The Danger of Following Your Heart

Christian apologist and author Frank Turek spoke at the Southern Evangelical Seminary’s 2022 National Apologetics Conference on April 8 concerning the leading idea of “following your heart,” otherwise referred to in public discourse as “expressive individualism,” its incompatibility with Biblical truth, and its disastrous consequences when consistently applied, as it is today with transgenderism.

Turek began by saying the incoming Associate Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson could not say what a woman is, and the Biden Administration is now talking about “Trans-Visibility Day.” President Biden himself talked about trans-identifying people being “made in the image of God,” which is true, insofar as they are human beings, but not insofar as they identify with the opposite sex, contrary to our fixed nature established at creation (Gen. 1:27).  

To those advocating for transgenderism, such an observation is “violence,” but the true violence is the rejection of reality in the name of self-assertion. It is barbarism, that masquerades as compassion, mandating partially irreversible or completely irreversible changes to the body lest immediate inclinations be denied. Here the threat of suicide is invoked to decisively win the debate. The possibility that one may regret in the future what is really sexual mutilation is just more “violence;” the violence imposed by reality. But this is an extreme position to take. A much more reasonable and compassionate understanding is that suicide in transgender identifying young people is an irrational response to the trauma of adolescence in sex-confused young people.

But the Biden Administration, Turek observed, clearly is maintaining that opposition to transgenderism is immoral, threatening to remove children from their parents if the parents object to so-called “gender transitioning” (giving minors puberty-blocking drugs and sexual anatomy altering surgery). The administration is advancing this, Turek pointed out, for children “as young as three to five years old.” The administration claims that “there is no scientifically sound research showing negative impacts from gender-affirming care.” Turek said immediately that “that’s false.” The craze of “gender transitioning” of minors is only something that has occurred in the last decade, thus there can be no “long-term research” on outcomes, he said. But the administration can nevertheless say that there is, so far, no research showing “negative outcomes,” so gender transitioning can proceed. It might be added that there is also the question of what “scientifically sound” means with a medical and academic establishment now committed to gender ideology. But the bottom line is that sexual experimentation with long-term consequences is being performed on troubled youth – if only momentarily troubled – and encouraged in their confusion by social media or peer pressure. “Common sense,” however, indicates horrific results to the sexual experimentation on children.  

However, this sort of thinking, Turek said, “has been at our universities for many years, actually.” Turek played a video clip of interviews at the University of Washington in which students expressed the belief that sex is a social construction, something we are conditioned to believe in, and imposed on individuals. One student conceded that there is “no reason” to have the labels “male” and “female.” Turek quoted Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, to say that “if you repeat a lie enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” He then quoted the apostle Paul to say that “if you suppress the truth long enough, you’re going to engage in futile thinking” (Rom. 1:18-21).

Turek asked “how did we get here?” He said that we got here because “even in the church, we’ve been preaching, you really ought to follow your heart.”  He identified three systems people use to find their identity: 1) tradition (in ancient culture), 2) self-determination (modern culture), and 3) rule directed (religious) systems. Turek asserted that “none of these are the Christian culture.”

Turek said that “a lot of people think that if they have an idea on their heart that that is somehow their identity.” This is why people construe condemnations of sexual behavior as a personal attack. “In effect now, what we have in the church, is much more ‘meology’ than theology … Whatever I want, whatever is on my heart, is right. That’s what the whole big deconstruction movement is about. That’s what so-called Progressive Christianity is about … You are not what you think about; we need to separate you from your thoughts … If you were what you thought about, most men would be women, and most women would be chocolate.”

Next Turek asked if there is such a thing as “my truth.” This expression likely is used to mean that “there is no ‘the truth.’” But to deny truth is self-defeating. All claims are truth claims, including the claims that there is no truth or that “truth is relative.” Further, to claim that there is no absolute truth must be absolutely true if it is to stand, and is thus necessarily false. Nor can one say that there is only “my truth and your truth,” since that is offered as the truth. One cannot offer one’s own math to improve one’s financial standing, or one’s own logic to improve one’s case in court.

Crucially, Turek asked, “can we change reality to conform to our beliefs and behaviors?” Truth, he observed, is what corresponds to reality. We cannot change reality to conform to our beliefs and behaviors. This, he said, is what divides Right from Left in today’s society. Leftists believe we can change reality to conform to our beliefs and behaviors, whereas rightists believe that we can change our beliefs and behaviors to fit reality.

He observed that leftists do not even conform to their own logic in the way they think of themselves and reality. They tend to say that men and women are the same, and yet that a man can become a woman by mere self-definition, which transition would be unnecessary if men and women are the same. Further, applying a logic that abolishes sex destroys the possibility of both homosexuality and bisexuality, and the possibility of women (or men).

Another leftist claim that Turek examined was the claim that “diversity is our strength.” This claim can have truth in it, we need people in different occupations to have a functioning society, for instance, but not people with diverse sexual behaviors. He observed that corporate America is now emphasizing diverse sexual behaviors “that have nothing to do with the ability of a team to do something well in the public square.” Sex really has little to do with the goods and services that most of corporate America provides.

Turek emphasized that boundaries are necessary in all of life. This goes for sexual identity and behavior as well, and if boundaries are not respected “you’re going to be abandoned, and you’re going to be alone … If you follow your heart without any moral restraint, you’re going to destroy yourself and destroy others … Without boundaries, we would all be dead, and yet you have people at our major universities saying ‘oh, there shouldn’t be any boundaries.’” He quoted C.S. Lewis to say that “all happiness requires restraint … Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, disease, jealousy, lies … and loss of everything that is the result of health … for any happiness even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary.”

Turek quoted the prophet Jeremiah saying “the heart is more deceitful than all else and desperately sick, who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9).He gave three reasons why we should not follow our hearts:

1. “Our hearts are often selfish”
2. “They are changing and conflicting”
3. “They’re contrary to God’s will and our own long term best interests”

Because of these, “you just can’t follow your heart blindly.”

On the first point, “it’s easy to be bad, it’s hard to be good.” He observed that we would not want our thoughts visible to the public, and that all murder involves either sex, money, or power.

On the second point, he observed that only a decade ago “gender dysphoria affected one out of every ten thousand, mostly men.” However, he noted that in some girls’ schools today it affects 30% of girls. This, Turek said, is the result of “a social media contagion.” Claims of “trans” status also gain attention and public approval. Additionally, there is the often quoted statistic that 80% of minors with gender dysphoria grow out of it by the age of 18.

On the third point, “there’re many things we want, and normally they’re related to sex, money, and power that we see every day, and it’s contrary to God’s will, and contrary to our own best interests. How many lives have been destroyed by us indiscriminately following our hearts.” While acknowledging that it may offend some of today’s Evangelicals, he asked “how many kids have been scarred permanently by divorce?” He said that “all sexual sin” is to be avoided (as of course all sin should be).

Turek said that the most important Biblical passage for point three is “above all else, guard your heart, because everything you do flows from it.” (Prov. 4:23) This verse, he emphasized, says “guard your heart,” not “follow your heart … If you don’t guard your heart, you are going to create havoc in your own life and the lives of those around you.” This is the reason we need to “renew our minds” (Rom. 12:2). An imperative to follow some Biblical precept can be impressed on our hearts particularly strongly at times, and we should follow what has been laid on our hearts, but the fact that we have a strong inclination in some direction does not establish its righteousness.

Against the common contemporary claim that love for another requires approval of their decisions, Turek also pointed out that “if you approve of everything somebody wants to do, you’re not loving, you’re unloving.” If we truly love, it involves “sacrificing our own desires to help others.” This certainly does not necessarily involve telling others what they want to hear.

Turek said that we get the identity that we should have by receiving Christ as Savior and Lord. This gives us Christ’s righteousness. Unlike the things we have in life, such as our family or our possessions, Christ cannot be lost. This is better than “a fleeting thought I had when I was fifteen,” he said. Christ takes the pressure off of us to establish our identity.

He added that, against President Biden’s claims, it takes little bravery in today’s culture to follow your heart, and in particular to claim to be “trans.” It in fact takes bravery to say that one won’t “support that.” Turek also observed that for persons with gender dysphoria who go on to surgery, the suicide rate is 19 times greater than that of the general public. He cited Dr. Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins University, a long-time opponent of gender transitioning, to say that “transgenderism is like anorexia, you have a mismatch between your psychology and your biology.” It is not loving to give an anorexic person liposuction. Similarly, one’s body cannot be changed into the body of the opposite sex, only mutilated. It is the mind which must be changed.

Turek added that pastors will not be able to avoid this issue. The issue must be addressed, and not much help is currently being given “from the pulpit.”

Turek is surely right that this is a subject pastors and Christians generally would rather avoid or finesse it if they can. Why isn’t there much said about transgenderism (or sexual issues generally), from the pulpit or in church? Because it is such a deeply personal matter, which easily offends people. But that is not a reason why there should be no judgment in these matters, contra the U.S. Supreme Court’s reasoning since the Griswold decision (1965). Sex is deeply connected to what it means to be human, and reasonably there should be publicly understood limits in line with the observable differences between males and females and millennia of human experience to avoid disastrous courses of action. Indeed, the logic of following one’s heart on sexual issues is that sex loses any meaning, as we see today in the abolition of the real categories of male and female. Maintaining that our desires and inclinations establish truth regardless of external reality in any other area will likewise rob it of meaning. Christians even more should understand the two sexes are divinely established and revealed, and more generally in life we must remain within the moral law God has revealed, although our hearts are inclined against it – whether momentarily or persistently – if we want to enter into life.