Christian Living

Worldviews and Public Policy

Author Melinda Penner Published on 09/25/2013

Nancy Pearcey has a really great article explaining a strategy for more effective conversations and public dialogue over controversial issues. In this case, she writes about sexual identity and transgender politics.

Every law has an implicit worldview, a set of assumptions that justifies it. The worldview implicit in the transgender movement is that our physical bodies have no particular value—that our biology is irrelevant to who we are as persons...

The law is being used to impose a worldview that denigrates the physical body as inconsequential to personal identity. It is a worldview that drives a wedge between one’s body and one’s sense of self, which exerts a self-alienating, fragmenting effect on the human personality.

The transgender movement is a stepping stone to a completely postmodern conception of psychosexual identity. What does that mean? A psychotherapist explains in these words: People “don’t want to fit into any boxes—not gay, straight, lesbian, or bisexual ones...they want to be free to change their minds.”

Instead we are moving to a postmodern view that gender is something we can choose, independent of biology—and thus something we can also change...

The autonomous self will not tolerate having its options limited by anything it did not choose—not even its own body...

The liberal world does not know for sure what a man or woman is...

Because every law presupposes a worldview, the most effective way to address the law is to show the negative impact of the underlying worldview. For the law to be humane, it must reflect a view of the person that is holistic, integrating gender identity with the biological facts of life.

Nancy writes about how to show the positive and holistic view of being human that the Bible teaches. Before jumping into the morality the Bible teaches, it’s more effective to start at the foundation of people’s values, their worldview. Show how their worldview fails and then show how the Bible provides the best guide for how we are made.

She goes into much more detail on the affects of worldview in her excellent book Saving Leonardo. It’s really essential reading.