Thought Life
Hunter Baker is a sharp dude out of Houston Baptist University who just published a piece on the Salvo magazine website entitled “Facts Evasion: When it Comes to Sex, the Left Hates Science.” I commend the piece to you–it’s apologetically quite useful. Hunter just published The End of Secularism, I might add, which will make you much smarter than you are now if you read it.
In Hunter’s article, he takes aim at the common misconception that the political left works from a scientific standpoint on matters of social policy while conservatives work from a merely ideological perspective. His article makes several excellent points, and I’m going to block quote a big section of it because it is highly worth your time as a thoughtful Christian person engaging cultural matters for the glory of Christ:
How well does it work to encourage promiscuous sex accompanied by birth control pills and condom use? Ask an obstetrician-gynecologist about the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases in young women. The rate is exceptionally high. We may well reap a demographic disaster of infertility down the road. Let’s pray that P. D. James, who wrote The Children of Men, is no prophet.
Abortions continue to be performed in huge numbers despite the past assurances of some on the left that modern birth control would eliminate the need for the grisly procedure. And of the children who are born, an alarmingly high number are born to single mothers. As a group, these children are substantially more likely to do poorly in school, abuse drugs, commit crimes, require governmental assistance, and serve time in jail—and to see the cycle repeated when they have children of their own.
Is it a scientific outlook that would maintain that this state of affairs is somehow conducive to human flourishing? Or would the evidence-driven observer be more likely to affirm that sex within marriage is far more advantageous to women than promiscuity? A more logical mind could also see very well that social support for traditional marriage would help with the recurring problem of convincing men to raise their offspring rather than simply siring them.
And let us dwell for a moment on the record of the secular left’s “rational” approach in the matter of procreation. In the case of the unborn child, for example, pro-choicers for a long time stubbornly clung to the notion that the child inside the womb was no more than a cluster of cells, undifferentiated tissue, and/or a tumor-like growth. They maintained this stance long after Lennart Nilsson’s landmark photos of fetuses were published in Life magazine in 1965, and even beyond the advent and regular use of ultrasound technology.
It has only been within the past decade, when major corporations began using images of unborn children in their advertising and parents began purchasing ultra-detailed images of their in utero babies, that supporters of broad abortion rights began to abandon the dehumanizing and, yes, anti-scientific language of the fetus as inert matter. Some years ago, the famed feminist Naomi Wolf broke ranks with her side just enough to plead for recognition of the humanity of the fetus, lest the battle be lost through a failure to acknowledge what is obvious to non-ideologues.
The whole piece is worth reading, and Baker’s chief argument is worth noting and using extensively. We Christians are not behind the 8-ball when it comes to science. We’re squarely in line with it. To an extent that we too rarely cite, it is on our side.
Too often we operate culturally from a position of weakness instead of a position of strength. Selections like this show us the importance of evaluating rhetoric and thinking clearly about science, faith, and the way in which the former, when handled well, serves the latter.
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