. She wanted to start a
project, but two different colors were twisted together. It had reached
the point that if you pulled on any one thread, the knot grew tighter.
So I started the slow, careful, painstaking process of teasing the vari-
ous knots apart. Every time I seemed to be making progress and was
winding one color neatly round my hand, I’d come to the end of the
thread. It turned out she’d been extracting wool by pulling on random
ends and then cutting the thread when she came to a knot.
In chapter 1, we explored the biblical big picture of love and unity
across racial and cultural difference. In chapter 2, we saw the biblical
big picture of sex and marriage and how the Bible has a different
beautiful vision for same-sex relationships. In this chapter we’ll ex-
amine how the historic failure of white Christians to love their black
neighbors has propelled the powerful claim that the gay-rights move-
ment is the new civil-rights movement. This is the tape that tethers
44 The Secular Creed

“love is love” to “black lives matter.” We’ll look at why this claim is so
persuasive, as well as why it ultimately fails. And we’ll see that short-
cuts only make the slow, careful, painstaking process of untangling
this knot more difficult.

‘ YOU’R E ON T HE W R ONG SIDE OF HIS T OR Y ’

On November 14, 1960, a 6-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges was
escorted into an elementary school in New Orleans. The year Ruby
was born, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled public school segrega-
tion unconstitutional. But many were still resisting integration. This
brave 6-year-old’s small steps into William Frantz Elementary School
were part of an attempted giant leap for America: a leap toward ed-
ucating black and white children together, a leap toward equality, a
leap toward the day when “little black boys and black girls will be
able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and
brothers.”1 But rather than joining with this great leap, many white
parents took another step. When Ruby Bridges entered school, she
faced death threats, racist slurs, and a white crowd chanting, “2-4-
6-8, we don’t want to integrate.” Five hundred white children were
pulled from school that day, and as more and more schools became
integrated, many white parents moved their children to segregated
private schools.
Today, we’re all appalled by this behavior. But those of us who are
Christians should be more appalled. Many of the all-white private
schools had “Christian” or “church” in their name. It wasn’t just that
white parents didn’t want their children in integrated schools. White
Christian parents didn’t want it. These “segregation academies” are one
example among many in American history of when white Christians
have sided against love across racial difference. Not every white Chris-
tian, to be sure, but far too many.
Today, when people see Christian opposition to gay marriage, they
think it’s just the same song, second verse. The reasoning runs like this:

1. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream” speech delivered at the March on Washington for
Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihavead-
ream.htm.
 The Gay-Rights Movement 45

just as Christians have oppressed and terrorized African Americans,

so Christians have oppressed and terrorized gay and lesbian people.
Just as we are now ashamed of 1960s segregationists, so one day our
descendants will be ashamed of us, if we continue to oppose gay mar-
riage. I recently read a New York Times column titled “Choosing The
Right Side Of History” in which Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Nicholas Kristof made the usual move to tie gay rights to civil rights.2
Those who oppose any progressive ideal, he argues, are on the wrong
side of history. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “The
arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”3
Given the history of white Christian racism, I can see why people
think Christianity is the problem. In the minds of many of my secu-
lar friends, if we’re going to become more just, we must become less
biblical. Perhaps a progressive form of Christianity can survive in the
modern world. But traditional, Bible-based Christian faith—the kind
that cannot affirm gay marriage—has failed. The gay-rights move-
ment picked up the torch of the civil-rights movement and ran. We
must run with it or be left behind. Or so the thinking holds.
But there are multiple problems with this perspective.
First, as we saw in chapter 1, without the God of the Bible, our
ideals of human equality and justice have no foundation. Thus Yuval
Noah Harari declares, “There are no gods in the universe, no nations,
no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the com-
mon imagination of human beings.”4 From an atheist perspective,
there’s no reason to believe in human rights, no basis for love across
difference, and no meaning to right and wrong beyond our shared
imagination at a certain time. If this is true, then race-based slav-
ery and segregation laws were not absolutely wrong. So long as they
were right according to the “shared imagination” of enough people at
the time, that’s good enough, because there is no universal, timeless

2. Nicholas Kristof, “Choosing The Right Side Of History,” The New York Times, October 14,
2020, A27, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/opinion/amy-coney-barrett-health-care.
html. The online version modified the title: “Will We Choose the Right Side of History?”
3. Martin Luther King Jr., “Out of the Long Night of Segregation,” Missions: An Interna-
tional Baptist Magazine, February 8, 1958, https://thekingcenter.org/archive/document/
out-long-night-segregation.
4. Harari, Sapiens, 28.
46 The Secular Creed

moral standard. As Richard Dawkins puts it, “moral values are ‘in the
air’ and they change from century to century, even from decade to
decade.”5The very idea of human rights is, as Harari argues, a Chris-
tian invention. So we need Christianity to be right for human-rights
abuses to be wrong.
Second, the idea that minorities should be protected, not op-
pressed, also came to us from Christianity. As historian Tom Holland
points out, such protection would have seemed quite strange in the
first-century Greco-Roman empire in which Christianity was born,
where the ethic was essentially this: “The strong do what they have the
power to do. The weak must suck it up.”6 But when a poor man from a
historically oppressed racial and religious group claimed to be God in
human flesh, commanded love for society’s most vulnerable and died
a slave’s death on a Roman cross, he made the poor, oppressed, and
victimized forever central to God’s moral plan.
Third, without belief in a creator God, there is no story to the
universe. When King asserted that the arc of the moral universe bends
toward justice, he said it because he was a Christian, who believed in
Jesus’s death and resurrection:

Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a
cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and
B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, “the
arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”7

If there is no God who made the universe, there is no moral universe

to bend. There is, as Dawkins puts it, “no design, no purpose, no evil
and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”8 If there is no
justice-loving God who made the world, there’s no reason to believe
the world will finally be just. In fact, there’s no way of even knowing
what that would mean.

5. Richard Dawkins, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide (New York: Random House, 2019), 159.
6. See Holland, Dominion, 41. Quoting from Thucydides, 5.89.
7. Martin Luther King Jr., “Out of the Long Night of Segregation,” Missions: An International
Baptist Magazine, February 8, 1958.
8. Richard Dawkins, A River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books,
1996), 133.
 The Gay-Rights Movement 47

Fourth, the problem with Christians who supported segregation

was not that they listened to the Bible too much, but too little. While
the Bible cuts firmly against gay marriage for believers, it cuts equally
firmly in favor of racial equality and integration. Repenting of racial
injustice means turning back to the Bible. Affirming gay marriage for
believers means turning away. In the time before abolition, slavehold-
ers often either stopped those they enslaved from reading the Bible at
all, or drastically edited it. As Esau McCaulley puts it, “Part of them
knew that their exegetical conclusions could only be maintained if
the enslaved were denied firsthand experience of the text.”9 It takes as
much careful editing to make the Bible seem like it supports segrega-
tion as to make it seem like it affirms gay marriage. In both cases, it’s
like editing a “Do Not Enter” sign by crossing out “Do Not.”
The fifth problem with the claim that Christians who don’t affirm
gay marriage for believers are on the wrong side of history is that
(in purely demographic terms) it seems unlikely to be true. Today, 31
percent of the world identifies as Christian, and that proportion is set
to increase slightly to 32 percent by 2060, while the proportion of the
world not affiliated with any religion is set to decline from 16 per-
cent to 13 percent.10 Christianity’s closest global competitor is Islam,
which is set to grow from 24 percent to 31 percent and which also does
not affirm gay marriage. Many expected progressive Christianity that
affirms gay marriage to thrive while Bible-based faith declined. But
across North America, mainline churches have seen a steep decline
while evangelical churches have fared much better.11 Globally, evangel-
ical and Pentecostal churches (mostly composed of believers of color)
are growing, while more liberal churches (mostly composed of white
people) are declining.

9. McCaulley, Reading While Black, 170.

10. See “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050,” Pew
Research Center, April 2, 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projec-
tions-2010-2050, and “Projected Change in Global Population, 2015–2060,” Pew Research
Center, March 31, 2017, http://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-reli-
giouslandscape/pf_17-04-05_projectionsupdate_changepopulation640px.
11. “The Changing Religious Composition of the U.S.,” in America’s Changing Religious Land-
scape, Pew Research Center, May 12, 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-1-
the-changing-religious-composition-of-the-u-s/.
48 The Secular Creed

Finally, the claim that anyone who opposes gay marriage for
Christians is equivalent to a ’60s segregationist fails when we look at
the actual beliefs of black Americans.

AW K WAR D V IE W S OF BL AC K AMER IC ANS

In 2001, roughly a third of American adults supported same-sex mar-
riage. By 2013, it was half. When gay marriage was legalized across
the country in 2015, 55 percent of Americans agreed. Since then, sup-
port has grown further, with 61 percent of Americans affirming gay
marriage in 2019.12 This change in a single generation is one of the
most remarkable cultural shifts of our age. It’s important to note that
someone could oppose gay marriage for believers while not thinking
it should be against the law. As a comparison, I believe that frequent
prayer, weekly church attendance (except in extreme circumstances),
generous giving to those in need, and living as either faithfully single
or faithfully married are vital for Christian discipleship. But I don’t
think they should be enforced by law. I believe that Christian ethics
are most attractive when they are undertaken freely. Still, to the extent
that not believing gay marriage should be legal is some kind of proxy
to underlying beliefs, we see a significant difference between black
and white Americans.
In many people’s minds, the fact that gay marriage was legalized
across all states under America’s first black president solidified the idea
that the gay-rights movement is the natural heir of the civil-rights
movement. But while President Obama supported the change, at the
time only 39 percent of black Americans agreed. By 2019, only 51 per-
cent of black Americans supported same-sex marriage versus 62 per-
cent of whites.13 This difference is the more remarkable as the average
age of black Americans is younger than whites, and younger people

12. Numbers quoted from “Changing attitudes on same-sex marriage,” Pew Research Center, May
14, 2019, https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage. A Gal-
lup poll found slightly higher levels of support, but a similar trajectory across time: https://
news.gallup.com/poll/311672/support-sex-marriage-matches-record-high.aspx.
13. “Changing attitudes on same-sex marriage,” 2019.
 The Gay-Rights Movement 49

are more likely to support gay marriage.14 Moreover, black Americans

are far more likely to vote Democrat, and Democrats are far more
likely than Republicans to support gay marriage.15
So, what keeps so many black Americans from affirming gay mar-
riage? There are likely several factors. One is that Americans with col-
lege degrees are far more likely to support same-sex marriage than
those with high-school degrees or less, and African Americans have
historically had less access to higher education.16 But another signif-
icant factor is the much higher levels of Christian faith and practice
among black Americans.17
As we saw in chapter 1, black Americans are more likely to iden-
tify as Christians than their white peers are. They poll higher on every
measure of Christian practice and tend to be theologically conserva-
tive.18 While black Protestants considered as a whole (without sep-
arating theological progressives from conservatives) are significantly
less likely than white evangelicals to oppose gay marriage, they are
far more likely than white mainline Protestants to do so.19 Which-
ever way you read it, the fact that nearly half of all black Americans
still do not support gay marriage is a major problem for the claim
that the gay-rights movement is the new civil-rights movement. It
certainly discredits the idea that anyone who does not support gay

14. In 2019, 83 percent of Americans age 18 to 29 supported gay marriage versus only 47 percent of
those 65 and older.
15. In 2019, 79 percent of Democrats supported gay marriage versus only 44 percent of Republicans.
16. In 2016, 68 percent of Americans with a college degree said same-sex marriage should be
legal versus 45 percent of those without. Hannah Fingerhut, “Support steady for same-sex
marriage and acceptance of homosexuality,” Pew Research Center, May 12, 2016, https://www.
pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/05/12/support-steady-for-same-sex-marriage-and-accep-
tance-of-homosexuality.
17. For a discussion of this from 2015, when same-sex marriage was being considered by the U.S.
Supreme Court, see Frank Newport, “Religion, Race, and Same-Sex Marriage,” Gallup Blog,
May 1, 2015, https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/182978/religion-race-sex-mar-
riage.aspx.
18. The faith statements of the largest black protestant denominations testify to this.
19. A 2020 survey found that 34 percent of white evangelicals supported gay marriage versus
57 percent of black Protestants and 79 percent of white mainline Protestants. See “Dueling
Realities: Amid Multiple Crises, Trump and Biden Supporters See Different Priorities and
Futures for the Nation,” Public Religion Research Institute, October 19, 2020, https://www.
prri.org/research/amid-multiple-crises-trump-and-biden-supporters-see-different-realities-
and-futures-for-the-nation.
50 The Secular Creed

marriage for religious reasons is like a ’60s segregationist. Of course,

you could say that black Christians are just wrong about gay marriage.
But minimally, this divergence of views shows that we cannot lump
the interests and beliefs of all minorities together. We see this crack in
the supposedly cohesive shell of diversity most clearly when failure to
affirm gay relationships leads to discrimination against black people
in white-majority countries.
In 2019, a black actress named Seyi Omooba was fired from star-
ring in a London production of The Color Purple because of a 2014
Facebook post in which she expressed her Christian beliefs about gay
relationships.20 “I just quoted what the Bible says about homosexu-
ality,” Omooba explained, “the need for repentance, but ultimately
God’s love for all humanity.” 21 The firing of a black woman because
she holds traditionally Christian views is not a triumph for diversity.
Quite the reverse.
The fact that many black people in the United States do not affirm
gay relationships is hinted at in the mission statement of Black Lives
Matter. The second point in that mission statement says:

We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undoc-
umented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the
gender spectrum. Our network centers those who have been marginal-
ized within Black liberation movements.

Of course, Christians should affirm and defend the right to a life

free from harassment, bullying, and violence for any person as an im-
age-bearer of God. Black people who identify as queer or trans matter
so much to Jesus that he came to die for them, and any hatred and
abuse poured out on LGBT+ people by Christians goes quite against
Christ’s call to love our neighbor as ourself. But the acknowledgement
that LGBT+ people have been “marginalized within Black liberation
movements” shows that the gay-rights movement is not smoothly

20. Sofia Lotto Persio, “The Color Purple actress under fire over anti-gay post,” Pink News, March
17, 2019, https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/03/17/the-colour-purple-actress-anti-gay-post.
21. Jonathan Ames, “Seyi Omooba: Actress fired for anti-gay Facebook message wins backing in
legal fight,” The Times, November 16, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/seyi-omooba-
actress-fired-for-anti-gay-facebook-message-wins-backing-in-legal-fight-srczzfj67.
 The Gay-Rights Movement 51

continuous with the civil-rights movement. Most African Americans

engaged in the civil-rights movement would not have affirmed gay re-
lationships or transgender identities and (ironically) the people most
likely to hold progressive views on LGBT+ rights today are white and
economically privileged.
Race, sexual choices, and gender identities are different threads
that must be untangled to be understood. As we look more closely at
the comparison people make between being born gay and being born
black, we’ll find intrinsic problems that ultimately don’t do justice to
people in either group.
We see this most clearly when gay marriage is compared to
interracial marriage.

IS G AY M AR R I AGE LIK E IN T ER R ACI AL M AR R I AGE?

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned laws banning interracial
marriage. The case at hand was that of Mildred and Richard Loving,
who had both been sentenced to prison for a year. Richard was white.
Mildred was part African American and part Native American. Their
marriage violated Virginia state law. It’s shocking to think how recent
this is and to think that, despite all that the Bible says about love
across racial and cultural difference, many Christians insisted that in-
terracial marriage violated God’s plan.
When the Supreme Court was considering the case for gay mar-
riage in 2015, Loving v. Virginia was cited as a precedent. The court
voted 5 to 4 in favor. Justice Clarence Thomas—the only African
American justice on the court—was one of the four who argued
against same-sex marriage. But whatever the rights and wrongs of
the U.S. legal system, is it right to see gay marriage as a natural heir to
mixed-race marriage? I don’t think so.
For centuries, motivated by racism, white scientists claimed that
there were meaningful biological differences between black people
and white people. But they were wrong. In fact, now that we can an-
alyze each human’s DNA, we can see that there is often more genetic
variation between two people of African descent than between a black
person and a white person. What’s more, any apparent differences be-
tween an individual black person and a white person—skin color or
52 The Secular Creed

hair type, for example—are irrelevant when it comes to having sex and
having kids. While the laws against interracial marriage in the United
States were partly based on the claim by scientists in the mid-19th
century that racial mixing led to infertility, this claim was completely
false.22 Nothing about interracial marriage changes what marriage was
designed to be: a picture of Jesus’s love for the church and a partner-
ship for bearing and raising children.
The case of same-sex marriage is different. There are significant
biological differences between men and women. In many life situa-
tions, such differences don’t matter. For example, to do most jobs, it
doesn’t matter if you’re male or female. But the differences between
men and women are highly relevant in marriage. In fact, this is the
setting in which they’re most relevant, because the differences enable
us to have babies together. Equating same-sex marriage to mixed-race
marriage only works if you accept the wrong beliefs about people from
different racial backgrounds that white scientists used to peddle. This
doesn’t by itself mean gay marriage is wrong. But it does mean we can’t
say it’s the natural successor to mixed-race marriage.

IS BEING G AY LIK E BEING BL AC K?

The gay-rights movement built on the foundation of the civil-rights
movement on the basis that being gay was in important respects like
being black. Each of us is born with an unchosen racial heritage. Like-
wise, the pioneers of gay rights argued, some people are born gay. They
should, therefore, have the same right as anyone else to work in any
job, serve in the military, and marry. But there are two substantial
problems with the analogy.
First, when people compare being gay to being black, they typical-
ly don’t distinguish between a person’s attractions and actions. What-
ever our patterns of attraction, we don’t choose our attractions. I didn’t
choose, for example, to be attracted to women. But we do choose our
actions, and we all agree that sexual actions carry moral weight. For

22. William H. Tucker, “The Ideology of Racism: Misusing Science to Justify Racial Discrimina-
tion,” UN Chronicle, https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/ideology-racism-misusing-sci-
ence-justify-racial-discrimination.
 The Gay-Rights Movement 53

example, not long ago I met a man in his 50s who has wrestled all
his married life with attraction to other women. He has worked hard
to turn away from these attractions. But he could have made other
choices. When attracted to another woman, he could’ve responded
by starting an affair. He could’ve divorced his wife to marry another
woman. Or he could have attempted a sexual assault. All of these are
moral decisions, and all of us would agree that the last choice at least
would be immoral. In each case, the attraction is the same, but the ac-
tion is different. My friend experiences attraction, and then he makes
moral choices about how he responds. Likewise, while my same-sex
attraction is as unchosen as the color of my skin, if I left my husband
for another woman and then said I had no choice but to do so, I’d be
denying a basic fact of my humanity: that I’m a human who makes
moral decisions, not an animal who simply responds to her drives.
When you think about it, it’s dehumanizing not to distinguish be-
tween someone’s attractions and actions.
Second, while racial heritage is both unchosen and unchanging,
the latest research shows that our sexual attractions can change over
time, and that bisexuality is far more common than exclusive same-
sex sexuality. University of Utah professor Lisa Diamond, who iden-
tifies as a lesbian, is a pioneer of this research. Diamond has found
that women like me, who experience same-sex attraction but not ex-
clusively, are by far the largest group of same-sex attracted people.
About 14 percent of women experience attraction to other women,
while only 1 percent are never attracted to men. For men, it’s roughly 7
percent who are attracted to other men, while only 2 percent are never
attracted to women.This means there is significant complexity within
labeled categories. For example, 42 percent of self-identified lesbians
and 31 percent of self-identified gay men report having had an oppo-
site-sex sexual fantasy in the last year, one study found.23

23. Professor Diamond summarizes her data in a lecture at Cornell University, “Just How Dif-
ferent Are Female and Male Sexual Orientation?,” YouTube, October 17, 2013, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=m2rTHDOuUBw. For a short summary on the different proportions
of the population that report same-sex attraction, same-sex sexual behavior, and LGBT identity,
see Gary J. Gates, “How Many People are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender?,” UCLA
School of Law, Williams Institute, April 2011, https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publica-
tions/how-many-people-lgbt.
54 The Secular Creed

Popular culture is starting to acknowledge this complexity. The

Canadian comedy Schitt’s Creek won a raft of Emmys in 2020. One
of its central characters, David, signals gay identity from the start and
ends up marrying another man. But in the first season, the show plays
with the audience’s expectations by having David sleep with a woman
and say he’s bisexual. Meanwhile, the man whom David finally mar-
ries was previously engaged to a woman and has never before dated
a man. Ten years ago, this man would have been portrayed as some-
one who always knew he was gay but never acknowledged it. But as
professor Diamond’s research has shown, rather than being set from
birth, “change in patterns of same-sex and other-sex attraction is a
relatively common experience among sexual minorities.”24
Diamond clarifies that change is not forged by intentional ef-
fort—for example, someone undergoing therapy to try to change
their attractions. But change over time and in different circumstances
(sometimes called “sexual fluidity”) is seen in every category, whether
people identify as gay, straight, or bisexual. Diamond recognizes how
challenging this finding is to the gay-rights movement:

We’ve advocated for the civil rights of LGBT people on the basis of them
being LGBT. We have used categories as a part of our strategy for social
policy and for acceptance, and that is really, really tricky, now that we
know it’s not true.25

None of this means we choose our attractions, or that everyone who

experiences same-sex attraction is also capable of heterosexual desire.
But it does mean that sexual orientation is not like race. Our patterns
of attraction can change over time. Our racial heritage does not. Out
of respect for all concerned, we must untie the knot that has bound
these two ideas together.

24. See Lisa M. Diamond, “Sexual Fluidity in Male and Females,” Current Sexual Health Reports
8 (November 4, 2016): 249–256, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11930-016-0092-z.
25. Quoted from Diamond, “Just How Different Are Female and Male Sexual Orientation?” See
also Clifford J. Rosky and Lisa M. Diamond, “Scrutinizing Immutability: Research on Sexual
Orientation and U.S. Legal Advocacy for Sexual Minorities,” The Journal of Sex Research 53,
nos. 4–5 (May–June 2016): 363–91, https://psych.utah.edu/_resources/documents/people/dia-
mond/Scrutinizing%20Immutability.pdf.
 The Gay-Rights Movement 55

But those of us who are Christians must also repent of the ways in
which Christian sin has tied that knot.

R ACE, SE XU ALI T Y, AND P R EJUDICE

One of the most noxious lies told over centuries about black people
was that they were morally inferior to whites. This deep-seated prej-
udice made 6-year-old Ruby Bridges seem like a threat and made the
prosecution lawyer think he knew Anthony Ray Hinton was guilty
just by looking at him. King dreamed of a day when his children
would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of
their character, because racial heritage does not carry moral weight.
While sexual choices do, we must also recognize that Christians have
too often seen people who identify as gay or lesbian through similarly
prejudiced eyes.
Many who were raised in the church were taught to be suspicious
of gay and lesbian people. In fact, the idea that gay and lesbian people
were in some general sense bad people was baked into the teaching.
When people raised that way discover their prejudices aren’t true, they
often throw out what the Bible actually says. For example, I’ve fre-
quently heard straight Christians say something like this: “I used to
think that the Bible was against gay marriage, but then I made a gay
friend at work. He’s really nice and seems to be in a really loving rela-
tionship, so now I’m not so sure.” When someone says this, it shows
that they were raised with views that baptized what the Bible actually
says in a steaming pot of prejudice. There’s no reason for a Christian
to think that someone in a gay relationship is not also kind, generous,
and trustworthy. A gay person might well be all these things, just as a
straight person who commits adultery might be a nice person in other
respects. We might have a gay friend who is faithful to his husband
and a straight friend who is not faithful to his wife. If this surprises
us, we might need to repent of our prejudice. But we shouldn’t repent
of our theology.
To be sure, the Bible presents homosexual relationships as a symp-
tom of a generally sinful heart. But this is also true of other forms
of sexual sin. People sometimes observe that Christians go easy on
straight sin while being strict on gay sin. They’re right to cry foul when
56 The Secular Creed

they see this inconsistency. As we saw in the last chapter, the apostle
Paul cried foul too. But the answer is not to say “Yes” to gay marriage
because we have so often allowed for sinful heterosexual sex outside
marriage. The answer is to say “No” to heterosexual sin as well—which
the Bible also condemns.

W H AT A B OU T P EOP LE W HO AR E ALR E ADY M AR R IED?

An increasingly important question for Christians is what the Bible’s
teaching means for gay and lesbian people who come to Christ while
in a same-sex marriage. The question is particularly pressing for those
raising children in same-sex partnerships. The God of the Bible hates
divorce. So, isn’t it better for those in same-sex marriages to stay mar-
ried after coming to Christ, just as Paul tells believers who are married
to unbelievers not to leave their husband or wife (1 Cor. 7:12–13)?
From a biblical perspective, the answer is No. While same-sex
marriage is recognized legally, it is not valid before God, because it
requires unrepentant sin. But especially in cases involving children,
the church must think creatively about how to welcome new believers
into the community of faith. This is one of many areas in which the
biblical truth that the church is the primary family unit comes into
play. I recently met a woman who is living this reality.
Genia married first at 17 and had her first three children with a
chronically unfaithful man. She tried to turn her marriage around, but
it didn’t work. Instead, she had an affair with another woman, who
gave her the relational connection she craved. When her marriage
finally broke up, Genia became depressed and suicidal. She was part of
a church and had met a young woman named Misha through a friend
in her Bible study group. Misha kept vigil over her. “We were at a lake
house,” Genia recalls. “I could have just walked out into the water.”
Misha had no history of same-sex attraction, but one thing led
to another and she and Genia fell in love. They moved in together,
entered into common-law marriage, and (through a sperm bank) had
a child. Everything was well until Misha’s grandpa died. She start-
ed wondering about mortality and told Genia she wanted to go to
church. “I was fine and happy until I went back to church,” Genia
said. “That was when God started tugging at my heart again.” God’s
 The Gay-Rights Movement 57

call became so clear that Genia told Misha they couldn’t go on as they
were. At first, Misha took it very badly. But after a period of resisting
and even having an affair herself, Misha gave her life to Christ. “Her
transformation was amazing,” Genia recalls.
All this time, Genia’s daughter and son-in-law, who pastors a
church in Nashville, had been loving and praying for the two of them.
When Genia and Misha came to Christ, they knew they couldn’t con-
tinue in a sexual relationship. They were open to the possibility that
this would mean breaking up their family, and they were ready to
take that step—trusting the Lord that their obedience would be best
for their daughter as well. But as they prayed, they both felt called
instead to restart their lives in the church family Genia’s son-in-law
served. That church had been deeply instrumental in Misha’s faith
journey and felt like their spiritual home. So in the end, all three of
them moved in with Genia’s daughter and son-in-law, who were also
raising little girls. Rather than being broken up, their family grew,
and their relationship changed. “We were lovers,” Genia explains, “and
now we’re sisters.” With words that brought tears to my eyes, Genia
told me that she and Misha are closer now as sisters in Christ than
they ever were as lovers.
Not every story will have such a happy ending. Some same-sex
couples will need full separation to live faithfully for Christ. Painful as
this may be, Jesus calls us to deny ourselves and take up our cross and
follow him. It isn’t safe. But a creative, expansive approach to family
will always be part of the answer for gay and lesbian people entering
the community of faith: whether they are leaving legal marriages or
less formalized relationships, or whether they are simply giving up the
possibility of sexual and romantic relationships in the future. Rosaria
Butterfield, who was a literature professor at a secular university in a
long-term lesbian relationship when she became a Christian, says she
learned hospitality from her time in the LGBT+ community.26 Today,
most people associate “non-traditional family”—the sense of corpo-
rate closeness that doesn’t depend on DNA—with LGBT+ people. But

26. Her excellent book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospital-
ity in Our Post-Christian World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), makes the case for this being a
Christian norm.
58 The Secular Creed

the first pioneers of such community were Christians. As one sec-

ond-century commentator put it, Christians have “a common table,
but not a common bed.”27

‘ W H Y H AV E C HR IS T I ANS AC T ED H AT E FULLY T OWAR D

L GB T+ P EOP LE? ’
In January 2020, I gave a talk—“Aren’t We Better Off Without Chris-
tianity?”—for a Christian fellowship at MIT. When it came to Q&A,
I asked for questions from skeptical people. One of the first was this:
“Why have Christians acted hatefully toward LGBT people?” I said
I could answer that important question with one word: sin. Not the
sin of the LGBT people who experienced the hate, but the sin of any
Christians who deliver it.
Jesus calls us to love even our enemies—let alone those who have
made different sexual choices than we have. The ways in which Chris-
tians have at times acted hatefully toward gay and lesbian people
is simply disobedience to Christ, and its effects can be devastating.
The lesbian couple I met with in Missouri were sincerely concerned
what I’d say wouldn’t be “safe,” since some studies have suggested
that LGBT+ young adults raised in religious contexts are more likely
to attempt suicide than those who weren’t. For example, a 2015 study
showed that “LGBT young adults who mature in religious contexts
have higher odds of suicidal thoughts, and more specifically chronic
suicidal thoughts, as well as suicide attempts compared to other LGBT
young adults.”28 In general, as we’ll see in the next chapter, regular
churchgoing has a significant protective effect against suicide. But this
does not seem to be the case for those who identify as LGBT+, whose
suicide rates in general continue to be much higher than their het-
erosexual peers, despite greater societal acceptance.29 Loving a person

27. The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus, chapter 5.

28. See Jeremy J Gibbs and Jeremy Goldbach, “Religious Conflict, Sexual Identity, and Suicidal
Behaviors among LGBT Young Adults,” Archives of Suicide Research 19, no. 4 (March 12, 2015):
472–88, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25763926.
29. See, for example, Julia Raifman, et al., “Sexual Orientation and Suicide Attempt Disparities
Among US Adolescents: 2009–2017,” Pediatrics 45 no. 3 (March 2020): 1–11, https://pediatrics.
 The Gay-Rights Movement 59

doesn’t mean affirming all that person’s actions. But it does mean lis-
tening and seeking to understand. In Us versus Them, Andrew Marin
quotes a 29-year-old gay man living in Athens, Georgia, who said
something typical of other LGBT+ people he interviewed: “I left the
church because I couldn’t find one person who cared enough to listen
to my story. I mean really listen.”30
If we look at Jesus’s life and ministry, we often find him criticized
for loving people known for sexual sin. Indeed, he shocked his reli-
gious critics when he claimed, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors
and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you” (Matt.
21:31). Jesus’s point was not to affirm prostitution or the extortionate
tax collecting of his day. His point was to say, “Look, these people are
getting ahead of you, because they realize they’re sinners who need
me. You guys are sinners too. You just don’t realize it!” Some peo-
ple use this text to argue that Jesus wasn’t bothered by sexual sin, so
we shouldn’t be either. But the opposite is true. In fact, if Jesus had
affirmed the sins of the tax collectors and prostitutes, it would have
removed what set them apart from the self-righteous Pharisees: they
knew they were sinners who needed a Savior.
When Ruby Bridges walked into William Frantz Elementary
School, she had to walk past jeering crowds waving hateful signs.
Many gay and lesbian people historically have experienced similar
treatment in the name of Christianity. Today, such explicit, public hate
mainly comes from fringe groups, like the so-called Westboro Baptist
Church, which is mostly one man’s extended family. But there is still
much prejudice in churches, to the extent that it is typically easier to
confess to a pornography addiction than to experiencing same-sex
attraction, and same-sex attraction is often linked in people’s minds
with pedophilia. If the beautiful biblical vision of marriage is to shine,
this layer of prejudice must be sloughed off.
But while black and LGBT+ experiences have at times been bound
together by the unchristian behavior of many professing to follow
Christ, we must once again reject a simple narrative of them-and-us.

aappublications.org/content/145/3/e20191658.full.
30. Andrew Marin, Us Versus Us:The Untold Story of Religion and the LGBT Community (Colorado
Springs: NavPress, 2016), 35.
60 The Secular Creed

Rosaria Butterfield was wooed to Christ by the unconditional love of

an older Christian pastor and his wife, whom she met after writing
a newspaper article critiquing Christian hate. My friend Rachel was
immediately embraced by a Christian fellowship at Yale, and faithful
friends walked with her in love and helped her stand again when she
fell into sexual sin. And as the 6-year-old Bridges walked past those
hateful crowds, she prayed for those who despised her, asking God
to forgive them and reflecting true love for enemies. Through cen-
turies of abuse, millions of African American Christians have done
the same.

C AN YOU UN TANGLE T HIS F OR ME?

When my daughter came to me with her mess of wool, it was partly
an act of confession. Her actions had led to different colors getting
tangled up, to knots being pulled more tightly, and to short sections
of wool being cut. She had to realize she’d gone wrong and ask for
help. If we look back over the last 400 years, we may have a similar
realization. It’s easy as a Christian today to see the faith of civil-rights
leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Fannie Lou Hamer and to
feel a warm glow of pride. But that glow turns cold for white Chris-
tians like me when we realize that if white Christians had upheld
biblical ethics from the first, there would have been no need for the
civil-rights movement.
Going further back, I like to think with pride about leading aboli-
tionists like Harriet Tubman or William Wilberforce, whose faith fu-
eled their pursuit of justice. But if white Christians had stood against
race-based, chattel slavery in the first place, there would have been
no need for the abolitionist movement. Christian sin has allowed the
gay-rights movement to trade on the moral capital of the civil-rights
movement. “Black lives matter” got tied in people’s minds to “love
is love” not just because of sin in the world, but because of sin in
the church. The sin that protested Ruby Bridges’s small steps into an
all-white elementary school. The sin that made Richard and Mildred
Loving’s marriage illegal. The sin that played midwife to the black
church, as white believers rejected their brothers and sisters in Christ
and refused to worship with them as equals before God. But before
 The Gay-Rights Movement 61

we conclude that all this history of Christian sin means we should

throw out Christianity, we must remember that human equality is
ultimately God-given.
My daughter could have given up her tangled wool entirely and
thrown it in the trash. And if we abandon Christianity, we will not
find ourselves in a brave new moral world, better able to support
equality for all. No, we will find ourselves unable to justify human
rights for anyone. Without Christianity, human beings have no nat-
ural rights, just as chimpanzees, hyenas, and spiders have no rights.
And there is no moral arc to the universe. There is nothing but blind,
pitiless indifference.
 4

“ WO M E N ’ S R I GH T S
ARE HUM AN RIGH TS”

In 2019, Margaret Atwood published The Testaments, a sequel to her

1985 success The Handmaid’s Tale. The first book imagined the Unit-
ed States overtaken by a pseudo-Christian sect. In monthly ceremo-
nies, potentially fertile “Handmaids” submit to sex with their assigned
“Commanders.” Wives supervise. The Handmaids greet each other
with a shortened version of Elizabeth’s words to the pregnant Mary:
“Blessed be the fruit.” Atwood’s sequel came hot on the heels of a
Hulu adaptation that brought The Handmaid’s Tale to a new genera-
tion and made it an icon of resistance against the pro-life movement.
Today, protesters wearing the bright red capes and white caps of At-
wood’s Handmaids visually suggest that any reduction in a woman’s
right to choose is a religiously motivated threat to women’s rights of
every kind. Banning abortion would be the ultimate assertion of male
control over female bodies. It’s a story told in red and white: Christi-
anity is bad for women’s rights.
In this chapter, we’ll see how wrong that story is. We’ll see that
without the Bible, there is no basis for women’s rights and that Je-
sus’s treatment of women changed their status forever. We’ll see that
the church has always been disproportionately female, and that rather
than benefiting women, the sexual revolution of the 1960s handed us
64 The Secular Creed

a poisoned chalice. Finally, we’ll see that far from being the central
plank of women’s rights, abortion rots their foundation.

IN HIS IM AGE
In Genesis 1, God creates humans “male and female” in his image
(Gen. 1:27). In the Ancient Near East, this language would have sig-
naled royalty. And in a world in which women were not seen as equal
to men, Genesis specifies that female humans bear this godlike stamp.
God blesses these first people and tells them to be fruitful and multi-
ply and rule his creation as his deputies (Gen. 1:27–28). To be a wom-
an, first and foremost, is to be made in the image of God.
The equality of men and women is reinforced when the creation of
humans is retold in Genesis 2. God makes the man first, but declares
it “not good” for him to be alone and plans to make “a helper fit for
him” (Gen. 2:18). “Helper” might sound demeaning to us, but in the
rest of the Bible, it typically describes God himself, so it cannot signal
inferiority.1 None of the animals is a fitting helper for the man, so
God makes woman from man’s side. The woman is like the man: bone
of his bones and flesh of his flesh (Gen. 2:23). She is not an afterthought.
She is essential to the project given to humanity in Genesis 1. But the
storyline of Genesis 2 makes a point: men and women are created
equal and alike, but also meaningfully different from each other—and
vitally different from any other animal.
My husband and I are watching Planet Earth 2. At times, I’ve be-
come so invested that I shout, “Run, baby, run!” at little marine iguanas
fleeing for their lives from hungry snakes. Most stories include repro-
duction, whether the month-long courtship dances of high-altitude
flamingos or the violent sex of ocean otters. Sometimes females have
the upper hand. But sex often asserts male power. For instance, when

1. The other use of this exact word is in Ps. 89:19, when the Lord uses it to describe himself
helping David. Other examples of the word in different forms include Ex. 18:4; Deut. 33:26, 29;
Pss. 20:2; 33:20; 54:4; 118:7; Hos. 13:9. For example, in his final blessings on Israel, Moses says,
“There is none like God, O Jeshurun, who rides through the heavens to your help, through the
skies in his majesty” (Deut. 33:26). Or the lifeline opening of Ps. 121: “I lift up my eyes to the
hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and
earth” (vv. 1–2).
 Women’s Rights Are Human Rights 65

introducing us to a female snow leopard and her 2-year-old daugh-

ter, the narrator warned that male snow leopards often kill cubs not
their own. This mother managed to distract the male enough for the
cub to escape, but she was injured during his sexual assault. Watching
this series is a stark reminder: as close as we may be to our pets, and
as much as we may identify with baby iguanas, if we are going to lay
claim to women’s rights, we need a reason why we are not just animals.
To be clear, I have no problem identifying as a mammal. Female
mammals are warm-blooded, have hair, give birth, and nourish their
young with milk. I check every box! My faith gives me no reason to
say I’m not an animal. But it gives me every reason to say I’m not just
an animal—not because my body doesn’t fit the bill, but because my
Creator says so. Humans alone are made in the image of God.
Many secular people see evolution as an origin story that replaces
the Genesis account. The theory of evolution doesn’t by itself disprove
God’s creation or show that we’re not set apart by him. Some of the
top evolutionary scientists in the world, in fact, are serious Christians.2
But if evolution is our only origin story, then Yuval Noah Harari’s
earlier observation is right: we humans have no natural rights, just
as chimpanzees, hyenas, and spiders have no natural rights. We only
have the triumph of the strong over the weak. As men are almost al-
ways physically stronger than women, we have no grounds for saying
women are equal to men. And if our only purpose is to propagate our
DNA, we have no grounds for saying rape is wrong. Feminists rightly
object to women being treated like wombs on legs, valued only for our
reproductive power. But if evolution is our only origin story, that is
precisely what we women are.
So why do so many secular people believe in gender equality?

HOW T HE C HR IS T I AN R E VOL U T ION R EM ADE T HE W OR LD

Historian Tom Holland stopped believing in the Bible as a boy. He
was far more attracted to Greek and Roman gods than to the crucified
hero of the Christian faith. But after years of research, Holland has
concluded that even secular Westerners are deeply shaped by Chris-

2. See Confronting Christianity, chapter 6 for a fuller exploration.

66 The Secular Creed

tianity. In particular, he argues, people on all sides of today’s debates

about gender and sexuality depend on Christian ideas:

That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely
a self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign
against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however,
was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common as-
sumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this
principle . . . lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of
Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.3

In Greco-Roman thinking, men were superior to women and sex was

a way to prove it. “As captured cities were to the swords of the legions,”
Holland explains, “so the bodies of those used sexually were to the
Roman man. To be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as
inferior.”4 In Rome, “men no more hesitated to use slaves and prosti-
tutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use
the side of a road as a toilet.”5 The idea that every woman had the right
to choose what happened to her body would’ve been laughable.
Christianity threw out this model. Rather than being seen as in-
ferior to men, women were equally made in God’s image. Rather than
being free to use slaves and prostitutes (of either sex), men were ex-
pected to be faithful to one wife, or to live in celibate singleness. Iron-
ically, the scenario described in The Handmaid’s Tale—a man sleeping
with an enslaved woman—is one of the exact things Christianity out-
lawed. The Christian husband was to love his wife as Christ loved the
church (Eph. 5:25). The relative weakness of her body was not a license
for domination, but a reason to show her honor as a fellow heir of
the grace of life (1 Pet. 3:7). While Roman families often married off
their prepubescent daughters, Christian women could marry later. A
woman whose husband had died was affirmed in remaining single, but
also free to marry any man she wished, so long as he belonged to the
Lord (1 Cor. 7:39–40).

3. Holland, Dominion, 494.

4. Holland, Dominion, 99.
5. Holland, Dominion, 99.
 Women’s Rights Are Human Rights 67

No wonder Christianity was so attractive to women. Jesus had

changed everything.

JE SU S’S SHOC K ING R EL AT IONSHIP S W I T H W OMEN

If we could read the Gospels through first-century eyes, Jesus’s treat-
ment of women would knock us to our knees. We saw in chapter 1
that his longest recorded conversation with any individual was with a
Samaritan woman of ill repute ( John 4:7–30). But this wasn’t an iso-
lated incident. Jesus repeatedly welcomed women his contemporaries
despised. One time, he was dining at a Pharisee’s house when a “sinful
woman” gatecrashed. She wept on Jesus’s feet, wiped them with her
hair, and kissed them. The Pharisee was appalled: “If this man were a
prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is
who is touching him, for she is a sinner” (Luke 7:39). But Jesus turned
the tables on his host and affirmed this woman as an example of love
(Luke 7:36–50). He welcomed women despised as sexual sinners. He
also welcomed women deemed unclean.
One day, Jesus was on his way to heal a 12-year-old girl when a
woman who had suffered 12 years of menstrual bleeding figured that if
she could just touch the fringe of his clothes she’d be made well. She
was right. But Jesus didn’t just move on. He had her come forward
from the crowd and commended her faith (Luke 8:43–48). When Je-
sus finally reached the sick 12-year-old, she was dead. But it wasn’t too
late. Speaking Aramaic, their shared mother tongue, Jesus said, “Little
girl, I say to you, arise,” and she got up (Mark 5:41). Whether little girls
or prostitutes, whether despised foreigners or women made unclean
by menstrual blood, whether married or single, sick (Matt. 8:14–16)
or disabled (Luke 13:10–16), Jesus made time for women and treated
them with care and respect. In Luke’s Gospel, women are often com-
pared with men, and where there is a contrast, the women come out
looking better.6 In all four Gospels, women witness Jesus’s resurrection
first—although the testimony of women wouldn’t have been seen as
convincing at that time.

6. See discussion in Confronting Christianity, 126–28.

68 The Secular Creed

We gain an intimate glimpse of Jesus’s relationships with women

in his friendship with two sisters. We first meet Mary and Martha in
Luke, when Jesus is at their house. Martha is busy serving. Mary is sit-
ting at Jesus’s feet, learning with the disciples. Martha complains and
asks Jesus to tell Mary she should be serving, too. But Jesus responds:
“Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away
from her” (Luke 10:42). In a culture in which women were expected
to serve, not to learn, Jesus affirms Mary’s learning from him. But far
from dismissing Martha, John tells another story in which Jesus has
a stunning conversation with her after her brother Lazarus has died.
In fact, it seems that Jesus let Lazarus die partly so that he could have
this conversation with Martha—whom he loved ( John 1:5)—in which
he uttered world-changing words: “I am the resurrection and the life.
Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone
who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
( John 11:25–26).
Martha did. So have countless women since.

DISP R OP OR T ION AT ELY FEM ALE C HUR C H

In the early second century, Roman governor Pliny the Younger wrote
to the emperor Trajan for advice on how to deal with Christians. The
“contagion” of Christianity was spreading: “many persons of every
age, every rank, and also of both sexes” were at risk. To find out more
about Christianity, Pliny had tortured “two female slaves who were
called deaconesses.”7 From other accounts of early Christianity, these
female slaves seem representative. In fact, it seems that there were
roughly twice as many women in the early church as men, many of
them slaves.8 One second-century Greek philosopher quipped that
Christians “want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonor-
able and stupid, only slaves, women, and little children.” Likewise, in
the third century, Christianity was mocked for attracting “the dregs

7. See Michael J. Kruger, Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future
of the Church (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018), 32.
8. See Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became
the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996), 97–110.
 Women’s Rights Are Human Rights 69

of the populace and credulous women with the inability natural to

their sex.”9
That the early church was as much as two-thirds female is es-
pecially surprising given that the Greco-Roman empire was dispro-
portionately male. Many women died in childbirth, and many baby
girls were abandoned: distressing proof that women were seen as less
precious than men. But given the way Jesus treated women, it’s no
surprise that women flocked to him. And they’re flocking still.
Women tend to be more religious than men are, but the effect is
most pronounced with Christianity. Globally, women are more like-
ly to identify as Christians, and Christian women are more likely to
attend church and pray.10 This gender imbalance holds in the United
States, where women are more likely to say they pray daily (64 per-
cent vs. 47 percent) and attend religious services weekly (40 percent
vs. 32 percent).11 But the gender gap is even greater in the country
soon to become home to the largest number of Christians in the
world. Much of the church in China is underground, so data is hard
to collect. But there’s evidence to suggest that the Chinese church is
also at least two thirds female, despite the general population being
disproportionately male.12
So why are modern women in countries as different as the United
States and China choosing Christianity? Haven’t men used Christian-
ity to denigrate and control women? Isn’t Christianity against wom-
en’s rights, from sexual freedoms to equality in the workplace? Doesn’t
Christianity subjugate women, in the home and in the church? As
we’ll see in the rest of this chapter, it’s not so simple.

9. See Kruger, Christianity at the Crossroads, 34–35.

10. In a 2016 survey of 192 countries, for example, 33.7 percent of women identified as Chris-
tian versus 29.9 percent of men. See “The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World,”
Pew Research Center, March 22, 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/
sites/7/2016/03/Religion-and-Gender-Full-Report.pdf.
11. “The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World,” Pew Forum, March 22, 2016, https://www.
pewforum.org/2016/03/22/the-gender-gap-in-religion-around-the-world.
12. For example, a 2007 survey found that 73.2 percent of Chinese Protestants surveyed were
women. See F. Yang et al. “Spiritual Life Study of Chinese Residents,” Association of Religion
Data Archives, September 16, 2019, https://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Descriptions/
SPRTCHNA.asp. Likewise, members of house churches in China are estimated to be 80
percent female. See David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China
and Changing the Global Balance of Power (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003), 98.
70 The Secular Creed

C HR IS T I ANI T Y AND FEMINISM

Like many movement-making words, feminism is a charged and
changing term. Many today insist it includes things Christians can’t
affirm—in particular, abortion. But the definition of feminism is:

1. The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of

the sexes.
2. Organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.13

There are many things that have been fought for under the banner of
feminism that Christians can and should affirm: for example, women’s
right to vote, hold property, and be paid the same as a man for do-
ing the same job. Indeed, many early feminists advocated for women’s
rights because they were Christians. For these reasons, I’m happy to
call myself a feminist, even if I have to explain what I do and don’t
mean. I believe that women are equal to men. I believe we should
have many opportunities that have historically been denied to us, and
that we should be paid the same salary for the same work. But rather
than see abortion rights as the central plank of the feminist structure,
I believe its central plank should be the cross.
As we’ve seen, the biblical creation stories and the life and teach-
ings of Jesus present men and women as equally precious in God’s
eyes. Many think this edifice was undermined when Paul called wives
to submit to their husbands. But as we saw in chapter 2, far from
asserting male superiority, Paul calls husbands to sacrifice for their
wives, giving themselves up like Christ on the cross. If we make hus-
bands and wives interchangeable, we lose the gospel message that
marriage is designed to preach, and we do violence to the word of life
to which women have been drawn for millennia. Of course, we must
recognize that men throughout the centuries have often failed to live
up to this vision and have used texts like Ephesians 5 to subjugate
and denigrate women. Some continue to do this today. But just as
the failure of white Christians to love and respect their black brothers

13. See “Feminism,” Merriam-Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictio-

nary/feminism.
 Women’s Rights Are Human Rights 71

and sisters arose not from too much obedience to the Bible but too
little, so the failure of Christian husbands to love and serve their wives
comes from ignoring what the Bible really says.
We find a similar problem when we see Paul assigning some lead-
ership roles in the church to qualified men and assume this asserts
male superiority. When the mother of Jesus’s disciples James and John
asked for special leadership roles for her sons in his kingdom, Jesus
replied, “You do not know what you are asking” (Matt. 20:22). This
mother thought she was securing status for her sons. But Jesus said
she was securing suffering. He asked James and John if they were
able to drink the cup he was going to drink, referring to his horrify-
ing death. When the other disciples were angry with these brothers,
Jesus explained they were all getting it wrong. In the world, leader-
ship meant self-serving power. But in Jesus’s kingdom, being great
meant becoming a slave, “just as the Son of Man did not come to
be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”
(Matt. 20:26–28).
If we listen to Jesus, leadership in the church isn’t about power
and privilege. It’s about service and sacrifice. We easily forget this in
a world of Western comforts. But in the early church and in much of
the global church today, leading a church means risking your life. God
made men physically stronger than women and then put them in the
firing line. In a world in which strength meant dominance, Jesus got
down on his knees and washed his disciples’ feet, before being lifted
up on a cross. Where the Bible gives different roles to men and wom-
en, it calls men first to come and die.
What’s more, while Paul seems to give certain specific roles in
the church to men, he also explicitly values the ministry of women.
For example, he tells the Christians in Rome to welcome the woman
delivering his letter:

I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at

Cenchreae, that you may welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of
72 The Secular Creed

the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has
been a patron of many and of myself as well. (Rom. 16:1–2)

Paul greets a married couple, Prisca and Aquilla, whom he calls “my
fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for my life” (vv.
3–4), and he greets seven other women, including “Mary, who has
worked hard for you” (v. 6) and Tryphena and Tryphosa, whom he
calls “workers in the Lord” (v. 12).
While the Bible clearly values the work of raising children that
women often undertake, it also greatly values women’s gospel ministry
outside the home, and gives us positive examples of women working
for pay. The ideal wife described in Proverbs 31 makes money from
her work outside the home, and some of the first female Christians
held paid jobs. For example, Lydia—one of the first people to follow
Christ in Philippi—was a “seller of purple goods” (Acts 16:14). She
opened her home to the apostles, and it seems likely that the Philip-
pian church continued to meet at her house. At no point was Lydia
rebuked for having a job, and nothing in the Bible suggests that wom-
en should be paid less than men for the same work.
Some of my female Christian friends are married. Some are single.
Some are in secular work. Some work for Christian ministries. Some
work full time, some work part time, and some are full time with
their children. I’m grateful for the opportunities they have to serve the
Lord in each of these situations. Many of these freedoms have been
argued for by feminists. But many Christians understandably don’t
want to identify as feminists—despite believing that men and wom-
en are equal—because some of the beliefs associated with feminism
today can’t be endorsed by Christians. Before coming to the central
plank of abortion, we must see the larger structure it upholds: a struc-
ture built by the so-called sexual revolution.

FALL OU T OF T HE SE XU AL R E VOL U T ION

The sexual revolution of the 1960s was sold to us as the liberation of
women. For centuries, men had been finding ways to sneak around
marriage and have commitment-free sex. Thanks to the pill, now
women could as well. But in the last 60 years, despite gains in free-
 Women’s Rights Are Human Rights 73

dom and opportunities, women’s self-reported happiness in America

has declined.14 Why? Part of the reason is that commitment-free sex
is a poisoned chalice.
Stable marriage correlates with mental and physical health ben-
efits for both men and women. But being married seems to be a
particularly significant factor in happiness for women.15 Conversely,
multiple studies have shown that for women in particular, increasing
our number of sexual partners correlates with worse mental health,
including higher levels of sadness, suicidal ideation, depression, and
drug abuse.16 This isn’t because women are uninterested in sex. But
married people experience more and better sex than their unmarried
peers do.17 In fact, a recent study found that women in highly religious
marriages (couples who pray together, read Scripture at home, attend
church, and so on) were twice as likely as their secular peers to say they
were satisfied with their sexual relationship.18
Christian marriage has long been seen by secular liberals as a
repressive institution designed to hold women down. But in 2016, a
study of women in America found that highly religious women mar-
ried to highly religious men who agreed with the statement, “It is
usually better for everyone involved if the father takes the lead in

14. See, for example, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “The Paradox of Declining Female
Happiness,” IZA Discussion Paper, May 2009, http://ftp.iza.org/dp4200.pdf, and Jason L.
Cummings, “Assessing U.S. Racial and Gender Differences in Happiness, 1972–2016: An In-
tersectional Approach,” Journal of Happiness Studies 21 (2020): 709–32, https://doi.org/10.1007/
s10902-019-00103-z.
15. See, for example, “Subjective Health and Happiness in the United States: Gender Differences
in the Effects of Socioeconomic Status Indicators,” Journal of Mental Health and Clinical Psy-
chology 4, no. 2 (May 14, 2020): 8–17, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7304555.
16. See, for example, Tyree Oredein and Cristine Delnevo, “The Relationship between Multiple
Sexual Partners and Mental Health in Adolescent Females,” Community Medicine and Health
Education, December 23, 2013, https://www.omicsonline.org/the-relationship-between-mul-
tiple-sexual-partners-and-mental-health-in-adolescent-females-2161-0711.1000256.
php?aid=21466; and Sandhya Ramrakha et al., “The Relationship between Multiple Sex Part-
ners and Anxiety, Depression, and Substance Dependence Disorders: A Cohort Study,” NCBI,
February 12, 2013, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3752789.
17. See, for example, Stephen Cranney, “The Influence of Religiosity/Spirituality on Sex Life Sat-
isfaction and Sexual Frequency: Insights from the Baylor Religion Survey,” Review of Religious
Research 62 ( January 1, 2020): 289–314, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-019-00395-w.
18. Matthew Saxey and Hal Boyd, “Do ‘Church Ladies’ Really Have Better Sex Lives?,” Institute
for Family Studies, November 16, 2020, https://ifstudies.org/blog/do-church-ladies-really-
have-better-sex-lives.
74 The Secular Creed

working outside the home and the mother takes the lead in caring for
the home and family” are the happiest wives: 73 percent say the rela-
tionship quality of their marriage is above average. The next happiest
were religious women married to religious men who disagreed with
that statement—60 percent reported above-average satisfaction. Both
groups were happier than women in secular marriages.19 Ironically, the
demographic most pitied by secular progressives—women in religious
marriages—are happier than those who pity them. But the reason isn’t
just that they’re happily married. Being actively religious gives women
a boost in happiness. In fact, it can be lifesaving.

DE AT HS OF DE SPAIR
In October 2019, I wrote to Tyler VanderWeele—a professor at the
Harvard School of Public Health—because I was shocked. I knew
from his research that weekly church attendance was associated with
better mental health and lower rates of suicide. But I didn’t know how
big the difference was. I’d just read a paper on one large-scale study of
U.S. women that found those who attended religious services at least
once a week were five times less likely to kill themselves than those who
never attended.20 I was so stunned I wrote to Tyler to check that this
was a representative result. He answered, “Yes! Studies suggest three-
to six-fold lower rates. It may be one of the most protective factors
known for suicide!”
In May 2020, Tyler’s team published a new, large-scale study with
similarly striking results. After controlling for multiple relevant fac-
tors, it found that women who attend religious services weekly were
68 percent less likely to die “deaths of despair” (deaths due to suicide,
drug overdose, or alcohol) than those who never attended. Men who

19. See W. Bradford Wilcox, Jason S. Carroll, and Laurie DeRose, “Religious Men Can Be De-
voted Dads, Too,” The New York Times, May 18, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/
opinion/sunday/happy-marriages.html.
20. See Tyler J. VanderWeele et al., “Association Between Religious Service Attendance and Low-
er Suicide Rates Among US Women,” JAMA Psychology, August 2016, https://jamanetwork.
com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2529152.
 Women’s Rights Are Human Rights 75

attended weekly were 33 percent less likely to die such deaths.21 The
effect of religious participation is remarkable. But going to church
seems to have the strongest effect on women. The results aren’t unique
to Christianity, though most of the U.S. data is from churchgoers.
It seems that, for an alarming number of women, rejecting reli-
gion isn’t a passport to life but a ticket to despair. The lesbian couple
I mentioned in chapter 2, who asked whether what I was going to say
about gender and sexuality would be safe, are raising two daughters.
Loving parents though they clearly are, they’re raising their girls with
one of the practices most associated with suicide: not going to church.
But if secularization and the sexual revolution didn’t lead to great-
er happiness for women, are we at least doing good to women by
allowing them to choose abortion?

BR IE F HIS T OR Y OF INFAN T ICIDE

One of the brute facts by which we can judge how the ancient world
valued women is the common practice of abandoning baby girls. As
we saw earlier, the practice of leaving newborn girls to die led to a
gender imbalance in the Greco-Roman empire. We gain a sobering
insight into this from a letter by a Roman soldier to his wife in 1 BC.
The otherwise affectionate letter includes this instruction: “Above all,
if you bear a child and it is male, let it be; if it is female, cast it out.”22
Babies with disabilities were also discarded. In fact, the Greek philos-
opher Aristotle had pitched for eugenics legislation: “Let there be a
law that no deformed child shall live.”23
The idea of abandoning baby girls is alien to us. But even today,
we see this practice continuing in the two largest countries that hav-
en’t yet been significantly shaped by Christianity. The Chinese church
is growing so fast that it could reshape Chinese culture in the next
generation. But selective abortion and infanticide in past generations

21. See Ying Chen, et al., “Religious Service Attendance and Deaths Related to Drugs, Alcohol,
and Suicide Among US Health Care Professionals,” JAMA Psychiatry 77, no. 7 (May 6, 2020):
737–44, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2765488.
22. Letter of Hilarion, P.Oxy. 4 744, http://www.papyri.info/apis/toronto.apis.17.
23. Aristotle, Politics, 7.14.10. Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 192.
76 The Secular Creed

have led to a gender gap of 35 million. Likewise in India, where Hin-

duism is the dominant religion, the gender gap from selective abor-
tion and infanticide is 25 million.24 So what has changed our ideas
about the abandonment of newborns in general and of newborn girls
in particular? Jesus.
Jesus’s valuing of babies is as striking as his valuing of women.
Right after Jesus preached against divorce (a practice that left women
and children abandoned), people tried to bring their little children
to him for his blessing (Matt. 19:3–15; Mark 10:2–16). Luke says they
were bringing “even infants” (Luke 18:15). Jesus’s disciples turned them
away. But Jesus rebuked them:

Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs
the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the
kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it. (Mark 10:14–15)

Then Jesus took the children and babies in his arms and blessed
them. We do not feel the shock of his words and actions. But his first
hearers did.
Paul Offit, a non-Christian professor of pediatrics at University
of Pennsylvania, calls Christianity “the single greatest breakthrough
against child abuse” in history. He explains:

At the time of Jesus’ life . . . child abuse, as noted by one historian, was
“the crying vice of the Roman Empire.” Infanticide was common. Aban-
donment was common . . . children were property, no different than
slaves. But Jesus stood up for children, cared about them, when those
around him typically didn’t.25

Taking their cues from Jesus, the early Christians collected the babies
abandoned by others. And when (to everyone’s surprise) the Roman

24. Elaine Storkey, “Violence against Women Begins in the Womb,” Christianity Today, May
2, 2018 https://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2018/may/violence-againstwomen-be-
gins-in-womb-abortion.html.
25. Paul A. Offit, “Why I Wrote This Book: Paul A. Offit, M.D., Bad Faith: When Religious Be-
lief Undermines Modern Medicine,” Hamilton and Griffin on Rights, March 17, 2015, https://
 Women’s Rights Are Human Rights 77

emperor Constantine became a Christian, legal protections for wom-

en and children started to come into place.
In the early fourth century, Constantine passed laws protecting
women from unwarranted divorce and offering provision for children
born into poverty: “If any parent should report that he has offspring
which on account of poverty he is not able to rear, there shall be no
delay in issuing food and clothing.”26 Historian John Dickson notes
that Constantine used churches “as the welfare distribution centres for
this program.”27 Killing an infant became a form of homicide in AD
374, under a subsequent Christian emperor. In our culture, pro-lifers
are often accused of not caring about vulnerable mothers and children
after birth. But the first Christ-motivated pro-life legislation in the
world followed laws protecting women from abandonment and pro-
viding for poor families. Consistent Christian ethics must do all these
things. It’s no coincidence that in Matthew and Mark, Jesus’s teaching
on marriage and welcoming children is followed by his instruction to
the rich young man to sell all he has and give it to the poor.
Today, as in the first century, two symbiotic factors put babies at
risk: poverty and fatherlessness. In the United States in 2018, 85 per-
cent of women seeking abortions were unmarried and about three
quarters were living below or not far above the federal poverty line.
Due largely to historic inequalities, this means that black babies are
more than three times as likely to be aborted as white babies.28 These
tiny black lives matter. But rather than providing women with the

casetext.com/analysis/why-i-wrote-this-book-paul-a-offit-md-bad-faith-when-religious-be-
lief-undermines-modern-medicine.
26. Theodosian Code 11.27.1–2.
27. See John Dickson, Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History
(Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2021), 76. See pp. 33–36 and 74–76 for a broader discussion.
28. See Katherine Kortsmit, Tara C. Jatlaoui, Michele G. Mandel, Jennifer A. Reeves, Titilope
Oduyebo, Emily Petersen, and Maura K. Whiteman, “Abortion Surveillance — United
States, 2018,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 69, no. 7 (Summer 2020), http://dx.doi.
org/10.15585/mmwr.ss6907a1; and Tara C. Jatlaoui, Lindsay Eckhaus, Michele G. Mandel,
Antoinette Nguyen, Titilope Oduyebo, Emily Petersen, and Maura K. Whiteman, “Abortion
Surveillance — United States, 2016,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Surveillance Sum-
maries 68, no. 11 (November 29, 2019): 1–41, http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.ss6811a1. See also
Jenna Jerman, Rachel K. Jones, and Tsuyoshi Onda, “Characteristics of U.S. Abortion Patients
in 2014 and Changes Since 2008,” Guttmacher Institute Report, May 2016, https://www.gutt-
macher.org/report/characteristics-us-abortion-patients-2014.
78 The Secular Creed

support they need, our society opts for the quick fix of abortion.
Thankfully, abortion rates in America are trending down—2018 saw
the lowest rate on record. But that still represents 619,591 lost lives.
What’s more, far from being a public good, abortion pushes an
alarmingly low fertility rate down yet further. With a fertility rate at
1.78 babies per woman—significantly below the replacement rate of
2.1—the United States is sitting on the demographic time bomb of an
aging society. To be clear, the value of life should never be measured
in economic terms. But contrary to the prevailing myth that chil-
dren are a burden on society, from a purely economic perspective, we
need more kids. Most women also want more children. In America,
“the gap between the number of children that women say they want
to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably actually
have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years.”29 And contrary to
popular imagination, the vast majority of abortions do not arise from
teenage pregnancies, but are sought by women who—with the right
support—could be in a good position to raise these children.30
The Bible doesn’t call us to a pseudo-Christian past, when the
West was supposedly controlled by Christian norms, but men were
all too often excused to sleep with prostitutes and servant girls and
pregnant women were abandoned by the thousands. It doesn’t call us
to a world in which unmarried mothers are despised or marginalized
and forced into back-street abortions. Rather, God calls us to a world
in which women are seen as equal to men, regardless of their marital
status; in which pregnant women are supported; in which men are
called either to be faithful husbands or faithful singles; and in which
babies are valued and provided for—not just by their biological par-
ents, but by their spiritual family writ large. To solve the problem of
abortion, we don’t need one law reversed. We need a loving revolution.
But is abortion actually a moral problem? Isn’t it quite different
from infanticide, which we’d all agree is unacceptable?

29. Lyman Stone, “American Women Are Having Fewer Children Than They’d Like,” The New
York Times, February 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility-
is-falling-short-of-what-women-want.html.
30. In 2018, adolescents aged <15 and 15–19 years accounted for 0.2 percent and 8.8 percent of all
reported abortions. See “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2018.”
 Women’s Rights Are Human Rights 79

IS A B OR T ION DIFFER EN T FR OM INFAN T ICIDE?

When I first engaged these debates as a teenager, most pro-choice
advocates argued for a bright white line between abortion and infan-
ticide. Pro-life folk insisted that there is no line. Sure, we could set a
point at which we suddenly declared an unborn human. But whatever
point we picked—for example, the time from which the infant would
likely survive outside the womb—was arbitrary. As medical technol-
ogy advanced, the age of viability changed. But babies didn’t. To con-
sider babies at 22 weeks gestation to be human today, when 10 years
ago they would not have been, made little sense.
My niece, who is now 16, was delivered at 24 weeks and 5 days.
Her newborn body was so small that her father’s wedding ring could
fit around her upper arm. At the time, she was on the edge of viabil-
ity. In many other countries, she certainly would’ve died. After birth,
she enjoyed every legal protection and medical support. But the day
before delivery, her mother could legally have chosen to abort: she
had preeclampsia, and her life was under threat. In many states, she
could’ve been aborted a week earlier without this threat. At that age,
was my niece a human being? Undoubtedly. Did she have human
rights? It depends whom you ask.
Today, rather than denying that unborn babies are human beings,
pro-choice advocates tend to distinguish between a human being
and a human person. We’re all human beings by virtue of our species.
But to be a human person—someone with human rights—we must
have certain capacities. The problem is, when people start identifying
those capacities, they realize newborn infants don’t have them either.
In 2012, medical ethicists Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva
published a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics arguing that “both
fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual
persons,” so “after-birth abortion (killing a newborn) should be per-
missible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the
newborn is not disabled.”31 Most pro-choice activists wouldn’t go this
far. The question is: Why not?

31. Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby
Live?,” Journal of Medical Ethics 39, no. 5 (May 2013): 1, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.
80 The Secular Creed

One of the leading philosophers to argue for the being-person

distinction is Princeton professor Peter Singer. He faces the fact that
atheism doesn’t justify a distinction between humans and other ani-
mals. So, rather than anchoring value in our being human, he argues
that beings (human or otherwise) should be valued according to their
capacities. In Singer’s view, “A week-old baby is not a rational and
self-conscious being, and there are many nonhuman animals whose
rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity, and so on, exceed
that of a human baby a week or a month old.” Therefore, Singer con-
cludes, “The life of a newborn baby is of less value . . . than the life of
a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.”32 To translate this into practical terms,
eating bacon might be more immoral than infanticide.
This logic shocked one of the few people who knew both me and
my husband before we knew each other.

UNE XP EC T ED C ONV ER T
I met Sarah Irving-Stonebraker when we were both graduate students
at Cambridge. She was a convinced atheist and believed that abortion
is a woman’s right. After finishing her PhD she won a postdoctoral
fellowship at Oxford, where she attended a series of lectures by Peter
Singer. Sarah had been raised by loving, non-religious parents, who
taught her to believe in human rights. But as she heard this famous
atheist philosopher explain that simply being human doesn’t mean
you should have human rights—and that infanticide is morally justi-
fiable—she began to realize that her atheism stuck a knife in the back
of her deepest moral beliefs. As a secular liberal, Sarah had thought
Christianity was the enemy of human rights, care for the poor, racial
justice, and equality for women. But she gradually discovered it was
the basis for those things. Eventually, as assistant professor of history
at Florida State University at age 28, she turned to Jesus.
In becoming a Christian, Sarah has changed her mind about many
things, including abortion. But she doesn’t believe in the equality of
men and women less since she converted. In fact, she believes in it

gov/22361296.
32. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 169.
 Women’s Rights Are Human Rights 81

more. Now, instead of “just a well-meaning conceit of liberalism,” her

belief in universal human value is grounded in God’s creation of all
humans in his image and in the overwhelming love of God in Christ
that is “utterly unlike anything which [she] had expected, or of which
[she] could make sense.” Christianity, Sarah realized, is ultimately “far
more radical than the leftist ideologies with which [she] had previous-
ly been enamored.” 33 Jesus’s death on the cross for us upended all our
human views of power and made the weak as precious as the strong.
But what about women left in desperate circumstances? What
about cases of rape or risk to the mother’s life? What about the women
who just don’t want to have the child they have conceived? Shouldn’t
women ultimately have the right to choose?

SHOULD W OMEN H AV E T HE R IGH T T O C HOO SE?

One powerful claim of the pro-choice movement is that women
should have the right to decide what they do with their bodies. In
most situations, I strongly agree. As we saw earlier, one of the stark
contrasts between Christianity and the Greco-Roman world was the
idea that women’s bodies weren’t just objects to be used by men. The
sex slavery of The Handmaid’s Tale is utterly at odds with Christianity.
Christians absolutely believe that a woman should have the right
to choose not to have sex. What’s more, we believe a woman shouldn’t
be pressured into sex, as all too many women are today. (One friend
who had moved from Manhattan to Boston told me that in Manhat-
tan you were expected to sleep with a guy on the second date, while
in Boston you might reach the third before he pushed for sex.) But
whatever our perspectives on abortion, none of us believes a woman
should have the right to choose what she does with her body in every
respect. As a woman, I have the right to choose not to have sex with
you. But unless you’re assaulting me or someone else, I don’t have
the right to punch you in the face. Both sex and punching are things
I do with my body. But one would hurt your body, and your body
matters too.

33. See Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, “How Oxford and Peter Singer Drove Me from Atheism to
Jesus,” The Veritas Forum, May 22, 2017, http://www.veritas.org/oxford-atheism-to-jesus.
82 The Secular Creed

What if the scenario wasn’t so simple? What if you’d slipped over

the edge of a cliff, and the only thing keeping you from falling to your
death was me holding your hand? What if my arm was in serious pain,
and my shoulder was dislocated by your weight? What if I’d been
forced by someone else to hold your hand before you slipped? Would
I have the right to choose to let go? No. I’d need to hold on as long
as possible, until some other help could come. My body matters. But
your body matters too.
My niece was born prematurely because her mother had pre-
eclampsia. To carry her baby to term would’ve killed my sister-in-law,
but she carried my niece for as long as possible with the hope she’d
survive. Both their lives mattered, and thank God, both survived. I
have no wish to oversimplify. There will be times when tragedy is in-
evitable and terrible choices must be made. But if Christianity is true,
then both mother and baby matter. And if there is no God, then ulti-
mately neither do.
If there is no God who made us in his image—if, as Harari puts
it, “human rights are . . . figments of our fertile imaginations”—then a
baby in her mother’s womb is just a collection of cells.34 But if there is
no God who made us in his image, then that’s what you and I are too.
Pregnant women have no natural rights, just as chimpanzees, hyenas,
and spiders have no rights. If we’re no more than animals, the state-
ment “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” isn’t worth the yard sign
on which it is written.
But if Christianity is true, the central plank of women’s rights isn’t
our right to have our unborn babies killed. The central plank of wom-
en’s rights is Mary’s unborn child, who grew to be the man who valued
us so much he died on a Roman cross so we could live. Filled with the
Holy Spirit, Elizabeth shouted to her pregnant cousin Mary, “Blessed
are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” (Luke
1:41–42). The Handmaid’s Tale contorts these words into a modern
curse. But truly this baby conceived out of wedlock and born into
poverty changed everything for women. Blessed be the fruit.

34. Harari, Sapiens, 32

 5

“ TR ANSGENDER
WO M E N A R E WO M E N ”

At the beginning of the film Mulan (2020), we see a young girl with
extraordinary gifts. Mulan wields a stick like a swordsman, scales
walls, and runs on roofs. “Your chi is strong,” her father declares. “But
chi is for warriors, not daughters.” Mulan’s role is to marry well. But
her meeting with the matchmaker is disastrous, and when impe-
rial messengers come to conscript one man from every family, she
steals her father’s armor and sword and runs away to train for war.
“We’re going to make men out of every single one of you,” her new
commander boasts.
Mulan didn’t fit her role at home. But when the soldiers pledge
to be “loyal, brave, and true,” she cannot echo the last word. The only
person who sees through Mulan’s disguise is her nemesis Xianniang—
another warrior woman who was rejected by her community because
her chi was “beyond imagining.” Xianniang goads Mulan to speak the
truth. When she refuses, Xianniang shoots to kill. Mulan is saved by
the leather that binds her breasts. She gets up, throws off her armor,
and returns to the battle as the chi-filled woman she is. When she
finally comes home, her father greets her with these moving words:
“One warrior knows another. You were always there. Yet I see you for
the first time.”
84 The Secular Creed

The questions in this chapter cut deep into identity. What is the
truth of you and me? Is there something other than our bodies that
defines our male or femaleness: something like chi, perhaps, that be-
longs to men but might also make a warrior woman? Is sex binary or
a spectrum? How can people who don’t feel like they fit with their
biological sex be seen and known for who they truly are? And what
does the Bible have to say about all this?
While not yet etched on our neighborhood signs, “Transgender
Women Are Women” is edging into the secular creed. In this chap-
ter, we’ll see that if this claim is true, then “woman” has no meaning
anymore. We’ll notice the long history of a small number of males ex-
periencing alienation from their sex that starts in childhood and may
or may not resolve by adulthood, and a recent upsurge of adolescent
girls identifying as transgender, often without any known history of
gender dysphoria. We’ll see that some people are born with intersex
conditions, but that this does not mean we should abandon the reality
of male-female sex difference. We’ll recognize that whereas transgen-
der-identifying people may not be more vulnerable to homicide (as is
often claimed), they’re highly vulnerable to suicide, so it’s all the more
vital that Christians approach these issues with empathy and care. But
we’ll see that rather than being a hateful tool of oppression, the Bible
truly offers hope to those who feel alienated from their bodies.

HOW H AR R Y P O T T ER BEC AME P OLI T IC AL

In December 2019, J. K. Rowling tweeted her support for Maya
Forstater, a tax specialist who lost her job for questioning a change in
British law that would not require a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to
change someone’s birth certificate sex. Forstater had tweeted her con-
cern that “radically expanding the legal definition of ‘women’ so that it
can include both males and females” made it “a meaningless concept”
and would “undermine women’s rights & protections for vulnerable
women & girls.” She added,

Some transgender people have cosmetic surgery. But most retain their
birth genitals. Everyone’s equality and safety should be protected, but
 Transgender Women Are Women 85

women and girls lose out on privacy, safety and fairness if males are
allowed into changing rooms, dormitories, prisons, sports teams.1

Forstater was fired. When she lost her appeal, Rowling responded:

Dress however you please.

Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill2

Until recently, this tweet would’ve been standard liberal fare. But
it triggered a torrent of attacks from those who saw it as an assault
on transgender identities. Rowling wasn’t surprised. “I expected the
threats of violence,” she recalled, “to be told I was literally killing trans
people with my hate, to be called [various misogynistic expletives].”3
But the headlines multiplied when Daniel Radcliffe (who starred in
the Harry Potter films) disagreed with Rowling: “Transgender women
are women,” he said.4 The question is, What does it mean?
The answer might seem obvious. Radcliffe means that people
who were born male, but now identify as female, should be treated
as women in every respect. If transgender women are women, they
should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms, enter women’s shelters,
and compete in women’s sports. Anything less, so the logic runs, is
transphobic and harmful. But aside from any concerns about its im-
plications, there is a deeper problem with the claim. If it’s true that
“Transgender women are women,” then we no longer know what

1. Maya Forstater (@MForstater), Twitter, September 2, 2018, 6:08 p.m., https://twitter.com/

mforstater/status/1036375233723330560.
2. J. K. Rowling (@jk_rowling), Twitter, December 19, 2019, 7:57 a.m., https://twitter.com/jk_
rowling/status/1207646162813100033.
3. J. K. Rowling, “J. K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender
Issues,” JKRowling.com, June 10, 2020, https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-
writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues.
4. Daniel Radcliffe, “Daniel Radcliffe Responds to J. K. Rowling’s Tweets on Gender Identity,”
The Trevor Project, June 8, 2020, https://www.thetrevorproject.org/2020/06/08/daniel-rad-
cliffe-responds-to-j-k-rowlings-tweets-on-gender-identity.
86 The Secular Creed

“woman” means. We saw in chapter 4 that the slogan “Women’s rights

are human rights” is worthless if there are no human rights. Now, the
problem intensifies. If transgender women are women, there’s no such
thing as a woman either.

W H AT DOE S ‘ W OM AN’ ME AN?

Until recently, “I am a woman” was a statement of biological sex. Ex-
pressions of gender (masculinity or femininity) can vary. In my cul-
ture, having long hair, wearing a skirt, and painting one’s face all sig-
nal femininity. But watch the classic film Braveheart and you’ll see
long-haired, skirt-wearing, face-painting warrior men! Yet regardless
of culture, “I am a woman” is a claim to biological sex. But if transgen-
der women are women, this is no longer true: a biological male—who
may or may not have taken hormones or undergone surgery—can be
as truly a woman as I am.
A few years ago, a speaker at a Christian conference I attended
used an analogy to describe male and female roles. She asked us to
imagine we were building a skyscraper. Men were the architects and
builders: they made the skyscraper. The women came in and decorat-
ed. The analogy seemed so utterly disconnected from anything the Bi-
ble says that I nearly left the room. But to borrow the misguided met-
aphor: if we take biological sex out of the definition of a woman, we
swing a wrecking ball at the building itself. We have cultural paintings
to hang, but no walls. For decades, feminists have been differentiating
biological sex from cultural stereotypes, creating space for women to
live as women in different ways. But if our bodies are removed from
the equation, those stereotypes are all we have left.
This dismantling of the bodily reality of womanhood has led to a
brewing conflict between some transgender activists and some fem-
inists, who resent how gender stereotypes are being drawn back in.
When a series of “reproductive rights” posters released by Amnesty
International paired the slogan “I Stand with People in Poland” with
images signaling femininity, a feminist on Twitter observed:

Strangest thing about this is how rather than use the word ‘women’
in order to be understood they produced a load of cartoons of women
 Transgender Women Are Women 87

with gender stereotypical features like long flowing hair, lipstick & nail
varnish. This isn’t progress.5

“Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” and “Transgender Women Are

Women” turn out to be uncomfortable companions, fighting for ideo-
logical space. Responding to an article that referred to “people who
menstruate,” Rowling quipped: “I’m sure there used to be a word for
those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”6
Shortly before disclosing her experience of domestic abuse, Rowl-
ing explained: “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is
erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex
removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t
hate to speak the truth.”7 But to hold classic feminist beliefs today is
to be labeled a “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist” (or TERF) by
some transgender activists. Secular feminists have lost their jobs, been
canceled as speakers, and had their reputations smeared not by foes on
the religious right, but by angry mobs on the progressive left.
The convention of referring to “the LGBT community” can suggest
that folks identifying as LGBT+ are all aligned. But some gay and les-
bian people are being called “transphobic” for expressing their prefer-
ence for members of their biological sex and for voicing concern that
women’s rights are being compromised and that same-sex-attracted
kids are being pushed to question their gender. For example, in 2019,
British gay-rights activist Simon Fanshawe left the largest LGBT-
rights organization in Europe (of which he was a founding member),
saying that its new transgender policy risked undermining “women’s
sex-based rights and protections” and objecting that children in ele-
mentary school were being challenged to review their gender identi-
ty.8 Likewise, Fred Sargeant, who organized the first gay-pride march

5. Victoria Freeman (@v_j_freeman), Twitter, November 3, 2020, 3:31 a.m., https://twitter.com/

pastasnack_e/status/1323547595839602688.
6. J. K. Rowling (@jk_rowling), Twitter, June 6, 2020, 5:35 p.m., https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/
status/1269382518362509313.
7. J. K. Rowling (@jk_rowling), Twitter, June 6, 2020, 6:02 p.m., https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/
status/1269389298664701952.
8. Nicholas Helen, “‘Anti-women’ trans policy may split Stonewall,” The Times, September 22,
2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/anti-women-trans-policy-may-split-stonewall-
wfv2rp5cx.
88 The Secular Creed

in the United States, proclaims on his Twitter page: “Homosexu-

ality is same-sex attraction. Biological sex is real. Sex is binary, not
a spectrum.”9
So how do transgender activists themselves speak into this? A
wide range of experiences and views huddle under the transgender
umbrella: from an older transgender person who thanked me for the
tenderness with which I had addressed these issues after a talk I gave
in England last year, to those who would have seen every word out of
my mouth as hate speech. No one voice speaks for all. But it’s worth
hearing from individuals nonetheless.

I T W ON’T M AK E ME H AP P Y, AND I T SHOULDN’T H AV E T O

In 2018, a week before elective surgery, transgender woman Andrea
Long Chu wrote one of the best written New York Times columns
I’ve ever read. In “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy. And It
Shouldn’t Have To,” Chu declared:

Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a
result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what
I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t
expect it to.

In mournfully evocative terms, Chu explained how little justice the

definition of “gender dysphoria” (the distress some people feel at the
mismatch between their biological sex and their internal sense of gen-
der) does to the experience:

Dysphoria feels like being unable to get warm, no matter how many
layers you put on. It feels like hunger without appetite. . . . It feels like
grieving. It feels like having nothing to grieve.

I’m not much of a stereotypical woman. There have been times in my

life when I’ve felt an acute sense of failure of femininity, like it’s a
compulsory sport I’m terrible at playing. Despite these glimmerings

9. Fred Sargeant, Twitter profile, visited November 18, 2020, https://twitter.com/FredSargeant.

 Transgender Women Are Women 89

of empathy, I felt my lack of understanding swell as I read Chu’s essay.

Those of us who have not experienced gender dysphoria cannot really
hope to grasp it. Sometimes, we love people best by acknowledging
that we don’t understand.
Most transgender activists tell happy-ending stories. But Chu
wrote of feeling more depressed and suicidal after taking hormones,
of not expecting the self-inflicted wound on the horizon to usher in
a new dawn of happiness, but of believing nonetheless that a trans-
gender person’s desire for surgery should not be denied. The article
concludes, “There are no good outcomes in transition. There are only
people, begging to be taken seriously.”10
Struck by the bold argument and mesmerizing prose in this piece,
I sought out Chu’s other work. What I found continued to impress
me with its authorial swagger. But the gap between Chu’s viewpoint
and that of any halfway traditional feminist became a chasm. The first
chapter of Chu’s debut book begins, “Everyone is female,” and ends, “I
am female. And you, dear reader, you are female, even—especially—if
you are not a woman. Welcome. Sorry.”11 Chu explains: “I’ll define as
female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make
room for the desires of another.”12 Here, we find less of a plea for
transgender women to be taken seriously and more an artful playing
with the fact that, if we have evacuated biological reality from the
word “woman,” we can truly say whatever we like. And here, as in the
original piece, we find the primacy of choice. Not that Chu chose to
experience gender dysphoria. No one would choose such a profound
sense of alienation from their body. But the primacy of the right to
choose one’s destiny, even at the expense of one’s happiness.

NE W T R ANS GENDER T R END

In one respect, Chu’s experience is typical. For as long as experts have
been documenting gender dysphoria, it has been observed predom-

10. Andrea Long Chu, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy,” The New York Times, No-
vember 22, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgen-
der-medicine.html.
11. Angela Long Chu, Females: A Concern (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2019), 1–2.
12. Chu, Females, 11.
90 The Secular Creed

inantly in a small minority of biological males, who felt discomfort

with their sex from childhood. For most, dysphoria resolves by adult-
hood. For some it does not.13 But in the last few years, the gender
imbalance has flipped. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender
surgeries performed on females in the United States grew by 289 per-
cent, to the point that biological females accounted for 70 percent of all
gender surgeries.14 In the UK, the decade from 2008 to 2018 witnessed
a 4,400 percent rise in the number of teenage girls seeking gender
treatments compared with the previous decade.15 So, what is going on?
Some argue that greater social acceptance has given young girls
courage to transition: the proportion of “trans boys” has not increased,
but social change has allowed them to come out. Others think there’s
more at play. Journalist Abigail Shrier observes that many of the ado-
lescent girls now identifying as boys, or using terms like “non-binary,”
“gender non-conforming,” or “genderqueer,” had not shown previous
signs of dysphoria. She argues that much of what we are seeing is
adolescent girls struggling to come to terms with their developing fe-
male bodies and often with other mental-health challenges, and seek-
ing social acceptance by coming out as trans. In Irreversible Damage:
The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters, Shrier compares “rapid
onset gender dysphoria” in girls to anorexia, and suggests that the in-
creasing numbers of young women who are seeking puberty-blocking

13. There is much dispute about the exact numbers, but it seems that the majority of people who
experience gender dysphoria in childhood find that it resolves by adulthood. See, for example J.
Ristori and T. D. Steensma, “Gender Dysphoria in Childhood,” International Review of Social
Psychiatry 28, no.1 (2016):13–20.
14. In the United States in 2016, 1,759 male-to-female surgeries were performed, versus 2,483 in
2017: a 40 percent increase. In the same year, female-to-male surgeries increased from 1,497 to
5,821: a 289 percent increase. See “2017 Plastic Surgery Statistics Report,” American Society of
Plastic Surgeons, https://www.plasticsurgery.org/documents/News/Statistics/2017/body-con-
touring-gender-confirmation-2017.pdf. See also See Madison Aitken, Thomas D. Steensma,
Ray Blanchard, et al., “Evidence for an Altered Sex Ratio in Clinic‐Referred Adolescents with
Gender Dysphoria,” The Journal of Sexual Medicine 12, no. 3 (March 2015): 756–63, https://doi.
org/10.1111/jsm.12817.
15. Gordon Rayner, “Minister orders inquiry into 4,000 per cent rise in children wanting to change
sex,” The Telegraph, September 16, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk//politics/2018/09/16/min-
ister-orders-inquiry-4000-per-cent-rise-children-wanting.
 Transgender Women Are Women 91

drugs, taking testosterone, and having their breasts removed are en-
gaging in a form of self-harm.16
Shrier has no personal axe to grind. She does not have a trans-iden-
tifying child. She is Jewish, has no particular religious motivation, and
she believes that for a small minority of people with severe and lasting
gender dysphoria, medical intervention is warranted. But she does not
think that adolescent girls should be encouraged to make life-altering,
fertility-destroying choices. That’s exactly what’s happening. Because
therapists are now in effect required to affirm an adolescent’s stated
trans identity, young girls who may have other mental-health strug-
gles are being offered puberty-blocking drugs, testosterone, and ulti-
mately mastectomies in order to enter the promised land of maleness,
while their parents are told that stopping them will lead to suicide.17
One widely cited study asked trans-identified people, “Did any
professional (such as a psychologist, counselor, religious advisor) try
to make you identify only with your sex assigned at birth (in other
words, try to stop you being trans)?,” and found that those who said
yes reported worse mental health than those who said no.18 But the
study had multiple methodological problems, including not correct-
ing for underlying mental-health conditions, which may have caused
a professional to question someone’s trans identity.19
The incidence of suicide attempts among adolescent girls who
identify as transgender is extremely high. One study found that fe-
male-to-male trans adolescents had an attempted suicide rate of 50.8
percent—the highest of any category—followed by those who iden-
tify as neither fully male nor female (41.8 percent) and then by male-

16. See Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters (Wash-
ington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2020), 33, 136.
17. As Shrier points out, nearly every medical accrediting organization has endorsed “gender af-
firming care” as the standard for treating those who identify as transgender. Shrier, Irreversible
Damage, 98.
18. Jack L. Turban, Noor Beckwith, Sari L. Reisner, et al., “Association between recalled expo-
sure to gender identity conversion efforts and psychological distress and suicide attempts
among transgender adults,” JAMA Psychiatry 77, no. 1 (September 11, 2019): 68–76, https://doi.
org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.2285.
19. See Roberto D’Angelo, Ema Syrulnik, Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano, Dianna Theadora Kenny,
and Patrick Clarke, “One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender
Dysphoria,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01844-2.
92 The Secular Creed

to-female trans adolescents (29.9 percent).20 Those who see transgen-

der identities as good and authentic blame this data on lack of social
acceptance. This is why parents are told they must affirm their child’s
identity and why Rowling is accused of “literally killing trans people
with [her] hate.” This kind of accusation is frequently combined with
the claim that trans-identifying people are murdered at a dispropor-
tionate rate. For example, Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page’s public letter
coming out as trans called the statistics on trans murders “staggering”
and linked this murderous hate to the high rates of suicidal ideation
among trans-identified people.21 But while it is certainly possible that
trans homicides have been underreported, the available evidence does
not show that trans people are murdered at a disproportionate rate.22
From the other direction, those who see transgender identities as
harmful will be tempted to see the levels of suicide attempts among
trans-identified youth only as evidence that identifying as trans is bad
for children and masks mental-health concerns, dismissing the role
played by bullying and lack of empathy. These issues are so politically
charged that vital research is hard to conduct, and there are no neat
ideological camps. Many of the parents Shrier interviewed were secu-
lar liberals who affirmed gay marriage and transgender rights, but did
not believe their daughter was trans.
Whatever our beliefs, these young people’s lives matter. Mocking
or dismissing those struggling with their gender identity is never the

20. Russell B. Toomey, Amy K. Syvertsen, Maura Shramko, “Transgender Adolescent Suicide
Behavior,” Pediatrics 142, no. 4, October 2018, https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/con-
tent/142/4/e20174218.
21. Elliot Page (@elliotpage), Instagram, December 1, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CI-
Q1QFBhNFg.
22. As a 2017 report expressed it, “Findings suggest that transgender people overall may not face
a higher risk of being murdered than do cisgender people but that young transgender wom-
en of color almost certainly face a higher chance of being murdered.” Rebecca L. Stotzer,
“Data Sources Hinder Our Understanding of Transgender Murders,” American Journal of Pub-
lic Health 107, no. 9 (September 2017): 1362–63, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/
PMC5551619. Most trans-identified people who are victims of homicide are black trans wom-
en, who are already more vulnerable due to their race, and 42 percent of black trans women
report having taken part in income-based sex work, which also makes them more vulnerable.
See Gina Martinez and Tara Law, “Two Recent Murders of Black Trans Women in Texas
Reveal a Nationwide Crisis, Advocates Say,” Time, June 5, 2019, https://time.com/5601227/
two-black-trans-women-murders-in-dallas-anti-trans-violence.
 Transgender Women Are Women 93

right approach. But encouraging emotionally vulnerable young girls

to undergo medical treatments that will distort their still-developing
bodies and affect their still-developing minds is also not an act of love.
Even from a secular perspective, there are real questions about
what should and should not be affirmed in people’s understanding
of themselves—especially if they haven’t yet reached adulthood. For
many, the primacy of individual freedom is a core belief. And yet most
would want to stop children from killing, starving, or cutting them-
selves. Is a teenage girl’s rejection of her female body a triumph for
freedom and authenticity, or a tragic yearning born of internalized
misogyny or untreated depression? Where should she look to find the
truth of her gender identity: at her body, or her social media feed? If
she takes puberty-blocking drugs, which Shrier notes are almost al-
ways followed by testosterone, will her resultant feelings show she was
never really female, or will they disrupt a normal female body? And
what about non-binary identities?

BIN AR Y OR NON-BIN AR Y? B ODY OR S OUL?

The British sci-fi series Doctor Who is one of my favorite shows. Its
central character is a time-traveling alien, with two hearts, a boundless
brain, and a handy ability to regenerate into a new body, when you and
I would just have died. For decades, the Doctor has been regenerating
as new actors have assumed the role. But the most recent incarnation
has turned the Doctor into a woman. This may look like a pro-trans
development. But the message seems to be that the Doctor’s mind
was not gendered and could pair equally well with a male or female
body, which actually doesn’t align with much transgender thinking.
While some trans people reject the “gender binary,” the slogan
that “Transgender women are women” reinforces the idea that one is
either male or female. The claim is not that trans women are some-
where on a spectrum, but that they are women. No half-measures.
Some attempt to ground this view in science, suggesting a biological
reality underlying gender dysphoria: perhaps there is a “male brain”
and a “female brain,” and trans women have female brains. This once
again raises feminist eyebrows and is highly questionable scientifical-
94 The Secular Creed

ly. Any slight variations between men’s and women’s brains represent
averages, not major disconnects.23
Others claim that transgender women are truly women, not be-
cause of a biological reality that could be scientifically verified, but
because psychology trumps biology. The belief is strangely spiritual.
Many secular people believe in science as the final arbiter of truth and
say that human beings don’t have souls. But the notion of a non-phys-
ical reality that defines our gender and may or may not align with
our body cuts against this stark materialism, and once again asserts
the male-female binary. Once we separate our “gender identity” from
anything connected to biology, it becomes impossible to pin down.
Before a recent doctor’s appointment, I was asked to declare my
“sex assigned at birth” and my “gender identity.” Transgender advo-
cates tend to talk as if “gender identity” is something more deeply
true of the person than biological sex. For example, an educational
video for Pink News describes the distress someone might feel at be-
ing “mistaken for the gender they were assigned at birth, rather than
their true gender.” This framing separates body from self and leaves
us wondering, “Who assigned this true gender?” According to most
activists, gender identity is not chosen, but discovered. It’s who trans
people really are, not something they have decided to be. But unteth-
ered from biological sex, it can also be a moving target. “Many wrong-
ly assume that sex defines gender,” explains a guide for transgender
allies, “when in reality gender identity is a living, growing experience
that can change over time.”24 According to this definition, transgen-
der women may only be women temporarily, as their gender identity
might change.
What precisely gender even means in this framework is unclear.
The same guide offers this definition: “Gender describes our internal
understanding and experience of our own gender identity.” 25 But this

23. See Lise Eliot, “Neurosexism: the myth that men and women have different brains,” Nature,
February 27, 2019, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00677-x.
24. Quoted from The Trevor Project’s “Guide to Being an Ally to Transgender and Nonbinary
Youth,” https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Guide-to-Being-an-
Ally-to-Transgender-and-Nonbinary-Youth.pdf.
25. Quoted from The Trevor Project’s “Guide to Being an Ally to Transgender and
Nonbinary Youth.”
 Transgender Women Are Women 95

only raises the question, “What then is gender identity?” An earlier

incarnation of the Doctor once had to explain time:

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but

actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big
ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff.

“It got away from me there,” he concludes. Separated from biological

sex, gender becomes just as nebulous. All we have left is stereotypes.
But perhaps this is no wonder. Stripped of belief in a creator God,
modern secular thinking cannot give us a coherent account of what
a human being is, why we are more than a collection of cells, or how
we are any different from animals. No wonder it can’t tell us what it
means to be male or female.
Increasing numbers of people today are leaning into the nebu-
lousness of gender identity and using terms like “non-binary,” “gender
non-conforming” or “genderqueer.” People vary on whether they see
these identities as expressions of biological or psychological realities,
or simply rejections of cultural norms. But some claim that even at
a biological level, sex is not like an on-off switch, but like a dimmer
light, with fully male at one end of a spectrum and fully female at the
other. To argue for this perspective, they cite the reality that some
people are born intersex.

IN T ER SE X P EOP LE AND T HE GENDER BIN AR Y

“Intersex” describes someone born with atypical features of their sexu-
al anatomy or sex chromosomes. Depending on which conditions are
counted, estimates of the proportion of people who are born intersex
vary greatly, from 1.7 percent to 0.018 percent.26 The higher estimates
include people with any kind of disorder or difference of sexual de-
velopment (who may not even be aware of it), while the lower esti-
mates restrict intersex to describe people whose sex organs are not
classifiable as either male or female or whose chromosomal sex does

26. See Leonard Sax, “How common is intersex? a response to Anne Fausto-Sterling,” The Journal
of Sex Research 39, no. 3 (August 2002): 174–78, https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490209552139.
96 The Secular Creed

not match their anatomy. For example, a few years back, a friend of
mine gave birth to a baby whose body looked predominantly female,
but who turned out to be chromosomally male. But whether the term
should apply to one person in 60 or one person in 6,000, some people
are undoubtedly born with significant intersex conditions. Is this the
key to unlock the shackles that have bound us to the gender binary?
First, it’s important for Christians to recognize that intersex
people are precious human beings made in the image of God—not
pawns in a political fight—and that many of us are undereducated
about intersex conditions and distinguishing them from transgender
identities. Christian parents of intersex children often feel isolated
as they face the unique challenges of raising their kids, and perhaps
having to explain to them at an early age that they will be unable have
biological children.
Second, however, to say that babies born intersex disprove the re-
ality of the male-female binary misses the fact that it was only because
of the male-female binary that these babies exist at all. In September
2019, a pregnant woman posted a series of photos parodying gender
reveals. In one photo, she held balloons spelling, “Gender is a con-
struct.” But while much of what we associate with gender is culturally
determined, biological sex is not. According to a previous Facebook
post, this woman’s pregnancy was made possible by a sperm donation
rather than a sexual relationship. But the reality remains that the baby
in her womb exists because of the sexual binary, and that if her child
one day has biological children, it will only be because of that binary.
Today, people often present the sex binary as oppressive. But at its very
heart, the male-female binary is creative. Rather than cutting against
diversity, God created us so that deep intimacy across this diversity
would generate new life.
So, where does this leave people with intersex conditions? What
does the Bible say to my friend’s child? And what does it say to the
trans woman who approached me after my talk at a Christian confer-
ence, or to Andrea Long Chu, who was raised Presbyterian, or to the
adolescent girls taking testosterone? Does the Bible speak to today’s
complex situations?
 Transgender Women Are Women 97

JE SU S’S H AR D T E AC HING
As we have seen, the Bible’s first words about sex and gender are that
God created humans—male and female—in his image (Gen. 1:26–27).
When the Pharisees ask Jesus, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for
any cause?,” he responds:

Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made
them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father
and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one
flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has
joined together, let not man separate.” (Matt. 19:4–6)

Jesus affirms both the binary of male and female in creation and the
binding of male to female in marriage. The Pharisees try to trap him
by asking why Moses allowed divorce. Jesus replies, “Because of your
hardness of heart” and adds, “I say to you: whoever divorces his wife
except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman, commits
adultery” (Matt. 19:8–9). Jesus is sometimes misrepresented as not
caring about sexual ethics. But here, as in the Sermon on the Mount,
Jesus doesn’t loosen the Old Testament law on sexual faithfulness. He
tightens it.
In Jesus’s context, as in ours, this strong repudiation of divorce is
countercultural. His disciples respond, “If such is the case of a man
with his wife, it is better not to marry.” Jesus replies:

Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given.
For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eu-
nuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who
have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.
Let the one who is able to receive this receive it. (Matt. 19:11–12)

While increasing numbers of people in our culture identify as trans-

gender, you’d struggle to find a 21st-century Westerner identifying as
a eunuch. So, what is Jesus saying?
As we saw in chapter 1, eunuchs were males who had been cas-
trated to perform a particular cultural function. While still identified
98 The Secular Creed

as male, they were cut out of the possibility of fatherhood and likely
denied marriage. Jesus’s allusion to “eunuchs who have been made eu-
nuchs by men” refers to this. Mosaic law stopped eunuchs from enter-
ing God’s temple, but eunuchs were fully embraced by the church. In
fact, one of the first conversion stories we read in Acts is of a eunuch
(Acts 8:26–40). But Jesus also describes two other groups: those who
were eunuchs “from birth” and those who have “made themselves eu-
nuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” What does he mean?
First, we must notice that while Jesus affirmed the sex binary
in creation, he also recognizes that some people from birth are not
equipped with standard-issue sex organs. Like castrated eunuchs,
these people would likely not have been eligible for marriage and
would have experienced various forms of social exclusion. But they
were fully welcomed among God’s people. Jesus’s words offer vital
truth for Christians with intersex conditions. Our value as Christians
is not tied to our reproductive ability. It’s tied to Christ.
Second, while Jesus’s answer to the Pharisees strongly supports
marriage, his response to his disciples affirms those who have “made
themselves eunuchs”—sacrificed marriage and parenthood—“for the
sake of the kingdom of heaven.” For Jewish men of Jesus’s day, build-
ing a family was a top priority. But while Jesus has such a high view of
marriage that his disciples were shocked, he also ranks God’s kingdom
before marriage and family (e.g., Matt. 19:29). Some believers then as
now serve God best as single people. Paul was one striking example
of fruitful singleness. But how do we know Jesus wasn’t referring to
people castrating themselves for the sake of the kingdom of heaven,
as some transgender advocates suggest?27
Voluntary castration was a known religious practice in Jesus’s day,
but it was associated with pagan cults. Tom Holland describes a cult
in first-century Galatia like this:

The Galli, men dressed as woman, were servants of Cybele, the Mother
Goddess who sat enthroned amid the highest peaks of Galatia; and
the mark of their submission to this most powerful and venerable

27. See, for example, Austen Hartke, Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender People
(Westminster John Knox: Louisville, 2018), 106–8.
 Transgender Women Are Women 99

of the region’s gods was the severing with a knife or sharp stone of
their testicles.28

Writing to Christians in Galatia, Paul argues powerfully against those

who said Gentile believers should be circumcised and quips, “I wish
those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves!” (Gal. 5:12). This
may be a critical reference to the Galli. As Paul was rejecting even
circumcision of Gentiles as a demonstration of devotion to Christ,
the idea that Jesus was talking about castration as a way of expressing
devotion to the kingdom of heaven is unthinkable. But what about
the most famous line in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in which the
boundaries of male and female are broken down?

NO M ALE AND FEM ALE, ALL ONE IN C HR IS T

Circumcision marked Jewish males as heirs of God’s promises to
Abraham. But in Galatians, Paul argues that Jesus alone is “Abraham’s
seed.” This is the context for these glorious, lifegiving lines:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is
no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are
Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.
(Gal. 3:28–29)

Gentiles don’t need circumcision to realize God’s promises. Slaves,

who would not inherit in the ancient world, become “sons of God.”
Women are as much Abraham’s heirs as Jewish men are. Marriage
(which some commentators think Paul means by “male and female”)
is not required. Anyone—regardless of ethnic background, religious
heritage, social status, biological sex, or marriage status—can be in
Christ. Jesus has them covered.
So, are male and female simply erased in Christ? No. Paul clearly
affirms the spiritual equality of men and women in Galatians 3:28. But
in multiple other passages he distinguishes between male and female
roles (Eph. 5:22–33). Using Galatians 3:28 to justify the erasure of male

28. Holland, Dominion, 83.

100 The Secular Creed

and female would be like using it to justify promiscuous sex between

believers on the grounds that we are all one body in Christ. We need to
understand Paul’s words in the context of the whole letter, and of the
whole New Testament.

NO M AR R I AGE IN HE AV EN
Another text to which people sometimes appeal to argue that the Bi-
ble erases male and female is Jesus’s conversation with the Saddu-
cees, who did not believe in the future resurrection. The Sadducees
described a woman being widowed by seven brothers and asked Jesus
whose wife she would be at the resurrection. Jesus replied:

You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power
of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in
marriage, but are like angels in heaven. (Matt. 22:29–30)

Some argue that this means we will no longer be male and female
in the new creation, so transgender identities are valid now. But the
point Jesus is making is not about biological sex, it’s about marriage.
As we saw in chapter 2, marriage points to a greater reality. When the
wedding of the Lamb comes, we will no longer need human marriage.
The absence of sexual relationships in the New Creation will change
one aspect of how many of us exist as male and female humans. But
this does not mean male and female are erased. The angels we meet in
the Bible are represented as male.29 And the one person we see prog-
ress through death to resurrection life (rather than just being brought
back from death) is Jesus, who remained male. God made us male and
female from the beginning. The promised resurrection of our male and
female bodies is the ultimate proof that they are truly good and that
they embody our true selves.

29. For example, the angel Gabriel, who tells Mary she’s going to have a baby.
 Transgender Women Are Women 101

GOODNE S S OF T HE B ODY
When Christianity was born in the first century, one of its distinctives
was belief in the goodness of the body. Many contemporary belief
systems promised an escape from the flesh. For example, the Greek
philosopher Plato taught that the highest reward for a man’s soul was
to be promoted into disembodied bliss, while souls that lacked vir-
tue could be reincarnated as women, and potentially move down the
chain of animals from there. Within this framework, the soul was bet-
ter off without the body, and men’s bodies were better than women’s.
This isn’t what the Bible teaches.
In the Bible, both men and women enter the kingdom of God as
men and women, because they are in Christ. Both men and women
are made in the image of God. Rather than seeing our bodies as pris-
ons to escape, the Bible asserts that the ultimate spiritual being became
flesh in the person of Jesus: not just for a time, but forever. The prom-
ise of Christianity is not the promise of an everlasting, incorporeal
soul. It’s the promise of a resurrected body.30
This integrated view of humanness that anchors the true self to
the body cuts against transgender ideology, which separates our “sex
assigned at birth” from our true “gender identity.” And it offers an
alternative to the pseudo-resurrection experience promised by tran-
sition. For trans-identifying people today, taking hormones and sub-
mitting to surgeries to conform their bodies to the supposedly deeper
reality of their gender identity is seen not as assault, but as healing:
bringing body and self into harmony. Transitioning (whether social or
surgical) is a kind of resurrection. Calling someone by their pre-tran-
sition name is known as “deadnaming.”
So, what alternative hope does Christianity offer to those who
feel alienated from their bodies, like their true selves are not seen,
like there is something deep within them that is out of joint with
their flesh?

30. Even when Jesus warned his followers not to fear “those who kill the body but cannot kill the
soul,” he reinforced the idea that soul and body belong together after death: “Rather fear him
who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28).
102 The Secular Creed

PAINFUL, R E SUR R EC T ION HOP E

With my first two babies, the epidural worked. I spent hours in early
labor groaning as each contraction hit. But then I got to the hospital
and, thanks to a kindly needle, the pain stopped. My body continued
to do its work. I rested until it was time to push. With my third child,
the epidural failed. As I entered the phase known as transition, my
body started to do the strange things women’s bodies do in child-
birth—shaking, trembling. I dreaded contractions as they came like
rapid fire. But when my son was born, my pain—at last—was worth
it. Paul uses this exact experience to help the Roman Christians un-
derstand their suffering:

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in
the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we
ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as
we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
(Rom. 8:22–23)

The Bible tells a story in which our bodies, male or female, are created
very good. But sin has cut us off from God and alienated us from his
world, from each other, and from our very flesh. Even those of us born
with healthy bodies will find they let us down, bring us suffering, and
finally expire. For those trusting in Christ, the redemption of our bod-
ies is coming. To be a Christian now is to groan inwardly and to wait
eagerly, like a laboring mother. But when that day comes, whatever
pain or loss or disappointment we feel now will be undone. However
alienated we feel from our flesh, it will be redeemed. And we know
this because of the painful, agonizing work of the greatest man who
ever died.
You see, at the heart of Christianity is the horrific death and stun-
ning resurrection of the one true image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15).
Jesus was the perfect man. But he was no gender stereotype. He had
the power to silence storms, command angels, and kill death. But his
arms held babies, his hands healed the sick, and his words brought
comfort to the weary, rejected, and weak. When his friend Lazarus
died, Jesus wept. Like a mother hen gathering her chicks under her
 Transgender Women Are Women 103

wings, Jesus longed to gather the children of Jerusalem to himself

(Matt. 23:37). To see God’s kingdom, Jesus says, is to be born again
( John 3:3).
No follower of Jesus need hold to rigid gender stereotypes, in
which men make skyscrapers and women decorate their walls. In-
stead, we must cling to our Savior. He is the one who knows us to
our core and loves us to death and beyond. He made our bodies, and
he holds our hearts. Our deepest identity lies in him. “For you have
died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God,” Paul writes. “When
Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in
glory” (Col. 3:3–4).
For those who feel alienated from their sex, who feel like they
can’t get warm in their bodies, no matter how many layers they put
on, Jesus offers hope. Not the hope of a differently sexed body, but
the hope of a new reality that no longer feels like labor pains. The
transgender person I met after my talk in England thanked me for
treating these questions with tenderness. But Jesus’s tenderness utter-
ly surpasses ours. It’s the tenderness of the God who likens his love to
that of a nursing mother (Isa. 49:15). We can trust our fragile bodies to
this God, however out of joint with them we feel, because he loves us
with an everlasting love. One day he will wipe away every tear from
our eyes and make our groaning bodies new.
When Mulan returned to her hometown, the father whose place
she took in battle said, “One warrior knows another. You were always
there. Yet I see you for the first time.” But when we see Jesus, we’ll
return to the one who formed us in our mother’s womb, and who took
our place when he died on the cross. He’s seen us every day we’ve lived
and knows us better than we know ourselves. However hopeless life
feels now, he’s written the script for our eternity. And if we simply put
our trust in him, our story’s end will be unfathomably good.
 CALL TO
L OV I NG A R M S

“Can’t you hear it?”

I didn’t need a car in London. But when we moved to America,
my husband taught me to drive on the manual-shift car he’d bought
second-hand at age 16. I struggled to learn when to change gears. I’d
start in first and accelerate until the car was pleading for second. Fo-
cused on the road ahead, I’d miss the tell-tale sound. “Can’t you hear
it?” Bryan would ask. I’d rush to switch from accelerator to clutch,
grab the gear stick, pull it back, and slide it across so I could push it
forward again into second. And so we’d go on, until the car was crying
out for third.
Perhaps, like me, you’re a follower of Jesus, and you want to keep
your foot on the gas. There is so much that we Christians need to do,
and so far we need to go to see people from every tribe and nation
won for Christ. But after 12 years living in America, I’m convinced
that in order to make progress we must change gears. Rather than just
ramming our foot down, we must pull the gear stick back and do the
hard work of repentance before shifting into second or third.
In particular, white Christians like me must recognize the ways in
which our tribe has been complicit in the pain of black Americans:
from slavery to segregation to racial inequality today. Acknowledging
this sin can feel like a step back. Some see it as a distraction from the
vital work of sharing the gospel. But what if the failure truly to listen
to the voices of black brothers and sisters and to reckon with this his-
106 The Secular Creed

tory of sin is holding our evangelism back, just as my failure to listen

to my car kept me from changing into second gear?
We might worry that proclaiming “black lives matter” affirms a
broader progressive agenda that also celebrates LGBT+ identities. But
what if our failure to fight for racial equality while also upholding
biblical sexual ethics allows that progressive wedding of ideas to stand
unquestioned? If we don’t fight for the biblical goals of racial justice
and equality, we’re playing into the script that says Christian sexu-
al ethics come bundled with oppression. In order to make progress,
it’s vital that we unyoke these ideas. To show where progressives are
wrong, we must also freely acknowledge where they are right.
Whatever our racial background, we Christians must also re-
pent of the ways we’ve allowed actual homophobia—fear, hatred, and
mistrust of gay and lesbian people—to infect our churches. Too of-
ten, LGBT+ people outside the church have only heard a message of
hate. Too often, we’ve left our same-sex-attracted siblings within the
church shivering in the dark, believing they’re unwanted and unloved.
If you want to pour lighter fuel on sexual temptation, you leave some-
one alone. But if we want same-sex-attracted Christians to thrive,
we must embrace them with loving arms. This doesn’t mean affirm-
ing same-sex romance. It means obeying the Bible, which calls us to
bear each other’s burdens (Gal. 6:2) and to love each other deeply (1
Pet. 4:8). What’s more, in a world in which people block their ears to
the gospel because they think we’re homophobic bigots, the faithful,
same-sex-attracted Christians in our congregations are a God-given
SWAT team to burst through those defenses. There is no more pow-
erful way to testify to Jesus in this generation than to turn away from
sexual and romantic fulfilment because you believe in a better love.
We must also acknowledge the ways in which we’ve failed to fol-
low Jesus in his treatment of women. Rather than sidelining women,
we must celebrate women’s gospel ministry, cultivate women’s theo-
logical growth, and encourage women as they serve the Lord, wheth-
er in the home or in the workplace. In a world where women are
pushed into commitment-free sex, the counterculture of the church
should affirm both marriage and singleness as compelling options for
Christians, rather than making women who aren’t married or don’t
have children feel marginalized. And against the history of shaming
 Call to Loving Arms 107

women for having babies outside of marriage, our churches should

validate women who have chosen to keep their baby against all social
pressure to abort, and offer the extended family and practical support
that single mothers need.
In a world where transitioning to the opposite sex or rejecting
the gender binary has come to seem for some like salvation, we must
affirm the goodness of male and female bodies without clinging to
unbiblical gender stereotypes. If Jesus cooked for his disciples, wept
with his friends, and took babies in his arms, we don’t need to pretend
that manhood is just about loving cars, watching sports, and lifting
weights. And if Jesus had some of his most important theological con-
versations with women, we must not act as if women only care about
cooking and clothes. Christians must repent of the ways in which our
embrace of cultural stereotypes has made some people feel as if they
don’t belong in their own skin. We must take those who experience
gender dysphoria seriously and sit with them in their discomfort, not
claiming to understand when we don’t, and not affirming a gender
identity that goes against their sex, but listening to each person’s story
and seeking to support them however we can. This action may not al-
ways be received as love. God’s rule over our lives is heresy to modern,
self-determining ears. But we must speak the truth with tenderness
and not let our sin take the wheel.
On all these fronts, we must fight hard with the weapon God
has given us: self-sacrificing, unrelenting love. Rather than shouting
progressives who seek love and justice down, let’s call them in with a
Jesus song: his song of good news for the historically oppressed, his
song of love across racial and ethnic difference, his song that summons
men and women, married and single, young and old, weak and strong,
joyful and hurting, rich and destitute, into eternal love with him. Let’s
fight with love and sing the song with which we’ll one day overcome.
Can you hear it?
 AC K NOW L E D G E M E N T S

This book happened quickly, and so will the thank yous.

I’m thankful to Collin Hansen, Matt Smethurst, and Ivan Mesa
at The Gospel Coalition for being willing to jump and for making all
things needful happen in record time. I’m thankful to Rachel Gilson
for telling me to write this book, and for being my first reader, best
counselor, and daily source of encouragement. I’m grateful for Claude
Atcho and Steven Harris, who gave me expert feedback; and for Sam
Allberry, who read the whole book the night I sent it to him: the sign
of a great friend! I feel greatly blessed by the support of Christine
Caine, who prayed for me and spurred me on, despite having so many
other demands on her time. These brothers and sisters in Christ are a
gift. God knows I work best with a team.
I’m thankful to all the people who let me use their stories in this
book, and to my family, who endured my writing frenzy once again.
I could not write in public on such controversial themes if I didn’t
know, in private, I am loved. Finally, I’m thankful to the One person
who thinks I am worth dying for, and who will hold me through eter-
nity. He is my resurrection and my life.
 ANO T HER T GC P UBLIC AT ION

“This book hit home with me, perhaps because some of my great-
est regrets have come from ways I’ve misused words—confidences I
didn’t keep, criticism I was too eager to offer, bragging to make myself
seem important, dominating the conversation when I should have lis-
tened. I’ve also misused words by keeping silent when I should have
come clean, when I should have offered praise, when I should have
spoken up. These and many more insights on how we use our words
are covered in this brief but wisdom-filled book—a great book to
read prayerfully on your own, but even better to use to discuss with a
small group.”

Nancy Guthrie, author and Bible teacher

 ANO T HER T GC P UBLIC AT ION

“Trevin Wax writes with keenness of insight, pastoral wisdom, and

prophetic forcefulness. In this book he articulates the pressure today’s
Christian leaders feel from every direction. Wax remains one of my
most reliable counselors for leading in a rapidly shifting context.”

J. D. Greear, pastor, The Summit Church, Raleigh-Durham,

North Carolina; president, Southern Baptist Convention
 ANO T HER T GC P UBLIC AT ION

“Over the years I’ve met many younger Christians who aren’t sure
they can or even should bother any longer with this ancient faith.
Some end up leaving the church with a sense of liberation. Others feel
as though they’re falling with no one to catch them. The church ought
to be the place where they feel safe asking hard questions and sharing
honest doubts. The distinguished contributors to Before You Lose Your
Faith write with sympathy and understanding. They can help anxious
readers reconstruct a stronger, lasting faith in our trustworthy Savior.”

Collin Hansen, vice president of content and editor in chief of

The Gospel Coalition and host of the Gospelbound podcast
The Gospel Coalition (TGC) supports the church in making disciples
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In all of this we want to help Christians around the world better
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We want to offer gospel-centered hope for the searching.
Join us by visiting TGC.org so you can be equipped to love God
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