Once allowances have been made for terminally ill children, the question will inevitably be asked, “What about physically suffering children who aren’t terminally ill?”…This is how the culture of death works its slow poison. This is how voices of death are elevated as kind and compassionate, while voices of life are drowned out as inhumane, fanatical. 

Look to Holland. That’s what conservatives tracing the progress of international euthanasia law over the years have learned to do. For that matter, look to either Holland or Belgium. These two countries are to Europe as Oregon or California are to the United States: first and worst. As they have raced each other to the bottom, they offer a glimpse of what the future might look like, unless someone cares enough to change it.
Holland first made euthanasia legal for adults in 2002, and Belgium followed only months later. In 2014, Belgium became the first country to legalize “voluntary” euthanasia for terminally ill children of any age. This week, Holland has finally followed suit, after years of limiting the “service” to minor teens and terminally ill newborns (who could be killed with parental consent if a doctor judged that the baby’s suffering was “unbearable” and incurable). Now, the gap between ages 1 and 12 has been filled. No child left behind, as it were.
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This is not “a fine line” to walk….don’t be deceived, and don’t be manipulated. By staying home, you will communicate that you mean what you say, and you say what you mean. That may not please your gay loved one, but it will please God. In the end, that is what matters.

The American Family Radio Ministry recently announced that it has dropped pastor Alistair Begg’s popular Truth for Life program from its daily broadcast schedule. The decision followed the recent circulation of some remarks from a September interview in which Begg said he had counseled a grandmother to attend her grandson’s wedding to “a transgender person.” As long as she made her personal disapproval of the union known, Begg impressed strongly on her that attending the wedding (with a gift in hand) was the loving thing to do. Otherwise, he warned that her absence would “reinforce” her grandson’s perception that conservatives are “judgmental” and “critical.” He concludes this story by encouraging all Christians to make the same decision, for the sake of “building bridges” to the “hearts and minds” of our nonbelieving loved ones.
Begg says he’s aware that “people may not like” this answer, and indeed, these remarks caused a stir when they were brought to light. I speak for many when I say Begg is a personal hero, a faithful minister of the Word with sermons ranking among my all-time favorites. That ministry has included strong messages like this series on the sin of homosexuality. Sadly, while there was some hope he would reconsider and recant after the interview began widely circulating, the AFRM reports that he refused to do so.
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If we recognize the Biblical foundations for human value while ignoring what the Bible says about human teleology, we have understood only half the story. And if we tell sinful people that they have dignity and worth without pointing them away from their sin, we are telling them only half the truth.

Is religion good for society? Increasingly, people are answering “yes” even if they might once have answered “no.” Regardless of whether they’re religious themselves, they have to admit that religion has given them a lot of nice things—specifically, Judeo-Christian religion. Do you like science? Do you like women’s rights? Do you like human rights, in general? Go thank a Christian!
In a nutshell, this is the thesis of British historian Tom Holland’s long 2019 book Dominion, subtitled How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. It was recently and notably cited by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in her head-turning announcement that she now considers herself a Christian. After seeing the evil of fundamentalist Islam up close as a child, then pivoting to New Atheism as a young adult, Ali now believes that “Christianity has it all.” Everything she holds dear as a citizen of the West traces back to a Judeo-Christian ethic, whether she always admitted it or not.
Or does it?
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The new law differs from the old version in two key ways: by expanding protected class status to self-identified sexual minorities, and by significantly rewriting the terms under which charges may be pressed. The old language prohibited physical assault and property destruction “with specific intent to intimidate or harass another person” falling in one of the then-current protected classes. The new language further disregards “any other motivating factors” and makes “intimidation” itself a crime, with a lengthy gloss focused solely on the victim’s perception. Anything that could cause “a reasonable individual” to “feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened” now qualifies. 

Last month, the Democrat-controlled Michigan House of Representatives voted 59 to 50 in favor of sweeping new hate crime legislation, drastically updating a 1988 law that was originally designed to prevent harassment on the basis of sex, race, or religion. Democrats like State Rep. Emily Dievendorf have hailed the bill as a significant step forward against the sort of hate speech that might translate into “hate actions.” Citing his own identity as a Jewish gay man, sponsor Nate Arbit passionately declared that it’s “about time” Michigan proved it can be “so much better” at prosecuting hate speech.
Fine words maybe, but what does the bill actually say? The new law differs from the old version in two key ways: by expanding protected class status to self-identified sexual minorities, and by significantly rewriting the terms under which charges may be pressed. The old language prohibited physical assault and property destruction “with specific intent to intimidate or harass another person” falling in one of the then-current protected classes. The new language further disregards “any other motivating factors” and makes “intimidation” itself a crime, with a lengthy gloss focused solely on the victim’s perception. Anything that could cause “a reasonable individual” to “feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened” now qualifies. The bill as originally introduced would have additionally allowed a victim reporting “severe mental anguish” to bring a civil cause of action even if a criminal suit was dismissed.
Who could possibly find fault with this, except a bigot? This, of course, is the implicit challenge presented by the bill. But Republicans like State Rep. Steve Carra have risked the heat to raise concerns about how the legislation will impinge on free speech.
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At this point in time, one may legitimately ask just how sharp the dividing line remains between “Side A” and “Side B,” when it seems almost no expression of gay identity is out of bounds for Side B Christians. This question was openly raised in a Religion News report last year, in which Collins suggested some in the Side B camp might feel they have more “shared ground” with “Side A people who are Christians” than with more conservative same-sex attracted Christians, some of whom might have roots in the old “ex-gay” movement.

In 2018, Wesley Hill published a report in First Things on a movement that claimed to be breaking new ground in the Christian discourse around faith and sexuality. It was the inaugural year of the Revoice conference, which billed itself as an ecumenical orthodox space for same-sex attracted Christians who wanted to honor a traditional sexual ethic, yet believed the Church’s approach to the issue needed to be rethought—“revoiced.” Such Christians needed more than a “vocation of no,” Hill argued. They needed a way to integrate their sexuality into their Christianity. They needed a “vocation of yes.”
Carl R. Trueman was an early critic of the Revoice project, although he was sympathetic in theory. Despite some concerns, he hoped the movement would self-correct and mature in response to good-faith criticism. But following a World magazine report on the conference’s 2022 convention, Trueman offered a less than favorable updated assessment: So far from self-correcting, the movement had ignored its critics and taken on board all the trappings of sexual identitarianism, from “preferred pronouns” to queer theory to the splintering of attendees into “affinity groups” based on their particular orientation. Cautiously hopeful as he’d once been, Trueman could no longer see anything to salvage. Besides all this, the conference’s inaugural host church, Memorial Presbyterian, recently voted to leave the PCA amid swirling controversy around its LGBT community outreach and its openly gay lead pastor, Greg Johnson.
The speed of this decline naturally prompts a question: Was there ever anything to salvage? In its current incarnation, are we witnessing a radical moral turn? Or are we witnessing the inevitable end of an inherently flawed project?
Before the first Revoice conference, Wesley Hill and Ron Belgau co-founded the group blog Spiritual Friendship in 2012, where they developed their new philosophy together with an ecumenical group of contributors. Catholic writer Eve Tushnet also contributed thoughts at her Patheos blog. As a shorthand for groups with divergent views on the topic, they used the metaphor of a record’s “A” and “B” sides. “Side A Christians” believed God would bless their gay relationships, while “Side B Christians” pursued chastity, some through heterosexual marriage, but most through celibacy.
Yet, even in celibacy, they proposed that they could still accept and sublimate their sexuality as a kind of gift. Perhaps they could even recover a covenantal model of “spiritual friendship” that would offer a chaste relational substitute for marital permanence, even if both parties were same-sex attracted. Tushnet, who first coined the phrase “a vocation of yes,” has recently written about her own exclusive commitment to another woman, the sort of commitment she has argued can strengthen a gay person’s walk with God. They openly identify as “a lesbian couple.”
In developing this philosophy, various Side B writers have rejected the idea that homosexual temptation is uniquely disordered. In his 2017 book All But Invisible, Revoice founder Nate Collins argued that the word “disordered” should apply equally to any sexual attraction outside monogamous male-female marriage. That same year, future Revoice collaborator Gregory Coles published his memoir Single, Gay, Christian, in which he speculated that his homosexual proclivity was not even a result of the Fall. Meanwhile, Hill, Belgau, and Tushnet all consistently normalized certain manifestations of same-sex desire, blurring the lines between proto-romance and “spiritual friendship.”
This normalization has been succinctly crystallized by Revoice charter speaker Grant Hartley, who has asserted explicitly that not all same-sex romance is “off limits” in a Side B framework, only same-sex sex. He goes on to elaborate that some “Side B folks” might “pursue relationships with the same sex which might be called ‘romantic’—the category of ‘romance’ is vague.” Hartley first provoked controversy with his inaugural Revoice talk, endorsed by Hill, which proposed that Christians could mine gay culture for “queer treasure.” For example, he analogizes “coming out of the closet” to death and resurrection. Even in spaces like a gay club, he feels a sense of “homecoming.”
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This is where World Opinions seeks to situate itself: precisely in that Protestant commentary market gap where incisive cultural analysis and neighborly love intersect, and the cultural falsehoods that lead our neighbors astray are clearly exposed for what they are. This is certainly my own goal as a contributor. It is precisely because not all Christians have the disposition or the calling to be culture warriors that wise volunteers are so needed. This is necessary work, and further, it is work that can be undertaken “objectively”—not because there is a Bible verse for everything, but because God has revealed himself by the light of nature as well as Scripture. 

Evangelical magazine news rarely draws mainstream attention. Last year’s New York Times coverage of the split between Marvin Olasky and World was a notable exception. It was a well-worn narrative: The magazine had been “conquered by Trump.” The launch of World Opinions, a new section on the magazine’s website, by co-editors Nick Eicher and R. Albert Mohler was ostensibly a manifestation of this hard right turn.
As usual, the facts are more complicated than the story suggests. Senior reporter Sophia Lee resigned in Olasky’s wake, but she also contradicted the Times narrative on her way out, tweeting that despite the “terrible” headline, World magazine “had not gone MAGA.” It was further confirmed at the time that funds were not being diverted to the opinions page from the magazine’s straight reportage arm, which Olasky was deeply concerned to preserve.
Nevertheless, in a new retrospective essay, Olasky maintains that the past year has borne out his concerns. He laments the shift in priorities between the “old World” and the new “Culture-War World.” Where old World covered scandal around a figure like Madison Cawthorn, new World hasn’t touched his latest shenanigans. Where old World toed an establishment line on the pandemic, new World has run stories that Olasky frames as playing to evangelicals’ “anti-vaccine prejudice.” And stylistically, where old World prided itself on “understated prose,” new World columns “toss hand grenades” at the left. Old World was “conservative on some issues,” but it also covered topics such as homelessness and poverty, which Olasky implies would be intrinsically out of place in “Conservative World.” Given that Olasky himself writes compellingly on homelessness for the Discovery Institute—the conservative think tank where anti-CRT activist Christopher Rufo first got his start documenting the gamut of homelessness and poverty issues—it’s not clear why he thinks this.
But the whole conceit of an op-ed page contradicts Olasky’s framework for “biblically objective journalism.” He defers to the Bible as the only “objective” source on matters it directly addresses. But on those topics the Bible does not directly address, he believes any human opinion is automatically “subjective.” Hence, he concludes that op-eds in these spheres are not the purview of Christian journalism.
Of course, the Bible doesn’t directly address a plethora of topics, including economics, immigration, gun control, contemporary American race relations, and pandemic protocol. 
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Vulnerable, disturbed individuals of all ages [are] hastily ushered into procedures that are nothing short of medical malpractice. Justice demands a reckoning in the form of penalties and strictures, for their sakes and for the sakes of others like them who may yet be saved from this Hippocratic Oath-breaking. 

There are many memorable moments in Matt Walsh’s provocative new documentary What is a Woman? But perhaps the most chilling is when Walsh sits down with Scott (Kellie) Newgent, a biological woman who underwent sex-change surgery at age forty-two. Today, Newgent is fiercely outspoken about her transition regret. Her voice trembles with rage as she tells Walsh about her tireless uphill battle against a propaganda campaign that is sweeping away a generation of troubled youth. “We have five children’s hospitals in the United States,” she says, and then she pauses to pull up her sleeve, “promoting that.” “That” is a hideously long scar where her left arm was flayed to create a phalloplasty. Newgent suffers from regular vaginal infections, which she predicts will lead to a premature death.
One such hospital provided a double mastectomy to Chloe Cole, a young woman who was fast-tracked through a sex transition from ages thirteen to fifteen. By age sixteen, less than a year after the surgery, she realized she had made a terrible mistake. Today, she joins a courageous band of other “detransitioners” who hope to save other young people from the same fate. The New York Post recently profiled her together with Helena Kerschner, who first began her own transition as an adult. To obtain testosterone, all Kerschner had to do was book an appointment at Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, in Scotland, Sinéad Watson tells a similar story of adult transition, after a string of mental health crises that her gender clinic showed no curiosity in exploring before hormone treatment.
Detransitioning men’s stories have received less attention, but they are no less harrowing. One of them recently went viral on Twitter. Ritchie Herron began his transition as an adult, but like Newgent, Kerschner, and Watson, he was vulnerable and criminally under-informed. “No one told me any of what I’m going to tell you now,” he begins his Twitter thread. He then details the excruciating, irreversible damage caused by his own “bottom surgery.” Today, he is suing the NHS for damages.
Understandably, the discourse around gender transition tends to focus on cases like Chloe Cole—minor boys and girls who are socially brainwashed into making catastrophic, self-harming decisions. A new bill co-sponsored by congressmen Tom Cotton and Jim Banks specifically targets surgeons who offer sex-change operations to underage teens. It promises to attract wide bipartisan support not just from conservatives, but from liberals and libertarians who draw a line at trans “medical” experimentation on children.
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