There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from losing arguments but from watching the goalposts move mid-sentence. You make a careful case for human dignity grounded in the nature of things. By the time you finish, the terms have shifted so that aged and infirm individuals now qualify as less dignified. You defend the family. The word “family” gets quietly renegotiated to now include surrogate third-parties. You point out that biology is morally relevant. You are told, with a straight face, that biology is itself a social construction. The culture, it turns out, will not sit still long enough to be reasoned with. Norms constantly evolve beneath the flux of shifting moralities.
I have been making these arguments long enough to recognize what is actually going on here. What presents itself as a series of isolated cultural debates—over gender, sexuality, marriage, the beginning and end of life—is not, at the outer boundaries, a series of debates at all. It is one debate. Beneath the surface noise is a single, unified metaphysical revolt. We are not watching a society change its collective mind about a handful of contested issues. We are watching a civilization try to cut itself loose from the very conditions that made moral reasoning possible. The storm is not ethical at its root. It is ontological. It is a war about the nature of reality, and the ethical chaos is downstream of that.
You cannot understand where we are without grasping where we went wrong. Because we have gotten ontology wrong, our ethics quickly follow. Christian ethics, which is what this article is focusing on, is grounded in what is (creation) before it prescribes what we ought to do (moral action). God establishes the moral architecture of reality in creation, orders goods according to His will, and restores human moral agency in Christ.
Western moral thought, at its best, rested on a coherent picture of the world. Though historians debate just how unified the past was under a single expansive Christian canopy, it is no overstatement to suggest that earlier times, at a minimum, understood reality as having a fixed structure. Human beings had a nature. That nature was oriented toward certain ends—not ends we invented, but ends baked into what we are, discoverable by reason, capable of supporting a common moral life. This picture did not appear from nowhere. It was the accumulated inheritance of Greek philosophy, Roman law, Jewish tradition, and Christian theology. Aristotle gave us the insight that things have ends built into their natures. Augustine rooted the moral order in love rightly directed. Aquinas showed that natural law is nothing less than participation in divine reason. The Reformers, Calvin especially, insisted that conscience retains the moral law even after the fall, because that law is not an ecclesiastical imposition but a feature of creation itself. Underneath each of these voices is a shared belief in ontological grounding.
What has collapsed in our moment is not simply Christianity’s account of ethics. It is the metaphysical architecture in our culture on which any serious ethics must stand. Abandon teleology, and you lose the concept of human nature as something given and normative; it mutates into a constructed, malleable concept. Lose human nature, and you lose the rational ground for human dignity. You are left with the naked assertion that human beings matter for reasons they cannot explain, which turns out not to be self-sustaining. What fills the vacuum is power. Rights become whatever the dominant class determines them to be—endlessly negotiated, revocable at will. Morality collapses into social consensus, elite fiat, or, failing that, individual preference. This is not progress. It is a very old regression dressed in humanitarian vocabulary. It is moral barbarism.
What makes our specific moment so disorienting is not just the speed of the collapse but its inversion. Previous moral revolutions, for all their faults, typically claimed to be recovering something real. The abolitionists appealed to natural equality. The suffragists appealed to rational dignity. They were arguing about the proper application of principles, principles they took to be real and binding. The current revolution does not work that way. It does not appeal to nature; it rejects nature as a valid category. It does not appeal to reason; it treats reason with suspicion, elevating emotion and will as primary drivers. It does not seek to apply moral principles more consistently; rather, it seeks to expose them as instruments of oppression. And it prosecutes its case entirely in the language of compassion, liberation, and human flourishing, which makes it genuinely difficult to oppose without being heard as cruel. It is a deadly, toxic stew of weaponized emotionalism, contradictory rights-claims, legal positivism, and empty-headed relativism.
That is the storm’s most dangerous feature. It does not present itself as an attack on morality. It presents itself as the fulfillment of it. Every demand for capitulation arrives wrapped in the rhetoric of rights and inclusion. To hold the line is to be labeled a bigot. To stand firm is to be accused of causing harm. The inversion is nearly complete, to the point that secular progressivism exhibits its own fatigue that it cannot admit.
So, What Does It Actually Mean to Stand Firm Here?
First, you have to know what you are standing on. Stubbornness is not a virtue unless it is stubbornness in the right direction. Christians must recover genuine confidence in an ontological foundation which posits the only coherent basis for moral realism—the conviction, grounded in both reason and revelation, that moral truths are discovered, not invented. They are not the products of cultural negotiation. They correspond to reality: to the nature of things, to the ends for which human beings were made, to the order embedded in creation by a rational and good God. This is not a sectarian claim you have to accept on faith before you can evaluate it. It is a claim about the nature of nature, one that practical reason can assess and that the moral intuitions of virtually every human civilization have broadly confirmed up until twenty minutes ago.
The natural law tradition makes exactly this point, and Christians should be far more comfortable with it than most evangelical churches currently are. The Bible, along with our use of reason, posits basic human goods that are self-evidently worth pursuing and that provide rational foundations for moral norms. These are not merely Christian goods. They are human goods built, ultimately, from the wellspring of God’s creative authorship revealed both in visual revelation (creation order), verbal revelation (Scripture), and visceral revelation (conscience). They can be identified by anyone reasoning carefully about what it means to live well as the kind of creatures we are. Scripture confirms, deepens, and clarifies what reason can identify. But it does not operate in a vacuum, and Christian moral engagement in the public square is not about smuggling sectarian commitments into secular debate. We are pointing to the moral grammar already written into the human situation. The fact that this grammar is increasingly illegible to people is a diagnostic symptom, not a refutation.
Second, and here I want to be blunt, holding the line requires genuine courage, not its various substitutes. Not aggression, not self-righteousness, not the performative outrage that passes for moral seriousness in online discourse. Actual courage: the willingness to say true things clearly when saying them carries real costs. And the costs are real. Speaking plainly about human nature, about the goods of marriage and family, about the sanctity of life from conception to natural death can disqualify you from polite company in ways that were, not long ago, unimaginable. You have to decide whether you believe what you say you believe.
Augustine wrote The City of God while Rome was burning. That is worth sitting with. He was not writing from a position of cultural confidence. He was writing in the middle of genuine civilizational collapse, watching the world he had known come apart. His response was not despair. It was not an accommodation. It was relentless intellectual clarity in naming what Rome had gotten wrong, tracing the theological roots of its failure, and articulating a more coherent account of justice and human flourishing. That is the model. Not unbounded optimism that things will necessarily improve. It is about clarity and accepting (and fighting against) what can be the tragedy of modern moral dissolution.
Third, standing firm does not mean standing still. Our ethics, though persuasive on their own, require active advance to be put into practice. The moral framework must be applied freshly because the challenges take new forms. The basic goods of human nature do not change. But gender medicine is different from anything Aquinas addressed. The ethics of artificial intelligence raises questions Calvin could not have anticipated in their particulars. The tradition must be brought forward, not revised to make it palatable, but genuinely applied to new situations with real rigor. The people who tell you the Christian tradition has nothing to say to contemporary problems have simply not done the work (or the reading).
One more thing, and this matters more than the rest: the gospel is not a supplement to Christian ethics. It is its ground. Natural law can establish that a moral order exists. It cannot explain why that order will ultimately prevail, or why it is worth defending at personal cost, or why human beings, broken and confused as we are, keep reaching for something that transcends the immediate gratification on offer. For that, you need the news that the author of the moral order has entered history, has borne the accumulated weight of human moral failure, assuaged divine wrath, and has walked out of a tomb a living, breathing human. The resurrection is not sentimentalism. The resurrection is the reason for Christian moral confidence because creation is not evacuated of substance or purpose.
Which means Christians engage this cultural moment with neither the panic of people who think everything is lost nor the naivety of people who think niceness will win the day. We engage with the sobriety of people who know the diagnosis is serious and the physician is sovereign.
The exhaustion is real. I understand it. My inbox and social media replies are dented by people who do not like Christian ethics. But exhaustion usually signals that we have been fighting on the wrong terms, where treating cultural victories as the point rather than faithful witness as the point. We are not responsible for converting the culture. We are responsible for telling the truth about it, as clearly, charitably, and persistently as we can.
The culture will not sit still. The storm will not stop. If our ethics are true, which I believe they are, they are stubborn.
And the moral order inscribed into creation by a wise and good God has not moved. Stand on it.
This article originally appeared in Southern Seminary Magazine in the Spring 2026 issue.
