A leaked Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) training video instructs staff to confirm that men can get pregnant and encourages them to refer to a pre-born baby as an “embryo” or “fetus,” to a “fetal heartbeat” as “embryonic or fetal cardiac activity,” and to a “mother” as a “veteran” or “person.”

When I saw the story, I then checked some other taxpayer-funded agencies for similar language. I found this statement on the National Institutes of Health website: “The term chestfeeding or bodyfeeding can be used alongside breastfeeding to be more inclusive” for “nonbinary or trans people.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website similarly includes COVID-19-related information for “pregnant and recently pregnant people” (not “women”). The website later refers to “people who are pregnant,” presumably in deference to pregnant biological women who do not identify as women.

The VA training video correctly states, “Language has a profound impact on what people hear and learn.” Therein lies my point today.

A pervasive four-part strategy

One of my persistent frustrations across decades of cultural engagement has been the degree to which our opponents have weaponized euphemisms in service to their various causes.

Early in the abortion struggle, for example, those of us who are “pro-life” were labeled “anti-abortion” while those who supported abortion were labeled “pro-choice.” Who doesn’t want to be for choice? And who wants to be “anti” anything?

Now our “pro-choice” opponents call themselves advocates for “reproductive justice” or “reproductive freedom” and caricature us as part of a “war on women.” Again, who doesn’t want to be for “justice” or “freedom”? Who wants to be part of a “war” on half the human population?

We can see the same strategy at work all around us. Euthanasia advocates are for “death with dignity.” Those of us who defend biblical sexual morality are labeled “homophobic” or “transphobic.” What started out as “gay pride” is now simply “pride.” The rainbow was co-opted from a biblical symbol of new life to a cultural symbol of “inclusion” that actually endorses and embraces destructive behavior.

As I have warned before, this is all part of a four-part strategy to normalize unbiblical immorality, legalize it, then stigmatize those who disagree and ultimately criminalize their disagreement. Where my warning may be misleading, however, is that these are not stages through which society progresses. We are ever in the normalizing phase as our opponents seek to indoctrinate new generations (thus Pride Month preschool cartoons, Legos and other “affirming” games, children’s books extolling same-sex parents, and so on). It’s not enough in their view to grant LGBTQ persons civil rights—we must agree with their ideology and actively promote their cause or we are dangerous homophobes and worse.

Lessons from pine trees

This theme has been on my mind because of a storm that blew through our area Sunday night. My wife Janet and I woke up Monday morning to shingles blown off our roof and branches scattered across the backyard. That was all repairable. Here’s what was not: a large hardwood tree was snapped over and lay sprawling across our front yard. However, the pine trees surrounding it, though they are much taller, escaped the storm with no damage.

This is for two reasons: they have deep roots, and their trunks are flexible. As a result, they can withstand gale-force winds by staying connected to the ground in which they are planted while bending rather than breaking in the storm. Pine trees are evergreen as well, shedding their needles only when they age and quickly replacing them.

All of this reminds me of the person who is “like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers” (Psalm 1:3). His secret? “His delight is in the law of the Lᴏʀᴅ, and on his law he mediates day and night” (v. 2). By contrast, “the wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away” (v. 4).

To yield “fruit in its season” with a “leaf” that “does not wither,” stay rooted in the word of God. Spend time every day “meditating” on it—the Hebrew word means to “ponder, ruminate, reflect upon.” Do this “day and night,” not just on Sunday and during brief devotional times.

When we do this, we give the Holy Spirit tools he can use in helping us to “understand the time” and know what our nation “ought to do” (1 Chronicles 12:32). The more we immerse our minds in Scripture, the more we are able through the “powers of discernment” to “distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:14).

Lessons from bank tellers

Think biblically, and you will act redemptively. And you will live a life God can bless and use with enduring fruitfulness in this world and the next. Like bank tellers in training who handle so much genuine currency that they can intuitively spot fakes, we are “transformed by the renewal of [our] mind” so that we can “discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).

In response to Jesus’ question, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you?” (Luke 6:46), Billy Graham wrote: “Always ask yourself these questions about your plans: ‘Can I ask God’s blessing on it? Can I do this to the glory of God? Or will this be a stumbling block to me or someone else?’

“Are you calling Jesus ‘Lord’ but not doing what he wants?”

How would you answer Dr. Graham’s question today?

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A reporter for the New York Post attempted to gain entrance to some of New York City’s finest restaurants while wearing shorts and a hoodie, only to be turned away at the door by each establishment. The reason for his experiment: he was wearing attire that Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.) has made famous (or infamous) in our nation’s capital. The senator’s preferred clothing generated national headlines a few days ago when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that he was relaxing the Senate’s longstanding dress code requirement that its members wear a suit on the floor.

The backlash was immediate and bipartisan. Sen. Fetterman then replied to the furor in a crude statement, agreeing to “save democracy” by wearing a suit on the Senate floor if House Republicans pass a government funding bill and support Ukraine.

New York Times columnist Rhonda Garelick noted that “dress codes are a marker of social, national, professional, or philosophical commonality.” Accordingly, a dress code for the Senate “does remind senators and everyone around them (including the general public) of the still-noble goal of consensus. A sum greater than its parts.”

And Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan perceptively identified a larger cultural narrative at work: Americans “want to be respected but no longer think we need to be respectable.” In her view, “We are in a crisis of political comportment. We are witnessing the rise of the classless. Our politicians are becoming degenerate. This has been happening for a while but gets worse as the country coarsens. We are defining deviancy ever downward.”

“A man is always a teller of tales”

David Brooks recently quoted philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: “A man is always a teller of tales. He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them, and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.”

By passing the Bill of Rights on this day in 1789, the US Congress told the story that our infant nation would be a democracy for all its residents. In as stark a contrast as I can imagine, hundreds of people who identify as dogs gathered in Berlin recently, communicating only by howling or barking at each other.

Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders has become a national celebrity by virtue of his personal story as “Coach Prime” (though his team’s resounding loss to Oregon on Saturday may dim his light just a bit). And Amanda Gorman, America’s first National Youth Poet Laureate, told another story that typifies our self-reliant culture: “We are the good news that we have been looking for, demonstrating that every dusk holds a dawn disguised within it.”

A nation “planted on good soil”

In Ezekiel 17, God told a story about the people of Israel as a vine “planted on good soil by abundant waters, that it might produce branches and bear fruit and become a noble vine” (v. 8). When I read this parable, I thought immediately of America’s founding declaration that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Here’s the “good soil” in which we were planted: there is a God; we are created equal by him; we each have an “unalienable” right to life, liberty, and “the pursuit of happiness” (not happiness itself, which the Founders did not guarantee). Would the cosigners of this Declaration recognize the society we have become?

It’s difficult to imagine John Adams or Thomas Jefferson wearing shorts and hoodies to conduct the nation’s business. But it’s equally difficult to imagine that they intended the country they birthed to reject our Creator and our status as his creation. Or that they would have endorsed the monstrosity against life that is abortion on demand, the assault on liberty that is our escalating rejection of religious freedom, or the undermining of the pursuit of happiness that is our rampant secularism and sexual immorality.

God warned that the consequences of Israel’s apostasy would “pull up its roots and cut off its fruit” (v. 9) so that the nation would “utterly wither when the east wind strikes it” (v. 10). Will this be how our story ends as well?

A wise pastor’s reminder

Let’s begin this week by returning to the “good soil” on which we were planted as creatures of our Creator: “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lᴏʀᴅ, our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand” (Psalm 95:6–7).

Have you knelt before your Maker yet today?

Then let’s advance life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for ourselves and our nation by telling our Savior’s story in words and deeds. Let’s make him the Lord of every dimension of our lives every moment of this day. And let’s pray and work to help those we influence do the same.

Over the weekend, I attended a board retreat at which a wise pastor and friend of many years reminded us of the time Jesus and his disciples were in a boat on the Sea of Galilee when a “great storm” arose (Matthew 8:24). Jesus then “rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm” (v. 26).

The pastor noted: “Jesus wants to be the Captain, not the cargo, in your boat.”

Which would your Lord say is true for you today?

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