Well, it's a great pleasure to be with you this evening to talk about my new book. I want to express some personal gratitude to begin with. I want to thank both Crossway and Bethel Church for hosting this weekend. Derek has been a friend for many years. He was my doctoral student at Westminster Seminary and I'm delighted to see that he's now even modelling his hairstyle on mine as a sign of his respect for his old doctoral supervisor. I'm very touched by that, Derek. I'm also reminded, Friday was the first time I actually saw the book myself. Obviously, I wrote the thing, but I'd never seen the final version, the final copy. And I was reminded as I picked it up of how a book like this is really a team effort. The author of a book gets the credit, and on occasion gets the blame for what's in the book. But really, all books are the result of a team effort. So it's appropriate, I think, that I thank a few other people. It's not going to be one of those dreadful Oscar speeches where I go on and on thanking everybody for their help, but I do want to thank Crossway. This book is an odd project. It's not a typical Crossway book. It's significantly heavier in many ways than many books Crossway have published. And it's also very different to any book I've ever written. It's a book, if you like, published by a publisher that's never published a book like this, commissioned from somebody who's never written a book like this. What could possibly go wrong might be the thinking there. But I'm very grateful to Crossway for backing this book and seeing it through to completion. And I'm very grateful to the many friends, both the team at Crossway and the intellectual and academic friends I have around the country who've helped with different aspects of this book. If you look at the dedication page, you'll see that it's dedicated to my friends Matt Frank and Fran Meyer. who are very good friends for me for some years now and also critically important in my intellectual development in terms of matters that I address within this book. So I'm very grateful to Matt and Fran and to their lovely wives for friendship and support during the writing and research of this book. The book itself began in a sort of three-way conversation in 2015 between myself and Justin Taylor, one of the senior people at Crossway, and Rod Dreher, senior editor at the American Conservative, who were interested in getting me to write an introduction to the thought of a man called Philip Reif. And I'd read very little Reif when they approached me, so I said, sure, I'll consider it, but I better go away and do some research first to see if it's worth my time. And as I read Reif, It became clear to me that a more interesting project would not be writing an introduction to Philip Reeve so much as using some of the ideas and the concepts which he develops as a way of trying to explicate aspects of modern culture. One aspect in particular gripped my imagination, and that's this question. How is it that the sentence, I am a woman trapped in a man's body, has come to make sense? not simply to a French deconstructionist or an expert in continental philosophy or a queer theorist, not simply to somebody who has spent hours in some literary theory seminar at an Ivy League university, but has come to make intuitive sense to ordinary people, the ordinary man or woman in the street who's never sat in such a seminar. Why is it that society has decided that that sentence is not only coherent and cogent, but so coherent, so cogent, so pellucid that to deny it is these days to sort of place yourself beyond the political pale in many quarters. To deny it is not simply an expression of incredulity. but an expression of political hatred. How does that happen? When you think about it, there are so many things that society has to buy into before that sentence becomes coherent. It rests upon a notion of human nature, of what it means to be a human that prioritizes inner feeling over what we might call outward realities. when you say that I'm a woman trapped in a man's body, what you're saying is the real me is that which I feel I am inside not that which my body or which society tells me I am that also connects to the idea that the body is kind of an appendage that you are not your body, your body is something that the real you inhabits like a house And like a house, it can be modified to reflect your true identity. It also dramatically separates that which for generations, thousands of years, has been regarded as a self-evident truth, that sex and what we now call gender were the same thing. that being born in a certain way meant that you were a man or a woman. You have to be able to separate those things. What has happened in society that those things have fallen into place? And as I researched the book, what I wanted to do was try to find some overall narrative or overall framework that would allow me to make sense of where we find ourselves today. Why is it that my grandfather, who died less than 30 years ago, would almost certainly have burst out laughing if he'd heard the sentence, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body. And yet many today are frightened to call that into question in any kind of public setting. for fear of swift and immediate social media retribution. What's happened? And I became convinced as I worked on the book that often as Christians, we tend to get preoccupied with symptoms. We tend to treat things as they present themselves to us in isolation. And we tend not to think about the broader chronological context in which they take place. And so what I do in this work is set that specific problem against the background really of 300 years of slow and steady cultural transformation. whereby the way ordinary people intuitively think about themselves and the world has been slowly, radically, incrementally changed to the point where a sentence that even 30 years ago might have seemed nonsensical is today part of the governing political orthodoxy of the hour. That is, if you like, the story of the book. I don't come to transgenderism really until right in the very chapter. Most of the book is telling that story. A number of people have said to me it might be helpful to give some reading guidance to the book. So before I give you an overview of one strand of my argument, I just want to suggest that reading the book, it's worth remembering the advice that I was given many years ago as a young academic when I was struggling to know how I was supposed to read the amount of stuff I'd got to read in order to keep up with my field. And an older, more experienced academic said to me, if you read the introduction and the conclusion of a book, and you read the first and last section or paragraph of each chapter, you should get the overall argument. I've written this book in such a way that if you read the introduction, and you read the introduction to each section, each chapter, and then you read the epilogue of each section, and then you read the concluding chapter, you will get the bones of the argument. It should come through fairly clearly. Everything else, if you like, is just putting sort of flesh, evidential flesh, on that skeleton. So that's just an aside, really, to suggest a reading strategy that might help with the book. The basic thesis of the book is this. Transgenderism is a symptom of a fundamental transformation the human notion of selfhood over the last 300 years. I repeat that transgenderism is a symptom of the fundamental transformation of the notion of human selfhood over the last 300 years. I cannot possibly even adequately skim the surface of 300 years of social and cultural and philosophical history in a 45 minute lecture. But I want to zero in on just a few key moments in that story. to give you a kind of grand schema that will hopefully make the story as, if you choose to go away and read it, will give you a kind of framework for understanding the detail that the book plugs in. And the second thing, the second aspect of my basic thesis is this. The radical transformation of selfhood, the radical transformation of the human self is most dramatically and obviously demonstrated to us today in the politics that surrounds sex. We might all put that in, in the sexual revolution, which is something I want to talk about a little bit later. Having said this out, I think the first important thing I need to do here is offer a definition of what I mean by the self. There's a sense in which we use self in a common sense way. And human beings have always had what I would call a common-sense notion of selfhood. You know, Derek and I may have similar hairdos, but I am intuitively aware that I am me and not Derek. I'm going to leave tonight with my wife, not Derek's wife. There's an intuitive understanding that I am a different self-consciousness to Derek. That's not the sense in which I'm using self in this book. When I use self and selfhood in the book, I'm really thinking about What makes me a human being? In what does my fulfillment consist? What does happiness look like? How do I realize my humanity? That's the notion of selfhood I want to get out in the book. How is it that we understand how we as individual self-consciousnesses connect to the world around us? And that's changed. That's changed dramatically over time. So come now to the narrative, and I want to divide the narrative, the broad narrative, into three parts, as I do in the book. I say that there are three key moves made in the understanding of selfhood in the last 300 years. First of all, the self is psychologized. Self is psychologized. Secondly, psychology is sexualized. And thirdly, sex is politicized. That's the kind of the broad scheme. There are variations on that theme as we work through the history. I'm not going to touch those tonight, but that's the broad story that I tell in the book. The self gets psychologized, psychology gets sexualized, sex gets politicized. How does this happen? Well, I'm just going to zero in or jump into the narrative at a few key points this evening to sort of illustrate each one of those. The psychologizing of the self. Key, I think, to this story For intellectuals, sort of the intellectual aspect of this story, the figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his successors, the Romantics. Rousseau's a fascinating figure, both a despicable man, had all of his children sent to orphanages shortly after birth, which was a death sentence in the 18th century, and yet somebody who's hard to dislike because he writes with wit and panache. Rousseau's essential importance to my story is this. He is the first guy who gives real sharp articulation to the idea that essentially it's society that screws you up. That the problem with human beings is society squeezes us into a mold. We have to learn to perform in certain ways to fit into society, and that kind of alienates us. It's that famous phrase in Rousseau, man is born free, yet everywhere is in chains. Said last night, that has got to be one of the most self-evidently false statements ever made by a philosopher anywhere, and yet seems to have gripped the imagination. When you think about it, human beings are born remarkably unfree. Of all species on the face of the planet, we have a rather long period when we are dependent upon grownups and adults. When I was a kid, I used to breed hamsters. It's like 21 days from a hamster being born to a hamster being out on his own. 21-day-old child is utterly dependent on others. So Rousseau is self-evidently wrong, but that, as we know from the history of thought, just because an idea is errant nonsense doesn't mean it doesn't become highly influential. on the way we think about the world. One must never confuse the truth of an idea for its plausibility and power within culture. Rousseau really felt that the way to make human beings moral, the way to make human beings at one with their nature, was to recover that inner voice of nature that was there, that was innate, and that was authentic. It was not perverted or corrupted by society. It's the beginning of what we call expressive individualism, that I find my reality by being able to express outwardly that which I truly am inwardly. It's the very opposite of being English in some ways. The Englishman of my generation, the whole point of being English was you never express outwardly. that which you feel inwardly. We're uptight, we're unemotional, and we're hypocrites. I remember some student saying to me recently, how are you going to cope when that happens? I said, I'll cope with it as all Englishmen do. I'll just be two-faced and hypocritical about it. It's part of our national characteristic. Rousseau would say that's terrible. The key to being a genuine human being is to be outwardly that which you first are inwardly. And that lies behind the great artistic project of the Romantics. where feeling comes to the fore as that which really defines us as human beings. It's not reason. The French Revolution shows the dramatic limitation of reason in making human beings civilized. The French Revolution is the great revolution of reason, and it leads to terrible bloodshed. The Romantics said, so reasons failed. The way to make human beings good and moral is to take them back to simple humanity. You read William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's important preface to their collection of poems, Lyrical Ballads. And they say there, it's the task of the poet, it's the task of the poet, through his poetry, to enable the reader to reconnect with his emotions. with the kind of the innocence of the world. It's why Wordsworth writes this poem, controversial poem in its day, The Idiot Boy. Can you imagine writing a poem, The Idiot Boy, today? Very politically incorrect title today. Even in the early 19th century, Wordsworth's friends were offended by that. And one of them, a man called John Wilson, writes him and says, you know, it's rather tasteless, is it not, to write a poem about a boy with what we would call today learning difficulties? And Wordsworth replies, and I'm sort of translating him to modern idiom, Wordsworth replies, no. What is a more honest example of humanity than somebody with no filters? What you see is what you get with the idiot boy. He's not artificial. He's not being civilized. He is outwardly exactly what he is inwardly. And the thing to take away from this is the importance of psychological feelings as defining who we really are. And you might say, well, where does that tie in with today? Well, what importance does this stuff have? Well, this has trickled down to permeate the whole of society. The example I use of my grandfather in the book is, if I were to ask my grandfather what, you know, grandad, who was a sheet metal worker, he was a humble, he was a poor man. He worked in a factory from the age of 14 to the age of 65, hammering sheets of metal day after day. And if I, he did a job that I would regard as mind-numbingly boring. If I would say to him, grandad, did you have job satisfaction? If he actually knew what I was talking about, which might be questionable, he'd probably say, yeah, I got job satisfaction. I did an honest day's work for a fair day's pay, and I put shoes on my kids' feet and food on the table, and I was never in debt a day in my life. Hard to imagine that. My granddad was never in debt a day in his life. I got job satisfaction because I was able to do those things. Ask me the same question, and I give a very different answer. My answer is going to be something like, yeah, I get a real kick out of teaching. It's a buzz standing up in front of a classroom of students and engaging in sort of intellectual cut and thrust, knowing that I can beat them. Because even if I'm wrong, I can blind them with science. And knowing, and the other, you know, the kick of teaching a hard idea and seeing that light bulb go on in a mind that suddenly grasps what I'm trying to teach. Yeah, I get job satisfaction. That's a real buzz. Notice the difference in the two answers. The one answer is very externally driven. My grandfather's job satisfaction was not something that was intrinsic to his job. It was what his job enabled him to do. He was happy when he was able to provide for others. For me, it's a more psychological thing. I'm an heir of the romantics on that front. Happiness for me is that inner sense of psychological happiness that is generated directly by what I do. Not by what I do for others, if you like, but what I do for myself. We can see this playing out in public life. It's interesting that less than 50 years ago, an American president's reputation was ruined in part by the fact that when tapes, transcripts of tapes of him talking in private in the White House were released, they contained the phrase expletive deleted. Americans were horrified and rightly horrified that their president used bad language. Look at politics today. Bad language abounds, why? Because it has a ring of authenticity about it, doesn't it? What you see is what you get. We know that Donald Trump is a foul-mouthed man. So if he was being polite, it would confuse us. Same with his opponent. I always find it embarrassing when politicians drop the F-bomb. It makes me cringe. I'm a sort of, as I said, an uptight Englishman. I like reserve. I like two-facedness when it looks like civility. But that's not the world we live in. We like our politicians to be, guess what, authentic. That's the key word that comes out of romanticism and expressive individualism. What makes a person a moral person is their authenticity. Think of Bruce Jenner. Think of that interview with Diane Soyle. The language is very interesting there, when he talks about having lived a lie. And finally, he's able to be himself. That's language that stands in line with the romantics and the idea that to be a genuine authentic person is to be able to express outwardly that which one feels inwardly. The psychologized self. That's not my grandfather. If you were born in the Middle Ages, let's say, in Europe, becoming an authentic human being would not have been expressing outwardly that which you felt inwardly. It would have been working out what your place was in society and learning to conform to it, regardless of what you felt inside. You're born the son of a peasant farmer. then the key for you is learning how to be a peasant farmer, not gazing at your navel and worrying about your inner feelings. So that's the first move then, the psychologizing of the self. The second move is the sexualizing of psychology. And here we have the figure of Sigmund Freud. Now, I should preface this. I didn't quite make this clear last night and was asked about it this morning over breakfast. Again, the truth value of Freud's ideas is not as significant as the way they come to grip the imagination. Freud is the man who says, he sort of agrees with the romantics. Yes, it's that inner space. It's that inner depth that makes you who you really are. But that inner space is much darker than Rousseau thought. Rousseau, I don't think he ever uses the phrase, but the idea of the noble savage is associated with Rousseau that left alone to our own devices, we would be magnificent moral specimens. Freud is much more, much closer to the Lord of the Flies. And I think more accurate. You know, you get a bunch of, you know, the story of the Lord of the Flies. You get a bunch of civilized English public, as in very private school boys, stranded on an island. You don't get a bunch of noble savages. You get savagery. Savagery. Freud says, yeah. Civilization is a thin veneer. It's a trade-off. It's a way of keeping under control that dark space of inner desires we have. And the key move for Freud is this, that those dark desires are characterized above all by sexual desires. And the significance of this is, by making us fundamentally sexual beings, by making that inner space above all sexual, what Freud does is help shift notions of sex from activity to identity. One of the standard tropes in typical discourse about the history of sexuality is, of course, there are homosexuals in Greece. There were. When I was at college studying classics, there was a course on Greek homosexuality. The difference is that in ancient Greece, nobody thought of themselves as defined by that. Homosexuality was an activity. It was not an identity. Freud is the key man building on this inner space. When he sexualizes the inner space, what he does is he makes sexual desire fundamental to who you are. When you think about it, the language of contemporary politics is very much wrapped up with sexual identity. Amy Coney Barrett got into trouble when she used what was, up until the point she'd used it, a perfectly acceptable phrase. Sexual preference. I think Webster's dictionary changed it that night to an unacceptable insult. Quite remarkable the way the language was immediately gerrymandered for political purposes. We talk now about sexual orientation. We talk about sexual identity. We don't think of sex primarily as an activity. We think of it as fundamentally determinative of who we are in terms of our identity. That's the move that's facilitated by Freud. Whether Freud's ideas hold water scientifically is another question. But that idea has trickled down in society to the point where it clearly grips the imagination. Hence, Mrs. Barrett gets into serious trouble during her Supreme Court candidating process. When you think about the other forces in society that push that way, virtually every commercial you ever watch for a motor car will probably be predicated on sex appeal. Think about the prevalence of pornography. Pornography is obnoxious for numerous reasons. There are the usual ones we think of, it objectifies women, it promotes lust, et cetera, et cetera. I would say it's also lethal because it promotes a view of what it is to be a human being. that your humanity is most fulfilled when you engage in sexual activity for your pleasure. That's the philosophical message of pornography that grips the imagination. The sexualizing of the self facilitated by Freud, and I think independent of whether Freud is correct in his broader theories or not, That's the world we live in. That's the world we live in. So we have the psychologized self and we have the sexualized self. Then we have the politicizing of sex. How does that come about? Well, that's a somewhat complicated story connected to various philosophical problems that pop up in Marxism in the early 20th century. Suffice it to say this, a group of Marxist thinkers in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s, put forward the case that one of the ways of the middle class, the bourgeois, maintaining its power over the proletariat, the working class, is the enforcement of bourgeois sexual codes, a.k.a. heterosexual, monogamous, lifelong marriage. That's the core of the issue. What that does is it shifts. It shifts the political agenda to dismantling of the family. If you want to generate the proletarian self-consciousness that will lead to revolution, you have to smash the family. You have to smash the family. One of the big problems the Marxists face in the 30s is why is it that the revolution happens in Russia, which doesn't have a developed industrial working class that's meant to rise up and seize the means of production? It barely has the means of production. Why does it happen there and not in Germany? Highly developed industrial society, highly developed working class, and they've just lost a catastrophic war. If you can't have a working-class revolution in Germany in 1919, you wouldn't think you could have it anywhere. But the problem gets worse. Not only do the Germans not rise up in Marxist revolution, they start goose-stepping in the direction of Nazism on the far right, and the same sort of thing happens in Italy. The left, people like Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse say, well, the reason is the family. The family trains children to fear and to work then to please the dominant authoritarian father figure. And when children grow up and are launched into the wider world, they crave, look, need the dominant father figure to tell them what to do. The Duce, Mussolini, the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. It's a tripe theory. No way of proving it one way or the other. But it serves the purpose of revolutionizing sex. The fruit we see of that really comes in 1968 with the student rebellions. 1968 when the language of political liberation coalesces with the language of sexual liberation because they are seen to be two sides of the same coin. And again, one might turn around and say, well, yes, but very few people have read Marxist theorists. A lot of this Marxist theory has been debunked, et cetera, et cetera. It trickles down and becomes part of the air that people breathe. It ties in, in some ways, quite nicely with a sort of libertarian view of the world. To be free is to be what? It's free to be me. And if me is a psychologized sexual self, then to be free to be me is to not have other people impose their sexual codes upon me and oppress me. For me to be happy is for me to make my own path, make my own rules in the sexual realm. And anybody who tries to corral or limit that is committing an act of political oppression. You don't have to be a Marxist to think that's the way it is. So those are the three big parts of the narrative then. What might we say as I'm sort of drawing in the last 10 minutes to a conclusion? What might we say are some of the results of this? And one of the things that I would say about the conclusions of my book is the conclusions of my book have significance far beyond the realm of the sexual. One could say, well, one of the results is discussion about sexual matters is transformed. Think of the concept of modesty. In the Christian world, the concept of modesty, debates about modesty, have typically focused on women's attire. How short can a skirt be and still be modest? Can a woman wear a bikini, or does she really need to wear a one-piece bathing suit? Those are the kind of discussions that are focused on modesty. It's interesting that modesty is almost not an issue today. Modesty has become an inherently ridiculous concept. We no longer think about modesty in terms of a range, a set of acceptable limits and behaviors. We think about modesty as absurd. I've never seen the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but I know it's a comedy. Why do I know it's a comedy? Because the concept of being 40 years old and being a virgin is ridiculous in our modern culture. When you think of humanity as fully realized in sexual activity, then virginity becomes a sign of an unrealized humanity. It becomes ridiculous. Modesty becomes ridiculous. Modesty becomes a word of oppression, a word of oppression. So the first thing is that the whole realm of sex is transformed. And I would say the sexual revolution, we make a mistake if we think the sexual revolution was about the expansion of the range of acceptable sexual behaviors. The sexual revolution was about the complete dismantling of the notion of sexual codes in their entirety. It's not, if you like, an expansion of the canon of acceptable sexual behaviour. It's the rejection of any notion of a canon in its entirety. We live in a world now where sexual acts are seen as having no intrinsic morality. The morality of sexual acts in our world is entirely predicated on the issue of consent. Does that act occur in a context where the parties engaged in it have consented to it? That's what makes an act moral or immoral. Nothing intrinsic to the act itself. Second, in a world where identity is founded on inward desires and feelings, oppression becomes a psychological category. You might say, well, what does that mean? Well, if again, pick on my late grandfather. If my late grandfather was here and I would say, Granddad, tell me what you understand by oppression. I think my grandad would have said, oppression is not being paid a fair day's wage for an honest day's work. My grandad was a union man, committed union man. Fair day's pay for an honest day's work. If you pay me half of what I've earned, that's oppression. If you tell me that I have to sit in a certain place on the bus, that's oppression. My grandfather, I remember him telling me, I asked him once, what was it like to be alive in the 30s? And he said, there were days when you would walk down a road looking for a job, knowing there was no job available. That's oppression. Notice for my granddad, oppression is a very tangible kind of thing. Very tangible sort of thing. That's because he thought of his fulfillment as outwardly directed. And when his outward direction was frustrated in some way, that was oppression. When you move to a world where identity is inwardly directed, oppression becomes psychological. And what does that mean? Well, I would say it means various things, but it means words become weapons. It's not trendy, I know, these days to quote Thomas Jefferson with any approval. And of course, from my perspective, he was just a godless traitor who should have been executed. Do you know that in Britain we have a statue of George Washington in, I think, Trafalgar Square? You know, what other country in the world would put statues of people that were traitors in, you know, to celebrate them in its capital? But, you know, from my perspective, it's not the war of independence, it's the illegal war of colonial rebellion. But I'm going to quote Jefferson positively. There's that bit where he's talking about religious liberty, and he says something to the effect of, you know, what does it matter to me whether a man believes in one God or 30? If it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, that's fine. Notice Jefferson's living in my grandfather's world, really, where oppression was a very tangible thing. That's not the case today, though, is it? Why do we have so much angst and anger over words? Because in a psychologized world, words become weapons. And we all have an intuitive understanding of that, to use a racial epithet. Hopefully everybody here knows that's a bad thing to do. But it neither picks the pocket nor breaks the leg of the person you hurled it at. But it denies their human dignity. It oppresses them psychologically. It denies them recognition as a real human being and is therefore oppressive. Words become weapons and then, of course, we begin to see public values being radically transformed. It's a shock to many that religious freedom is suddenly no longer seen as a virtue. I agree with Rod Dreher that the moment the world changed was when there was that dramatic reaction to the relatively mild Religious Freedom Restoration Act that the state of Indiana tried to pass a few years ago. It was a moment the world changed because the reaction against it was remarkable and involved big business. It was a sign big business had switched sides, if you like, in the kind of culture war. Think about that. In the world of psychological man, religious freedom gives me the right to say that certain activities that other people regard as central to their identity are not legitimate. And in a psychological world, it's easy to see that that does not serve the common good. Same with freedom of speech. You've seen recently, freedom of speech is hate speech. But surely the answer to hate speech is just more speech. Well, not in the world of psychological man. Words are weapons. Words are weapons. That's why I say I think the thesis of my book applied to the sexual revolution actually has broader implications for the nature of politics in our contemporary society. Ethics gets dramatically changed. Think about marriage. Marriage, the purpose of marriage in the Book of Common Prayer is sex, children, and lifelong companionship. When I was a pastor for some years, I had the privilege of marrying young couples on numerous occasions. And I would always say at the wedding, it's easy to love your spouse on your wedding day. But true love is demonstrated when your spouse is old, and infirm, and ill, and dependent upon you. When actually, it doesn't bring you a sense of inner psychological happiness to be with them. It could be a terrible psychological burden. when you're feeding your wife because she's had a stroke and is paralyzed, or when she's descended into the mists of Alzheimer's and needs help with even her most basic bodily functions. Love is demonstrated most powerfully in those situations. But in the world of psychological man, you think, why would you stay in such a marriage? Put your spouse in a home, get on with life. even pervaded so-called Christian circles. Pat Robertson a few years ago made that despicable comment that if your wife has Alzheimer's disease, as long as you make sure that her needs are taken care of somewhere, you can divorce her and marry somebody else because she isn't the woman you married. That's actually a position very consistent with transgender ideology because the identity of your wife is purely psychological, nothing to do with her body. Ridiculous, blasphemous, I would say, position. When was marriage redefined in the United States? A lot of Christians would say 2015, Obergefell versus Hodges. I would say 1970, state of California, Ronald Reagan signs no-fault divorce into law. No-fault divorce codifies the values of psychological man. by essentially saying marriage is not a lifelong bond for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Marriage is there for the mutual happiness of the parties concerned. And when it ceases to fulfill that function, you can get out of it without let or hindrance. It affects the ethics of abortion. Peter Singer. When I say Peter Singer's very good on this, what I mean is he's very consistent on this. I'm not promoting Peter Singer at all. But Singer's very clear. If a couple have, say, a child with Down syndrome, and it's clear that bringing up that child will lessen the gross amount of psychological happiness they might have, then they would be perfectly justified in having that child euthanized. I think up to, he's prepared to go up to two years, but I think he'd say he'd only push for 21 days because the tastes of the culture won't yet accept two years for infanticide. Abortion, infanticide, euthanasia makes sense in the world of psychological man because it's all about me and how I feel. Cancel culture becomes coherent, as I've said, because the old social virtues, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, suddenly become social ills because words are violence. Even silence becomes violence, we're now told, in some quarters. Powerful, powerful ethics of the psychologized self that we now live with. So how might the church respond? And I think we'll probably explore this more in the Q&A with Derek shortly, but I would say a few thoughts that we might take away as Christians in this context. I think we need to realize that the framework has changed, particularly on the LGBTQ issue. I think when Christians talk about it, we think we're talking about behavior. The grammar and syntax of our current culture sees us as talking about identity. And that's a very different thing. It's a very different thing and it's a far more difficult and complicated situation. The church cannot compromise in its view of homosexual behavior and that places it on a collision course with a culture that sees that as a denial of identity, akin to racism. So we need to realize that the framework has changed. We need to realize also that religion is not simply for the wider world an intellectual problem. I'm not sure that anyone was ever really persecuted for believing somebody rose from the dead. I think Christians were generally persecuted when they were seen as a threat to the common good and stability of society. That's the situation that Christianity in the United States is heading into. Thankfully, we have strong democratic institutions. I don't think we're going to be China anytime soon. But I think it's timely to reflect on these things and realize we may not be persecuted, but gosh, we hold views that are gonna make sure mean that we are definitely culturally marginalized and despised. So how should we respond? Well, I think first of all, we need to teach our people well. We should never get focused on the obsessions of the world and allow that to set our agenda. we continue to do what we've always done, and that's teach the whole counsel of God. Issues of sexuality, identity, psychology, gender, these things all need to be set within the overall scope of Christian teaching. I think, and this is perhaps somewhat controversial in some Protestant circles, but I think we need a recovery of natural law. We need to develop a theology of the body, We can all as Christians tend to assume that our body, our identity is really our soul that inhabits our body. I don't think that's real Christian teaching. I think real Christian teaching is that we are body and soul combined. Thomas Aquinas has a great passage when he's talking about death and he says, you know, when you die, your soul goes immediately to be with the Lord. But it isn't actually you. It's just your soul. It's only really you on the day of resurrection. Aquinas had a clear grasp of the importance of the body to our identity. And I also think we need to eschew the language of culture war for what I call churchly protest. Got this statement from the great Scottish Presbyterian, James Bannerman. He says this about the task of the Church, doubtless the first and primary duty of the Church has respect to those that are the members of the Christian society. But the Church's duty does not terminate with them. It has an office of a somewhat different character to discharge in regard to the world without, as being an authoritative witness to the world on behalf of God's truth, and a no less authoritative protest against its unbelief and errors. The problem with culture war is it's often very worldly in its means and approach. It's about destroying them and asserting our authority. Bannerman's not talking, I think, about culture war here. Bannerman's talking about the church as a community being a sign of protest against the wider culture. The church as community being a place where people truly love and care for each other. The place where all are welcome. where all will be pointed towards the truth. That's what Bannerman's talking about. And I think as we think about how we might address these things as Christians, there's no silver bullet. There's no one answer. It's not a question. Well, we just need to be stronger in our doctrinal emphasis. We certainly should never be weaker in our doctrinal emphasis. But we need to think about the church as a body of believers. as a sign of protest against a world that is, one might put it bluntly, going to hell in a handcart at this point in time. That's how the church, that's how the church is a sign of protest, by being the church in the midst of a dark and dismal generation. Thank you for listening.