The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims

Earlier this year The Gospel Coalition ran their biennial conference, this time going partially virtual and this time not offering their talks for free afterwards. I signed up for their virtual conference and in doing so I received six free books, including this one.

I liked Rebecca McLaughlin from her previous book and coming out of another book that looked at culture, I thought this would be a good read too.

This was a short book that looked at five main creeds that have populated our culture in recent times, they are:

• Black Lives Matter
• Love is Love
• The Gay-rights movement is the new Civil-rights movement
• Women's rights are human rights
• Transgender Women are Women

Rebecca set out to explain these issues in a clear simple way, and even models how she talks to her own children on these matters:

I tell my children that in our house we believe that black lives matter because they matter to Jesus. We don’t believe that love is love but that God is love, and that he gives us glimpses of his love through different kinds of relationship. We believe women’s rights are human rights, because God made us—male and female—in his image; and for that same reason we believe that babies in the womb have rights as well. We believe God has a special concern for single mothers, orphans, and immigrants, because Scripture tells us so again and again. And we believe that diversity does indeed make us stronger, because Jesus calls people from every tribe and tongue and nation to worship him as one body together.

As an apologetic book, this doesn't necessarily appeal to logic or reason or philosophical ideas, but more to the individual, culture and societal influences. Throughout this book  McLaughlin strength is in the field of sociology, looking at groups of people and trends in culture and where those ideas come from. Smattered throughout this book are personal stories alongside Biblical stories to help stress her main points. Below is a more detailed summary of the main ideas in the book. (You can skip it all and just go to my summary in the last paragraph, most of this content is more for my own reference anyway.)

Looking at the Good Samaritan story and the conversion of the first black Chrisitan in Acts 8, we see that Christianity is not a one-race religion, it was for all people for all nations. Anyone who has read anything from the New Testament should pick up this vibe as it always harps on about the Jew and Gentile divide that was was a thing in their day, but Christianity sought to remove it entirely, as we believe that all people are created in the image of God. This means we don't show favouritism to one race, nor do we show prejudice to one race. This idea is fundamental to our ideas on (Western) human rights. Interestingly if we were to listen to Black Christians in America, we would probably have a more confident view of the Bible (and by extension what it says about race) as proportionally they believe the Bible is the word of God 23 percentage points more than White Christians in America.

McLaughlin uses personal stories to speak from her same-sex attracted perspective to help untangle the contemporary tautology of "love is love". Starting from the Biblical metaphor of marriage in relation to Christ and the Church, moving to what the Bible says about same-sex attraction to the call to Biblica non-erotic love for each other, she puts forward the standard Biblical position for marriage and relationships.

When looking at the gay-rights movement it runs into a bit of conflict if they want to listen to the Black community in America. When Obama affirmed same-sex marriage only 39% of Black Americans agreed. McLaughlin thinks arguments for civil rights back in the day do not match with the gay-rights moment today. This is because sexual attraction and gender identity are seen more as a choice, rather than your race which is something immutable. Even those who argue that people are born gay still fail to distinguish between attraction and action. We may not choose our attractions, but we do choose our actions. McLaughlin knows this first hand, experiences same-sex attractions but also choosing to continue in her marriage to her husband. Also, our attractions can change over time, race doesn't.

Jesus is pro-women, the church was disproportionally women in the first three centuries of the male-dominated Roman Empire as well as pretty much any church today. It was Chrisitan arguments used for first-wave feminism pointing out that because women are equal to men in God's image, they should be equal in society. Not only does the church advocate for women seeing them as equal (the natural sciences, depending on what species you focus on has vastly contradictory results) but it seems pragmatically living in the church has massive overall benefits for women. Looking at contemporary studies suggest the male of the house should work outside the home and the woman in the home as it improves the overall happiness of the wife, not to mention Chrisitan marriages experiencing better sexual satisfaction and those who attend church are five timeless less likely to commit suicide than those who don't attend church once a week. The church has always been against infanticide, (which baby girls were the main victims) and so likewise abortion as an updated version of infanticide the church has always argue for the unheard voices of the victims, at least half of which are female (more in non-Western cultures).

With the rise of transgender issues in culture, McLaughlin points out (along with J. K. Rowling) that if pushed too far, "woman" doesn't actually mean anything anymore. Sometimes referred to as "people who menstruate" (or just this week The Lancet published a paper on "bodies with vaginas"), terms like this seem a bit dehumanising, and removing sex/gender makes communicating about many meaningful aspects of women's lives hard. Leading LGBT activities Simon Fanshawe and Fred Sargeant left their respective gay rights organisations they founded due to today's climate of intolerance towards this idea that sex is binary. Looking at multiple studies of those who feel gender dysphoria, we see suicide attempts much higher. Some point to cultural hate for this cause, except that trans people aren't murdered at a higher rate. While people want to triumph over the individual and their wishes, we still want to discourage eating disorders and self-harm in teens, as there are some mental perceptions that are not healthy, so we should be sensitive to how we affirm certain perceived realities, especially if the trend and stats aren't glowing.

The issues of intersex people are dealt with showing that this very uncommon condition doesn't negate male and female genders, in fact, you need both genders to create any baby, intersex or not. Going back to the first black Christian in Acts 8 we also learn that he was a eunuch. There is room in Christianity for those who do not have standard-issue sex organs. Building a family is not the top priority in Christianity, instead, it is about building a new people group, made up of all nations, and both genders for the future marriage in heaven is.

There is much in this book that people would go raving mad for, and completely dismiss it - not due to the research or the logical flow of the argument, but because it says things opposite to our shared cultural imagination of how things should be. Those who do this, show they aren't ready to engage or think. Lots of this book is sociological so I am sure there are probably many more studies that can be pointed to, ie I am not sure they are the strongest airtight method to build an argument. However, with personal stories, historical accounts and footnotes the book does come across stronger than just a collation of generalised stats.