From the legality of transgender bathrooms to the morality of physician-assisted suicide, a series of social issues have become emblematic of the stark differences between worldviews vying to be cultural norms in the United States. More fundamentally, these hot-button issues illustrate a gap between starkly different ways of understanding right and wrong. As these differences play out in the public square, too little attention is given to the most basic assumptions made by the opposing positions. Writing for Religion News Service, Trevin Wax explains that the source of our societal disagreement stems from the commonly held misconception that the individual can define its own reality:
Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, describes the mentality of many in American society this way: “No longer do we think we have the power merely to discover moral reality and truth – we think we have the power to actually create it.”
Quoting from C.S. Lewis, he continues: “We now believe that there is no ‘external cosmic order … to which we must conform’ but that truth can be ‘constructed according to the individual’s will.’ We have moved from the ancient understanding that we should ‘conform the soul to reality’ all the way into an age where we ‘subdue reality to our (soul’s) wishes.’”
This wish to “subdue reality” has extended into a desire to mold sexuality to human desires in recent years. Wax explains the argument depends largely on whether the individual believes that he can create reality, or if believes that he receives reality from an external source.
We’re mired in debates over gender and sex because some in our society view freedom as flourishing within the bodily form that we’ve received, and others view freedom as overcoming and redefining the body. In either case, the debate concerns receiving versus creating moral reality and truth.
For this reason, in his recent apostolic exhortation Pope Francis opposed contemporary gender ideology that assumes human identity is “the choice of the individual.”
“Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift,” he said.
In the end, every one of these “culture wars” debates boils down to our conception of truth.
And so we come back to the fevered frenzy of the culture wars and the uniqueasthmatreatmentsecrets.com and victories that are, in one way or another, connected to new definitions of human autonomy and freedom. Some see the radical vision of autonomy as essential for human flourishing, while others see it as the road to death — death in the womb, death from pills prescribed by a physician, or the deadening of our bodies through gender-related hormones and surgeries that sterilize the healthy.
Is truth something we make or receive? That is what the debates are all about.
