Your Body Is Good

Dannah Gresh: According to author Nancy Pearcey, you and I need a right attitude about our physicality. 

Nancy Pearcey: Your body is good. It has been created by God intentionally. God made you who you are, and you are supposed to respect your body, live in harmony with your body, live in coherence with your biological sex. Honor the body that God has given you.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast for February 12, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh. Our host is the author of Adorned, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: You don’t have to look far to see that people all around us are confused—even deceived—when it comes to some basic truths—things like what it means to be a man or a woman and what to do if you don’t like how God made you.

Thankfully, God’s Word on these things is clear, as we’re about to hear. Here’s Dannah Gresh with a further introduction.

Dannah: Have you ever felt ashamed of your body or maybe struggled with yo-yo diets or maybe even self-harming? Our guest today will help us contend with our lack of love for our bodies, but she’s going to carry us beyond our personal problems.

We’re going to equip you to converse about some of the toughest headline issues of the day, things like: transgenderism, abortion, homosexuality. Our guest today claims these complex and often painful experiences are actually rooted in the same lack of love for the body that you may experience when you look in the mirror.

Our guest is Nancy Pearcey. A couple of years ago Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and I found we were both reading her book at the same time. The book is titled Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. Again, the author’s name is Nancy Pearcey.

Nancy is a professor, a Scholar-in-Residence at Houston Baptist University.Her brilliant thinking gives her a platform in publications like The New Yorker and Newsweek. Today we’ll benefit from that, but also be able to integrate Scripture into the conversation. 

Nancy, welcome to Revive Our Hearts!

Nancy P: Thank you so much; I’m glad to be here!

Dannah: I am so excited about this conversation because I’ve heard some of your interviews. When I am finished listening to them, I feel like, “Oh, I can have these hard conversations!” I’m excited to give that gift to my sisters listening to Revive Our Hearts today.

I want to start at a tender place. I have often written about purity, about modesty. I try to write that from a point of view that’s kind and respectful and winsome, but many people today claim that the negative view of the body in Western culture is a product of Christianity, authors and teachers like me.

“Too much teaching on purity, too much teaching on modesty or sin, has resulted in shame . . . and now we hate our bodies! That’s what it all came from!” What would your response be to that?

Nancy P: Well, I think it’s a misunderstanding of Christianity, although it is very common to think that Christians have a low view of the body and that our view of sexual purity, for example, comes from a low view of the body, rejection of the body.

Here’s how one of my students put it. She said, “Growing up in the church I was always taught, ‘Body bad, spirit good.’” When I use that with Christian audiences, I always get a lot of people nodding their heads, like, “Good summary.” 

But it’s actually a misunderstanding of Christianity, and you can see that especially if you go back to the early church. The early church faced not a secular but a pagan culture that denigrated the body and material world.

So the early church as you would know, Dannah, from your Bible reading, a lot of the New Testament books are written against worldviews like Gnosticism and Platonism, and Manichaeism. The point is that all of these “isms” treated the material world as the realm of death, decay, and destruction, that the goal of salvation was to escape the material world.

In fact, Gnosticism even taught that there were several levels of “gods”—of deities—and it was a low level god who had created this world. It was actually an evil god, because this world is bad and therefore it must have been created by an evil god.

So in this historical context, Christianity was nothing short of revolutionary, because Christians said, “No, this world is good! It was not created by an evil god, it was created by a good God—the highest level God, the Supreme Deity, and therefore it’s intrinsically good!”

In addition to that, Christianity also taught—and this was the greatest scandal, by the way, in the first century—that that same God entered into the material world, right? That was the Incarnation. Jesus took on a physical body, so the Incarnation is the greatest affirmation of the dignity and value of the human body. 

And when Jesus was executed on a Roman cross, we might say He did escape the material world as Gnosticism taught we should aspire to do, but what did He do then? He came back! To the ancient Greeks at that time, this was not spiritual progress!

Dannah: Yes, He came back in a physical body. His physical body was resurrected.

Nancy P: In a physical body, exactly! And that’s why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:23, the concept of the physical resurrection was foolishness to the Greeks. They thought this was utterly ridiculous! And of course at the end of time, what is God going to do? We often think we’re going to go up to heaven and be spirits. No! The ultimate goal is the New Heavens and the New Earth, and we will be resurrected in physical bodies. 

I was talking to a non-Christian not long ago. She had a Christian background. I said, “Look, the Apostles’ Creedwas right from the beginning a promise of resurrection of the body. So Christians affirm the value of the body!” 

And my secular friend said, “Oh, my goodness! I learned the Apostles’ Creed when I was a kid, and I never realized, really, what that meant.”

What that meant is, Christianity does give a positive basis for a high view of the body. And what we need to do as Christians is recover our own heritage.

Dannah: Yes, a lot of Scripture is coming to my mind. I had a really “Eureka!” moment I guess in my twenties, reading Ephesians 1. In that passage it says that God is working together—when times will reach their fulfillment. He will bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ (see v. 10).

And so, this heresy of our times is actually what your student was saying, “Body bad, spirit good.” When we divide the secular and the sacred, we are moving in the opposite direction that God is moving, which is to bring these physical bodies into a place where they are once again in unity with how He created us to be spiritually. And when we think, Body bad, we aren’t having that mentality, are we?

Nancy P: That’s right! And so, one of the themes—perhaps the main theme—of my book Love Thy Body (with a title like that!) is that Christians need to recover the language of the value of the body. 

I’ll just give an anecdote. One of the stories in the book is of a young man named Sean Dougherty, and he was exclusively homosexual from the time he was quite young. What is interesting about his story is that he was raised in a “gay affirming family” and attended a “gay affirming church,” so he didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.

But today he is married and has children, and by the way, he’s a Christian Ethics professor in London. And so you say, “Well, if he wasn’t driven by shame or guilt . . .” which is what most people think, right? “If you leave the homosexuality behind, oh, it was just shame and guilt and self-loathing.” That’s what critics will say.

But he said, “No, it was discovering the value of the body!” He said (and here’s how he put it), 

I came to realize, I wasn’t trying to change my feelings directly, because that rarely works. But what I did do was I said, “Look, God gave me a body—a male body—and so clearly I was created to interact sexually with a woman.

I came to accept my body as a good gift from God, and I wanted to live according to it. Eventually, my feelings started to follow suit. 

So this is really the worldview point at the heart of the debate: Are our bodies products of mindless material forces—as naturalism or materialism would tell us? Or are our bodies intentional creations of a loving God and therefore intrinsically good? 

And so, our arguments against issues like homosexuality are not purely negative. It’s not just, “It’s wrong. It’s against the Bible. Stop doing it! And, there’s something wrong with you!” That’s kind of the message people pick up.

No, the message should be, “Your body is good. It has been created by God intentionally! God made you who you are, and you are supposed to respect your body, live in harmony with your body, live in coherence with your biological sex, and honor the body that God has given you.

So that language of honor and respecting your body is the language that Christians need to master if they want to communicate effectively.

Dannah: Okay, let me play the devil’s advocate with a question, “Can’t I honor God with my body and still be biologically female and decide, ‘Oh, I think I’d rather be male.’ Why does it matter that I embrace the gender that God has given to me?”

Nancy P: Well, we could start by listening to the transgender activists themselves. They themselves say, “The body has nothing to do with who I am. My body is not part of my authentic self.” So BBC Social put out a video.

It highlights a young teenager who is clearly a girl, but she identifies as nonbinary and she said, this is a direct quote: “It doesn’t matter what meat-skeleton you’ve been born in; it’s your feelings that define you.” So your body has been denigrated to a “meat skeleton.”

There’s another BBC documentary called Transgender Kids. It said at the heart of the debate is the idea that your mind can be at war with your body—at warwith your body—and of course in that war, it’s the mind that wins.

There was aKickstarterpage started by a male-to-female transsexual. It was to raise money for a documentary, and it was titled, I Am Not My Body. So that title kind of says it all. Basically, if you listen to the secular transgenderism activists, what they are saying is, “Your body doesn’t matter; it’s not a part of your authentic self.”

In fact, Dannah, I have to read academic literature, right? Because it’s what the intellectuals say that eventually filters down to the ordinary discussions. So I read a book, I think it’s the first book defending transgenderism on an academic level, by a Princeton Universityprofessor.

And to my great surprise, she actually said transgenderism involves disconnection, self-alienation. Here’s how she said it. She said, “Your physical body tells you nothing at all. It is meaningless.” So essentially, this message is filtering down to young people. 

They’re being told, “Your body is meaningless! It tells you nothing at all. It gives you no clues to your identity.” Well, if kids are told their bodies are meaningless, that’s a big part of who they are. No wonder they think they are meaningless, that their lives are meaningless!

The transgender activists say, “If you don’t transition your kid, they’ll commit suicide.” There was a study done by the Heritage Foundation. They decided, “Well, how do you test that?” They tested that by looking at states that had laws allowing kids to transition without parental consent over against states that don’t allow kids to transition without parental consent.

And they found that the states that allow children to get puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery without parental consent had 14 percent higher rates of suicide among teenagers. So the message that “your body is meaningless” has actual consequences!

Kids think that they are being told, “You are meaningless.” It’s just your transcendent feelings . . . You know, your feelings can come and go. If you base your life on that, your life will be very unstable, very fragile.

Dannah: Yes, I’m listening to you and I’m thinking in contrast that the Bible places great value on the body when Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, “[Don’t you] know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?” (NKJV).

God has chosen to dwell within us. We are His dwelling place! “For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God [where?] in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s” (v. 20). So, there again is that joining together of the value of the body and the spirit. That’s what the Christian message is about, the value of our bodies.

Nancy P: Yes, you’ll never read these verses the same again: “Offer up your body as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1). These verses will suddenly jump out at you the way they never did before! Scripture teaches that we are an integrated unity, we are embodied spirits. Both of them are part of our identity.

This comes out very nicely through the parallelism of Hebrew poetry. So, these [examples] are from several psalms; you’ll recognize these, I’m sure. “My soul thirsts for you, my flesh yearns for you” (Psalm 63:1 NASB). “Our soul has sunk down into the dust; our body cleaves to the earth” (Psalm 44:25 NASB).

In these psalms, Scripture is saying essentially that what our soul feels is expressed in our body. Or, “Keep my words in the midst of your heart, for they are life to those who find them and health to all their body.” The last one I have is, “When I kept silent about my sin [that is, when I refused to repent], my body wasted away through my groaning all day long” (Psalm 32:3 NASB).

So the Bible treats the human being as a cycle of physical unity. The inner life of the soul is expressed through the outer life of the body. There’s no dichotomy, there’s no division between them.

I’ll give you one more story, this is one of my favorites, too. This is a young woman named Jean who lived as a lesbian for many years, and today is married and has two kids. She wrote an article about it and she said (again, a direct quote, these are her actual words):

I came to accept that God had made me female for a reason, and I wanted to honor my body by living in accord with the Creator’s design.

When I speak to Christian audiences—I speak a lot to conferences and schools and universities—that’s the hardest thing for people to get their minds around.

They’re so used to the idea that as Christians, we have a primarily negative message: “You’re a sinner. You need to get saved!” Which is true, but we have to start with Genesis 1, which is: “You’re made in God’s image, and you have great value and dignity!” 

I almost have to train people to practice these phrases! 

• Honor my body by living in accord with the Creator’s design.
• Respect your biological sex. 
• Live in congruence with who God made you. 

If our message is positive like that, it will carry a lot more weight, and of course, it will especially speak more to young people.

Dannah: You refer to Genesis 1, we were created in God’s image. That right there is really mind-blowing, that somehow God created us in such a way that we look like Him, reflect Him, remind others of Him. 

It’s striking to me that in that same verse, Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” I mean, there are so many things about us that really are God-like in contrast to the rest of Creation: our ability to procreate, our ability to compose sonnets, be creative. We have reasoning and intellect and connecting gifts that other pieces of God’s creation don’t enjoy.

Why, then, was maleness and femaleness the one thing God chose to say, “This is part of what makes you in My image”?

Nancy P: Let me answer that with this story about an argument that I have found surprisingly effective with both Christians and non-Christians. I first developed this with non-Christians who are very into environmentalism. I help them to see that it’s really the same issue. They say, “What does environmentalism have to do with sexuality?”

Here’s the connection: the environmental movement has taught us that to avoid pollution and ecological disasters, we need to respect the structure of nature. It doesn’t mean we can’t intervene, but when we do, we need to work with the natural order and not against it.

And what Christians are saying is that on these moral issues as well, we want to respect the natural structure of our bodies; we don’t want to violate the natural structure. After all, our bodies are part of nature, and so we should respect our bodies at least as much as we respect this tree outside my window or the way we respect the river and we don’t dump toxic waste in it.

Our argument is, “We should respect our bodies as the handiwork of the Creator, and live in harmony with our bodies, live in congruence with who God made us to be.”

Dannah: I recall a conversation I had with a friend who came for breakfast at my house. This friend is very left-leaning and very environmentality conscious and is struggling with issues of sexuality and identity.

When I brought the eggs in, this individual said, “Oh, I don’t eat eggs. I wouldn’t do that to chickens!” 

I said, “Well, I don’t have a rooster on my farm, so they’re not fertilized.” And in the conversation then I eventually said, “But it’s okay to abort a baby?” That’s not logical, is it?

Nancy P: No, it’s not! That’s a good point! Somehow abortion has the same logic. What most people don’t realize is that if you read or talk to secular bioethicists, they too argue for abortion on the basis of the body not having value. Here’s how they argue it. They say, “Well, yeah, the fetus is human.” Do you realize that secular bioethicists today, none of them deny that the fetus is human? The evidence from DNA, from genetics, from science is just too strong to deny it.

So they say, “Yes, the fetus is biologically human genetically, physiologically, chromosome really, the fetus is human.” Well, how do they get around that, then, to support abortion? What they say is, “Well, it’s human, but it’s not a person yet.”

And they define personhood in terms of some kind of mental capacity, some kind of self-awareness, cognitive functioning, and so on. So, what are they really saying? They’re saying, “As long as you’re human, you don’t count!” 

The fetus can be killed for any reason—or no reason. It can be used for experimentation; it can be tinkered with genetically; it can be picked through for sellable body parts—as Planned Parenthood does—and then tossed out with the other medical waste—which is exactly how medical journals refer to it: “medical waste.” 

So essentially what they’re saying is, “Even though the fetus is human, it has no human rights. It has no moral standing. It warrants no legal protection.” Well, essentially they’re saying, “Being human is no longer a basis for human rights.” They’ve completely tossed out the notion of human rights.

So essentially, the reason that your friend can be for abortion is because the reasoning there is, “Even if the fetus is human, it’s only a body.” By the way, that’s somehow the way that bioethicists sometimes call it. They say, “It’s only a body. And until it becomes a person, we don’t give it any legal protection.”

So, do you see how the logic of the arguments for abortion are once again denigrating the body? Christians haven’t quite caught up with the form of the argument today. That’s why I wrote the book Love The Body, to help Christians realize that all of these issues—from abortion to homosexuality, transgenderism, euthanasia—all rest on a view of the body. 

This can be very helpful for us in talking to our non-Christian friends or our more progressive Christian friends because we tend to want to try to figure out good arguments for each one of these issues independently: “Let’s get some arguments for this issue and some arguments for that issue, and how do we talk about that issue?”

Well, it turns out they all have a common underlying worldview. If you grasp that worldview, you will be equipped to talk about all of them, and it’s so much easier. Your task is a lot easier because you can address the underlying worldview that connects all of them.

Dannah: I love that you’re inviting us to just embrace the idea of “loving thy body,” because it really does take us out of some of those spaces where language has become so volatile, explosive. Definitions have been changed and, really, battles are fought and won based on words. 

And you’re not hearing the word “body” necessarily in the conversations about these things, although there are these underlying things going on. So if we can just change the conversation to say, “Hey, let me just ask you . . .”

“Let’s not just talk about pronouns, or let’s not talk about parental rights for children that are transitioning in the public schools. Let’s talk about something different. What do you think about the value of your body?” Change the conversation, right? That’s what you’re inviting us to do.

Nancy P: Yes, I love it! I love the way you just put that. That’s great. So, let me give an example. There was a very secular liberal website, and I read an interview with a fourteen-year-old girl who had transitioned to male at age eleven and lived as a transboy for three years, and then recovered her identity as a girl.

And here’s how she put it, again, direct quotation. She said, “The turning point came when I realized it’s not conversion therapy to learn to love your body.” And I thought, Wow, out of the mouths of babes! She’s only fourteen, and she recognizes that the issue here is whether you love your body.

This was not from a Christian website, but a very secular, very liberal one. What it shows is that even secular people are starting to recognize that the key issue here is your body. You will see secular people saying now, “The transgender agenda represents body hatred.” So, secular people are recognizing it.

So, yes, as Christians, we need to catch up with where the debate really is. The debate now is, “Do we recognize our bodies as valuable?” And this is very practical because of some of the very personal questions we have, “How do we deal with our own children, or our neighbors, our kids’ classmates, people in our churches or Christian schools?”

The path of approach, I would say, is what you just said now, which is, “Let’s talk about valuing your body.” We want to convey that we love and respect and value you and your body. In my book Love Thy Body, I do talk about a young boy who had gender dysphoria from a very young age.

And true gender dysphoria, by the way, does usually start at a young age. We have a lot of young girls now coming out as the opposite sex as teenagers, but gender dysphoria has traditionally been something that starts very young.

So this boy, I call him Brandon (not his real name), before he was even walking people recognized that there was something different about this kid! His babysitter said to his mom, “He’s too good to be a boy!” By which she meant he was sweet and gentle and compliant and quiet—the things that we normally associate more with girls.

When he was in preschool, every day when his mom picked him up, he was playing with the little girls, not the boys. And already in elementary school he was coming to his parents weeping—repeatedly—and saying, “I don’t fit in anywhere! I don’t feel like a boy, but of course, the girls don’t truly accept me, either!”

And let me see if I can remember his exact words. He said to his mom, “I’m interested in the things girls are. I like the things girls do. God should have made me a girl!” And of course this was very painful for both him and his parents.

By the time he was a teenager, he was scouring the internet for information on sex-change surgery. So, what did his parents do? First of all, they made it very clear that they loved him just the way he was. They did not try to change him.

When I was in seminary, I had a friend who was a former homosexual. He said, “When I was young I liked music and poetry. My dad was baffled and kept trying to toughen me up by pushing me into more boy activities, like sports.”

Brandon’s parents did not do that. They said to him, “It’s perfectly okay to be a gentle, emotional, sensitive, relational boy. It does not mean you’re really a girl.” And they went through the gifts of the Spirit with him.

They said, “Look, the gifts of the Spirit are not divided by sex. It’s not like teaching and prophecy are for men, like they’re masculine, and mercy and service are feminine. The fruit of the Spirit are not divided my sex. The vast majority of commands in Scripture are not divided by sex.”

They even took him through things like the Myers-Briggs personality test. It shows that both males and females can be at both ends of the spectrum. Men can be sensitive and gentle, and a girl obviously can also be more outgoing and rational and take-charge and assertive. It’s okay for kids to be gender nonconforming.

It was a long painful process. It was not until his early twenties that Brandon really accepted his identity as male and reconciled himself to his true sex. And so, what we need to do with young people who come to us is respond the way Brandon’s parents responded, by saying, “We love you just the way you are. It’s okay for you to be the way you are.” 

Do you know what Brandon told me? He said the hardest places are Christian circles, like church and youth group. He said it’s because Christians are so concerned to stand against the secular culture that they almost overemphasize masculine and feminine stereotypes. 

The academic literature on this—I won’t quote it because it’s academic lingo. But studies have found that the most reliable correlation of non-heterosexual orientation (which is either sexual orientation or gender identity) is gender nonconforming behavior in childhood. In other words, kids who act more like the opposite sex.

So this is good information for Christians to have because what it means is we should be reaching out to those kids. We should reach out especially to the young people who are gender nonconforming, who don’t necessarily fit the stereotypes. Brandon’s parents’ favorite line, the one they used more than anything else, was, “It’s not you that’s wrong. It’s the stereotypes that are wrong.” 

Dannah: Mmm, that’s good.

Nancy P: And so, when I talk to Christian audiences I say, “Look, if you’re in a Christian school or church, reach out to the kids who are gender nonconforming, because they are under enormous pressure these days! Realize they are going to be targeted by gender activists.”

I’ve heard from several parents who say this, by the way, this is not speculative. Parents say, “My gender nonconforming kid is being targeted at school and being told . . .” If you’re a more masculine girl, “Well, you need to admit you’re really a boy.”

Or if you’re a more feminine boy, “You need to admit you’re really a girl.” So they’re under tremendous pressure these days!

Dannah: So what you’re saying is, if your daughter likes hunting with Dad, that’s okay. If your daughter would much rather be in jeans than a skirt and doing rough-and-tumble things, God may have created her to do some rough-and-tumble things. I don’t know what those things are, but we have to stop making boys blue and girls pink. That’s not in the Bible.

There are some things very clearly written in Scripture about the distinctive differences of maleness and femaleness—and those matter very much! I believe they matter very much, but we really are adding things when we say a boy can’t grow up to be a florist or a girl can’t grow up to be a world-class hunter. That’s not in the Scripture, and we have to be really careful!

Nancy W: That’s the cohost of Revive Our Hearts, Dannah Gresh, talking to Nancy Pearcey about how we can better appreciate and be thankful to God for our bodies . . . and how we can better help children think about and process these things as well.

I hope you’ll stop and give thanks today for your physical body. I know that may be hard for some of us, but we can rest in knowing that God knew exactly what He was doing when He made us. And even if your body may be chronically ill or deformed or just doesn’t work the way it used to, you can rest in knowing that, if you’re a child of God, someday He’s going to give you a brand-new body—a body free from the effects of sin and the curse. That will be so, so worth waiting for!

I want to remind you about Nancy Pearcey’s book Love Thy Body. The subtitle is: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. Nancy is such a gift to the body of Christ, and her writing has been helpful to so many.

You’ll find more information about how you can get a copy at a link in the transcript of today’s program. Just go to ReviveOurHearts.com and look up this episode. You’ll find the transcript there and, again, the book is Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey.

I want you to think about this: Jesus took on a body. It’s what theologians call the Incarnation. That’s what we celebrate every year at Christmas: “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). That’s one of the amazing things about Jesus that I’ve written about in my new book Incomparable. That book takes you on fifty days with Jesus to show you why He is truly incomparable. There’s no one like Him! 

We’ll be talking more about that starting Wednesday. As a thank you for your donation of any amount, we’d be glad to send you a copy of Incomparable. Just request the book when you contact us with your gift. Again, our website is ReviveOurHearts.com, or you can call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Tomorrow, Nancy Pearcey and Dannah Gresh will continue their conversation on how we can have a right view of our bodies and why that’s so important. Be sure and be back for Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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