Who respects the body more? Christians or the world? I bet most Americans would answer that the world loves the body more than Christians do. After all, the world celebrates its sexuality and supports going after whatever our body desires. Many will judge their Valentine’s Day on whether it was a day they got what they desire.
Ours is an age of affirmation, and our bodies appear to be the object of that unquestioned affirmation.
But what if it isn’t true that our world truly values our bodies? What would it mean for issues such as gender and abortion if the Christian ethic is actually the worldview that honors the body most deeply?
Ethicist Nancy Pearcey believes that the Christian view of the body honors it while our contemporary Western world actually devalues the body. In Love Thy Body, Pearcey has written one of the most important books a thoughtful Christian ought to read to wisely navigate the modern world.
Love Thy Body is an extended consideration of what a Christian ethic of the body is. Pearcey contrasts the Christian and the dualistic contemporary Western understanding of the body. She then navigates how this distinctive views of the body play themselves out in everything from abortion to euthanasia to understanding gender and sexuality.
Pearcey audaciously declares that a Christian ethic grants the body more value than a secular perspective. How is that? Christianity affirms our embodiment. “But the truth is that Christianity has a much more respectful view of our psycho-sexual identity. It is not anti-sex, it is pro-body.” Christianity believes that we will not “fly away” from our bodies, but will live eternally in resurrected bodies. Christianity affirms the scientific reality of our bodies, from our personhood in the womb to our biological sex.
In contrast, the secular world separates our biological reality from our sense of self that we can choose based on our feelings. Pearcey calls this a “two-story” fragmentation, where our body is separated from our mind, with the mind being our “true self.” This is the natural outcome of Kant’s division between the noumenal and phenomenal. Once our being is created by our mind (seen in Descartes’s declaration “I think therefore I am”), we can be whoever or whatever we want to be. “C. S. Lewis put it this way: “The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can’t both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn’t fit the real universe.” She says later, “Modernists claim that the lower story is the primary or sole reality—facts and science. Postmodernists claim that the upper story is primary—that even facts and science are merely mental constructs.”
While we consider ourselves a scientifically advanced culture, it is our Kantian worldview that has trumped our science. There is no division in the field of embryology as to whether an unborn child is a human being or not. It is agreed that unborn children are human beings. But, the philosophy of our age trumps the science and a child is considered a fetus who can be terminated because of we will that they be so.
The same thing can be said about sex. Genetic tests can determine the chromosomal makeup of human beings and whether they are male and female. But culturally we reject the science and have asserted that we can choose our own gender. Pearcey explains, “To protect women’s rights, we must be able to say what a woman is. If postmodernism is correct—that the body itself is a social construct—then it becomes impossible to argue for rights based on the sheer fact of being female. We cannot legally protect a category of people if we cannot identify that category.”
In all of this, Pearcey builds a case that the Christian worldview honors our bodies while the secular Western worldview undermines the body’s value. Pearcey explains that, “You may not believe in God. . . . But I do, and because of that I believe in the value of all people. I believe we are all made in His image and likeness. That’s why I believe all people are worth something. If you believe that people only get their value from each other, then people can take that away. But if our value comes from God, then nobody has the right to say someone who walks is worth more than someone who doesn’t.”
Pearcey’s heart breaks for those living in such a confused world. She says, “Young people are trying to live out a worldview that does not match their true nature, and it is tearing them apart with its pain and heartache.”
I encourage you to read Pearcey’s Love Thy Body. Whether you are a Christian or not, you ought to read this book and wrestle through our conception of whether the Christian or secular worldview honors the body more and which most comports with reality.
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