Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Thursday, August 22, 2024
The problem with progressivism is not simply an ephemeral set of policies. The problem is that progressivism is a worldview with a set of metaphysical assumptions. And while I would never go so far as to equate Christianity with conservatism proper, there is no metaphysical comparison between progressivism and conservatism. They possess an organizing logic of total contrasts. Conservatism champions a constrained idea of the universe, one of moral givenness and order. For this reason, it builds within the confines of limits and hands down this moral inheritance through successive generations. 

Do you ever wonder why everything progressivism touches eventually rots? While some may question the exact correlation-causation link I am making, the rearview mirror of history seems to tell us a very plain truth: The preponderance of progressive ideas and influence in society corresponds to statist and authoritarian government, decadent and perverse morality (especially sexual morality), family decline, cultural despair, crime-ridden streets, and, yes, even ugly architecture. Cultural decline and social pathologies result from the progressive vision for humanity and government.
This is not, chiefly, a reality that stems from politics alone. It stems from theological realities that spill into the political. Our political order traffics in deeply theological and moral realities that deceive us into believing that political arrangements are surface-level conflicts over tax policies. Behind every political arrangement is an organizing logic that will lead either to truth and flourishing or error and destruction. My settled conviction is that the organizing logic of progressivism leads to decay, degeneracy, and destruction.
The problem with progressivism is not simply an ephemeral set of policies. The problem is that progressivism is a worldview with a set of metaphysical assumptions. And while I would never go so far as to equate Christianity with conservatism proper, there is no metaphysical comparison between progressivism and conservatism. They possess an organizing logic of total contrasts. Conservatism champions a constrained idea of the universe, one of moral givenness and order.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Thursday, June 20, 2024
We do not go looking to the experience of our desires to validate an identity. We go to Scripture. The fact of “naturally occurring” experiences or desires tells us nothing about the appropriateness of those occurrences or desires. “If it feels good, do it” is devastating as an ethic. 

It is a cultural myth that December is America’s most religious month. It is not, if we define religiosity by what truly grips the affections of the country’s elite.
June is now our most religious month. June is when the parades and symbology of America’s primary religion flowers: the religion of sexual transgression.
December is now just a pro forma and perfunctory overture to America’s past golden age as a Christian nation, a time when sodomy, the denial of biologically determined gender, and telling young children to ingest hormones were not considered deeply held American values.
But that is not the America we live in. June reveals the true religious center of elite American life. And our elites, it seems, are deeply enamored with and captured by all things homosexual.
It is not just about homosexuality or transgenderism. It is now about the worship of sensuality and nerve endings. We can be shocked by this, but familiarity with Scripture should disabuse us of this shock. The Apostle Paul does, after all, warn against sexual sin (Romans 13:13).
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Friday, June 14, 2024
Making human existence reducible to our sexual desires, chromosomes, melanin, or geography without obedience to Scripture and its full-bodied anthropology grounded bearing God’s image is where today’s left wing and right wing horseshoe into similar worldviews. Without Scripture as our authority, humans are prone to valorize whatever gives them the identity they are looking for, whether homosexuality, transgenderism, misogyny, or racism.

Christian morality is a respecter of no tribe or alliance. Faithfulness to Christ requires that we apply Biblical truth to every dimension of life, including our political life and social media.
It is not simply that I agree with the content of Christian ethics. I love how Christian ethics works as a theory. Our ethical standards are timeless, objective, and impartially applied without fear or favor. Our values, understood rightly, should never change or evolve.
How Christian ethics work as a theory is best measured against how secular ethics work. If you pay attention to secular moral values, you will notice how they constantly evolve and catch up based on the current cultural mood. For example, 20 years ago, same-sex marriage was unthinkable, and Democrats universally opposed it. Twenty years later, if one is against same-sex marriage, one could never conceive of being a Democrat. So, the moral values change to meet the needs of an evolving political constituency. At root, it is a form of ethical subjectivism and relativism.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Tuesday, May 21, 2024
Same-sex marriage has also fueled the redefinition and imagination around how we conceive of family structure and how children are to be brought into this world. While a child with two moms or two dads may seem commonplace now, nature persists in telling us that it is unnatural. Children need moms and dads in conjoined pairs, not just in any random combination. The legal move to intentionally ensconce children in homes that lack maternal or paternal love cannot be considered anything else than a fundamental denial of creation order and Biblical justice.

Depending on your age, same-sex “marriage” may be as quintessentially American as baseball and apple pie at this point. That was what I came away with after reading Molly Ball’s Wall Street Journal report on how same-sex nuptials have transformed the American landscape. In her telling, the transformation has been a stunning success, winning wide cultural approval. As Ball tells it, the effects have been commonplace as gay couples have largely conformed themselves to the otherwise humdrum and bucolic trappings of other ordinary marriages. One expert interviewed noted that “overall, the fears of opponents of same-sex marriage simply have not come to pass.”
As an opponent of same-sex marriage dating back to over a decade now, I beg to differ. Ball is not altogether wrong in her reporting that many within same-sex marriages find themselves enjoying the routineness of their relationship in the eyes of the world. And yet, the fact that something becomes routine does not mean that it is right or good. What Ball’s reporting focuses on is the personal aspects of same-sex marriage as an institutional phenomenon while overlooking the significant downstream negative consequences of same-sex marriage on American culture. And on that front, there have been many.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Wednesday, May 15, 2024

America is waking up to the fact that most of American higher education is an enemy of American ideals. In a sane world, the government would establish a commission to study the ideological capture of institutions like a Columbia. But this is the constituency Democrats need to win elections, so that will never happen.

In recent months, I was invited to speak at a law school on the subject of religious liberty. My host—a progressive, but an old-school free-speech progressive—warned me: “It’s up to you, but I would stay away from anything related to LGBT issues or Israel. I’ll be frank with you: If you bring those issues up, a group of ultra-woke students will go insane.”
I appreciated the warning, genuinely. I did not intend to bring those issues up, but knowing what could happen if I did was helpful. Nonetheless, it was mystifying to receive a warning of this type. I could never envision telling a guest speaker who did not share my students’ views to be prepared for an intellectual tantrum.
I raise this episode alongside the ongoing story playing out at our nation’s most elite institutions surrounding the Israel-Hamas conflict. What is playing out across America’s most prestigious universities (and fanning out to many other universities in general) is morally deplorable and deserving of the highest condemnation. In what can be described as reminiscent of events from 1930s Germany, students at these universities are taunting, harassing, and invoking genocidal language against Jews. Faculty are, of course, aiding and abetting this foolishness. Defenses of Hamas are made. Behold the product of a generational effort to mainstream Critical Social Justice.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Friday, September 8, 2023
Yuval Harari offers his readers a rare insight into the worldview of a postmodern materialist. According to Harari, morality is a façade that we attach to naturally occurring realities. Because all we are is just our biology, whatever occurs within us is, by definition, natural, and presumably, in Harari’s understanding, good. If it is natural, it cannot be immoral because whatever occurs, occurs in accordance with nature. So, it must be okay.

Occasionally, statements get made by important figures that, for individuals like me, a Christian ethics professor, do a great service. They just accidentally say what they truly mean with little possibility of confusion or misinterpretation. They reveal their underlying worldview. They do not disguise their beliefs. In an act of intellectual transparency, some say the unvarnished truth out loud, even if by accident. This is an act of public service.
One such example comes from the Twitter/X account of the world famous intellectual, Yuval Harari. Harari is an Israeli professor well known for forecasting the future of scientific and human advancement.
In a tweet posted last week, Harari showed the reality of a worldview that neglects God as the foundation of morality. In Harari’s own words, he stated: “From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”
Now, be patient as I try to explain Harari’s philosophical gobbledygook.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Friday, June 16, 2023
For practicing Christians, fidelity to God may mean recommitting ourselves to the practices that habituate us into deeper relationship. Even when we do not feel like it, we must read our Bibles and pray as a ritual reminder that the first thing about each of us is our ultimate end, not our temporal end. Contemplating God’s works in His Word is good for you. We must go to church, catechize ourselves and our families, and love each other.

One of the most important sentences in the entire Western canon comes from Augustine. It is a statement written in the indicative voice that many are doubtless familiar with, given its ubiquity. From The Confessions, Augustine states, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Though this sentence is an indicative statement of truth, it also assumes an imperative: we are meant to be in communion with God. For homo religiosus, knowing God is to be human at its fullest. We are to commune with God not because we seek our own supremacy, but because communing with God is what brings peaceful rectitude to the soul. Knowing God quenches our deepest desires to know the glorious and be known by the glorious.
The First Pillar
In the planning and execution for Fidelity Month, it became clear that dedication to God needed to be the first pillar of fidelity. This first pillar reminds us of an architectonic truth: whatever the goods of family, community, and nation represent, their intelligibility must be ordered and understood by what created them and, in turn, best illuminates them: God. The “ordo amoris,” or “order of loves” spoken of in the Christian tradition, insists on the inherent goods of family, community, and nation as ends to be pursued for their own sake. The love they are given, however, is proportionate to the love they are owed. But we owe God our highest affections because it is He who has made us. As we come to know God and conform ourselves to His divine plan, fullness of being comes into view. Scripture deems the knowledge of God as a resplendent good that colors every other experience of our humanity. As Psalm 36:9 states, “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.” Communion with God is what lights our path (Psalm 119:105). If we shall not walk in darkness, we must turn ourselves to the light (Isaiah 9:2; John 8:12).
Never more than now is the time ripe to rededicate ourselves to God. It’s what our culture needs most. With religion on the decline, it should come as no surprise that mental health appears more statistically volatile than ever before. Excise or trivialize the most important foundation of a person’s existence—their relationship to God—and it is to be expected that humanity’s sense of balance and purpose would be torn asunder.
Furthermore, in an age of cascading “identities” on endless offer, knowledge of God bequeaths a right and definitive knowledge of the self. Christian theology has a rich tradition of delineating the relationship between epistemology and anthropology, insisting on their essential unity. The two subjects ask: how do we know who we are? Theologians believe that philosophy on its own cannot adequately answer this question. In John Calvin’s Institutes, his famous opening lines sought to demarcate how knowledge of God spills over into an accurate knowledge of the self. For Calvin, they are inextricably bound in a helix-like structure. As Calvin says:
Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while they are joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he “lives and moves” (Acts 17:28). For quite clearly, the mighty gifts with which we are endowed are hardly from ourselves; indeed, our very being shares in God’s own being. Then, by these benefits shed like dew from heaven upon us, we are led as by rivulets to the spring itself.
Here Calvin restates that architectonic truth: God is the font of all meaningful knowledge. Apart from him, we fumble around in the darkness. We cannot explain the obligations that beset us without God as the source of those obligations.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Friday, June 2, 2023
We cannot let routineness overwhelm or supplant how Scripture and the Christian tradition have reflected on the uniqueness of conjugal marriage. Same-sex “marriage” is not marriage. Truth is truth no matter the untruth, and the created order defies societal manipulation. A marriage where husband and wife are rightly geared towards procreation is a blessing to society, and it is truly irreplaceable.

Since 2015’s Obergefell ruling, same-sex “marriage” now seems as quintessentially “American” as baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolet. New “normals” that gain mainstream acceptance mean nothing, though, when the “normals” in question defy Scripture, natural law, and creation order—as same-sex “marriage” unquestionably does.
The Truth of What Marriage Is
To address the challenge of same-sex “marriage,” we must first ask: What is marriage? How one answers will reveal a number of insights about other important aspects constitutive to human flourishing. Scripture assumes a grand a priori pertaining to sexual ethics: The normative expression for sexual activity is the conjugal union of man and woman who become husband and wife through the union of their wills, affections, and preeminently, their bodies (Gen. 1:28; 2:18-25). The Bible’s standard for sexuality from the first chapter of Genesis assumes that the complementary relationship between husband and wife is the exclusive expression of God’s will for sexuality in creation. Any deviation from that explicit pattern is thus unbiblical and unreasonable due to the undermining of marriage as the moral good of Scripture.
I define marriage as the conjugal union of one man and one woman united to one another within a permanent and monogamous bond that is, absent any medical problems, ordered to procreation. It is an institution that provides an outlet for safeguarding procreative potency, sexual fulfillment, and relational companionship. The consummation of a marriage is fortified by the unitive and procreative goods securing husband and wife, jointly, in a bond of mutual self-giving.
We must also understand the logic of marriage that makes it singularly unique with an intelligible purpose that other types of relationships lack and also thwart. To say there is a “purpose” to a particular thing, X, is to say that there is an ideal fulfillment for what X ought to be. For example, if one plays basketball with a football, basketball’s telos as a sport is disrupted. It is impossible to bounce a football even if one could hypothetically “shoot” with a football. Everything about the game itself would be disrupted by awkwardness. Playing basketball requires the coordination of a team with the necessary parts (which includes, obviously, the right type of ball). Basketball and football are thus different sports because of the different constitutive elements that comprise the games. The coordination of organized parts that completes (or brings about) a particular end gives explanation to an entity’s essence or nature.
How does this relate to marriage? The coordination of male and female toward the integrated end of reproduction is what gives intelligibility to the marriage union, since coordination toward an end is what gives intelligibility to a thing in question. This feature is what separates other types of human relationships in that the depth of union experienced is unparalleled in what other human relationships can achieve. Marriage is thus intelligible by kind—not simply “degree”—ultimately by its reproductive end. To be “one flesh” as Genesis speaks of is not only a metaphor. It vividly depicts the fully organic integration of embodied persons joined together in coordinated activity. As a solitary person’s circulatory system is self-enclosed and sufficient all on its own, so marriage is enclosed and sufficient only with two persons whose total persons unite at all levels of their being in gamete donation that each body is fit to contribute.
Looking beyond the good of just the individual husband and wife, marriage as a creation order institution and public good is the building block of human society. Marriage is civilization in microcosmic form. It is civilization’s chief organizing principle, since society is nothing less and nothing more than the aggregate number of families that comprise it. Though not all marriages will produce children due to involuntary circumstances outside the control of spouses (i.e., infertility), what gives marriage its structure is the complementarity of male and female that makes procreation possible. The nature of marriage is tied to the complementarity of male and female reproductive ability. If you remove the unique role of procreation intrinsic to male-female union, marriage would cease to be intelligible as a union distinct from other types of unions. Moreover, if the procreative primacy and uniqueness of marriage as an inherently and exclusively complementary union is denied or lessened, marriage is open to endless redefinitions. Marriage has an ontological structure such that the removal of complementarity negates the ability for any relationship that strives to be marital to actually be marital. The reason that marriage and its orientation to family life is upheld as the moral good of Scripture and the natural law tradition is that it safeguards the design for sexuality with the outcome of sexuality: Children. Marriage, in other words, prevents the severing of procreation, sexual drive, and society’s need for stability. It unites them all together under one beautiful canopy.
Marriage is thus inherently oriented to the common good by providing the guardrails and sanctuary for the proper rearing of children. This bringing forth of new human beings to the civic community is essential to the common good’s relationship to marriage, for, apart from marriage, society is robbed of the seedbed for civilization’s flowering and renewal. An earthly society with no children is a dying society. Conversely, where marriages break down or fail to even form, incalculable damage is done to the social fabric of the civic community. A society that fails to champion the primacy of marriage will cease to offer any normative vision for society’s future apart from the fleeting needs of the present. Atomizing and de-populating societies, such as our own, represent the inversion of creational norms and the slow suffocation of civilization.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Friday, October 21, 2022
We live in an age whose moral barbarisms eclipse what Schaeffer saw in his own day. Were he alive today, Schaeffer would not be shocked in the least. Instead, watching the wreckage of the world, he might say with tears, “You should have listened to me” (cf. Acts 27:21). Contemporary society is living proof of Schaeffer’s correctness, and we should not fail to listen to him now. It should not go unsaid that Schaeffer’s chapter ends with chastising those who should have seen what was happening in their respective disciplines and did nothing. So, too, shall we ask ourselves the question Schaeffer would ask of them: Do we see the rot before us? 

The famous political philosopher Leo Strauss once answered the question regarding what is a just political order “par excellence” as “how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.”[1] All nations are still trying to determine the correct formula. Strauss was not a Christian, but his statement captures the same tension and dilemma described in chapter three of Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto on “The Destruction of Faith and Freedom.”
Schaeffer’s chapter captures what political philosophers and public theologians alike refer to as the “theo-political question”: How does a society secure its future in perpetuity when varying degrees of religious, ideological, and moral diversity confront it? In other words, how much moral diversity can a society withstand before it collapses beneath the weight of relativism and moral subjectivism? What ultimate standard can serve as such a guide?
Some degree of moral consensus is necessary for a social order to persist, even if it is modest in scope. The question is how “thick” or “thin” such a consensus must be before the outer boundaries of social cohesion are stretched beyond their limits. Scripture teaches the same principle as well (Prov. 29:18). Society needs a shared moral horizon to offset the corresponding temptations of totalitarian rule by the state and autonomous rule by the subjective self. A just political order comprises neither too much liberty (license) nor too little liberty (oppression). Some Being, authority, force, order, or object must be present to shape that moral vision and measure the extremes of license and oppression. Schaeffer sees Scripture’s God as the only sustainable option given the reality of divine revelation. When God is denied, ignored, or treated as inconsequential, rival systems offering rival moralities contend for the space left vacant by God’s “absence.” The result is confusion—and one or many systems that are inimical to a rightfully-ordered society.
To make his argument, Schaeffer draws attention to three main areas where he sees the creep of secular humanism making inroads. All three areas converge at the point of making morality a product of human design, which subverts the long-term viability of moral cohesion, social order, and the principled basis of liberty.
Three Areas of Rising Secularism
First, Schaeffer identifies the legal landscape, which impacts the nature of power. Schaeffer sees law as having been emptied of anything resembling theistic natural law and having taken a turn toward “sociological law,” which rejects “higher law” (Divine Law). Whether knowingly or not, a culture that rejects the “higher law” will inexorably substitute something in its place, with the intended impact being that man-made authorities or ideologies, over time, are bent toward self-aggrandizement, thus reshuffling where the presumption of liberty resides. In a Christian worldview, the state is inherently limited. In a secular worldview, nothing inherently limits the state other than its own discretion.
Second, Schaeffer draws attention to the area of science, which impacts the existence of any sort of binding morality. An intelligent Creator has been exchanged for the blind forces of evolution and materialism. Again, because morality is collapsed into the material, nothing outside the observed world can impose any form of morality.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Wednesday, August 3, 2022
There are glimmers of optimism that the secular foundation upon which the transgender worldview is built is beginning to crack. There are a growing number of people, some of them quite prominent, who are not Christians, who are raising concerns about the unsustainability of the transgender worldview. 

Pastors have no shortage of issues that they are called up to address in their ministries. The pressure to be an expert on every new issue can be daunting when thinking about everything else on the pastor’s plate. Most pastors need fewer burdens, not more. But when issues of what it means to be human surface — and this is at the center of the debate over transgenderism — it’s important that pastors seek to bring the full counsel of God’s word to bear on the issue at hand.
Having written a book on transgenderism, my purpose here is to simplify for pastors what I think are the absolute essentials for them to consider when addressing their congregations and counselees on the challenge of transgenderism.
Necessity of Nature
What is a man? What is a woman? Until just a few years ago, these questions would have hardly been controversial. But now one cannot answer them without fear of offending someone who identifies as transgender. But this is where ground zero of the debate really is: whether the category of maleness and femaleness means anything concrete at all. In theological terms, we call this ontology, which is the study of being.
When a male claims to be a female, that is not only a psychological claim, but also a philosophical and biological claim about one’s being. From Genesis 1 onward, Scripture teaches that males and females are biological and embodied beings with immutable natures. We cannot change who we are. To speak of nature is to say that there exists an ideal form and function of what something ought to be. The nature of a family, for example, is to care for and raise offspring. To say that something has a nature is to insist upon the existence of concrete purposes to that thing’s being, which supplies our understanding of what the thing in question truly is.
This is where the true debate resides. Christianity views reality through the lens of Scripture, which speaks of male and female as beings defined by their anatomical and reproductive organization (Genesis 1:26–28). Hormones or surgery cannot override the underlying realities of our genetic structure. If culture tries to define male and female apart from anatomy and reproductive organization, male and female become fluid, absurd categories. Hence where we are as a culture.
The transgender worldview is an active thwarting of one’s nature. It is akin to defying limits or swimming upstream against a current: you might try, but eventually limitations and the strength of the current are going to sweep you up against your will.
Read More
Related Posts: