Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Part I

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A ‘Regression’ on Gender? The Recoil to the Transgender Movement is Grounded in Creation Order, Not Merely a Speed Bump in Progressive History

The Christian and the secular understanding of history come into a clash regularly. And as we’re thinking about unfolding developments, we need to just see that on the left, the secular left, the predominant understanding of history is that it is a straight line from oppression to liberation, unfolding liberation, continuous liberation. So you have the liberation from this form of oppression, then the liberation from that form of oppression. So gender theory, the women’s liberation movement, particularly second wave feminism, the sexual revolution, the LGBTQ revolution, and remember again at the end of LGBTQ somewhere there is a plus sign, is an acknowledgement of this unfolding liberation, an unfolding dynamic of personal autonomy. And thus anything that obstructs that is considered to be regressivism, it’s a backlash.

And that’s exactly the kind of term that has shown up even in the headlines of newspapers and in the titles of books, backlash, conservative backlash. Now from the Christian perspective, we understand that morality as all truth exists as objective reality. It is established by God, it is revealed in nature. So when we look at categories such as just for example, human beings and others, we understand that it’s a static ontological reality, the human beings are made in the image of God. We look at human beings as male and female, and we would say that liberation from that is impossible. It’s a part of creation order, and so it’s not liberation from creation order that results its rebellion against creation order. And as Christians understand, that can never go well. From time to time, we’ve remarked upon the fact that the issue of gender and in particular transgender, those patterns, they have been an obstacle to this continuous progress that the left just sees as inevitable.

As a matter of fact, the weird thing from a very liberal or progressivist direction, when you look at the perspective of the left, the weird thing is that this is a problem because they thought of course it was a problem. But then again, they thought they were seeing the fact that society was moving past it. We were over that. So for instance, you had a cover story in Time Magazine in 2014 in which it was declared that the society had reached a transgender turning point. So that’s 2014, 11 years ago. But arguably right now, our society is more conservative on these issues than was true in 2014. Apparently, I would argue because a lot of Americans hadn’t even figured out these issues in 2014. They pretty much had to figure them out in the intervening decade and more. Now, from a Christian perspective, the amazing thing is the arrogance in declaring there was a transgender tipping point.

In other words, progress is now inevitable. And that plus sign is going to bring newer and newer forms of personal autonomy, sexual liberation, and all the rest. That leads me to a very interesting essay that was published just yesterday in The New York Times by David Wallace Wells. The headline in the essay is “Our Regression on Gender is a Tragedy.” So there you notice, that means that there have been progress. Now there is regress, there’s retreat, a loss of the progress that had been achieved. Wallace Wells says that in 2016 it was largely economic issues and perhaps he insinuates even racial issues that factored into the presidential election. But in 2024 he says, “We now know it was gender issues that played the decisive role.” He says this, “In 2025, MAGA seems much more distinctively molded by gender politics, gender backlash is here and before we think through the implications for partisan politics, we need to recognize it is a phenomenon that goes beyond them.”

So interesting here, you have someone from the left and let’s just say from a very respectable center-left position when it comes to the elite media, this is an article in The New York Times. And thus it’s an effort to try to assist the readers of The New York Times to understand where this backlash came from and why there has been retreat, or actually the word regression is even in the headline here. This writer also to his credit, understands that this is bigger than politics. Indeed, he says, “This was crucial to the Trump strategy in 2024, but if you think it’s just about politics” He argues, “Then you’re missing the big point. It’s a far deeper issue in the society than that.” Here’s what he writes, “It’s not just in policy or party leadership where you see the shift. In 2022, fewer than 30% of Republican men believe the proposition that women should return to their traditional roles in society, according to the views of the electorate research survey assessed by a group of political scientists writing for the Times.”

Again, that means The New York Times. “Two years later, that number was 48%. Republican women underwent a similar surge from 23% in 2022 to 37% in 2024. And over the past few years, Democrats too have been trending in the wrong direction, though those shifts have been smaller.” So here you have a writer clearly very much for the sexual revolution, for the LGBTQ revolution, for the gender revolution, even for the transgender movement, but he’s warning society’s moving in the wrong direction. There has been this backlash, but then to his credit he goes on to say, “This is bigger than politics. Politics was a part of this or it was a part of politics in 2024, but you look at the Republican side, both men and women register more conservative now than just four years ago.” And then he goes on to say and this is really crucial, “Even the Democrats are more conservative on this issue than they were just four years ago.

Still more liberal than the Republicans certainly on these issues. But what you have here is the acknowledgement that if you are all for the gender revolution and LGBTQ and all the rest, the regression here is bigger than you might think. That’s central to this author’s argument. He goes on to say, “If one trust the polling, the trends are perhaps more distressing among those still too young to have even dip their toes into the workforce. According to the data analyst, David Waldron’s assessment of the world-class monitoring the future survey run by the University of Michigan in 2018, 84% of eighth and 10th grade boys said they agreed either completely or mostly that women should have the same job opportunities as men. Five years later, the number had fallen to 72%.” Now he gives similar statistics, most of them again related to high school and college-age young men. But his point is this and it’s really a wake-up call for those on the left.

Guess what? Maybe even when you look at the numbers, worse is coming. It turns out that the coming young people who as he said, really didn’t factor into the political analysis until all of a sudden right now, what if it turns out they’re not more liberal but in fact more conservative than the voters today? What if the backlash is a lot bigger than even the left had calculated? He also mentions 2014 when time declared the transgender tipping point. He then says this, “It was believe it or not, a full year ahead of the Supreme Court’s affirmation of gay marriage. A decision that when it arrived in June 2015, also seemed to endorse an entire theory of social history. With the pattern of libertarian drift so natural seeming you might’ve confused it for progressive cultural autopilot.” Now, I see articles like this from time to time. I haven’t seen this kind of insight in this kind of candor put together in a very long time.

Here you have someone on the left writing to others on the left suggesting that the moral challenge they face, the cultural challenge they now face is far larger than they could have imagined. But the bigger issue here is the acknowledgement of this theory of history. To put it in the author’s words, he said they had seen a pattern, “Of libertarian drift so natural seeming you might’ve confused it for progressive cultural autopilot.” That’s an admission that they saw just about everything going their way. They thought momentum was on their side and almost like the Hegelian dialectic, they thought that it was so powerful, no force could withstand it. They again, in his words, saw it as something like a progressive cultural autopilot. He then says this, not only interesting, downright fascinating. “We are not anymore in that world, when you could look back on the previous decades and probably see below the ups and downs of partisan conflict, the broad strokes of a basic cultural consensus. One that pushed towards a stronger embrace of markets and consumption in the realm of economics, and toward more personal autonomy and freedom of choice in the social sphere.” He then says, “Like the just-so story of free markets, the just-so story of reliably expanding civil rights and opportunity looked at the time if simplistic, also not inaccurate.” Once again, he just underlines and puts into his own words that progressivist understanding of history. Things are going our way, they inevitably must go our way towards unfolding personal autonomy, and of course that means that plus sign at the end of LGBTQ. There’s another enormous acknowledgement here. When the Obergefell decision was handed down in 2015, a good many of us criticized not only the outcome but the shape of the argument in the court’s majority opinion. In that majority opinion they made the argument almost like you have from the progressivist left, that there’s this unfolding personal liberty upon which persons have now premised to their lives.

As David Wallace Wells puts it, he talks about this pattern of libertarian drift that was so natural-seeming. And beyond what he says, the cultural conflicts, ups and downs, you had an inevitable directive here, “toward more personal autonomy and freedom of choice in the social sphere.” He then makes this admission, really crucial and I quote, “Faith that social progress would be inevitable was always at least a bit naive, even if it also served as a basic foodstuff of complacent liberalism.” He says, “But for about a generation here as elsewhere else across the wealthy world, culture seemed to be trending in that direction. You could take issue with the pace of change, but when people talked about the right and wrong side of history on these matters, it was clear what future was expected.” He then asked, “And now?” I would refer to this as very wise, very insightful and remarkably candid. Someone from the left saying it was perhaps a bit naive that we thought progress would unfold inevitably in the direction of greater personal autonomy. And of course that means lessened constraints upon morality, gender, and all the rest.

He acknowledges if it was naive, it was also widespread and it was so much assumed by those on the left that they are still absolutely confused, befuddled, and thrown into consternation by the fact that they’re ever unfolding utopia of personal autonomy hasn’t happened, certainly not as they expected, certainly not on an inevitable timetable. Now let me step back and say as a cultural conservative and more urgently as a Christian, I’m not certain that path of inevitable unfolding personal autonomy is something that has genuinely been corrected. I think we should be very, very thankful that at least some major speed bump, we might say, on the superhighway to what they would see as absolute libertarian autonomy, that the transgender obstacle has now become something real. That is to say an increasing number of Americans just don’t believe that a boy can be a girl, and they also don’t believe that a boy should play on a girl’s team. And they don’t believe that you can actually change your gender and so you have that inevitable progress, the left thought, now blocked by a spectacular problem.

But for Christian conservatives we also have to understand, societies have a way of getting over these kinds of problems without any genuine return to something like a Christian worldview. And so I want to point to Christians the fact that even though there is encouragement and the fact that this leftward direction has been at least checked somewhat. And you’ll notice, I won’t say that this author reflects panic but a certain sobriety and a sense of loss as the liberal progress hasn’t happened as expected. But I want to suggest that the biblical worldview makes very clear that it is not just that conservative Christians are to hold to an ideal say of male and female in creation order. We believe in the reality of creation order. Thus, as Christians we have to be somewhat dubious about any recovery that just comes with say, the recovery of the categories of male and female. That’s not tied to something even deeper, which is to say creation order, which means the design and glory of the creator.

You have to wonder if this is not just a temporary speed bump, as we say, on the way to inevitable liberal progress. As this article comes to an end, it is also really interesting to see what the left fears. What do they see as the big obstacle in terms of the accomplishment of their aims? And at least one obstacle is named here, and that is eighth to 10th grade boys. And the writer is simply saying to those on the left, you are looking at future voters and you’re looking at the fact that when you have young men who reach certain convictions at that age, they tend to hold onto those convictions. Now, as Christians we’ll look at that and say, “It’s simply because in this case the subject is really about eight and 10th grade boys.” You can look at that and say, “Well, at that point they pretty much figured out reality.”

At least we can hope they have, and this kind of study indicates, well, to some degree apparently they have figured out reality. And that’s making them rather resistant to any argument based in unreality. But as the writer of this article, David Wallace Wells notes, “You do have a problem if you look at young people and recognize they are going to be the voters, they’re going to be the decision makers, they’re going to be the consumers and the citizens of the future. That doesn’t mean that conservatives can be in any sense complacent. It does mean that we should at least understand and credit this to the glory of God. The fact that creation order cannot long be denied, eventually creation order is going to show through. The question for all of us of course is, after how much confusion and how much disaster?”

Part II

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The Triumph of the Therapeutic and the Death of Family Ties: Therapy Culture is Causing Kids to Cut Their Relationships with Their Parents

Okay, now I want to turn to a very different issue, but on a similar theme just of noticing a development in our culture that ought to have our attention. In this case, this is an article by Michael Leibovitz and she is writing an article entitled “There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness.” Now, the problem of childlessness and the fall off on the birth rate is something that we have to return to time and time again. As a matter of fact, the mainstream media has finally caught on to the fact this is a very, very big story. Yesterday on The Briefing we discussed the decision made by the regime in Vietnam to drop the two-child only policy because their birth rate is falling below sustainable levels. We also noted the fact that when governments make this kind of policy, and try to encourage births, there is very little evidence that government can encourage births. We know that governments can discourage births. It’s not clear that governments can in any way that has traction, encourage births.

Part III

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The Therapeutic Culture and the Tragedy of Childlessness: The Tie Between Therapy Culture and Falling Birth Rates

But the link between therapy culture and childlessness, well, here you’re talking about the intersection of two things very important from a Christian worldview perspective. Because when you talk about childlessness, and this means deliberate childlessness, the decision not to have children, you’re talking about something that is a direct rejection of creation order. The first order given to humanity is “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” But when you add therapy to it, well, here you see that the modern worldview inevitably results in a therapeutic mindset because the modern worldview says it’s not about you, it’s about what has happened to you. The therapeutic culture is simply a way of getting out of just about all moral responsibility. And when it comes to the intersection between childlessness and therapy culture, Michael Leibovitz has really helped us in making this point, she writes about the drop-off in the fertility rate and an increased number of young adults deciding that they’re just not going to have children. And she suggests that, quote, “Millennials will have the highest rate of childlessness of any generational cohort in American history.”

She goes on to say, “There are plenty of plausible explanations for the trend.” She says, “People aren’t having kids because it’s too expensive. They’re not having kids because they can’t find the right partner. They’re not having kids because they want to prioritize their careers, because of climate change, because the idea of bringing a child into this broken planet is too depressing. They’re swearing off parenthood because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, or because they’re perennially commitment phobic, or because popular cultures made motherhood seem so daunting. It’s burdened so deeply unpleasant that you have to have a touch of masochism to even consider it. Maybe women” She says, “In particular are having fewer children simply because they can.”

There’s a lot of admission there and she’s really conceded a lot of ground there. But you can tell by the way she’s framing her argument that she’s about to say, “I think there’s more to the story.” And that’s exactly what she does. And she says, “I think there’s another major factor here, and that is the therapy culture.’ Now, we talked about that a lot. The triumph of the therapeutic, Philip Reiff wrote about that years ago. It’s this idea that the therapeutic is so infused the culture that we’ve lost a sense of talking in terms of reality and of say, objective morality. Now everything’s about therapy, and therapy inevitably revolves around the sovereign self. That’s a huge problem. She writes about in the millennials in particular and she says, “Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously cut off contact with a parent. Sometimes citing emotional, physical, or sexual abuse they have experienced in childhood, and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity, or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.”

She says, “The cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for parenting. Not only must parents provide shelter, food, safety and love, but we, their children also expect them to get us started on successful careers and even to hold themselves accountable for our mental health and happiness well into our adult years.” She says that several things have now been produced by the therapeutic culture. One is the idea that, well, she says, number one, parents mess you up. Now, the big point she makes here is that there are abusive parents, there are neglectful parents. But she says, “The amazing thing is how many millennial adults look back at their parents and blame them for just about everything, including insufficient affirmation or even a clash of moral judgments.” She writes about being a fourteen-year-old girl taken to therapy, and she speaks of her therapist saying, “She was sympathetic to me. In our first session together she suggested that my feelings, my pain, my not eating were reasonable and rational reactions to my family’s religious beliefs and high expectations.” She told this young woman, “That sounds very controlling.”

And this is when she talked about conflict with her father over things including what she wore. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist and expert on what’s described here as familial estrangement said, “If you have problems, you assume that it has to do with your parents.” And he says, “I’m sure it sometimes does, but it’s also random good luck, random bad luck, genetics, cohort siblings, and other important relationships.” In other words, he says, “Yeah, parents may be a part of the mix, but these days in therapy you just get by with blaming the parents for everything.” Ashley Frawley, who’s also looking at this as a sociologist says that parents continue to be blamed for their children’s hardships long into adulthood. She says, “A voluminous academic literature has mined the minutiae of childhood experience to find the sources of personal and social problems and everything, from how parents feed their children, bottle or breast, spoon or baby-led weaning, to how many words they say before an ever-lowering crucial age.”

Eva Illouz identified as the author of the book Saving the Modern Soul, she says that the entire therapeutic narrative is the problem. “What is a dysfunctional family? A family where one’s needs are not met. And how does one know that one’s needs were not met in childhood? Simply by looking at one’s present situation.” As is explained here, “It is as if every current difficulty rather than being addressed in its own terms, is seen as an x on a treasure map, a clue to dig for childhood trauma that has long been buried.” She describes the second problem as the relentlessness of modern parenting. Here’s how she describes it,, “Working mothers in the year 2000 spent as much time focused on childcare as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s. Since the last decades of the 20th century, upper middle class mothers in particular have embraced an intensive style of child-rearing, devouring parenting books and advice, loading children down with toys to stimulate their development, choosing only organic foods and enriching extracurriculars, and today, PFAS free diaper subscriptions.” Not that that’s neurotic. 

The author then reaches this point, “And yet we adult children seem increasingly likely to find fault with our parents, and perhaps to manifest this fault-finding by cutting them out of our lives.” It turns out that when you have a generational separation, this article makes clear it is overwhelmingly a separation that is demanded by the child rather than the parent. And evidently in some elite parts of our society, this is reaching something of pandemic levels. And I’ll just say as a Christian, that’s just absolutely tragic. But then the author goes on to say that the end result of this is the simple assessment, “Don’t have any kids yourself.” So again, she’s trying to make the connection between therapy culture and the problem of childlessness, and I think she does a marvelous job, frankly. I think she makes the point conclusively. And you’re going to find this problem most emphatically where you’re going to find the therapeutic culture thickest on the ground.

That too is not evenly distributed throughout the culture, although through the media and through, well, you could just say the entire medical community and so many other aspects, it does get downloaded to just about everyone. And honestly, it just becomes a part of the atmosphere we all breathe.

Part IV

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The Glory of God in the Birth of a Dolphin Calf: One Dolphin Mother Helps Another With Her Birth

Okay, we need something happy here at the end of today’s edition. How’s this for a good headline? “Dolphin Gets Helping Finn from Friend for Calf’s Birth.” The Associated Press is behind the story reporting, “A bottlenose dolphin at a Chicago area Zoo gave birth to a calf early Saturday morning with the help of a fellow mom, and a successful birth recorded on video by zoo staff. The dolphin calf was born at Brookfield Zoo, Chicago, early Saturday morning as a team of veterinarians monitored and cheered on the mom, a 38-year-old bottlenose dolphin named Allie, push, push, push, one observer can be heard shouting in a video.”

It was released by the zoo Saturday, Allie, the mom swims around the tank, the calf’s little tail fins poking out below her own. “Then the calf wiggles free and instinctively darts to the surface of the pool for its first breath.” Also in the tank we were told, was an experienced mother dolphin named Tepeco, 43 years old, “Who stayed close to Allie through her more than one hour of labor. In the video, she can be seen following the calf as it heads to the surface and staying with it as it takes that first breath.” The next statement, “It is natural for dolphins to look out for each other during a birth.” Okay, that is a happy story. It’s just sweet to think in nature of these two dolphin moms, well, of the one assisting the other she gives birth to a healthy calf, who by the way was remarkably large. But it’s also a sign of the fact that there’s a knowledge in those dolphins, and this is something that glorifies God.

It also points to something else, the dolphins didn’t develop this knowledge. This was something that was given to them. This is a reminder of the fact that even the creatures like dolphins, highly intelligent among the non-human animals, it’s important to recognize that God has given them certain knowledge in a certain proportion and His glorious scene in this. And so as we’re thinking about a civilization, there’s a tiny little dolphin civilization even in a tank in a zoo where this one experienced mom helps another mom as that mom is giving birth. And then follows the little dolphin to the surface to make certain that all is well. It’s just a sweet story, and of course there are going to be naturalists who look at this from a materialistic worldview and say, “Well, that’s an amazing thing that somehow Dolphins developed that knowledge.” I think as Christians we want to say, “Well, there has to be more to it than that. It has to point back to a creator, and we should see the glory of that creator in one dolphin mom helping another dolphin mom in the wonder of birth.”