The problem and the solution

Two recent articles at Public Discourse illustrate the basic problem in our society and its only solution–this side of spiritual awakening.

The problem is fundamental untruth and unwillingnesss to be honest about it.  Matthew Tuininga reviews a new book in gender studies that implicitly recognizes the disconnect between biological facts (men and women are fundamentally different) and “gender studies” that stubbornly insists that sexual difference doesn’t matter.  Listen to an excerpt of Tuininga’s analysis:

“[The author’s] goal is to prove that gender differences have no necessary connection to human sexuality. How could he possibly prove such a thesis, in the face of nearly universal human experience? Kimmel concedes that women and men are physically and sexually different, but he refuses to recognize that such sex differences have any necessary gender implications. He ignores the fact that for all of human history human beings have assumed the opposite. Indeed, the very distinction between sex and gender is itself a modern social construct. And it is on the basis of that constructed distinction that the entire edifice of [the author’s] ‘balanced’ approach to gender studies depends.”

If you have gone through higher education in the past thirty years, you are familiar with this refusal to acknowledge the reality of biology and everyday life.

Then consider this refreshing piece by a 5th-year MD-PhD student at Dartmouth med school.  She refuses to be intimidated by pressures to keep quiet about the sanctity of human life and the horror of abortion which most med students are pressured to assist.  Here is Ana Maria Dumitru:

“When I first moved to New England, some older students advised me to keep my head down. ‘Don’t rock the boat,’ they told me. ‘One day, when you graduate, you can get to a position where you can create change.’ But if I suppress my conscience throughout my training, I will repeatedly squelch my beliefs, and I will suffer internal turmoil because of the forced dissociation of my beliefs from my actions.”

Dumitru spoke up in med school, and found herself stereotyped and regarded as close-minded and backward.  No matter.  She speaks out, such as in this article arguing for the Conscience Protection Act in Congress.

Here is the solution to today’s refusal to acknowledge reality: courage.  Ana Maria Dumitru has courage–the character quality which both Kierkegaard and Solzhenitsyn said are in such short supply in this modern era.

Now courage might not be rewarded.  Often the courageous are squashed, as we see frequently in the world today.  And there is no guarantee that in America courage will turn the ocean liner called society around.

Not unless God sovereignly pours out upon us not simply religious revival but spiritual awakening, such as He did in the 18th-century English Awakening under Wesley and Whitfield that changed not only the religious lives but the social mores of a nation.  And as God did on the American colonies in the Great Awakening in the 1740s, an awakening that was the necessary if not all-sufficient precipitator of the American Revolution.  That Revolution, whether or not you consider it to have been wholly justified, brought to this world a new birth of religious freedom, which in turn led to innumerable blessings to societies the world over.