Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1007 ｜ Republicans Push Taxpayer-Funded IVF ｜ Guest： Andrew T. Walker

00:00:00.920 Republicans are now pushing a bill to secure taxpayer-funded IVF.

00:00:07.700 We are discussing that as well as natural law.

00:00:11.120 What is it? Why does it matter?

00:00:13.120 How does it apply to our political views as Christians today?

00:00:19.000 Andrew Walker, managing editor at World Magazine, among many other things,

00:00:24.540 is here to discuss this in light of the publication of his new book on natural law.

00:00:30.000 You are going to love this conversation and learn so much.

00:00:33.360 This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.

00:00:35.440 Go to GoodRanchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. 0.97

00:00:37.680 That's GoodRanchers.com, code Allie.

00:00:49.220 Andrew, thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

00:00:52.860 You've been on before, but could you remind those who may not know who you are and what you do?

00:00:57.960 Sure, Allie. It's great to be with you.

00:01:00.000 My name is Andrew Walker, and I teach Christian ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

00:01:07.900 And then I'm also a fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

00:01:11.600 So I've been teaching for almost five years at this point.

00:01:14.540 And that's not even all your titles.

00:01:16.940 You're also managing editor of World Magazine, too, which is big.

00:01:20.080 Yeah, I carry quite a few titles. I stay busy.

00:01:24.660 I'm thankful to have you as one of our writers as well.

00:01:27.060 Yes, and a girl dad. So a lot going on.

00:01:31.520 Absolutely. In fact, after this, I got to go to a daughter's program for end-of-year school events.

00:01:36.460 Aw, fun, fun. I understand how that is, balancing all the things all at once.

00:01:43.260 Okay, before we get into your new book, I just want to talk about some things that happened this week that you offered commentary on on X.

00:01:50.960 And because we talked about it yesterday on this show, the Pope's recent interview with 60 Minutes, we talked about his comments about everyone being fundamentally good.

00:02:02.360 And I guess before I get into what you said on X, I'm curious your take on that.

00:02:07.840 The Pope says we're fundamentally good.

00:02:09.880 There may be some rogues, some sinners out there, but at the end of the day, the heart is good.

00:02:14.720 What did you make of that?

00:02:15.620 Sure. So, I mean, as a Protestant, I would have to firmly disagree with what Pope Francis said right here.

00:02:23.480 I think this goes to the heart of some of the important differences in Catholicism versus Protestantism.

00:02:30.280 Protestants tend to have a greater stress on the sinfulness of human nature post-fall, whereas in Catholicism, generally speaking, there tends to be more of an optimistic view of human nature.

00:02:45.200 And so on the one hand, it wasn't all that surprising to hear Pope Francis cast human nature in a more cheerful, positive way.

00:02:56.300 But then I think he went shockingly too far in calling humans fundamentally good.

00:03:03.460 I don't even think most people think that we're fundamentally good.

00:03:07.200 If you read a lot of political philosophers through history who aren't even Christians, they'll all acknowledge that humanity is pretty corrupt and pretty bad. 0.62

00:03:15.860 And if you give humanity free reign to do what it will, it's going to do some bad stuff.

00:03:21.200 So I think that this was, I mean, out of sync with some of its own Catholic doctrine in some sense as well, because he spends this so positively.

00:03:30.300 But I also want to make this kind of juxtaposition is he says, you know, humans are fundamentally good.

00:03:37.480 But then how does 60 Minutes end on its program?

00:03:41.860 It starts talking about the Holocaust. 0.61

00:03:44.220 It gives this story that literally brought my wife to tears talking about the horrors of the Holocaust.

00:03:49.600 And the Holocaust is one of the one of the gravest moral events in human history, which I think demonstrates that the human heart is fallen. 0.73

00:04:00.360 No one is good, according to Scripture.

00:04:03.020 No, not one.

00:04:04.100 We are in Colossians chapter one.

00:04:06.460 It talks about how we are hostile.

00:04:09.300 So we're not just kind of in a position of neutrality.

00:04:12.220 We're actively working against God's plan.

00:04:15.880 So this is, I think, it was a really tragic overstatement by the Pope.

00:04:20.480 And what did you think about this statement that he made?

00:04:23.460 Conservative is one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that.

00:04:28.140 It is a suicidal attitude.

00:04:30.560 That was a comment that he also made to Nora O'Donnell.

00:04:33.700 What's your response to that?

00:04:36.360 Yeah.

00:04:36.600 So, I mean, I think if he's talking about this in an American conservative context, that might be the most cheerful way to spin his comments.

00:04:45.140 But even there, what are the American conservative Catholics trying to do?

00:04:48.920 They're trying to hold on to simple Catholic teaching, and particularly all of these issues that are the most controversial around gender, sexuality, abortion.

00:04:59.860 Everyone knows that the Francis papacy has been a papacy of, I think, strategic ambiguity and willed ambiguity.

00:05:08.900 And he has, without a doubt, moved the Catholic Church to the left, even though, you know, the framing would suggest that he can't officially change the doctrine.

00:05:18.440 Okay.

00:05:18.600 Well, if he can't officially change the doctrine, he can definitely change how Catholics are thinking about these issues and talking about these issues. 0.79

00:05:27.360 So, I think that when you think about what biblical orthodoxy is, it's the faith once and for all delivered to the saints.

00:05:36.220 To conserve is to hold on to and to perpetuate a certain body of doctrine and a certain body of teaching.

00:05:44.660 And so, I think it's absolutely absurd to criticize conservatives for doing the very thing that I think Christians are called to do, which is to conserve the faith.

00:05:56.760 If he's criticizing American political conservatives, okay, I can understand that.

00:06:01.880 I don't think that's what this pope is doing as we've seen this papacy unfold over the last decade plus.

00:06:08.980 And to be fair to the pope, Nora O'Donnell also asked him, hey, okay, if we've got a Catholic girl who is watching this, can she hope that she's ever going to be a part of the clergy?

00:06:32.300 And he just answered simply, no.

00:06:34.480 So, he does understand, at least when it comes to that, that there are things to conserve and there's a reason to conserve them.

00:06:44.000 So, I don't know, maybe he was talking about a more narrow definition of conservatism there, even though I would still disagree with him.

00:06:52.600 You know, to his credit, he does believe in conserving some fundamental things about Catholic doctrine.

00:06:59.340 Yeah, and I actually, I'll be candid, I am critical of this pope, very much so, but this pope has actually, at this particular interview, he gave some very clarifying answers.

00:07:09.980 He said that the church cannot bless homosexual unions.

00:07:14.380 He spoke against the issue of surrogacy.

00:07:17.020 And I do want to applaud that, but then you have to put that up against other actions that he's taken where the language in his papacy can appear very, very ambiguous at times.

00:07:27.800 Right.

00:07:28.940 We have our own issues on the Protestant side and in the American side, especially on things that I see Catholics, and in particular the pope, remain very clear and strong on, and that is the theology of the body, and especially reproduction.

00:07:47.760 I think evangelicals have a long way to go to catch up to how clear many Catholics and Catholic teaching has been when it comes to things like IVF.

00:08:00.560 And we see that in two of our Republican politicians.

00:08:05.520 We've got Ted Cruz, we've got Katie Britt.

00:08:07.780 I think both of them may identify as evangelicals.

00:08:11.420 I know Katie Britt does.

00:08:14.140 I'm not really sure about Ted Cruz, but they are now announcing a new bill that declares IVF in vitro fertilization a right.

00:08:28.100 This is SOT1.

00:08:28.960 So we came together and said, let's draft a simple, straightforward federal bill that creates a federal right, that you as a parent have a right to have access to IVF.

00:08:40.580 If you want to have a child and you need medical assistance to do so, that should be your right.

00:08:47.760 A right to IVF.

00:08:50.940 What do you make of that?

00:08:51.740 I'll be honest, Ali.

00:08:55.140 I was really discouraged with this legislation coming out from two senators who I want to be very clear.

00:09:01.740 I really respect and admire Senator Katie Britt, Senator Ted Cruz.

00:09:07.300 I think that this is obviously coming in the aftermath of the Alabama Supreme Court decision from earlier in the year.

00:09:14.100 But I think, tragically, they're going further out in support of a practice that, tragically, most Americans are just woefully misinformed about when it comes to what IVF is.

00:09:28.100 IVF obviously can help infertile couples bring children into the world, but there's a dark underbelly to the IVF issue, which is the creation of excess embryos after IVF procedures are done that are perpetually cryo-preserved, oftentimes destroyed.

00:09:48.400 And it's just, it's an affront to human dignity in the service of so-called support for human dignity.

00:09:56.260 And so you want to affirm the desire for a family.

00:09:59.700 Absolutely, that's a godly desire.

00:10:01.860 The issue is, Scripture doesn't allow us to do whatever we want to bring about good ends.

00:10:08.980 That's called consequentialism.

00:10:10.940 And we can't do bad things in order for good outcomes as a result.

00:10:16.460 And so I think that this is one of these issues where, tragically, the Republican Party has been caught flat-footed, and they need to do some more education and more equipping of themselves about what's actually going on with IVF.

00:10:30.840 Yes, we like to say that when technology takes us from what is natural to what is possible, Christians have the responsibility to ask, but is this moral?

00:10:40.580 And more importantly, is this biblical?

00:10:42.140 And Catholic teaching even goes further, which I love, than just saying, okay, you can only make one embryo at a time and transfer that embryo, which of course I think is preferable to making a dozen embryos.

00:10:52.920 But Catholic teaching takes issue with removing or with separating reproduction from sex, which I think is good and I think is fair, because when you make that separation, all kinds of ethical issues flow from that.

00:11:11.600 And I think we can have compassion, of course, for those who desire a child, what biological children of their own, that's a natural good desire.

00:11:21.880 However, like you said, good desires do not justify an any means necessary approach to anything, but particularly reproduction, because we are talking about people made in the image of God.

00:11:35.380 And I do see a disconnect here among pro-lifers.

00:11:39.580 I'm sure that Senator Cruz and maybe Senator Britt have said at one point, life starts at conception.

00:11:45.480 I'm just assuming that they've probably said that before.

00:11:48.540 But if life starts at conception, then how we treat embryos matters.

00:11:53.780 IVF very often includes a eugenics process of selecting the best embryos and discarding the others.

00:12:00.460 As you said, indefinite freezing of those embryos, if life begins at conception, then how can we say that we have a right to IVF when inherent in IVF is the mistreatment of these little human beings made in God's image?

00:12:17.800 I think you're exactly right.

00:12:47.800 To bring children into the world however you would want, utilizing any means that you would want.

00:12:54.540 I think the language of children as a right versus children as a gift from the Lord is really clear categorical differences in how we want to frame this.

00:13:05.680 But I also want to commend something you just said because you're really getting to some of the deeper kind of textual theological issues at play when you're talking about, you know, do we have a right to sever the act of intimacy from reproduction?

00:13:22.720 And I think that when you look at what Genesis is giving, it's giving a picture of creation order where the act that unites husband and wife is the same act that can also make them mother and father.

00:13:37.760 And so for us to introduce third party technologies that can disrupt kind of this organic union of bodies, I think that can't be done without some consequences, cascading consequences happening on the backside.

00:13:57.720 Yeah. And, you know, the interviewer, to her credit, tried to confront Senator Cruz with this, with this kind of disconnect that we see among a lot of pro-lifers.

00:14:08.640 Here's that, too.

00:14:10.040 Is an IVF embryo considered life at conception?

00:14:13.660 Well, look, I can tell you that there is unanimity.

00:14:16.500 I believe all 100 senators support IVF.

00:14:19.780 I don't know a single senator that does not.

00:14:21.980 I don't know a single Republican that does not.

00:14:23.640 I don't know a single Democrat that does not.

00:14:25.740 We ought to be able to find real agreement on a question like IVF.

00:14:30.640 That was a master class in PR.

00:14:33.080 Pivot.

00:14:33.920 An incredible pivot.

00:14:35.500 Just completely ignored the question and said there is a lot of agreement on this issue, which I think I think that he's probably right.

00:14:44.840 I think that he's right that there probably are no Republicans, at least, who will publicly say that they're against IVF.

00:14:52.640 I think you're right.

00:14:53.660 I think that this demonstrates kind of a gap in a lot of conservative thinking about the nature of human embryos, the nature of human dignity.

00:15:03.160 I think that what we all have to consider is the question of who is our neighbor.

00:15:09.480 And, Ali, you and I are having this conversation as an adult male and an adult female.

00:15:17.020 What we both have in common is that we were once embryos.

00:15:21.180 But when we were embryos, we were still the same individuals and persons that we are today.

00:15:28.220 What has allowed for you and I to have this conversation together is that we were allowed to reach our developmental capacities.

00:15:38.360 We were able to grow.

00:15:39.600 And, by the way, we're going to keep growing and keep developing until our lives naturally end.

00:15:45.540 I think what we have to reckon with and what United States senators have to reckon with is this question of who is our neighbor.

00:15:51.820 Do we want to leave our neighbors cryogenically preserved for years on end?

00:16:00.940 To speak candidly in some powerful metaphor here, America has a tragic history in kind of trafficking and trading in human bodies.

00:16:11.580 We did that a couple hundred years ago.

00:16:13.840 It didn't go well, to put it mildly.

00:16:16.260 That was an evil systemic injustice.

00:16:18.480 But because we have voiceless, small individuals who I believe are human beings who can't speak for themselves, these individuals need advocates who have had their opportunity to grow and mature to lobby on their behalf.

00:16:34.100 And so I'm so thankful we can have this conversation today.

00:16:36.480 Yeah.

00:16:36.840 And I just want to remind people, too, that when we're talking about IVF, we're not just talking about the young Christian couple who, unfortunately, is unable to conceive naturally.

00:16:47.780 We are also talking about the two men who bought the eggs from one woman and rented the womb of another woman.

00:16:54.880 They also have to go through an IVF process in order to conceive a child that is biologically one of theirs.

00:17:02.420 We're talking about two women buying the sperm from one man and then having a child that way. 0.99

00:17:08.520 We are talking about single men using a surrogate to be able to basically buy a child and create an embryo through IVF. 0.78

00:17:19.420 So when we have a right to IVF, we are saying you have a right funded by the taxpayers, I believe, according to National Review, funded by the taxpayers to create children.

00:17:30.240 And as far as I see, there's no limit on how many children a person can create.

00:17:35.500 For example, I think Paris Hilton through IVF created over a dozen embryos and she kept on creating more trying to get a girl. 0.95

00:17:43.860 And people think, oh, that's just an extreme example.

00:17:46.920 No, that kind of eugenics process is very common.

00:17:50.540 I'm not saying every single IVF case, but it's very common.

00:17:54.000 And so, again, I would just, you know, challenge pro-lifers to apply the same thinking that we have to abortion, that a person is a person no matter how small, to IVF, too.

00:18:04.960 And I do think it's sad to see Republicans as the ones who are championing this.

00:18:11.380 I totally agree.

00:18:12.460 And, I mean, there's two.

00:18:15.180 First is I think what the IVF and surrogacy industries do is to make children preeminently about the desires of adults rather than the good of children.

00:18:28.100 And I think that we're kind of we're inverting kind of the moral triage here.

00:18:33.780 We're first concerned about what parents can get out of children rather than looking to the child's interest.

00:18:39.480 And so I think you raised a good point of when we create this kind of regime of IVF, what we're doing is we're creating situations where children can be brought into the world where they are intentionally denied either maternal love or paternal love in certain situations.

00:18:57.920 And I think all of this stems back, Ali, from something you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, is once you step outside that Genesis 1 and 2 framework, once we kind of interrupt or sever the kind of natural organic goods that go into marriage, that go into family life,

00:19:18.880 these types of consequences are necessarily going to follow because our technology in America often is far outpacing our morality, which is tragic.

00:19:31.400 Yes, yes.

00:19:32.040 That's a good way.

00:19:33.060 That's a good way to put it.

00:19:34.340 The technology is outpacing our morality.

00:19:37.420 But it takes courage and it takes willpower in order to try to not only catch up to it but get ahead of it.

00:19:44.780 And I think too often when you've got money involved, when you've got special interests involved, if there's no interest in morally stopping technological development or no courage or no will to do that, then things get really dark really fast, really dystopian really fast, which I think is where we're going.

00:20:04.720 I mean, you could argue that's the entire moral of the story of Brave New World is technology outpacing morality and ending in a really ugly way.

00:20:14.780 Okay, well, this ties in beautifully to your new book.

00:20:29.340 And your new book is titled Faithful Reason, Natural Law, Ethics for God's Glory and Our Good.

00:20:36.480 It was just released, which is really exciting.

00:20:39.860 So just give us a big picture overview of what this is and why you wrote it.

00:20:44.780 Well, Ali, the last 20 minutes we've been talking and having a conversation about categories that involve the natural law, but we haven't used the term natural law.

00:20:58.280 And so that's what my new book is about.

00:21:02.320 And natural law might seem like a pretty academic category, but natural law is really a category of Christian morality that is there to help us understand the type of morality that God has placed in the world.

00:21:19.700 Christians believe that morality is universal, it's objective, and it's intelligible.

00:21:26.980 And what I mean by that is we believe that it's everywhere, it corresponds to reality, and we can actually understand that moral law and we can act on it.

00:21:36.620 And fundamentally, the natural moral law is there for our good and there to help us understand how it is God made us.

00:21:47.020 So when we're thinking about these categories of IVF, we're thinking about questions of what is a marriage?

00:21:55.120 What are the grounds for how children ought to be brought into existence?

00:22:00.760 And if we violate those natural goods of marriage, ethical problems can result downstream from kind of, I think, breaking God's natural moral law.

00:22:13.220 But natural law is not just about kind of granular issues like IVF.

00:22:18.620 It's about asking, you know, why do we have the moral intuitions that we do?

00:22:24.100 When we learned the news that Hamas was putting babies in ovens, everyone responds to that in shock and horror.

00:22:34.740 And why is that?

00:22:35.580 Because Christians believe that Romans chapter 2 talks about that God has placed a law written on the heart that our conscience bears witness to.

00:22:46.640 So individuals may want to suppress their moral knowledge and say that they don't believe in a universal moral law, but everyone at the deepest levels of their being, Christians believe, do believe in some type of moral law.

00:23:02.920 There's a philosopher who uses the language of there are certain things we can't not know.

00:23:09.740 There are just self-evident moral truth claims that all of us just come hardwired with because of our nature that God has given us.

00:23:19.100 Natural law is just this tradition that kind of helps tease out the ramifications of this idea that God has made us rational beings who can conform ourselves to his moral law.

00:23:30.960 Yeah, it reminds me a lot of how C.S. Lewis described it in Mere Christianity when he is talking about God as the lawgiver and that that moral law that you're talking about really is written on our hearts and that no one is actually a moral relativist, except for a few insane people.

00:23:51.420 And we consider them insane for this reason, everyone would agree that the Holocaust was evil and that Hitler was evil. 0.78

00:24:00.120 You're not going to find very many people that would say, well, I don't know.

00:24:04.180 Maybe that was right for them culturally at that time.

00:24:08.280 People don't really give excuses to the Holocaust or to Hitler.

00:24:13.180 No one really is a cultural or moral relativist when it gets down to it.

00:24:19.260 Everyone knows that there is some kind of goal of morality that we should be reaching to in the same way that people understand that one person's drawing of New York City is closer to someone else's drawing.

00:24:38.680 Like there is an actual real place called New York City called Times Square.

00:24:42.920 And if two different people draw it, you can say, yes, this looks more like the real thing than this doodle over here.

00:24:52.180 And yet it does seem like everywhere we look, there are people in denial about that, that there is such thing as objective morality.

00:25:01.800 And actually the only moral truth is that you should never say that there is a moral truth.

00:25:07.940 The only wrong is saying that there is wrong.

00:25:10.900 So how do how do Christians navigate that world, especially politically?

00:25:15.740 Sure. So I think we're actually living in a really interesting time where American culture and some facets of American public policy are doing their very best to try to go to the very outer edges of violating the natural law.

00:25:34.360 And if the natural law is what I believe that it is, it means it's something that is imposed on creation and it means we actually can't evade it eternally.

00:25:47.500 At some point, nature, creation order has a way of snapping back.

00:25:52.380 And oftentimes it's when we try to transgress the natural law that we end up realizing, oh, we better actually end up living and conforming ourselves to the natural law, not in spite of it.

00:26:05.720 If I can just use one example here, take the transgender issue of biological males competing against females who are identifying as females.

00:26:16.280 I think that this issue captures what the natural law is trying to say to us.

00:26:20.080 The natural law is saying that there is an objective design to the universe that we can perceive.

00:26:27.000 We can perceive it in the world around us.

00:26:29.880 We can perceive it in our bodily design as males and females, such that biological males, because how we have been made, have certain capacities that allow males to run faster than females.

00:26:42.860 That's not a qualitative statement on females being less than males when it comes to worth.

00:26:50.940 It's simply a fact of nature that in the whole, in the aggregate, males are going to be faster than females because of our design, because of how the body is ordered.

00:27:01.940 Now, when we try to tell ourselves lies and falsehoods that men can be women, and then you see men smashing female competition, there's something also that kind of internally goes off inside of us, and that is our sense of justice having been violated because there's this moral law written on the heart.

00:27:25.520 And I think this corresponds to what Paul is talking about in Romans chapter 1 and Romans chapter 2.

00:27:31.220 Romans chapter 1, he talks about how creation order is evident in the things that have been made, so we can see around us order and design and pattern.

00:27:43.200 Then Romans chapter 2 talks about how our cognitive faculties, our minds, our conscience is structured in such a way that we can observe and respond to the nature of that moral order.

00:27:57.200 So, I mean, the natural law is all around us all the time.

00:28:01.620 It's not simply an academic conversation.

00:28:04.400 In fact, one of my favorite things in this conversation in the natural law is the ways in which kind of progressives do what I call reverse engineering themselves to natural law truths and acting like they've discovered something fascinating.

00:28:18.580 So, last year, a headline in a progressive publication talked about how the missing puzzle piece for economic inequality was to make sure that children have moms and dads.

00:28:31.020 And it was like they had discovered this magical incantation and spell to which you want to respond, well, no, actually, it seems to be the case that if a man and a woman make a child, that child is most apt to thrive in the context of where they have been created.

00:28:49.940 This is not a novel insight from public policy.

00:28:54.240 This is a novel insight from human nature, from our bodies, and something that human history has testified to for as long as there's been human history.

00:29:02.920 Yeah. Statistics and science are always catching up to God.

00:29:06.260 I love when I see headlines.

00:29:07.320 That's exactly right.

00:29:08.040 I love when I see headlines like that, that, oh, marriage actually lends to like the stability and success of children.

00:29:15.460 I'm like, oh, really?

00:29:16.940 That's fascinating.

00:29:17.680 I had never heard that before.

00:29:19.940 How do we distinguish as Christians what should actually be written into public policy based on what we believe?

00:29:41.800 The Bible said, like, for example, we believe in basing our laws on our biblical worldview.

00:29:48.860 However, we also believe in free speech, which means that we believe in the liberty of someone to say something that we consider downright blasphemous, not just disagree with, but offensive and wrong.

00:30:00.080 So how do we balance our desire to allow human liberty to flourish and the desire to have a country, the laws of which reflect natural law and reflect basic biblical principles that we know that if we abandon those biblical principles, like what you were talking about, that is going to hurt our neighbor.

00:30:25.620 And that's going to hurt the most vulnerable.

00:30:28.320 How do we balance harm and liberty based on what we believe about God?

00:30:34.620 Sure.

00:30:35.420 So I think let's go to what Genesis 1 and 2 is doing as a text.

00:30:40.280 Genesis 1 and 2 is not just a Christian interpretation of reality.

00:30:45.820 It is what we believe is an interpretation of all of reality, regardless of whether you are a Christian or not, which means that the progressive or the secularist who wants to disagree with Christian views on abortion or marriage, they may think that they're just disagreeing with Christians or they're disagreeing with Scripture.

00:31:08.140 What we want to come back with and say is, no, you're actually not just disagreeing with Christians and Scripture.

00:31:13.400 You're disagreeing with the very fabric of created reality itself, because when Genesis 1 and 2 is speaking to what creation is, it is orderly, it's designed, it's patterned, it's meant for us to all live in together.

00:31:30.140 Because Genesis 1 and 2 is about creation order, and when we see what creation order is, it's hitting on these issues like our existence, questions of human nature, what it means to be a male and female, what it means to be a family.

00:31:45.740 And so I want to acknowledge on the one hand that the natural law doesn't necessarily tell us every last kind of entailment of what the natural law ought to look like in law, but what it tells us is that law cannot violate the natural law itself.

00:32:05.660 And there's a distinction there in what I just said. It doesn't tell us, again, every last iota of detail on how to legislate the natural law, but it says if you try to negate the natural law or treat the natural law as something that you can ignore or suppress, that is where society is going to be most harmed.

00:32:29.780 And so you think about something like our views on what it means to be a human being. That comes from Genesis 1, 26 and 27. We're made in God's image, and so our beliefs about what it means to be a human doesn't just apply to Christians only.

00:32:48.620 We believe that to be a human is to be a human regardless of whether you're a Christian or not. And so laws ought to uniformly protect all persons equally regardless of whether those individuals are agreeing with what Christians believe about Scripture.

00:33:02.780 And of course, scientifically, you can get to the reality that embryos are human beings, because if they're not living human beings, then what else are there? But science cannot answer whether or not that embryo matters.

00:33:18.460 Science can't answer whether or not that human being has value, and that's what Genesis 1 tells us.

00:33:24.120 So what's your response to someone who says, okay, Genesis 1 tells us that that embryo has value, but that's Christian nationalism to try to impose that biblical belief on me, Mr. Atheist over here. What do you say to that?

00:33:39.920 I would say to the atheist, would you rather live in a Christian country that values the human being and affords them rights, or would you rather live in a truly atheistic regime where there really can be no true coherent concept of rights?

00:33:58.400 A few years ago, a few years ago, the public intellectual Douglas Murray, who's an atheist, he wrote an article saying that atheists really have three options when it comes to human dignity.

00:34:08.820 We can try, he says, to hammer out an atheist doctrine of human dignity, which we've never been able to do.

00:34:15.680 Secondly, we can admit that we don't have a doctrine of human dignity as atheists.

00:34:22.380 Or third, we can recognize this is really just something that we've received from Christianity, and we all need to go back to church.

00:34:29.420 We live in this moment right now where very few people at large want to go about denying the existence of human dignity and human rights.

00:34:39.280 Oftentimes, some do.

00:34:41.700 A few years ago, the Jewish philosopher Yuval Harari gave a TED Talk where he said that human rights don't really exist.

00:34:49.920 Those are just kind of fictional narratives that we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better and to provide these kind of legal structures around us.

00:34:59.840 And he literally says, but if you cut someone open, you don't find human rights.

00:35:05.120 You find organs and entrails.

00:35:07.520 Now, you can be shocked at that, but you can also be thankful for the intellectual honesty of someone saying that out loud because you didn't want to say to your secular neighbor, okay, do you want to live in that guy's understanding of the universe or do you want to live in the Christian's understanding of the universe?

00:35:23.520 Yeah, which is, of course, as you said, that we have human rights that are innate.

00:35:28.640 They're attached to our humanity from the moment of conception.

00:35:32.340 And if it's not at the moment of conception, any point after that becomes completely arbitrary and based on what people in power decide.

00:35:40.580 And we see, as you mentioned earlier, what that looks like when people in power decide that some human beings are subhuman, that's the justification of a Holocaust or slavery or the mistreatment and the discarding of unborn children, of embryos.

00:35:58.740 And so it's the same line of logic.

00:36:00.640 And you're right.

00:36:01.180 It is the Christian understanding of human beings and why we matter that saves us from those really terrible human rights atrocities.

00:36:10.580 I know that we're about to run out of time.

00:36:22.240 Unfortunately, so many things that I could ask, but you talk about Tao evangelicals.

00:36:28.500 You wrote an essay, a National Review on that, going back to C.S. Lewis and something he talks about in Abolition of Man, the Tao.

00:36:38.880 What does that mean?

00:36:40.580 And what is this term, Tao evangelicals?

00:36:44.480 Yeah, Ellie, thanks for asking that question.

00:36:46.980 The Tao refers to this idea of the natural law in C.S. Lewis's book, The Abolition of Man, which I would advocate every person reading.

00:36:57.980 But what he's getting after with Tao is this idea that there's a universal morality that everyone to some degree acknowledges.

00:37:05.820 And so I wrote this article for National Review talking about this growing number of non-Christians who are recognizing that secularism is going too far. 0.97

00:37:15.460 And they may not be Christians, but they're understanding that they are going to need to be relying on something like Christian natural law to make sense of objective morality.

00:37:26.340 There are individuals like Louise Perry, Tom Holland, Douglas Murray, Joe Rogan even has made fascinating statements of late recognizing that, man, we are really bottoming out in secularism and trying to figure out coherent concepts of what is true, beautiful and good.

00:37:46.280 And we can't do it ourselves.

00:37:48.280 And so we are finding ourselves in these unlikely alliances with Christians at times.

00:37:54.540 In fact, in March, Joe Rogan basically said, my gosh, we actually need Jesus.

00:38:00.120 What I love when he said that is because he went beyond just kind of the vague abstractions of the natural law and recognized, no, actually, maybe this idea of Christianity has more plausibility to it than I previously thought.

00:38:16.000 Yes.

00:38:16.840 The Tao and the Logos meet their match and their source in Jesus Christ.

00:38:23.540 I think we see that beautifully in John 1.

00:38:26.120 Which is why it is always a positive development when people start pursuing the truth.

00:38:30.480 That's why you often hear people who say, yeah, once I left progressivism and I started becoming more conservative in my politics, that landed me in church and then I became a Christian.

00:38:40.920 So often I hear that and it's because of the concept of what you're talking about.

00:38:45.460 So we'll have to have you back on really soon because there are so many other questions I have for you.

00:38:49.380 But can you tell everyone where they can buy your book?

00:38:51.720 Yeah, sure.

00:38:54.320 The best place to buy Faithful Reason would be on Amazon or you can also check it out at the publisher's website at lifeway.com.

00:39:03.540 Yes.

00:39:03.880 Awesome.

00:39:04.400 Thank you so much, Andrew.

00:39:05.460 I really appreciate you taking the time to come on.

00:39:08.620 Thank you, Allie.

00:39:09.380 Thank you, Allie.

00:39:09.440 Thank you.

00:39:10.380 Thank you, Allie.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - May 22, 2024

Ep 1007 ｜ Republicans Push Taxpayer-Funded IVF ｜ Guest： Andrew T. Walker

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