Christians will need to continue to make the case for religious freedom and demonstrate in our lives that religious Americans are the best citizens. The schools, colleges, hospitals, churches, sports leagues, and charities established by Christians benefit everyone, and are therefore indispensable pillars supporting a limited government. The ascendent cult of sexual orientation and gender identity offers none of these things. It only results in a bigger and more intrusive government less concerned with the common good than the goals of ideologues. 

The question constantly repeated by those who pushed to redefine marriage a decade ago was, “How will my gay marriage hurt you?” More recently, from those demanding full legal and social recognition for transgender identities, it has been, “How does me being my true self hurt you?” The answers to those questions have been clear for some time.  
LGBTQ dogma is not a “live and let live” vision of reality. It constantly demands that dissenters—especially the religious ones who are allegiant to the Creator, whom their ideas deny—be rooted out and punished. Christian business owners, public and private company employees, nonprofits and even parents have felt the demand to comply and agree, or else … 
Recently, a few cases have helped right some wrongs against religious freedom. The latest battle involves an attempt by activists to keep students from using federal assistance to attend religious schools. Thankfully, this case went the right way.  
In Hunter v. U.S. Department of Education, Alliance Defending Freedom successfully argued that “Title IX allows students to use federal financial aid at private religious schools that operate according to their beliefs,” specifically their beliefs on “gender and sexual morality.”  
Since 2021, Title IX has been interpreted to prohibit “discrimination” on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, with religious institutions receiving exemptions. ADF represented three Christian institutions—two universities and a seminary—that welcome students who receive government help with tuition but operate according to biblical convictions about sexuality. 
Activists argued that this violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by involving the government in funding religion.   
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It’s possible there’s something about higher education itself that is radicalizing women politically and driving them away from the Church. Also, the decline of marriage has historically correlated with women adopting more progressive beliefs. Pew Research reported last year that the share of 40-year-olds who have never been married is at a historic high, and childbearing, partly as a result, is near a record low. Marriage and family are the most basic of all the “mediating institutions” in society that form individuals and buffer them from the state. With these institutions in decline, it’s inevitable that people, especially women, would look increasingly to the government for provision, protection, and influence. 

One of the oldest features of Christianity is its appeal among women. Women swelled the ranks of the Early Church as it reflected how Jesus had treated them. He talked to women in public, defended them against accusers, and appeared to them first after His resurrection. All this at a time when women were widely treated as inferior to men.   
Today, however, women in America seem to be abandoning Christian observance more quickly than men. Political scientist Ryan Burge, co-author of The Great De-Churching, recently shared survey data showing that college-educated men are now more likely to attend church weekly than college-educated women. In 2008, 36% of women with at least a four-year degree attended church weekly, compared with 34% of men with a degree. By 2023, just 27% of college-educated women attended church weekly, compared with 32% of men. Even among those who attended only some college, men led in church attendance. Only among those with a high school diploma or less are women still more likely than men to attend services.  
Obviously, church attendance has declined significantly for both sexes. However, the drop among educated women is disproportionately high, and it coincides with the leftward lurch in how women identify, politically. Earlier this year, polling data from Gallup showed that the percentage of men ages 18 to 29 who identify as Republican had risen by double digits in the last decade. Over the same period, the share of young women—particularly white women—who identify themselves as politically progressive has skyrocketed.  
According to an American Enterprise Institute survey last year, 46% of white Gen Z women identify as liberal, compared with just 28% of men.
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For most of history, as Holland described in his book ‘Dominion’, the idea that humans have “self-evident” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” would have been baffling: “A Roman would have laughed at it.”  Yet today, “rights” language is central to our way of life. It was at the heart of the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which asserted, following the Holocaust, that “inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” are “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Obviously, the UN declaration was inspired by the Declaration of Independence, which also called rights self-evident, but went further to name their source: a Creator who endowed people with “certain inalienable Rights.”

In a TEDx talk years ago, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari made the startling claim that human rights do not exist.  
Human rights are just like heaven and like God: It’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented and spread around. … It is not a biological reality, just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, Homo sapiens have no rights. … Take a human, cut him open, look inside—you find their blood, and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don’t find there any rights. The only place you find rights is in the fictional stories that humans have invented and spread around. 
Harari’s talk resurfaced on the site formerly known as Twitter and sparked a lively debate among Tom Holland, author of Dominion, Glen Scrivener, an Anglican priest and author of The Air We Breathe, and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who wrote 12 Rules for Life. Scrivener took issue with Harari’s materialism and called his remarks about human rights “nonsense.” Rights are indeed faith-based, he said, but that doesn’t make them any less real.  
Tom Holland, who is not a Christian, responded that while he believes in human rights, they are not self-evident. Rather, they require an act of subjective belief. “Human rights have no more objective reality than, say, the Trinity,” wrote Holland. “Both derive from the workings of Christian theology; and both, if they are to be believed in, require people to make a leap of faith.”   
Jordan Peterson disagreed, and responded in somewhat jumbled psychological lingo that rights are somehow “built into the structure of human beings” and are therefore “not arbitrary at all.” Holland shot back that if rights really are somehow “built into” reality, it’s awfully strange that the concept of human rights only emerged around the twelfth century in a specifically Christian and Western political context. 
The whole exchange was fascinating and instructive. For example, if the idea that human rights are not universal seems strange, that just shows how deeply Western one is.
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A recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that support for same-sex “marriage” dropped by at least two points last year, and support for “gay rights” anti-discrimination policies fell by four points. Also, opposition to businesses refusing certain services on religious grounds fell by five points. Every major media outlet that reported on these findings quickly assured readers that a large majority of Americans still support gay “marriage” and “rights.” Still, this reversal is significant. It may even suggest a potential backlash, especially since even young Americans are losing their rainbow zeal. 

A few days ago, David Von Drehle of The Washington Post scolded pro-lifers for allowing so-called “zealots” to take over their movement after winning the victory of overturning Roe v. Wade. In the piece, he compared pro-lifers to the Khmer Rouge of 1970s Cambodia, which, after its victory, began murdering its own members for trivial “offenses.” In Von Drehle’s mind, pro-lifers who are now calling attention to the ethical problems with IVF are doing the same thing: allowing counterproductive radicals to take over the movement in the wake of a victory. 
The irony here is that the kind of radical overreach Von Drehle is talking about is happening, just not in the pro-life movement. Rather, his analysis more closely describes another major political movement that, not too long ago, won a decisive victory at the Supreme Court. In the years since the Court redefined marriage for the whole country in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges, the LGBTQ movement has been overtaken by its most radical wing, who has demanded all kinds of new rights. 
No sooner had marriage “equality” been achieved, these activists demanded “transgender equality” that included giving men access to women’s bathrooms and lockers, hosting “drag queen story hours” at libraries, providing tax-funded gender transitions, and indoctrinating kids and taking them away from their parents. Some relentlessly persecuted businesspeople, such as cake artist Jack Phillips and florist Barronelle Stutzman, for refusing to join their celebrations. And most began demanding the entire population adopt new language, obey pronoun requirements, and join various “pride” celebrations.  
Perhaps then, we shouldn’t wonder that the years-long trend of growing support for so-called gay “marriage” has paused. Perhaps, it is even reversed. 
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A few days ago, over a million West African Methodists voted to leave the denomination. Jerry Kulah, a delegate from Liberia, spoke for many Methodists on the continent when he called the UMC’s decision to redefine sexuality “a serious drift away from the truth.” He added: “The church is now buying into culture. The Bible has not changed, but the [Methodist] church has changed.” 

The United Methodist Church was once one of the largest denominations in the United States, with over 11 million members and a presence in nearly every county. Today, after decades of numerical decline and doctrinal compromise, it is a shadow of its former self. Last month at a General Conference full of bizarre elements, the Methodists made what may be one of their final compromises, welcoming “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” to become ministers. 
For years, the remaining conservatives, especially the large number of delegates from Africa, have held back the full liberal takeover of the denomination. However, in just the last five years, more than 7,600 congregations have left the United Methodists, mostly over the denomination’s failure to enforce its stated rules on marriage and clergy.  
The Associated Press quoted one lesbian bishop who celebrated the vote: “It seemed like such a simple vote, but it carried so much weight and power, as 50 years of restricting the Holy Spirit’s call on people’s lives has been lifted.” In fact, what she labels a “call” contradicts everything the Holy Spirit has revealed in Scripture, not to mention 2,000 years of Christian teaching and the teaching of John Wesley, founder of Methodism.  
A few days ago, over a million West African Methodists voted to leave the denomination. Jerry Kulah, a delegate from Liberia, spoke for many Methodists on the continent when he called the UMC’s decision to redefine sexuality “a serious drift away from the truth.” He added: “The church is now buying into culture. The Bible has not changed, but the [Methodist] church has changed.” 
The liberal Methodists of North America have now virtually guaranteed their denomination’s extinction. Conservative Methodists around the world were and still are the lifeblood of the tradition. 
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The fact that more honest scientists find it necessary to call out prestigious institutions for embracing unscientific gender nonsense says a lot about the assault on reality happening right now. Biology doesn’t need “queer theory.” It needs instead a worldview that grounds the givens of reality, givens that were put in place by God, instead of an ideology that sees everything as a social construct. 

A recent video from the PBS Eons YouTube channel, a show which covers topics related to paleontology and evolution, wrestled with how it is possible to distinguish between male and female dinosaurs when all that is left are bones. In it, the host objectively defined the concept of biological sex as applied to these extinct creatures: “In this script, we’ll be using ‘male’ and ‘female’ as shorthand for ‘sperm-producing’ and ‘egg-producing’ individuals.” She then added that “one shortcut for assigning sex to an individual is by their reproductive organs. Sperm producers have testes while egg producers have ovaries.”
This definition is essentially correct, although no one “assigns” anything. A given individual, whether human or dinosaur, just is male or female. We identify sex; we don’t “assign” it. Sex is objective and binary and has to do with the two distinct roles in reproduction.
Unfortunately, not every source of science education is this clear. For example, evolutionary biologist Colin Wright recently called out Yale University for a lecture that redefined sex according to queer theory. According to slides from this Ivy League course, “Sex is not an inherent, binary fact about a gene, a genome, a zygote or an embryo” but instead a “cluster of iterative, coevolved, differentiated reproductive homologies.” Additionally, the materials for the course (a required course for all Yale pre-med students) claimed that “sex is not determined.” It is “a fact about history, not individuals,” “a performance of the self,” and that “biology needs queer theory.”
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Today, youthful naïvete and this thirst for attention is supercharged by social media. After all, until now, no generation has ever been able to virtue-signal to the whole world before. The powerful desire, not only to speak truth to power, but to be seen doing it while claiming the mantle of Civil Rights, is intoxicating. Joy Pullman once called this “Selma envy.” Ultimately, these students, who are often unsure why they’re protesting their schools and flirting with support for terrorism, are a product of universities in which the goal of education is activism rather than wisdom.

Many college and university campuses across the nation descended into petulant anarchy last week as students protested Israel’s war in Gaza. Demonstrations broke out at Columbia University in New York, Harvard, MIT, Emerson College in Boston, the University of Southern California, and the University of Texas, Austin, to name only a few. “Gaza solidarity encampments” were built, Jewish students were threatened and assaulted, and protestors demanded that their campuses “divest from companies linked to Israel” and sever academic ties with Israeli universities. Some Jewish students were told to “go back to Poland,” an apparent reference to death camps. “Stop funding genocide,” the signs demanded, as if Israel carried out the atrocities of October 7. Others said “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” without knowing which river and which sea.  
Those sympathetic to student protesters claimed that the uprisings are about ending Israel’s war in Gaza, which was waged in response to the October 7 attacks. Clearly, however, many are calling for something far more radical, such as so-called “decolonization,” or an end to Israel as a nation altogether. 
Left-wing students do have a long history of jumping on protest bandwagons, including those not-so-subtly associated with Islamic terrorism. Part of this reality is the “cult of youth” that has long pervaded American society, at least since the 1960s. This idea that young people are the conscience of our nation and that youth-led movements are always morally right was plainly articulated by a Democratic Socialists of America activist who wrote:  
A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue.  
This revisionist view of history forgets, among other things, that the Nazi movement in Germany and Mao’s Cultural Revolution were popular with students who mobilized against the ruling classes. 
In the case of the campus protests last week, however, it’s not even clear who the ruling class is. 
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For Christians who understand that human beings are more than matter that can be molded and medicated, the need for a book like this is even more obvious. Divine revelation and millennia of insight suggest that much of what passes for “psychological trauma” today is spiritual brokenness. Spiritual healing can take the form of counseling and medication, but to put it simply, no amount of psychotherapy alleviates our need for a Savior.  

As the old saying goes, “to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Among the hammers today is psychotherapy, and too many wielding it are convinced that every human problem is a nail. However, the unprecedented rise of mental health problems in Generation Z suggests that the overuse of this tool has done as much harm as good. 
In a bold new book, Abigail Shrier confronts the idea of psychology as an all-consuming ideology. In Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, Shrier argues that much of what is now taken for granted about psychological and emotional “trauma” is wrong and has left millions of young adults more “traumatized” than if they’d had no therapy at all.  
This thesis aligns with that of her previous book Irreversible Damage, which exposed the reckless push to medically transition gender-dysphoric kids, especially girls. This push has been driven by the mental health industry. In Bad Therapy, Shrier points out the many indications that the whole approach of our therapy-obsessed age is awry. Most obvious is that despite living in one of the most objectively prosperous and safe times in human history, our young people are, en masse, mentally sicker and emotionally sadder than ever. In fact, over 40% of young adults have a mental health diagnosis, twice the rate of the general population. So, the generation most treated for psychological wellbeing is doing the worst psychologically.  
How did we get to this point? In a podcast with former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, Shrier told the story of her grandmother, Bess, who grew up during the Great Depression.
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Marriage, sex, and babies. Our Creator designed them to go together. Tearing them apart has foreseeable results—both for individuals and for society. One of those results is that ever more selfish and loveless forms of sex become normalized as forms of self-expression and love.  

Back in 2004, a collection of voices warned of the consequences of normalizing homosexuality. They were often mocked and dismissed for predicting how so-called “gay marriage” would usher in all kinds of other perversions. Last month, after three national news publications ran stories praising polyamory, these critics now seem like prophets, though their predictions should’ve seemed obvious to all. The slope really was slippery, after all.
In The New York Times version, “[A] Polyamorous Mom Had ‘a Big Sexual Adventure’ and Found Herself.” The New York Magazine sported a cover photo of four cute, snuggling cats beneath the headline, “Polyamory: A Practical Guide for the Curious Couple.” The USA Today gave readers a crash course in the supposedly “misunderstood” polyamorous subculture known as “swingers.”
For the blessedly uninitiated, polyamory is the practice of having more than one sexual partner. In other words, it is what was called (until yesterday) “promiscuity.” However, as with each prior stop on the slippery slope of undefining marriage and the family, this one also abounds with creative euphemisms like “open relationships,” “non-monogamy,” “throuples,” “swingers,” and (worst of all) “polycules.”
The New York Times article listed a bevy of new TV shows, movies, and books promoting polyamory as fun and even beneficial—a journey of “self-discovery” that could liven up your “marriage” (whatever that word still means in this context). Fawning over the middle-aged mom who published her polyamory exploits in a memoir, The Times explained that by opening her marriage, she “cast off internalized sexism and her tendency to put others’ needs before her own.” That last part is certainly true. It’s hard to think of anything more selfish than the implied “you’re not enough” at the heart of polyamory.
The most important thing to know about how we got here is this: Dissolving commitment as essential to sexual relationships is the natural outcome of dissolving complementarity between male and female. If sexual differences are made unimportant to our love lives, so is the number of lovers.
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If there is no one to endow human rights, how can everyone be expected to honor them? There remains widespread agreement that genocide, terrorism, and slavery are wrong, but by what authority will we continue to agree? Glenn Scrivener offered the best answer to these questions. “Rights indeed belong to all,” he says, “—that’s the nature of them. But they’ve also come from somewhere particular.” The source is not just any God, but the God Who specifically became man in Jesus Christ, forever ennobling human nature and sparking the Christian revolution that would shape the West and inspire this declaration, that all are “created equal.” 

In a TEDX talk years ago, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari made the startling claim that human rights do not exist.  
[H]uman rights are just like heaven and like God: It’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented and spread around. … It is not a biological reality, just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, Homo sapiens have no rights. … Take a human, cut him open, look inside—you find their blood, and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don’t find there any rights. The only place you find rights is in the fictional stories that humans have invented and spread around. 
Last week, Harari’s talk resurfaced on the site formerly known as Twitter and sparked a lively debate among Tom Holland, author of Dominion; Glen Scrivener, an Anglican priest and author of The Air We Breathe; and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who wrote 12 Rules for Life.  Scrivener took issue with Harari’s materialism and called his remarks about human rights “nonsense.” Rights are indeed faith-based, he said, but that doesn’t make them any less real.  
Tom Holland, who is not a Christian, responded that while he believes in human rights, they are not self-evident. Rather, they require an act of subjective belief. “Human rights have no more objective reality than, say, the Trinity,” wrote Holland. “Both derive from the workings of Christian theology; and both, if they are to be believed in, require people to make a leap of faith.”   
Jordan Peterson disagreed, and responded in somewhat jumbled psychological lingo that rights are somehow “built into the structure of human being[s]” and are therefore “[n]ot arbitrary at all.” Holland shot back that if rights really are somehow “built into” reality, it’s awfully strange that the concept of human rights only emerged around the twelfth century in a specifically Christian and Western political context. 
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