The War Against the Body

Because the fight isn’t, and never was, simply about people’s right to choose their own gender, their reproductive organs be damned. Nor, for that matter, is the heated discussion about abortion merely about that catchiest of all contemporary American political slogans, a woman’s right to choose. Take a look at these movements—together with, say, the burgeoning pro-­assisted suicide crowd—and you’ll find not only shared funders and organizers but also something more profound and profoundly troubling: belief in the promise of disembodiment.

Christians and Jews, he says, know they were created by God in His image, so they have to recognize the sacredness of the body.  They prohibit certain behaviors because they are sins against the body.  “And of course, the pinnacle of embodiment—procreation—is carefully guarded against abuse,” Leibovitz says. “The sexual appetites must be regulated, because we approach the gift of life with trembling awe and respect.”

In contrast, he says, “every radical political movement in the past three quarters of a century made it its goal to promote and celebrate some measure of radical disembodiment.”  He cites the Sexual Revolutionaries of the sixties, who celebrated the birth control pill for severing sex from procreation.  Also today’s “fanatics who now argue that we ought to consider chemically castrating any eight-year-old boy who prefers Barbie dolls to trucks.”  We could add radical feminism, homosexuality, pornography.  And, as mentioned earlier, abortion and euthanasia.  And technologies like virtual reality, the metaverse, and avatars. All assaults on the body.

This is an intentional and purposeful project, Leibovitz believes, as they are all supported by the same theorists and the same funders.  He gives an example:

Transgender entrepreneur and founder of the satellite radio industry Martine Rothblatt, one of the movement’s visionaries, is candid about what lies ahead. Transitioning from one gender to another, Rothblatt explains ­repeatedly in written works and public addresses, is a relatively timid step. Shedding the human body ­altogether—in order to become an animal, say, or merge one’s consciousness with that of a powerful ­supercomputer—is the logical next step. Disembodiment must be complete, opening up new frontiers for all who believe, against flesh-affirming Christianity and Judaism, that the self’s ultimate goal is to tear through all of its constricting corporeal limitations and recreate itself.

How odd that it’s the secularists who are so fixated on being “spiritual” and the materialists who think the material realm is all that exists are so hostile to the physical body!

We must admit, though, that Christians have sometimes talked in similar terms as well, presenting the body as a mere shell for the spirit.  That might work as a metaphor sometimes, but taken literally, it is the Gnostic heresy, manifesting itself in either self-torturing ascetism or self-indulgent debauchery–or both–since the body doesn’t matter anyway.  (See our post on the Cathars, who despised the body so much that they allowed sexual indulgence while considering having a baby as a sin.)

Instead, the Bible teaches that “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you. . . .You are not your own,  for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

And though our spirit will live on after our body dies and turns to dust, we believe in “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.”  That is to say, in His New Creation, when Christ returns, God will restore us to the embodied life He originally intended for us and those new bodies will live forever.

Illustration by Mohamed Hassan from PxHere, Public Domain