Nancy Pearcey is a prominent author and Christian apologist who dedicates her scholarship to the intersection of faith and culture. Pearcey explores how Christianity must be lived as a worldview that touches on every area of life.
Pearcey offers a steadfast and courageous witness for today’s Christians, advocating for a conception of the human person as an integrated being, body, and soul, who should be valued accordingly. Our Sophia Kuby sat down with Pearcey to explore how this understanding should inform the Christian response to the issues of our day.
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Q: Arguably, your book Love Thy Body is more relevant today than even when you wrote it in 2018. You identify the dualistic, fragmented view of the person as the key to understanding where we are headed as a society. Why is that?
A: This dualism, this split, may be the most important key to understanding what happens in our culture today. We tend to treat euthanasia, abortion, transgenderism, the hookup culture etc., as individual issues. But if we can recognize the underlying worldview, it will be so much easier to respond because we’re digging deeper as to what’s really driving the secular culture on these issues.
What’s under the surface translates into a split about the human person such as body and mind or values and facts, science and morals, all of these splits. Once you understand that, there really is no surprise anymore, no matter how radical it gets.
Once you split the body from your mind and your identity you have something entirely disincarnated. And the body has no significance. Like everything makes sense in a way. It’s not right, but Christians need to understand this worldview because that way you are not surprised by secular conclusions.
Q: You explain how [dualism] it’s the same secular worldview that drives euthanasia. How so?
A: For proponents of euthanasia, if you are mentally disabled, if you no longer have a certain level of cortical functioning, then you are no longer a person, even though you’re obviously still human. And at that point, in this view, you’re not a person anymore. You’re only a body.
And so, you can be unplugged—your treatment withheld, your food and water discontinued, and your organs harvested. So, once again, you see how being human is no longer enough for human rights. You have to achieve a certain level of awareness or cognitive ability in order to earn the status of personhood. And anyone who falls short is considered a non-person. So, we are seeing the emergence of a new category now which is the human non-person.
On the other hand, the pro-life view is inclusive. If you are a member of the human race, you’re in, you count. You have the full rights as a member of the moral community.
What’s under the surface translates into a split about the human person such as body and mind or values and facts, science and morals, all of these splits. Once you understand that, there really is no surprise anymore, no matter how radical it gets.
Once you split the body from your mind and your identity you have something entirely disincarnated. And the body has no significance. Like everything makes sense in a way. It’s not right, but Christians need to understand this worldview because that way you are not surprised by secular conclusions.
Q: There is a worldview thread connecting abortion and euthanasia to questions of sexuality. Can you explain?
A: The connecting thread is the division of the body from the person. We see this in the hookup culture. The entire premise is that sex can be purely physical, cut off from the whole person.
The mistake people make is to assume that there are two very distinct elements in a relationship: one emotional and one sexual, and they pretend like there are clean lines between them. There is a fundamental despair stemming from the belief that the body doesn’t mean anything. [It’s] no wonder the hookup culture is leaving behind a trail of wounded people.
People are trying to live out a secular ethic that does not fit who they really are. The Christian ethic is incarnational. And science is on our side. Science has shown the interconnection of body and person, for example, with the discovery of hormones like oxytocin. We are designed to bond. And Scripture teaches that we are embodied spirits. Both body and spirit are part of our identity.
And so, you can be unplugged—your treatment withheld, your food and water discontinued, and your organs harvested. So, once again, you see how being human is no longer enough for human rights. You have to achieve a certain level of awareness or cognitive ability in order to earn the status of personhood. And anyone who falls short is considered a non-person. So, we are seeing the emergence of a new category now which is the human non-person.
On the other hand, the pro-life view is inclusive. If you are a member of the human race, you’re in, you count. You have the full rights as a member of the moral community.
What’s under the surface translates into a split about the human person such as body and mind or values and facts, science and morals, all of these splits. Once you understand that, there really is no surprise anymore, no matter how radical it gets.
Once you split the body from your mind and your identity you have something entirely disincarnated. And the body has no significance. Like everything makes sense in a way. It’s not right, but Christians need to understand this worldview because that way you are not surprised by secular conclusions.
Q: How do you respond to those who hold the view that you can be born into the wrong body?
A: What we need to realize is that it is a profoundly disrespectful view of the body to pit the mind against the body and then say it’s only the mind and feelings that count.
Would God create people to be torn in two conflicting directions like this? Not the Christian God. Things like conflict, self-division, and self-alienation are results of the fall, not creation. And yet today, it’s widely accepted that if somebody feels that sense of inner division, a conflict between the body and the mind, then it is your feelings and desires that count.
The Christian ethic is holistic. The mind and emotions are meant to be in tune with our body. And so, it’s an ethic that overcomes self-division and self-alienation, and ultimately leads to a sense of internal unity, wholeness, and self-integration.
Q: So how does this apply to the worldview driving the transgender movement?
A: This involves the same split view of the person, the same devaluing of the body. Transgender activists argue explicitly that your gender identity has nothing to do with your physical body, with your biological sex.
I watched a BBC documentary that said that at the heart of the debate is the idea that your mind can be at war with your body, and it is the mind that wins. So, in this view, your body has been reduced to a meat skeleton. I recently came across a Kickstarter page for a documentary titled “I Am Not My Body.” That title says it all. My body is not part of my authentic self.
This is a radically separate, divided, fractured, fragmented view of what a person is. That’s the core of what’s being taught to young people all the way down to kindergarten—that your body has no meaning at all.
Q: How should Christians respond to this extreme devaluation of the body?
A: Even secular people are saying that transgenderism involves body hatred. So what this means is that Christians have a wonderful opportunity to show that a Biblical ethic expresses a positive view of the way God made us as physically embodied beings, that the biological correspondence between male and female is not some evolutionary accident. It’s part of the original creation that God pronounced very good.
There is a turning point for people who identify as transgender when they can say: “I finally came to trust that God had made me my sex for a reason, and I wanted to honor my body by living in accord with the Creator’s design.” This is a beautiful language. This is not guilt, shame, and self-loathing. This is positive: I want to honor my body.
So, number one, we must learn how to use positive language. “Live in tune with your body. Live in harmony with the Creator’s design.” Let’s face it, Christians are known for having a negative message. We have to start with a positive message that our body is God’s creation, and that a Biblical ethic shows us how to honor and respect it.
Next, we have to be proactive. I’ve told Brandon’s story. Brandon was sort of the classic case before he was even walking. His babysitter told his mother, “He’s too good to be a boy,” by which she meant he was gentle and sweet-natured. By elementary school, he was coming to his parents weeping, saying: “I don’t fit in anywhere,” because he didn’t feel like a boy.
By his early teens, he was scouring the internet for information on sex reassignment surgery. So, what did his parents do? They made sure he knew they loved him just the way he was. They did not try to change him.
They said it is perfectly acceptable to be a gentle, sensitive boy. It does not mean you are really a girl. His parents said it may mean that God has gifted you for one of the caring professions like counselor or healthcare worker. His parents’ favorite line, which they said over and over again, was: “It’s not you that’s wrong. It’s the stereotypes that are wrong.”
Brandon did not transition. He did finally accept that it is scientifically impossible to actually change your sex.
Q: As we assess the toll that these ideologies are taking across the world, is there hope? What does the future hold?
There is good news. First, there are an increasing number of people who are “de-transitioning.” People who have gone through this are turning around and accusing the clinics of fast-tracking them. Some are bringing the clinics to court.
There are a couple of cases working their way through the courts in the US, and some states are banning medical interventions for minors. European countries are changing their policy. They are pulling back in England, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, France, Wales, Scotland, Germany, and the Netherlands.
We must continue to assert the revolutionary nature of Christianity, which teaches that the material world is made by the supreme deity, who is a good God, and therefore it is intrinsically good. Yes, the world is fallen, but the fall is like a beautiful masterpiece that a child takes a magic marker and scribbles on.
Yes, it’s defaced, but the original beauty still shines through. And that’s what we need to help people see—that the world still shows the original beauty of God’s creation. The Incarnation is the ultimate affirmation of the dignity of the human body. And what’s more, when Jesus was executed on a Roman cross, he did escape the physical world, as Gnosticism teaches we should aspire to do. But what did he do then? He came back in a physical body—a bodily resurrection.
God is not going to scrap the material world as if He made a mistake the first time around.
He’s going to restore it. The resurrection of the body, as affirmed in the Apostles Creed, is an astonishingly high view of the physical world. There’s nothing like it in any other religion or philosophy.
