CS Lewis knew how clever people teach themselves to be fools
The new trailer for Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” promises a dazzling sight: a world coming into being. Fans of C.S. Lewis will be watching Aslan and the White Witch. I’ll be watching Uncle Andrew. He may be the book’s most disturbing character because he teaches himself to deny what he knows.
Andrew’s talent for explaining away unwelcome truth raises an uncomfortable question about Gerwig’s adaptation. Will she allow Lewis to tell his Christian story, or will she explain its Christian meaning away?
God speaks through his Word, and Uncle Andrew shows how a person can become so skilled at self-defense that he loses the ability to listen.
As a philosophy professor and Christian pastor, I recognize the temptation. Education can help us discover truth. It can also equip us with elaborate excuses for resisting it. An impressive vocabulary does not guarantee an honest mind.
Lewis introduces Uncle Andrew as a man convinced that intellectual distinction exempts him from ordinary duties. Keeping promises is for lesser people. Andrew knows the secrets of the occult, so he imagines he can send children into dangers he refuses to face himself. He calls his cowardice greatness.
The vice is familiar: Exceptional ability supposedly confers exceptional moral privileges. A radical professor who believes his political vision justifies tearing down inherited institutions uses Andrew’s logic. So does the politician who excuses the dangers of communism or socialism because a glorious future allegedly demands sacrifices now. The superior mind claims authority to break rules it imposes on everyone else.
Then Uncle Andrew meets Aslan.
At first, Andrew hears the Lion’s song as music. It stirs thoughts and feelings he does not want to entertain. He then tells himself that no lion could possibly sing. He must have heard roaring. The longer Aslan sings, the harder Andrew works to believe his own explanation. Eventually he hears only animal noises, even when Aslan speaks.
Lewis gives us the verdict: “Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
Notice the order. Andrew recognizes something, resists it, and finally loses the ability to recognize it. His ignorance is learned. What looks like an intellectual limitation begins as a moral refusal.
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That’s why I worry about the film. A director can admire Lewis’s portals, creatures, and cosmic song while rejecting the Creator who gives them meaning. She can retain the scenery and rewrite the moral order. The result may look like Narnia without being Lewis’ Narnia.
A story has more than recognizable characters and scenes. It tells us what is good, what has gone wrong, and what would make things right. For Lewis, creation has a good and authoritative Creator. Sin requires repentance. Redemption answers a need human beings cannot overcome by declaring themselves enlightened.
Could a filmmaker present that vision faithfully without sharing Lewis’ faith? Certainly. But she must first let the author challenge her own assumptions. If Gerwig turns his Christian account of creation into a comfortable endorsement of modern cultural priorities, she will have made Uncle Andrew’s mistake: hearing the song and insisting it is merely roaring.
The trailer cannot settle that question, and I will judge the finished film when it arrives. My concern is what Hollywood so often does to stories whose moral claims it finds inconvenient. An adaptation should not become an exercise in correcting the author.
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Christians, however, should not congratulate themselves too quickly. Uncle Andrew is more than a stand-in for a leftist professor, a politician, or a Hollywood director. Lewis’ warning reaches the church as well.
In Romans 1, Paul writes of people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. God reveals himself through creation, but human beings refuse to honor him or give thanks. Their reasoning becomes futile, and their hearts grow dark. They claim wisdom as they become fools.
Paul does not describe every unbeliever as someone who merely lacks information. Our desires shape what we are willing to admit. We can demand more evidence while insulating ourselves from the implications of evidence already before us.
Christians can do this, too. We acknowledge God’s revelation in creation, then find reasons to disregard it. We know a biblical command, then use our intelligence to argue that our circumstances make us the exception. We defend Christian books without accepting their correction. Praising Lewis’ theology is easier than submitting to the God he confessed.
That is why Uncle Andrew belongs in a Christian reflection rather than merely a debate over a Netflix film. We should ask whether our explanations clarify the truth or protect us from it. Can we admit that our clever argument was an excuse? Will we confess when God’s Word confronts something we want to keep?
Christ offers forgiveness to sinners who have spent years defending their sins. His grace frees us to abandon our excuses instead of perfecting them.
I hope Gerwig gives Lewis a faithful hearing. The finished film will show us whether she has. Meanwhile, our own hearing deserves examination. God speaks through his Word, and Uncle Andrew shows how a person can become so skilled at defending himself that he loses the ability to listen.
When justice itself becomes the villain
In Shirley Jackson’s 1948 story “The Lottery,” a town selects one resident by chance and stones the victim to death. The killing is arbitrary by design, a ritual nobody can justify beyond the fact that it has always been done.
Much of the modern Western imagination now approaches capital punishment through a similar lens: not as justice, but as officially sanctioned cruelty. That suspicion fits an older philosophical claim associated with Thrasymachus in Plato’s “Republic”: Justice is “the advantage of the stronger.” Rulers make the rules, call them just, and use them to serve their own interests.
A culture that recognizes only victims, never sinners, will mistake punishment for cruelty and forgiveness for an unnecessary apology.
I have been surveying arguments for and against publicly broadcasting the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009. The Army has scheduled his execution by firing squad for Dec. 3. The Pentagon announced plans to livestream it, although President Trump has said he will decide whether the broadcast goes forward.
Thoughtful conservatives disagree about livestreaming an execution. To understand the objections, I asked people on X to list the arguments they had heard. What stood out was how often the discussion framed morality in terms of consequences rather than the goodness of justice itself.
The broadcast might make Hasan a martyr. Terrorists might use the footage to recruit. Children might encounter it online. It likely would not deter another crime.
Those concerns deserve consideration. But consequences do not exhaust moral reasoning. Consequentialism judges an action by its results. Utilitarianism, one version of consequentialism, weighs overall welfare against suffering. Under that framework, justice can become merely a tool for producing desirable outcomes.
As a philosophy professor, I want to ask a prior question: What if justice is good in itself?
Consider two tests. Would punishing a guilty murderer become pointless if it deterred nobody? Would punishing an innocent person become right if doing so deterred thousands? If your answers are no, you already recognize a moral standard that consequences alone cannot supply.
Justice means giving people their due. A worker deserves his paycheck because he performed the work. His employer cannot justify withholding it by explaining how much happier the company would be with the extra money.
The same principle applies to wrongdoing. Someone who deliberately murders the innocent deserves punishment. The murdered cannot be brought back. That does not mean nothing remains to be done.
Justice is not personal revenge. It is deserved punishment imposed under lawful authority. Justice requires established guilt, proportionate punishment, and limits on the state. It forbids punishing the innocent even when doing so would be popular or useful.
Justice is good in itself. Seeing justice done is a good thing to behold.
Yet our culture increasingly treats punishment as the villain. We learn the offender’s grievances, childhood wounds, and social disadvantages. The victims fade into the background. Understanding how someone became cruel may be valuable. Explanation, however, does not become exoneration.
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Michel Foucault’s influential “Discipline and Punish” examined punishment through the workings of power, discipline, and social control. That analysis encourages suspicion of institutions claiming to administer justice. But identifying abuses of power does not establish that justice itself is merely domination.
Indeed, if justice is nothing more than power, why condemn the powerful for being unjust? The person demanding recompense for a wrong appeals to something beyond the wrongdoer’s preferences. He expects us to recognize that he was owed better. He is claiming that the oppressor is objectively guilty.
None of this settles the livestream question. The state must justify both a punishment and the manner in which it carries that punishment out. Public accountability and acknowledgment of victims matter. So does the distinction between solemn judgment and entertainment, along with the prohibition against gratuitous cruelty.
The justice of Hasan’s punishment does not depend on how spectators respond to it. But neither does a just punishment automatically make every possible way of displaying it wise. The question is whether the state administers justice rightly.
The debate therefore reveals more than disagreement about a camera. It reveals uncertainty about whether anyone truly deserves punishment and whether it is good to see justice enacted. If justice must always prove its usefulness before we acknowledge its goodness, then justice has already lost its authority.
The effort to undermine human justice may also serve a larger purpose: undermining divine justice. Human courts are fallible and limited to this life. Their imperfection does not erase the idea of judgment; for Christians, it points beyond them to the perfect justice of God.
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When a culture treats every offender as ultimately an innocent victim, divine judgment will appear monstrous. God becomes the angry villain while the sinner is merely doing his best. A story long associated with Bertrand Russell captures the posture: Asked what he would say if confronted by God after death, Russell reportedly complained that God had not provided enough evidence.
Scripture presents a different picture. God’s revelation leaves humanity “without excuse,” and before His judgment “every mouth may be stopped.” It is right to stand in awe and fear of God as the perfect judge.
“The wages of sin is death.” Without that truth, the cross becomes unintelligible.
Christ was publicly crucified. He was innocent, yet Christians believe the sins of his people were laid on him. He paid the debt we owed and canceled the record that stood against us. A culture that cannot see justice as good in itself will specialize in justifying its sin and condemning the Judge. It will also lose sight of what the cross means for sinners.
A culture that recognizes only victims, never sinners, will struggle to understand either justice or grace. It will mistake punishment for cruelty and forgiveness for an unnecessary apology.
Justice is good in itself. Its goodness does not depend on applause, deterrence, or our comfort. Until we recover that truth, we will misunderstand both the courtroom and the cross.
You can medicate despair. You can’t manufacture meaning.
What happens when a society teaches people that they have no lasting purpose, then wonders why they feel hopeless?
I am spending time volunteering with Stranraer Reformed Presbyterian Church in Scotland. On Thursday, October 15, the church is hosting a free public talk on depression at 7 p.m. at the Millennium Centre. Depression deserves our attention because its effects reach beyond individuals into families, communities, and the life of nations.
The Christian still wrestles with sin and sorrow. Yet Christ is working in us. Our hope rests on His faithfulness, not on our ability to manufacture a cheerful mood.
I am also a professor at Arizona State University, where I see the importance of this question among students. The 2024-2025 Healthy Minds Study, based on responses from more than 84,000 students at 135 colleges and universities, found that 37% reported moderate to severe depressive symptoms, and 33% reported moderate to severe anxiety. Both measures had improved since 2022, but the burden remains enormous.
In Great Britain, the picture is troubling too. NHS England found a common mental health condition in 22.6% of adults ages 16-64 in 2023-2024, up from 18.9% in 2014. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, the figure was 25.8%. In Scotland, 2023-2024 data show that 10% of adults reported at least two symptoms of depression and 16% at least two symptoms of anxiety.
Some people seek relief through alcohol or drugs, but self-medication can become another prison. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism notes that alcohol may temporarily relieve anxiety even as heavy drinking and repeated withdrawal worsen it. The damage can spread outward: The United Kingdom recorded 9,809 alcohol-specific deaths in 2024, and victims in England and Wales believed offenders were under alcohol's influence in 39% of violent incidents in 2023-2024.
Clinical depression is not simply unbelief. Faithful Christians suffer it, and medical treatment can help. My concern here is spiritual hopelessness: What account of life can sustain someone when pleasure fades and suffering remains?
The secular state can fund treatment and other necessary services, but it cannot supply redemption. No program can answer the question that comes before policy: Why should I have hope? If human beings are only material organisms, here briefly and then gone, what lasting meaning does suffering possess?
That does not mean every government intervention fails. It means government has limits. A list of recommended behaviors may help people manage a problem, but it cannot give them a reason to live or reconcile them to God. Our trouble reaches deeper than ignorance of the rules.
A culture that reduces human beings to appetite, chemistry, and consumption should not be surprised by a crisis of purpose. Physical pleasure and distraction cannot bear the weight of the human soul. An evening's escape still leaves tomorrow's question waiting.
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Christianity begins somewhere else. Human beings are made in the image of God, and Christ redeems His people by His blood. Our lives therefore have meaning now, not merely after death.
Sometimes Christianity itself gets reduced to “when you die, you go to heaven and avoid hell,” as though everything before death were unimportant. That misses our present calling. Alienation from God has consequences now. Clinical depression is no verdict on anyone's salvation, but spiritual despair can foreshadow the hopelessness of separation from God. Communion with Christ brings hope into the present.
First, our feelings do not define us. We cannot always explain why darkness settles over us, but we can bring God's Word to bear on it. The psalmist asks his own troubled soul, “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” (Psalm 42:5). Then he directs it: “Hope in God.” His sorrow is real, but it does not have the final word.
Second, Christianity offers grace rather than a ladder we climb to earn acceptance. Rules can identify wrongdoing, but they cannot free sinners from sin's power. Islam's five pillars, for example, prescribe religious duties, but Islam does not offer the Reformed Christian doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone. The distinction is not academic: Christian hope rests on what Christ has done, not on whether we can accumulate enough religious merit.
I find no comparable assurance in religions built around reincarnation. A cycle of death and rebirth governed by karma is not the Christian promise of reconciliation with God and resurrection. Christianity offers a destination, not an endless series of attempts to repair ourselves.
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The Christian still wrestles with sin and sorrow. Yet Christ is working in us. Our hope rests on His faithfulness, not on our ability to manufacture a cheerful mood.
That hope also takes practical form in the church. We visit the lonely, listen to the grieving, pray with the discouraged, and help families bear burdens they cannot carry alone. The sufferer needs patient fellowship, not an accusation that sadness proves spiritual failure. The gospel gives us both a message to proclaim and neighbors to love.
Finally, Christian hope reaches beyond the individual. The Great Commission sends the church into the world because the nations belong within the scope of Christ's saving purpose. History need not follow a straight upward line; setbacks do not cancel God's promises. I believe Scripture points toward a day when “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord” as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9).
That gives parents, students, and churches reason to labor faithfully even when today's headlines seem to announce defeat.
Christians have hope to offer a hopeless world. We should bring it into the darkness. If you happen to be in the Stranraer area, join us October 15 at 7 p.m. And for a further resource on spiritual depression, listen to Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ series.
What Chris Hansen knows about sin that modern culture forgets
“You see how this looks, right?”
That question captures Chris Hansen’s method. He takes a man who believed he was meeting a child for sex and forces him to look at his own conduct from the outside.
We do not merely lie to other people. We lie to ourselves. That is how ‘I knew it was wrong’ can coexist with ‘I did it anyway.’
For more than two decades, Hansen’s predator stings — from NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” to later investigations — have offered a grim case study in self-deception. The men know the conduct is wrong. They choose it anyway. Then, when Hansen arrives with the transcripts, they scramble to preserve the belief that they are good men.
In other words, Chris Hansen has given us a case study in sin.
The basic scenario is familiar. An adult begins communicating online with someone he believes is underage. The age is made explicit. The conversation becomes sexual. A meeting is arranged. The man drives to the house.
Then Hansen walks into the room.
“Have a seat. What are you doing here?”
Almost nobody simply says, “I came here because I wanted to have sex with a child.”
Instead, the explanations begin.
“I just came to talk.” “I was lonely.” “I wanted to make sure she was OK.” “I knew this was probably a setup.” Sometimes the man insists he intended to warn the supposed child about the dangers of talking to strangers online.
Then Hansen produces the chat logs.
He reads an explicit message in that grave, almost bureaucratic voice and asks, “What did you mean by that?” Everyone knows what it means. The point is that the words are no longer private. Hansen has dragged the man’s rationalizations into the open and placed them next to the evidence.
Now the story changes. Simple denial will not work, so the explanation becomes biography. He was lonely. He was depressed. He had a hard day. The goal is no longer to deny the conduct but to move the audience’s sympathy toward the man who chose it.
Hansen keeps returning to the same question: Does any of that make it acceptable to send sexual messages to someone who told you she was 13?
The excuses collapse one by one.
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Perhaps he missed the message stating the child’s age. Hansen points to the exchange in which the decoy asked whether the age was a problem and the man said it was not.
Perhaps he never intended to do anything sexual. Hansen reads the acts the man described in his own messages.
Perhaps he changed his mind on the drive over. Then why did he keep driving? Why did he knock on the door? Why did he bring condoms?
If he knew it was wrong, why did he still show up?
At some point, the rational answers run out. What remains is the answer many of the men cannot bear to say plainly: I wanted to do this.
Instead, they reach for the self-image they are desperate to protect. “I’m not a predator.” “I’m a good person.” “I just made one stupid mistake.”
The deception is not merely directed at Hansen. Much of it appears to be directed inward.
They are trying to preserve a portrait of themselves that the evidence no longer supports. Dorian Gray had the decency to keep his portrait hidden in the attic. Hansen puts the chat log on the kitchen table.
This is where Hansen becomes an accidental moral philosopher. He keeps asking a question human beings are remarkably good at avoiding: Why did you do what you did if you knew it was wrong?
The answer is frequently, “I don’t know.”
Philosophers have a name for part of this problem: weakness of the will, or akrasia. A person judges one course of action to be better and chooses another anyway.
Christianity goes farther. Sin is not merely rule-breaking. It disorders desire and corrupts our understanding of ourselves. Jeremiah says the heart is deceitful. Paul describes people as suppressing truths they do not want to face.
We do not merely lie to other people. We lie to ourselves.
That is how “I knew it was wrong” can coexist with “I did it anyway.” Fallen human beings do not merely fail to do the good they claim to know. They can learn to love what is evil while renaming it good. Milton gives Satan the line: “Evil, be thou my good.”
Some of the strangest Hansen encounters make the point even more sharply: The men recognize him.
They have watched the show. They know what happens. They have seen other men caught in precisely the same way. Yet they somehow never placed themselves in the same category.
Those guys were predators. I’m different.
Hansen sometimes asks whether they have children the same age as the decoy. Many do. What would they think if a grown man sent their child these messages? The moral judgment suddenly becomes easy — until Hansen turns it back on them.
That brings us to the problem with toxic empathy.
Compassion is a virtue. But compassion becomes morally destructive when it rearranges the categories of victim and perpetrator.
A man who drives to a house believing he is about to sexually exploit a child may indeed be lonely. He may have suffered. He may have psychological problems. Those facts can help explain him. They do not make him the victim of the encounter.
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The child he intended to exploit is the victim.
Our culture increasingly prefers therapeutic questions: What happened to him? Why is he hurting? How did society fail him? Those can be legitimate questions. They become toxic when they displace the more basic moral question: What did he choose to do to someone else?
Hansen’s great contribution is remarkably simple. He puts the evidence on the table and asks the person to account for it.
In an interview with me, Hansen said he learned something from Mike Wallace: Sometimes the most powerful question is simply, “Explain.”
That is why the format has a moral force larger than the television sting itself. Explanation is where excuses either become clearer or finally run out.
For more than 20 years, Hansen’s subjects have demonstrated something Christianity has taught for 2,000 years. “The heart is deceitful above all things,” Jeremiah admonishes, “and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
Hansen’s kitchen table is not a confessional. But it is a place where self-deception has a hard time surviving the evidence.
There is a place sin cannot molest
After a week like this one, many Americans arrive at Sunday carrying more than they can easily name.
This past week marked one year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking to students at Utah Valley University. The following day, our nation observed the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, when 2,977 people were murdered in New York, at the Pentagon, and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
May we draw as near as circumstances allow, sit with them in their sorrow, speak the names of those they love, and remind them that grief does not have to be carried alone.
Though different in scale and circumstance, both remind us that evil never remains theoretical. Eventually, it enters a crowd, a cockpit, an office, a home, leaving behind blood, unanswered questions, and an empty chair.
Public trauma always becomes private sorrow, one household at a time.
We understandably respond with investigations, arguments, and demands for accountability. We should seek truth and justice. Evil should be named without apology. But grief should not have to pass an ideological examination before we treat it as grief.
In 1903, a Presbyterian minister named Cleland McAfee faced a brutal week of grief when his brother lost two young daughters to diphtheria within 24 hours. Because the disease was highly contagious, the family’s home was quarantined.
McAfee was a preacher, theologian, musician, and choir director. He stayed up late, considering what he could possibly say or sing the following Sunday.
From his own sorrow, he wrote the words and music to a hymn:
There is a place of quiet rest,
Near to the heart of God,
A place where sin cannot molest,
Near to the heart of God.
The modern ear catches on the word “molest.” Today, it almost always refers to sexual abuse. McAfee used the word in its older and broader sense: to harass, disturb, persecute, or injure with hostile intent.
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It is a jarring word, but it is the right one.
Sin does indeed molest. It does not knock politely before entering. It intrudes, violates, and corrupts. It turns passenger planes into weapons and political disagreement into bloodshed. Then it continues its work by tempting us to mock the dead, exploit the bereaved, turn suffering into content, and answer hatred with still more hatred.
McAfee did not write his hymn because sorrow had passed his family by. He wrote it because sorrow had come through the door. His nieces were dead, his brother’s home was darkened, and the family remained isolated by disease.
He did not attempt to explain why the children died. Instead, he pointed his brother toward the only refuge death could not breach:
O Jesus, blest Redeemer,
Sent from the heart of God,
Hold us who wait before Thee,
Near to the heart of God.
The choir learned the hymn at its Saturday evening rehearsal. Because the home remained quarantined, they could not go inside to embrace the family or sit beside them.
So they came as close as they could.
Standing on the lawn beneath the night sky, the choir sang through the walls. They did not repair the loss or answer the family’s questions. They simply placed themselves as near to the grieving family as the quarantine allowed, and they sang.
That image has stayed with me for years: a grieving family inside, the church outside, darkness surrounding them, and a hymn passing through the walls.
Twenty-five years after September 11, families still gather to read the names of those who died. One year after Charlie Kirk’s murder, his wife, children, friends, and colleagues continue living with the chair he no longer fills.
Their persistent grief is not weakness. It is the continuing cost of love.
McAfee’s hymn does not promise that sin cannot reach our bodies, families, or country. The circumstances that produced it would disprove such a claim. The place near to the heart of God is not where Christians become immune to suffering. It is where we find refuge when suffering comes and assurance that evil does not possess ultimate authority.
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Christ stepped into this broken world and took its worst. The cross shows us what sin does; the empty tomb shows us that sin does not get the last word.
Most of us will never address a grieving country, but nearly all of us know someone living inside a darkened house.
The lawn may be literal, or it may be a kitchen table, a church pew, a telephone call, or a quiet visit where very little is said.
After such a solemn week, and as battles rage within and beyond our borders, may we enter the coming days looking for the brokenhearted. May we draw as near as circumstances allow, sit with them in their sorrow, speak the names of those they love, and remind them that grief does not have to be carried alone.
And when words fail, perhaps we too can stand on the lawn and sing.
The child Gloria Steinem left out of the story
They say diamonds are forever, but so are humans. We do not stop existing at the death of our bodies. And that is why the death of Gloria Steinem should cause us to think seriously about more than her political legacy as a leftist activist.
Steinem died Wednesday at age 92. She will be remembered as one of the most influential feminists of the last century, a co-founder of Ms. magazine, and a leader in the movement that made abortion a defining element of modern feminism.
Gloria Steinem’s death should remind us that human beings are forever. That makes killing infinitely more serious than our culture wants to admit.
But there is another person whose life must be remembered when we remember Steinem: the unborn child she aborted.
Steinem became pregnant at 22. She had broken off an engagement and was preparing to leave for India. Abortion was illegal in Britain except in limited circumstances, but a physician, John Sharpe, helped her obtain one.
Decades later, Steinem dedicated her memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to Sharpe. She remembered his words to her: “You must promise me two things.” One was that she not reveal his name. The other was: “You will do what you want to do with your life.”
Those words summarize an entire moral revolution.
But what about the other life? What did that child want to do with his or her life?
That child never went to India. Never went to school. Never chose a career. Never fell in love. Never held a child. Never traveled, wrote a book, changed political parties, found religion, rejected religion, made mistakes, sought forgiveness, or grew old.
The philosophy supposedly centered on “choice” began by taking every choice away from someone else. There is no higher level of selfishness than to end another person’s life so that person does not get in the way of your own plans.
What does this tell us about the human heart?
Steinem once said, “I didn’t go to school until I was 12, so I missed a little bit of social conditioning.” She considered freedom from conventional social expectations liberating. That theme ran through her life: question inherited rules, throw off imposed roles, and determine your own destiny. In its most radical form, modern feminism treats human rules as mere social constructs and “being yourself” as acting on your desires without discipline or correction.
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There is something attractive about that message. Human beings should question unjust traditions. But there is a darker possibility. What if the moral law we are overthrowing is not merely “social conditioning”? What if some acts really are wrong regardless of what society says? Steinem’s questioning was not merely philosophical curiosity. It echoed the sin of Genesis 3: the desire to become one’s own god, even to claim power over the life of another human being.
The most frightening capacity of the human mind is not ignorance. It is self-justification. We can take something terrible and give it a noble name.
Steinem did not merely defend her abortion reluctantly. She later described it as taking “responsibility for my own life.” She said she tried to make herself feel guilty by imagining how old her child would have been. It is as if Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov had stopped midway through “Crime and Punishment,” still convinced that murder could elevate him above ordinary morality.
That is chilling precisely because the child disappears from the moral calculation.
Her life. Her responsibility. Her choice. Her future.
But another human being had a life too.
What does this say about the movement that followed her?
Steinem did not keep this reasoning private. She helped make it a political philosophy.
Millions of Americans were taught to describe abortion in the language of liberation, autonomy, and reproductive freedom. The unborn child became almost linguistically invisible. We learned to talk endlessly about the woman’s future while refusing to talk about the future being deliberately ended.
That is how moral revolutions work. They do not normally begin by convincing people to celebrate evil as evil. They rename it as something good.
Murder becomes “choice.”
The destruction of a human life becomes “health care.”
And denying another human being her entire future becomes “doing what you want with your life.”
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The lesson of Steinem’s life is therefore larger than Steinem. She became influential because millions of people found that reasoning persuasive. A culture embraced the astonishing proposition that equality could be advanced by denying the most defenseless human beings even the equality of being allowed to live.
And now comes the question death forces upon us.
Christians believe Gloria Steinem still exists. We also believe her child still exists. Death does not make our actions disappear. It removes our ability to distract ourselves from them.
Imagine the question that child could ask: Mom, why did you kill me? Why was your future worth more than mine? Why did you get to “do what you want to do with your life” while deciding that I would never get to do anything with mine?
And widen the circle. What of the millions whose deaths were justified by the political movement Steinem helped lead? What happens when slogans about “reproductive freedom” meet the human beings whose lives those slogans helped extinguish?
Gloria Steinem’s death should remind us that human beings are forever. That makes killing infinitely more serious than our culture wants to admit.
And it makes repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God infinitely more urgent.
The great question is not whether history praises us after we die. It is whether the God who gave life agrees with what we did with it. Steinem now stands before His judgment seat.
The Lindsay Clancy Case Should Make Pro-Lifers Rethink Absolving Mothers Of Murder
The growing calls for compassion and not punishment for Lindsay Clancy should force conservatives to confront their own history of excusing women who kill their children prenatally.Pregnant woman reveals method to make her unborn son gay — and progressive moms cheer
A very disturbing TikTok video has gone viral after a pregnant woman recorded herself playing ABBA songs to make her unborn son gay — while thousands of mothers cheered her on in the comments and across social media.
The video shows her blasting the lyrics “Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight” next to her stomach.
BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is shocked to read the comments, which include things like, “My son is 4 and exclusively listens to Sabrina Carpenter. Hopes are very high for him being gay.”
“My son just officially came out a few months ago,” reads another comment with a cheering emoji.
Another one reads, “My son was born to ‘Dancing Queen.’ I have high hopes for him.”
“This is disgusting that you are thinking about your child’s sexuality,” Stuckey says.
“It’s a horrible thing to wish on someone. It is. Now, I’m a Christian, and I believe that homosexuality is a sin, OK. But I also think that it’s bad for society to encourage this kind of thing,” she continues.
“We should be encouraging our boys to be strong and to be brave and to be protectors and to be fighters and to rein their masculine energy into good things. Yes, and you can call that old-fashioned, but it’s true,” she adds.
Stuckey likens these mothers’ hopes for gay sons to “conversion therapy” and calls it “very, very grotesque.”
“I talk about this concept of what I call ‘toxic mommy culture’ in my book, ‘You’re Not Enough (and That’s Okay)’ — when moms make their feelings and their validation and their social image the highest priority and they project that onto their kids and they use their children as props to perform this, like, progressivism on social media for likes, affirmation, cultural approval,” Stuckey says.
“I just find this little thing that this mother is doing gross. ... Kids are always the unconsenting subjects of progressive social experiments,” she continues. “It’s not good.”
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The left’s Cesar Chavez problem is much bigger than Cesar Chavez
For decades, Cesar Chavez occupied near-canonical status in American universities. The United Farm Workers leader’s name adorned schools, his image filled lecture slides, and his story was told as secular hagiography: the humble labor leader who organized the oppressed, challenged exploitation, and embodied moral courage in the struggle for justice.
Now that image is cracking.
The reassessment of Chavez is not the end of something. It is the beginning of a broader reckoning.
A blockbuster New York Times story this month detailed serious allegations of sexual misconduct, including deeply disturbing claims that, if true, must force a fundamental reassessment of Chavez. The question is not only whether the allegations are true, but why this reckoning arrived only now.
What we are witnessing is not merely the fall of a man but the exposure of a pattern — one that reveals more about the moral framework of academic elites than about Chavez himself.
The manufactured hero
For years, Chavez has been presented, especially in university settings, as a hero of the proletariat. Not always in explicitly Marxist terms, of course. The language is smoother than that. But the structure is unmistakable: Chavez as the labor leader who stood against capital, exposed exploitation, and mobilized collective struggle in the name of justice.
Students are taught to see history as the story of structural oppression and economic conflict. Chavez became a usable symbol in that story. Because he served that function, his image was carefully curated.
What is now becoming clear is that the darker aspects of Chavez’s life were not entirely unknown. Reports of infidelity, domineering leadership, and abuses of power were not buried in some inaccessible archive. They were part of the broader historical record.
Silence around sin
Yet they were largely ignored.
That is how leftist professors handle their heroes. The facts that do not serve the narrative get minimized, reframed, or omitted. This is the first lesson of the current moment: The moral concern of the DEI professoriat is not truth but rather usefulness to the cause.
A figure is praised or condemned not by a consistent moral standard, but by whether he advances a political project. As long as Chavez could serve as a symbol of labor activism and anti-capitalist struggle, his sins remained background noise. Now that those sins threaten his usefulness, they have moved to the foreground.
No new moral conscience has emerged on the left. What we’re seeing is pure calculation.
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A narrow moral vision
The deeper problem goes beyond hypocrisy. The moral vision offered by Chavez’s academic admirers is radically narrow. It focuses almost entirely on one category of wrongdoing: economic injustice. Greed, real and serious as it is, gets elevated into the supreme moral concern. Entire departments and movements organize themselves around exposing and correcting it.
But what about lust? What about pride? What about the abuse of power in personal life, not just economic systems?
Those sins get treated as secondary or, worse, as distractions from the real work of social transformation. The result is a moral framework that is selective and shallow. It addresses external structures while neglecting the corruption of the human heart. Marxism 101 still teaches that if we revolt our way into a better system, we can somehow produce a better man.
But a philosophy with no coherent account of sin cannot solve sin.
From moralism to tyranny
That failure has predictable consequences. If the problem lies mainly in external systems, then the solution must also be external: regulation, enforcement, and conformity. Behavior must be monitored. Speech must be controlled. Dissent must be suppressed.
That is why academic environments that preach tolerance so often practice censorship. That is why calls for equity come paired with ideological compliance. Those who depart from the approved narrative do not get argued with. They get disciplined.
Until we recover a full account of human nature, one that takes sin seriously and looks beyond man for its cure, we will repeat this cycle again and again.
And that is why such movements, once they gain power, tilt toward tyranny. They do not govern by the standards of fairness they once demanded, because their moral framework never grounded those standards in the first place. It only deployed them when useful.
The fall of Chavez is not an anomaly. It is a case study. A movement that cannot account for sin will eventually be undone by it. Robespierre gets guillotined every time.
The deeper problem
At the heart of all this sits a basic misdiagnosis. Man’s greatest problem is not economic inequality. It is not structural oppression. It is not even political injustice, though all of those are real. Man’s greatest problem is sin.
It is the corruption of the heart that gives rise to every form of injustice, whether in the marketplace or the home, the factory or the family. No amount of social reorganization can fix that. You can redistribute wealth, rewrite laws, and restructure institutions and still end up with the same fallen human nature operating under new conditions.
That is why movements that promise moral transformation through politics end in disappointment. They try to fix what is internal by manipulating what is external. A Latin American studies professor once told a friend of mine, “Che su Christo.” Che is Christ.
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The only real solution
But there is only one Christ and only one remedy for sin, and it is the one most conspicuously absent from the classrooms that long celebrated Chavez.
The answer is not a program or a policy. It is a person.
Christ does not merely demand outward reform. He gives a new heart. He restores sinners to communion with God. He addresses not only the consequences of sin, but its source. He transforms the inner man, and from that transformation flow justice, righteousness, and love.
That is precisely why He is excluded. A system built on human effort, collective struggle, and ideological conformity cannot tolerate a solution rooted in repentance, grace, and divine authority. It is the works-righteousness religion of our age.
The inevitable reckoning
The reassessment of Chavez is not the end of something. It is the beginning of a broader reckoning. If our heroes are chosen for usefulness rather than virtue, they will disappoint us. If our moral standards are selective, they will collapse under their own inconsistency.
And if we refuse to acknowledge the true nature of sin, we will keep acting surprised by its consequences. The real lesson of this moment is not that another historical figure has fallen. It is that a moral system built on partial truths and ideological commitments cannot bear the weight of reality.
Until we recover a full account of human nature, one that takes sin seriously and looks beyond man for its cure, we will repeat this cycle again and again.
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