Book Review: Love Thy Body by Nancy R. Pearcey
Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality by Nancy R. Pearcey is a resource available to you and your family to help you detect the dangerous flaws in modern messages about the body – so you can use Biblical knowledge and beliefs to regain knowledge, strength, and confidence in what is right and good.
Examples of Cultural Messaging
Whether it’s during the teen years, or not until after high school graduation, you can be sure to hear strong, compelling, even irresistible arguments for:
- “women’s reproductive rights” aka abortion
- “compassionate end-of-life” aka euthanasia
- “sex as an urgent, constant human need for exchange of self-fulfilling pleasures” aka casual sex and porn
- “sexual orientation and gender identity” aka homosexuality and transgenderism
- “partners” aka husband or wife
- “caregivers” aka mother or father
- “individual choice” aka defiance
This messaging is not only found in the media, but is even a significant part of the curriculum at universities. And yes, it’s found even at Christian colleges and universities, and is seeping down into high schools and primary schools as well.
Who Needs This Book
- Parents can choose to read the book and then teach the principles to the household.
- Friends and family can give this book to high school graduates for crucial equipping before leaving home.
- Church small-groups may want to use it as a Bible study. (There’s even a study guide in the back of the book).
- Current college students may want to read it as soon as possible to help them not feel so helpless in their beliefs when conversing with their peers.
- Christians who are drifting away from a Biblical worldview (because the post-Christian world has dissected it to seem outdated and condemning) can find hope and encouragement in this read. And readers will rediscover God’s incredible design, perfect ways, and loving goodness when His whole message is taken in as truth.
Key Message Taught In The Book
Behind every claim for a high view, is actually a very low concept of the body, a post-modern (pomo) view that is separating personhood from humanity. For example:
Abortion – to be allowed to live, some babies are now required to earn the right to be considered a person, with fallible, adults deciding at which stage he/she becomes a person.
Euthanasia – to be allowed to live, some adults must prove a certain level of functioning to still be considered a valuable person, with themselves or other adults deciding if and when it is time for them to be eliminated.
Casual Sex – to be able to engage in meaningless sexual activity, teens, singles, frustrated adults, etc. are now being persuaded to disconnect their physical selves from the rest of their personhood (in addition to being disconnected from a sacred bond with just one person), which is the opposite of God’s beautiful design for sexuality.
Homosexuality – to be able to commit to feelings over biology, some are disconnecting their identity from distinctive biology, in order to experience a culturally-imposed lifestyle which actually reduces a person to less than they are designed to be, and prevents them from embracing God’s good and wholesome design.
Gender – to be able to change or deny gender at will, some are ignoring the role and significance of the body’s design, by deciding themselves to what degree or not they feel like a certain gender, while ironically saying it cannot actually be defined.
Relationships – to be able to contract in and out of biological and covenantal relationships on a whim, some are terminating relationships with adults, women, children, babies, giving power randomly to others to decide who is worth investment and love; and who is not.
Your Influence
Once you understand the philosophies driving the secular agenda, you can reach a lost world with the Good News! Christians facing these forceful beliefs do not have to hide under a rock while waiting for Christ to come again. For example:
- Ultrasounds and baby showers have helped many mothers with unwanted pregnancies choose life over death.
- The Body of Christ has the grace to support those who struggle with biological and non-biological sexual temptations, feeling like you don’t fit into gender roles, etc. – by affirming not the lies they’ve been sold but the unique gifts these individuals offer, and to point them to a loving God with grand and rich purposes for their entire personhood.
- Christians have the strength of purity to object to sexual practices that not only dishonor God’s beautiful design for sexuality, but demean the body and fragment the person who is actually being victimized by this philosophy.
- Believers living in the pomo age have the opportunity to kindly and patiently point out all the ways that sexual/gender/women’s/human rights are actually contradicting one another, holding persons back from holistic expression, and denying them the rich, creative fulfillment of living according to the Creator’s gift of life and design.
- By celebrating the created order of life and all living things, those with a Biblical worldview can actually promote the most diverse, freeing, sophisticated, peace-filled, loving way to exist.
- As Christians and families, in your churches and homes, “practice radical hospitality to the refugees of the secular moral revolution whose lives have been wrecked by its false promises of freedom and autonomy.”
“Your Kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (Mt. 6:10)
With hope,
Jen
Jen Hughes
I hope this blog article is a helpful resource for you as you draw closer to Jesus through various situations and seasons of your life.
May you discover the rich fulfillment and growth the Lord can bring even when, or especially when, life is most challenging.