Not a Feeling

Before the school could tell a child that their identity is whatever they feel it to be, it had to establish something more foundational: that feelings are the legitimate source of moral guidance. This is the prior step. It is the grammar beneath the grammar.

The secular framework for right and wrong takes several forms. Some secular ethicists ground morality in harm reduction and consent—what is right is what does not damage others and occurs between willing parties. Others add authenticity: what is right is what is true to who you genuinely are. Both versions share a common move. They locate the source of moral authority inside the person rather than in any external design. The outer boundary varies—law, harm to others, community consensus—but the inner compass is the self. This framework is so pervasive in contemporary Western culture that it is rarely stated as a framework. It is assumed as the structure of reality.

The problem with this framework is not that it produces obvious monsters. It produces mostly functional people who carry no particular malice and who treat others with ordinary decency. Its failure is more subtle. It removes the category of design from the conversation entirely. There is no longer a question of what you were made for, because that question assumes an authority outside yourself—a maker with intentions, a design with a purpose, a direction the design is meant to serve. The secular framework does not attack that authority. It simply operates as if no such authority exists.

Scripture makes a different claim. Right and wrong are not feelings. They are not legal thresholds. They are the design of the Creator, revealed in Scripture, applicable to everyone regardless of how they feel about it. The child who grows up in a household where this claim is taken seriously arrives at every question—about desire, identity, money, honesty, the treatment of others—with a different starting point than the child who grows up in a household where the starting point is what feels true to me.

The collision between these two frameworks is most visible in the domain of sexuality because sexuality is where the secular framework has most aggressively claimed that feeling is authoritative. Desire has been elevated from a condition of the human person to the primary marker of personal identity, and any external authority that questions that elevation has been repositioned as oppression rather than truth. But the collision is not limited to sexuality. It runs through every question the child will ever face.

The Christian parent who wants to give their child a different grammar has to do more than substitute a Christian answer for a secular one in the domain of sexuality. They have to give the child a different account of moral authority altogether—one in which right and wrong are real, external, and revealed by the God who made them. Desire-as-identity is one consequence of feeling-as-moral-authority. Deal with the consequence without dealing with the source, and you have given the child a rule rather than a grammar. Rules can be argued with. A grammar governs the arguing.

Chapter Three