The news out of Mystic, Texas, was shocking. The flash floods brought more than water. They brought terrible sadness. I just checked. As of only a few hours ago, forty-three people are dead. Fifteen of them are children. The Associated Press article I was reading reported that “27 girls from Camp Mystic, a riverside Christian camp for girls in Hunt, Texas, still were unaccounted for about 36 hours after the flood.”

There’s something especially jarring about the death of children. It’s a primal ache. The little ones among us are meant to be protected. I can only imagine how helpless the parents of those children are feeling right now. They sent them to camp, expecting them to return. But in the middle of the night, a cabin of eight-year-olds was swept away.

Tragedies like this awaken something deep in us. They are reminders that being an adult is, in part, about standing guard. Even when, as children, we resisted the watchfulness, something changed the moment we became parents ourselves. We began to understand. We realized that protecting children is one of the most fundamental callings written into the human frame.

At least, you’d think it was. It seems more and more that this essential truth has been blurred by design. It seems that deliberate choices are being made by adults that not only fail to protect children but actually drop them right into the rising ideological deluge, insisting it’s for their good, even as the current pulls them under.

A long-time friend of mine, Martha, stopped by my office this past Wednesday while in town on business. It was good to see her. We spent a little over an hour catching up.

When it comes to what’s going on in the world, she’s a lot like me. She wonders how things got so backward. At one point along the way, we touched briefly on the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the Tennessee law. Essentially, the law bans transgender hormone treatments and surgeries for minors. I was glad for the 6-3 decision. Martha was, too. At its core, the law is a step toward protecting children from irreversible harm.

I mentioned to her in passing that Michigan has similar legislative efforts in motion. For example, House Bill 4190 would prohibit doctors from prescribing hormones or puberty blockers to minors. It also bans gender reassignment surgery on kids. My friend, Jason Woolford, is the one behind this worthwhile piece. He is an example of someone willing to step into the gap and defend children where others hesitate. I don’t think I mentioned the like-minded Senate bills that would criminalize healthcare providers while giving parents the right to sue for damages. One is Senate Bill 291.

These are all noble efforts, for sure. Still, I told Martha that someone should at least consider drafting a bill identical to Tennessee’s law. Make it word for word. I realize that with Governor Gretchen Whitmer at the helm and the Democrats controlling the State Senate, it’s unlikely that anything will get through and become law. Nevertheless, a shift in power could be on the very near horizon. And so, push the identical bill. Tennessee’s law has already been stress-tested in the nation’s highest court.

I’m sure not everyone agrees with this approach. Some might argue that simply copying another state’s legislation overlooks the subtleties of Michigan’s political landscape. I wonder if that’s part of the problem. Perhaps we’ve become too concerned with tailoring bills to conciliate rather than to confront. In fact, the longer I stand at the intersection of Church and State, the more convinced I become that we’re overcomplicating things. Too often, bills are laced with endless nuances, providing this exception and that concession, all in hopes of pleasing as many as possible, and yet resulting in the legislation being neutered before it even reaches the Governor’s desk. The more I see this, the more I question whether the bill drafters truly grasp the dangers posed by the ideologies they’re supposedly trying to address.

Chiseling away at devilish ideologies is virtuous, but only insofar as truth continues to meet squarely against anti-truth. To do this requires both unwavering clarity and legislative precision. When it comes to radical gender ideologies in particular, anything else risks the grotesqueness embedding itself deeper into our schools, our medical systems, our laws, and our souls.

Now, I should probably steer preemptively into two critiques I expect to receive from what I’ve just written.

First, I have plenty of friends in government who’ll step from my seemingly simple-mindedness, calling me naïve—that I don’t know how things work in Lansing, or, bigger still, Washington, D.C. I expect that assessment. And to some extent, they’d be right. However, I would respond by saying that if political realism leads to bills that ban surgery but affirm the worldview behind it, even if only a little, then perhaps a little naïveté is exactly what’s needed.

That said, rest assured, I’m not ignorant of the legislative process. I am aware that the political world involves negotiation, committees, amendments, and such. Rest assured also that I’m not necessarily an absolutist. Like Jesus during His earthly ministry, I’m more of an incrementalist. Indeed, divine absolutism will eventually play out, and everyone everywhere will know when it does (Philippians 2:10–11). On that day, “He will judge the nations with justice and the peoples with equity” (Psalm 98:9). Meanwhile, the Lord didn’t reach into this world, taking upon Himself human flesh, and instantly demanding complete comprehension from those He encountered (John 1:9-14). He preached, He taught, and He walked with people (Luke 24:27; Matthew 4:23; John 3:2). He led them step by step into His identity and truth—patiently, deliberately, and with perfect clarity (Mark 4:33–34; John 16:12–13).

But take note: He did this, never compromising truth’s substance for the sake of palatability (John 6:60–66).

That’s the balance I prefer. I want to do everything I can to move the ball down the field, avoiding any plays that risk giving up ground. In other words, incrementalism must never become appeasement. I’ve seen how the slow erosion of truth so often hides behind the phrase “what’s politically possible.” Refusing to give ground is the only respectable posture.

But that means we must first understand and then acknowledge just how backward things are. Until we do, we’ll remain a society that embraces madness, the kind that creates bills that still allow exceptions in some instances for surgically mutilating its citizens under the banner of compassion.

The second thing I should probably steer into is likely to come from a now former friend (unfortunately) who I can hear saying something like, “Look, no one wants to see kids suffer. But we need to get the government out of this altogether. We need to let families and doctors make these deeply personal decisions without government interference.”

And that, right there, is a big part of the problem.

Even apart from Christianity’s boundaries, personal liberty has never equated to moral neutrality. Liberty understands that truth exists and that citizens must be free to seek, speak, and live according to that truth without fear of coercion or punishment. But liberty untethered from truth is no longer liberty—it’s radical individualism. When radical individualism invokes the Declaration of Independence’s “pursuit of happiness” phrase to justify the mutilation of children, then freedom has become a twisted version of itself. We end up using our nation’s founding documents, not in pursuit of truth, but as permission-granting sources for redefining it. And again, it’s the children who pay the highest price for such redefinitions. They are both the battlefield and the collateral.

“But that’s more or less a spiritual argument, Pastor Thoma.”

In a sense, yes. But so is the counterargument. Right now, the prevailing narrative in our world says that someone can be “born in the wrong body.” Having spent enough time around Dr. James Lindsay, I’ve realized this is a deeply Gnostic concept—one that severs the soul from the body and declares the physical form irrelevant or even hostile to the true self.

The Christian faith insists otherwise. Body and soul are not at war but in union, created by God in perfect harmony (Genesis 2:7). Our Lord took on flesh, not as a costume to be shed, but as the very substance of our redemption (John 1:14). Christ’s incarnation affirms the goodness of the human body—male and female—as God designed it (Genesis 1:27). To mutilate that body in the name of self-actualization is not compassionate liberation. It’s a spiritual act, and a desecrating one at that (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). To slice away organs or pump anyone, child or adult (because age does not sanctify the level of one’s error), with cross-sex hormones in pursuit of an impossible transformation is not compassion or the pursuit of happiness. It is bodily harm, sanctified by pseudo-Gnostic jargon cloaking a lie, one that is easily detected in Natural Law (Romans 1:25).

Ultimately, I hope that future generations will look back on this time in America as a dark age. I hope everything that’s happening relative to so-called “gender-affirming care” will be remembered with the same horror as lobotomies. Whether such somber reflection will ever occur, I don’t know. What I do know is that a generation of legislators did not defeat slavery with bills that allowed “grandfather” exceptions.

There’s one more critique I should probably address before wrapping up, mainly since much of this has focused on gender dysphoria.

Per usual, I will be accused of hatred for what I’ve written. I will be told that I just don’t understand and that I am invalidating someone’s identity. Someone may even wield dissenting Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s argument that my position is nothing short of advocacy for suffering.

To that, I suppose I might say, “Yes, I am advocating for suffering. Just not the kind you think.”

I’m advocating for what we Lutherans call the “Theology of the Cross,” a path marked by humility, struggle, and self-denial. It’s what Jesus meant by saying, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). The one following Jesus is less interested in worldly accommodation, but instead, is inclined to suffer all things, even suffering against internal desires, rather than be separated from Him and His redemptive work on the cross. All this stands in stark contrast to the world’s “Theology of Glory,” which seeks affirmation and comfort at any cost.

Every human being is born with backward desires. That’s the reality of sin. Taking up the cross in life’s combat, some fight against lust. Others wage war against drinking. Others fight dysphoric tendencies. Right now, we live in a culture more inclined to affirm and celebrate these disorders rather than restrain them. Still, Christ bids us to follow Him, not the “self.” It is not dangerous or unloving to say this. It is, however, unloving to affirm a lie, and it’s risky to give it room.

In the end, I expect to be called hateful for my positions. However, in every aspect of life, the courage to suffer for the sake of truth is the only way forward. It’s the best levee for holding back the water. That’s because its strength lies in a divine kind of love that brings truth, even when it costs something. Look to Jesus on the cross and see for yourself. There, love and truth are not in conflict but are inseparably joined—and in the most wonderfully protective way.