I began our talk by asking him, “Do you know what the Bible says about moms and dads?” He shook his head no. I said the Ten Commandments tell us that we need to honor our father and mother. And then we spent a few minutes talking about what honoring someone means. It means to show respect, to be kind, and to care for them, because God has given them a special role in our lives. Everybody has a mom and a dad. And children have a special role to play in caring for them.

I shared this with him and then asked him the question: “Do you feel like saying those unkind things was honoring to your mom?” He shook his head no. And then we talked about what Jesus would have done.

It was at this point that a story popped into my head that I hadn’t really considered before in this context: the story of Jesus hanging on the cross, talking to John. This is obviously his point of greatest anguish. He’s facing death. The normal and natural thing for any of us to do would be to think of ourselves, to consider our own fate, to be worried about ourselves.

Not Jesus. Jesus used this moment to make arrangements for his mother. He looked down from the cross and saw Mary standing there with John, the only disciple present (more on that in a minute). To his mother, he said, “Woman, behold, your son.” To John, “Behold, your mother.” And John, the Gospel tells us, took her into his own home from that hour (John 19:26–27).

More than a goodbye…

What Jesus was doing, in the culture of that time, is transferring a responsibility that he himself, as the oldest son, had: to provide and care for his mother, with his father presumably dead at this point. He transfers that responsibility to John, the one the Gospels say is the disciple whom he loved.

This was not a sentimental gesture. In first-century Judaism, the eldest son was customarily responsible for the material care of a widowed mother, a duty that came from the fifth commandment itself. Joseph is absent from the Gospels after Jesus’s twelfth year and is presumed by many to be dead. As eldest, Jesus would have been expected to provide for his mother in old age. The commandment to honor your father and mother was never just about tone of voice or speaking respectfully. The command also included material provision when parents grew old and could no longer provide for themselves.

The natural successors would have been his brothers, but his brothers did not believe in him at this point in the story and none were present at the cross. James would later convert after the resurrection but in this moment, none of Mary’s sons are present to take responsibility for her.

So Jesus transferred the duty to the disciple who stayed. Jesus, in his final moments, honored the fifth commandment.

Where did all the disciples go?

Reading this story again this week, I was struck by the fact John was the ONLY disciple at the cross. His mother being there makes perfect sense. I am sure for any mom out there reading this, that’s not surprising. While it would have been the most heart-wrenching thing to see, being present to provide even just a little solace to your dying child seems very natural. I bet it would have taken a whole legion of Roman soldiers to keep Mary from being at the cross.

The disciples, however, are all absent. Why? In all likelihood, they were scared. They knew they would have been seen as potential heirs to the legacy of Jesus, people who would continue his rebellion and uprising that the Roman officials were so keen to keep quiet. In that framing, you can see why the disciples fled. Their fear was rational. Identification with him at the wrong moment carried the same penalty he was paying.

All four Gospel writers detail this:

Matthew: “Then all the disciples left him and fled” (Matthew 26:56).

Mark: “Then everyone deserted him and fled.” (Mark 14:50).

Luke shows us Peter following “at a distance,” and then denying Jesus three times by the courtyard fire before the rooster crowed for fear of being linked to Jesus. (Luke 22:54–62).

And John remembers Jesus predicting the whole thing on the night he was arrested: “A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me.” (John 16:32).

The disciples scattered in order to avoid what seemed to them certain death. But not John. For whatever reason, John did not fear death, or at least did not allow his fear of death to so intimidate him as to avoid being with Christ during his hour of anguish and moment of need. Instead, he held fast.

The violent irony…

What is ironic here is the inversion. All the disciples who avoided the cross for fear of further persecution were so convinced by the resurrection that they spent the rest of their lives building the Kingdom of the man who had been resurrected. And nearly all of them ultimately paid for it with their lives, in violent deaths, by the very authorities they once fled.

Here is the best I could find on each of them. Most of these accounts come from later traditions rather than from Scripture itself, so I can’t vouch for specifics but see if you can spot the overall pattern:

• Peter — crucified upside down in Rome under Nero, around AD 64–67.

• Andrew — crucified at Patras, Greece.

• James son of Zebedee — beheaded by Herod Agrippa in Jerusalem, AD 44. This is the only martyrdom recorded in the New Testament itself (Acts 12:1–2).

• Philip — crucified or hanged at Hierapolis in modern Turkey.

• Bartholomew — flayed alive and beheaded in Armenia.

• Matthew — killed in Ethiopia or Persia, possibly with a halberd.

• Thomas — speared to death near Chennai, India, around AD 72.

• James son of Alphaeus — stoned and clubbed.

• Thaddaeus / Jude — killed in Persia or Armenia.

• Simon the Zealot — cut in two, or crucified in Persia or Britain.

• Matthias (the replacement for Judas) — stoned.

Two additional:

• Paul — beheaded in Rome under Nero, around AD 64–67.

• James the brother of Jesus — thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple and clubbed to death in Jerusalem, around AD 62.

What about John?

Then there is an old tradition, that Rome tried to kill John but he was protected. The account goes that they threw him into a vat of boiling oil at the Latin Gate in Rome, and he emerged unharmed. He was then exiled to Patmos, where he received the visions we now call Revelation. There is a church in Rome that still marks the supposed spot.

I cannot tell you whether the oil is literal or legend. There is no mention of it in the New Testament itself. What I can tell you is that it would be strange if Rome, having executed every other apostle they could get their hands on, simply never tried with John. So the tradition goes that they tried, and the disciple who did not fear death was preserved through it. He was exiled rather than executed, and he died of old age around the year AD 100, an old man at last.

Whatever happened, you can see the pattern unfold. Those who scattered received opportunities for redemption and all met death bravely for the Lord. John was spared that end. We cannot know for sure whether it was his courage to be at the cross, or his sacred duty to be with Mary and provide for her, or both, that gave him this shroud of protection.

What we do know is, the one not afraid to die is the one spared from it. More than that, he was also given the most sacred responsibility of caring for the woman who gave birth to Christ. There was great honor bestowed on John in being given the responsibility to honor Christ’s mother, Mary.

The Buried Commandment

Reflecting on this story, made me realize how the fifth commandment is so often treated as a throwaway, irrelevant in today’s world. Overlooked among commands not to murder or lie.

This downplaying is to our detriment. The triad of mother, father, and child is the most fundamental relationship in society. It is a symbiotic one that moves through a life cycle. Children, at their earliest moments, unable to provide for themselves, must be nourished by their mothers. Mothers, while bearing and raising children, depend on their husbands. And husbands, once no longer able to provide, must relinquish this holy role to their children. In this unity, we see God’s plan for honor, protection, and provision.

We all live inside this cycle, it is how all of us enter the world. No one has ever come from anything but one man and one woman. Every child has but one mother and one father. It is this commandment and truth that Christ concerned himself with at his moment of death.

Jesus, with nails through his wrists and the weight of the world’s sin on his shoulders, was busy making arrangements for the care of his mother.

Can we honor the fifth Commandment today?

We should never take lightly what it means to deprive a child of their ability to walk in Christ’s footsteps. Unfortunately, we live in a society that has increasingly tried to do just that by trivializing and redefining the role of Mothers and Fathers entirely.

Just in the last several weeks I have seen a “single mother by choice” ask for affirmation on Instagram and divorced couples throwing parties to celebrate the death of their family.

The woman who does not bind herself through marriage to the father of her child, puts herself at much greater risk for the father to be absent, and for her son to never see what Jesus saw modeled. Christ no doubt watched Joseph provide for their family. That example of provision is what he stepped into as he came into his own.

The man who does not commit to marriage before creating life is much less likely to shoulder the responsibilities he has to his wife and mother of their children. This dishonors God’s design and leaves children with no example and no compass. We can all look around and feel the effects of this.

Newer family “innovations” have made it even worse. Reproductive technologies now allow adults (many in same sex relationships) to purchase these roles of Mother and Father. Eggs and sperm are bought, children are created in a petri dish, placed in surrogate wombs, and the resulting children are delivered intentionally deprived of their mother, father, or both. These children are orphaned by design. What society once mourned as tragedy is now being celebrated as “progress”. How can we consider ourselves a just society when we are creating children who are structurally unable to live out the fifth commandment, because their mother or father has been erased? The child knows them, if at all, as “donor number 6457”, “gestational carrier”, or “Daddy’s special helper”.

As Christians, we must believe that all Scripture has a purpose, and that it holds deep truths that we cast away at our great peril. This moment at the cross, even as I teach it to my five-year-old son thousands of years later, is not merely descriptive of one particular situation where a Jewish man dying on a cross happened to have a mother to care for. It is prescriptive of a biological reality we all must honor. It explains a unique and precious bond that exists between mother, father, and child, and that bond creates real responsibilities on all parties, cycling at different points in life to care, provide, love, and sacrifice for one another.

Have we “progressed” past needing this commandment? Has our modern definition of family that treats these roles and bonds as optional left us happier and more connected?

I think it is exactly the opposite. If we read the entire command, it is unique in its attachment to a promise: “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”

Paul underlines this in his letter to the Ephesians: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise— “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”

The bottom line is this: the health of our children, the care of our parents, and our flourishing as a society, depend on the sacrificial structure of the family. They depend on our obedience to the fifth commandment.

Jesus modeled that in his final moments. We would all do well to notice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.

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Like many of you, I have been triggered more than once by David French. His recent sit-down with Allie Stuckey was no exception. One claim from this recent interview is worth taking up in full. It is worth it because, anyone who has been around the pro-life movement has no doubt heard a version of it. French argued that conservative Christians who are s…

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When Jesus cries out from the cross, some of the bystanders think he is calling for Elijah. I had accepted this for years as background noise in the story, an odd detail quickly filed under crowd confusion. But this year, I kept wondering, why Elijah? Of all the names, of all t…

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If you’ve never heard of James Talarico, here’s the thirty-second version: he’s a Texas state representative and Presbyterian seminarian running for U.S. Senate, and he’s become something of a media darling — fawning coverage from the New York Times, a viral appearanc…

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There has been a lot of this lately:
“SNAP cuts are sinful. Jesus was a refugee. USAID saves lives.”

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A voluntary ecosystem of extraordinary density. Eighteen million Americans in fraternal orders by 1920, roughly one in three adult males. An economy generating wealth at a rate history had never witnessed. Poverty falling. Wages rising. The art of association Tocqueville had marveled at in 1831 still operating at full force, delivering healthcare, insurance, orphan care, job placement, elder housing, and emergency relief through voluntary communities of mutual accountability rather than government bureaucracy.

Add to this a century of technological innovation, the digital revolution, and the greatest accumulation of wealth in human history. By 2025, after all of that plus trillions spent on government anti-poverty programs, we should have obliterated poverty. Right?

We didn’t. The official poverty rate in 2023 sat exactly where it was in 1973. And Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in 1965 (on the cusp of implementing the Great Society), saw exactly why, before the damage was done, before the money was spent, before the programs were fully launched. He said so in plain language. He was denounced as a racist. Yet, nearly everything he predicted came true.

Moynihan: The Prophet No One Wanted to Hear

I have written about the Moynihan Report at length elsewhere — you can find that piece here— but the essential summary is this.

In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democrat serving in the Johnson administration, wrote a report titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” He was alarmed. The Black out-of-wedlock birth rate had reached 23.6%. He saw what this number meant with sociological precision.

His core argument was not about race. It was about the family as the fundamental unit of human welfare delivery. The single strongest predictor of whether a child escapes poverty is not the income of the household. It is the structure of the household. Two married parents produce dramatically better outcomes across every measurable dimension: educational attainment, income, health, avoidance of incarceration. Social scientists have confirmed this finding more times than almost any other.

I’ve also written about how this finding persists even today:

Moynihan argued that the proposed Great Society programs would, by design, substitute for the family rather than strengthen it — removing the economic incentives for marriage and family formation among the very populations most in need of them. He insisted on what he called the necessity of dignified independence: the capacity of individuals to provide for themselves and their families as the foundation of human flourishing. Programs that made dependency the rational economic choice were not compassionate. They were degrading. They substituted a check for a father and called it progress.

He was denounced as a racist. The report was buried. Policy went in exactly the direction he warned against.

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This is the honest version of the argument in the pastor’s tweet. The question of what the state owes its citizens and what it is actually capable of delivering is one of the oldest in political philosophy. So let’s explore: What is the government’s legitimate role?

• Can it be merciful?

• Can it be helpful?

• Can it be good?

And what does history tell us when it tries?

What Mercy Actually Is

Before asking whether government can be merciful, we need to be clear about what mercy actually is. Because in common usage the word has been flattened into something like “not being cruel” or “providing material relief.” It is far more than that.

Mercy is an act of the will, freely chosen, at personal cost, directed toward a specific person. It is what happens when someone who has the right and the power to withhold chooses instead to give. It is the Samaritan stopping on the road, not because he had to, but because he chose to. His own oil, his own wine, his own money, his own time, his own promise to return. Every element of that transaction was his. The moment of choice is what makes it mercy rather than procedure.

Mercy is also relational. It requires one person to see another. Not to process a faceless claim, not to assess eligibility, but to actually see a specific human being in a specific moment of need and respond personally. The Samaritan did not submit a report to the Jericho Department of Road Safety. He got off his donkey and touched a wounded stranger. Got blood on his cloak and sweat on his skin. That contact, that seeing, is inseparable from the act.

And mercy is costly to the one extending it. The Samaritan made a promise that obligated him personally. He bore the cost. That bearing of cost is not incidental to mercy; it is what makes mercy morally formative, on a practical level. The person who gives becomes a different kind of person through the giving.

The government can do none of these things. It cannot choose freely, because it acts by compulsion and mandate. It cannot see anyone, because it processes categories of people, adjudicated by eligibility. It cannot sacrifice because it spends other people’s money. What the government performs when it transfers resources is not mercy. It may be justice, rightly enforced. It may be prudent policy. It may be strategic stability management. These are legitimate functions. Mercy is not among them.

To say the government should be kind, generous, or merciful is to misunderstand what those words mean and what the government is. It is not that the government is cruel. It is that kindness, generosity, and mercy are personal virtues that require a person to exercise them. An institution cannot be kind any more than a spreadsheet can love.

What the Government Is Actually For

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The February 2026 issue ran a six-page feature titled "Invisible Identities: The Queer Experience at Messiah University." It opened with this premise: "Although the exact number of queer students at Messiah University is unknown, several students have felt that the current policies regarding same-sex relationships and queer identities have negatively impacted their time on campus." From that premise, the piece interviewed students and alumni who felt harmed by Messiah's commitment to historic Christian sexual ethics, with no defense from any alumni who appreciate the institution's courage to hold clearly and faithfully to Scripture. It presented one side of a serious debate under the guise of journalism.

(I have placed a PDF of the article at the bottom of this piece so you can read it in full)

That has compelled me to share what the magazine chose not to: the heart behind Messiah’s adherence to faithful Christian views on marriage, sex, and family. And to be clear, I am not writing as an outsider.

I enrolled at Messiah in the fall of 2009. I played on the men’s soccer team, met my wife, studied cross-cultural Christian ministry, and had some of the best years of my life on that campus. The faculty challenged me in the way good educators should: rigorously, charitably, and with genuine attention to more than one side of difficult theological questions. We try to make it back to campus at least once a year. I have always been proud to call myself a Messiah alum.

What follows is not the work of someone who wishes Messiah harm. It is the work of someone who loves the institution and believes this issue deserves a stronger defense than it received.

First, a Word of Appreciation

President Stuckey deserves credit for his clarity. Asked directly about Messiah’s position on marriage and human sexuality, he stated: “As a Christian university, Messiah University holds to beliefs and practices that are rooted in our humble understanding of scriptural teaching and the historic teaching of the Christian church, both broadly and of our founding denomination the Brethren in Christ Church. Accordingly, the university affirms Christian marriage to be the union of one man and one woman, and that all human sexuality should be understood within this framework.”

That clarity is the bare minimum we should expect from a Christian institution. It is a sad commentary on today’s landscape that holding the line, plainly and without apology, in the face of coordinated activist pressure has become notable. But it is notable, and it is right, and Messiah’s leadership deserves to be affirmed for it.

It is also worth noting what Messiah has done beyond holding the line. The University’s Student Handbook is more welcoming than many Christian colleges on the question of orientation itself, stating plainly:

“It is important to note that Messiah University’s behavioral expectations are related to same-sex sexual expression, not orientation. The University does not hold the view that it is morally unacceptable to experience same-sex attraction or to identify as LGBT+.”

A student who struggles with same-sex attraction and lives faithfully within Messiah’s covenant standards faces no discipline, no diminishment of standing, no exclusion from campus life. The university’s position appears to be that the struggle is not the sin, and that students navigating it deserve pastoral care rather than condemnation.

That pastoral posture extends even to behavioral violations. Dean of Students Doug Wood clarified that a breach of Messiah’s intimacy standards does not result in removal from enrollment. “It’s done in the context of care and counseling and support, as opposed to a formal disciplinary hearing,” Wood said. “So it is done with great care.” Taking even this posture of leniency and pastoral understanding has earned Messiah criticism from those who believe the university should draw a harder line, particularly on its decision to permit students to openly “identify” as LGBT+ while only restricting same-sex sexual expression. That debate is real and justified. But my point here is this: by any reasonable standard, Messiah has gone above and beyond to accommodate a minority constituency on its campus, and the article still paints it as not enough.

To that end, the university has also previously offered SAGE, Sexuality and Gender Education, described officially as an educational program that “exists to provide opportunities for enhanced care and support for students while cultivating learning and leadership development within the broad themes of relationships, sexuality, and gender rooted in Messiah’s biblical understanding.” SAGE operated under the Division of Student Success and Engagement. From outward appearances, it did claim to be an affirmation group of LGBTQ+ identity. That distinction is precisely why the article portrays it as falling short.

Read the article carefully and you find the real disagreement surfacing in the students’ own words. One recent alumna, Ella Shane, expressed dismay at the widespread belief that if you’re queer, you cannot actually be Christian, and that on Messiah’s campus, not being Christian is “pretty much the worst thing you can do.” Another, Alex Hay, declared: “I do believe I was intentionally made by God, and that means my trans-ness and my queerness was made intentionally.” These are not complaints about being excluded from campus life. They are theological assertions. They are claiming that their identity is doctrinally correct and that Messiah’s position is doctrinally wrong. That is not a problem any amount of pastoral care, SAGE programming, or gracious policy language can solve.

The finish line is not tolerance. The goal is affirmation and celebration of a belief the Christian church has historically never held.

One recent alum, AJ Jerome, made this explicit. Jerome declared that the board of trustees should “answer to the fact that they are actively hurting people” because they “can’t get over the fact that God can love people that aren’t straight, and aren’t cis, and that their God might be a little bit bigger than what they thought God was.” That quote was printed in a university-funded publication without editorial comment. It does not ask for kindness. It tells the board of a Christian institution that their theology is threatening. Complete capitulation is the only outcome that will satisfy. Anything less is recast as “oppression”.

On the Question of Motive

The article then goes on to present, without qualification or challenge, the accusation that Messiah’s convictions on marriage and gender are financially motivated; driven not by genuine theological conviction but by donor pressure. The alum making the accusation, identified as JJ, had himself served in a leadership position on the Student Government Association, at a time when, by his own account, the SGA had a majority queer cabinet. His full statement is worth reading:

“At some point in my leadership position, [Student Government Association] had a majority queer cabinet. But we all knew that a change in policy is far from anything this institution will be able to accomplish in the near future. I’ve found out that there is very little we could do when the people who hold all the power threaten with their money.”

Threaten with their money.

Read that carefully. A student who held significant institutional influence, whose cabinet reflected the movement’s priorities, who had genuine access to advocate for change, concluded that the reason policy didn’t move was financial intimidation. President Stuckey explicitly and emphatically denied it. The article printed both the accusation and the denial— then offered no analysis, no evidence, no journalistic accountability. That is not balance. That is the mask of neutrality used to legitimize a smear.

Imputing the motives of deeply religious people, people whose institution has held a consistent theological position for over a century, rooted in a denomination whose convictions long predate this cultural moment, is a remarkable editorial choice. To print it without comment is not brave journalism. It is cowardice parading in the costume of fairness.

What We Actually Believe, and Why It Matters

The Gospel is good and true. Good for humanity, for families, for children, and for society. True in a world that increasingly tells us it is not. We do not hold these positions because a rulebook demands it. We hold them because we are convicted of their Truth in a world that calls them false, and their goodness in a world that does not seek our flourishing. This is not robotic obligation. We defend them from a place of passionate conviction.

The Gospel makes claims about reality. Not just spiritual reality, but human reality. What we are. How we are made. What we need. What families are for. What children deserve. These are not religious preferences layered over a neutral world. They are descriptions of how things actually are. And when the world began insisting, with increasing aggression and intolerance, that biological reality itself was negotiable, that sex was fluid, marriage was outdated, and parenthood assignable at birth, those of us who knew the Gospel recognized the lies immediately.

What I did not expect, when I was a student at Messiah, was that I would one day have to argue for the reality of biological sex and the meaning of marriage, motherhood, and fatherhood as if these were debatable philosophical opinions rather than observable facts. Let alone that abandoning those convictions would be repackaged as faithful Christianity.

Take sex first. The belief that God created human beings male and female is the unanimous teaching of the Christian church for more than two thousand years, rooted in Genesis and reaffirmed across every major Christian tradition in every century of the Church’s existence. The article argues that queer people have “existed for all of recorded history.” Well, so has the Church’s unbroken consensus on this question. If longevity is evidence, the scales do not tip the way the article implies.

But the defense of biological sex is not only theological. It is urgently pro-child. We are living through a period in which young children are being told that their sense of unease with their bodies constitutes a medical identity requiring pharmaceutical and surgical intervention. Puberty blockers suppress normal development. Cross-sex hormones administered in adolescence cause documented risks of permanent infertility. Double mastectomies on young girls. These are not hypothetical concerns raised by ideologues. They are documented medical realities now under serious re-examination in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, all of which have restricted or reversed the pediatric gender medicine protocols that until recently had been expanding rapidly in the United States. To hold that children deserve protection from irreversible interventions is not hatred. It is the most basic form of child advocacy.

Now take marriage. Marriage between a man and a woman is not an arbitrary religious preference. It is the only relationship that unites the two people whose biology is required to create a child. Every child ever born is the offspring of one man and one woman. One sperm, one egg. That biological fact creates a bond as real and observable as the child’s sex. The reason virtually every human civilization has recognized some version of this institution is not bigotry. It is the recognition that children need, belong to, and have a right to the two people who made them.

This understanding did not collapse all at once. Christians failed to defend their definition of marriage in big ways and small— in the pulpit, in the classroom, and in the coffeeshop; in the quiet accommodation of divorce and cohabitation; and in a thousand other concessions that slowly detached marriage from its Christian definition and biological logic long before any court touched it. The Supreme Court did not create the opening. It walked through the door we left open.

In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court extended to same-sex couples the full “constellation of benefits” that marriage confers. One of those benefits is the “right” to become a parent. Previously, this was the recognition of the biological bond between Mothers/Fathers and their children. The centuries-old understanding that a married couple’s union produced children and those children have a right to both of them. But in the wake of the ruling, same-sex couples faced an unavoidable biological reality: two men or two women cannot create children. Extending “equal” access to children, therefore, required a new answer to who a child’s parents are. To say their biological Mother and Father (as we always have), excluded Same Sex couples. So, the the law arrived at a new answer: parents are no longer recognized by biology, they are assigned by intent (I’ve written more about that here). In today’s world, whoever intends to parent, whoever contracts for it, pays for it, wants it badly enough, is declared the winner (parent). The child’s actual biological mother or father is sidelined, compensated, and erased from the birth certificate.

This new legal fiction, Parent Assigned at Birth, requires sperm to be purchased, eggs to be sold, women’s bodies to be rented through surrogacy contracts, and children to lose their mother, father, or both so that unrelated adults who cannot be their biological parents are able to get what they want: a child.

We believe that is an injustice. Not because the adults who form these families are bad people, but because a child’s right to be known and raised by their own mother and father does not disappear because adult desire is intense or love is genuine. The child’s loss is real regardless of the quality of the home they are placed in. That is the true cost of affirming adult desires and identities at the expense of biological reality.

We believe this position to be both scientific and moral: neither your sex nor your parents can be assigned at birth. Both are encoded in your DNA. You can take a blood test and learn your biological sex. You can take that same test and identify your mother and your father.

The decision Messiah is being asked to make is not between donor money or compassion. It is between adult desires and children’s rights.

You may believe that biological sex is fluid. You may believe that marriage can be between any two, three, or five people. You may even believe that children have no particular right to be raised by their own biological mother and father, that any two adults the state assigns are equally sufficient, that the biological bond between a parent and child is a sentimental preference rather than a scientific reality. These are all positions people hold. That is your right. But to treat convictions held by the global Christian church since its founding as rooted in animus, homophobia, or greed, is a tired play.

It is 2026, we are done having our ancient beliefs blamed for threatening people’s existence. The children harmed by the outcomes of these ideas deserve better.

A Final Word

The Swinging Bridge asked its readers to see these students as victims: victims of an institution that refuses to fully affirm their identities, victims of a theological tradition that will not bend.

Affirm us, or you are the oppressor. But affirmation has a cost, and it is not a bill that will be paid by the adults demanding it. Affirming gender ideology means endorsing the medical interventions described above. Affirming the redefinition of marriage, and as a result parenthood, means endorsing a marketplace in which children are intentionally separated from their biological mother or father by contract. This is the choice being forced: will we deny Christian teaching or remain faithful to it?

These students are not the victims.

Families, kids, and our culture will inherit the consequences of decisions being made right now in our classrooms, courtrooms, hospitals, and legislatures.

We advocate for a Gospel-centered understanding of life, marriage, sex, and family because we believe it is God’s best for everyone. We believe it leads to flourishing.

We will not apologize for defending it.

-JW

Invisible Identities The Queer Experience At Messiah

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About the Author:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.

Each year that goes by, I have grown more convinced by this point. My journey with discipline took on an entirely new dimension when I had kids. It changed in a way that made everything before it feel like a scrimmage.

I might have been grinding, waking up early, hitting PRs, reading books, building habits, and that was great. But the moment I brought my first child home from the hospital, I entered a completely different arena.

Every priority got re-sorted. Every hour got re-weighed. Every dollar got re-assigned. And the version of discipline I practiced as a twenty-something with full autonomy over my schedule suddenly looked quaint.

This new season required something I’ve come to call Dad strength.

Money

When you’re single or married without kids, a frivolous dollar is just a frivolous dollar. An impulse buy feels like a small regret at worst. But the moment your first child arrives, the math changes completely.

Every dollar you spend carelessly is a dollar that affects the kind of wedding you can give your daughter. It’s a dollar that determines whether she graduates with student loans or without them. It could be the margin that gives you and your wife the flexibility later in life to be fully present as grandparents. A surprise bill that used to be an inconvenience now has the power to destabilize the security of your home.

When you bring your first child home from the hospital, your view of money completely changes. Disciplined stewardship of your finances stops being a personality trait and starts being an act of love.

The Power Hours

Here is the part that no optimization podcast can prepare you for.

What used to be a multi-hour post-work gym session, your chance to decompress, listen to a podcast, hit the weights, sit in the sauna, grab a late dinner with your wife, suddenly vanishes. Those hours between 5:00 and 8:00 PM get swallowed whole. This block of time has come to be called the power hours around my house. They are the most grueling three hours of the day. You walk through the door already running on fumes, and you are immediately called upon to stay awake, play with the kids, wrestle on the floor, help clean up dinner, manage bath time, and read a book without falling asleep in the chair.

Post work quickly becomes the most expensive hours of the day. If I am giving them to anybody, they better be worth it. And my workouts were certainly not worth taking from my family.

So where do the workouts go?

They go to the morning. Now the least expensive hours of the day are between 5:00 and 7:00 AM, when the house is completely quiet, the kids are asleep, and you can get a workout in and prepare for your day without anyone paying a cost for it.

Each day now comes with tension: sleeping through those hours means your workout has to come from somewhere else and that somewhere else is almost always family time. On the other hand, sleeping through those hours and never working out at all means your family pays a different price losing years with you because you refused to take care of your body.

Bottom line: get out of bed.

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Work

Traveling to cool new cities for work used to be exciting. You’d think, how awesome is this? Now you think, how many nights away is it?

Your relationship with work fundamentally shifts. You begin to think in terms of freedom and flexibility. What do I need to do to become so valuable within my organization (or so valuable to the market) that I have the freedom and flexibility to protect my family, provide for my family, and be present for my family?

Protect. Provide. Be present. These become the primary goals as your world shifts away from acquisition and success for success’s sake toward something beyond yourself, something bigger. Career ambition doesn’t die it just transforms. You stop climbing for the view and start climbing because people are depending on you at the top.

Faith and the Transmission of Values

Then comes the part that really shakes you.

You watch your children grow up awash in cultural messaging. You hear horror stories from other families… kids abducted by ideologies that would have them deny the goodness of their own bodies, infected by anti-natal sentiments that tell them the greatest thing they could do for the world is not bring another life into it. And you realize something that hits like a freight train: your grandchildren depend on the successful transmission of your faith and values.

Fighting for and promoting life, marriage, the permanence of the family and ultimately the source of all of this wisdom and truth, which is faith in Christ becomes an urgent mission. You realize you need to know culture’s arguments. You need to know what you believe. And you need to get good at teaching it to your children, because the transmission of your faith becomes one of the primary ways you protect them throughout their entire lives… even after you are no longer with them.

Discipline as a single man might mean reading your Bible regularly in the morning. Discipline as a father means knowing it well enough to hand it to your children as armor.

Marriage

Before kids, you don’t even realize how little you depended on each other daily. You don’t really have to coordinate schedules. It doesn’t much matter when one of you leaves the house in the morning or when you’re getting back. You get to preserve a great deal of your independent identity. It feels like freedom.

Kids expose all of that.

The minute you have children, you see how ill-equipped you are to be true teammates. To get on the same page about parenting. To tag each other in and out of daily tasks and chores. To defend one another while enforcing discipline. To stay unified as new decisions crop up that affect the little people you love more than anything in the world. If you have a genuine disagreement about something that affects your children, you had better know how to solve that problem, quickly and humbly.

And you’ve got to do all of this while not losing your romantic connection. Something that becomes incredibly difficult as you walk through seasons of sleeplessness with young children, passing like ships in the night through bedtime routines and stacks of kid’s books, exhausted beyond words.

But you know, looking into your children’s eyes, how devastating it would be for them to endure the breakup of your union. Splitting time between two houses. Watching their world fracture. If the two of you ever devolve into just teammates and stop being lovers, you’ve lost something your kids desperately need. The discipline to choose each other first, to invest time and money into your marriage even when you are completely exhausted, to protect the romance through the chaos that is one of the hardest things a man will ever do.

Dad Strength

I call all of this Dad strength because I really do believe God delivers a new kind of strength to you when you become a father.

I’ve always thought about it like daily bread, like the manna the Israelites gathered in the wilderness. They couldn’t stockpile it. They couldn’t save a two-day supply. They had to trust that it would be there again in the morning.

In my eight years of having kids (four total now) I have never had a two-day supply of dad strength. I’ve only ever had enough energy for the day ahead of me. And honestly? That dependency on God is good.

Whether I think it’s good or not, it’s all I’ve got.

The burden and mantle and blessing that it is to lead a family is only ever made lighter by walking with Jesus and asking Him each and every day for provision and rest.

Now, am I as fit as I was in college? No.
Am I as well-rested? No.
Does my car look as cool with french fries ground into the seats and car seats strapped in the back? Absolutely not.

But this is a new season and a new challenge. Learning to embrace these intense years by being ruthlessly efficient with your time, incredibly disciplined with your sleep, diligent with your workouts, frugal with your funds, and intentional with your wife… these are the new challenges. It is a different kind of hard than the disciplined, intentional life you pursued at twenty years old.

But don’t overlook that dad falling asleep at 8:02 pm, having put his children down after three books and a bath. That legend, nodding off on the couch, has far more grit than the twenty-year-old gym rat will ever know.

-JW

About the Author:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.

This isn’t a finding from a conservative think tank. It’s from the Chicago Fed, using data from Denmark, one of the most progressive, gender-egalitarian nations on earth. And it doesn’t just describe a pattern. It reveals a mechanism. Women’s time is the irreducible currency of motherhood. The more that time is worth in the marketplace, the more expensive children become. Not in dollars, but in opportunity. No subsidy, no policy, no program has been able to neutralize this trade-off. Not in Scandinavia. Not anywhere.

The paper also finds that human capital depreciation—the way a mother’s professional skills, workplace networks, and earnings trajectory erode during time away from the labor market—is an important driver of the long-run gender wage gap, explaining about a quarter of the persistent gap between men’s and women’s earnings. Motherhood is not just temporarily costly. It compounds.

Put these findings together, and you arrive at a fork in the road. Two fundamentally different visions of human flourishing, each with its own logic, its own appeal, and its own inevitable destination.

Before We Get to the Fork: The Denmark Problem

At this point, a reasonable person might object: the problem isn’t structural. It’s that we simply haven’t built enough support. If we had better parental leave, affordable childcare, and a real safety net, women wouldn’t face such a brutal trade-off between career and children. The mechanism the Chicago Fed describes is real, the argument goes, but it can be overcome with the right policy architecture.

This is a fair objection. It’s also one that Denmark has answered decisively, by building exactly the system this argument calls for. And fertility is still falling.

Consider what Denmark actually offers parents. Each parent receives 24 weeks of paid parental leave after the birth of a child, a combined 52 weeks total, with the option to extend parental leave from 32 to 46 weeks. For workers, 11 of those 24 weeks are non-transferable, specifically designed to encourage paternal involvement. Childcare is available from the age of 26 weeks, with the state subsidizing at least 75 percent of the cost. Every child in Denmark is guaranteed a spot in municipal daycare by law. Low-income families pay nothing. According to 2021 OECD data, a couple in Denmark spends roughly 9 percent of household income on childcare, compared to over 22 percent in the United Kingdom and even more in the United States.

But it doesn’t stop there. Healthcare is universal and free at the point of service, including all maternity and pediatric care. Education is free from primary school through university, and students receive government grants while enrolled. Families receive a quarterly child allowance for every child under 18. Housing subsidies are available for eligible families. The “flexicurity” labor model means that even if a parent loses a job, robust unemployment benefits and retraining programs prevent economic freefall.

Denmark is not a country that has neglected family support. It is arguably the most family-supportive policy environment ever constructed. And its total fertility rate is approximately 1.5 children per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement level needed to sustain a population. It peaked at 1.9 in 2010 and has fallen by 22 percent since. Even a recent Ms. Magazine article acknowledged that Denmark’s policies only offset about 80 percent of the “motherhood penalty” and that remaining 20 percent is apparently enough to keep fertility below replacement indefinitely.

The Nordic countries as a whole tell the same story. Finland, with a similar welfare architecture, has fallen to a TFR of 1.25, the lowest in its history, lower than at any point since record-keeping began in 1776. Sweden is at 1.43. Norway at 1.44. Iceland hit a record low in 2024. These are the countries that took the “just build more support” hypothesis most seriously, invested most heavily, and still cannot produce enough children to replace their own populations.

This is not an argument against parental leave or subsidized childcare. These are good things that help families. But they are not sufficient to solve the fertility crisis, because the crisis is not primarily a policy problem. It’s a structural one. The Chicago Fed data tells us why: the mechanism that suppresses fertility (the rising opportunity cost of women’s time) operates at a level that policy supports can cushion but cannot reverse. Denmark has proven that you can build the most generous safety net in human history and still not reach replacement fertility.

With that established, we arrive at the actual fork in the road. Not “should we have better policy?” but “which fundamental vision of society will we organize around?”

Road One: The Egalitarian Individual

The first road is the one the Western world has been building for half a century. Its core commitment is to the economic equality and autonomy of the individual, regardless of sex. On this road, the goal is to minimize the differences between men’s and women’s economic lives. Women should earn what men earn, work where men work, and never be penalized, economically or socially, for their biology.

This road has produced extraordinary gains. Women are more educated than ever. Female labor force participation has transformed economies. The gender wage gap, measured crudely, has narrowed. For millions of women, this road has meant freedom, dignity, and opportunity that previous generations could not have imagined.

But this road has a destination, and the Chicago Fed data helps us see it clearly.

If the primary project is to increase women’s individual earning power and labor market attachment, then fertility will continue to decline. Not because women are selfish. Not because policy has failed. But because the mechanism is structural: the more a woman’s hour is worth in the marketplace, the more each child costs her. The substitution effect (the economist’s term for the rising price of her time) overwhelms whatever subsidies, leave policies, or childcare programs are layered on top.

Every nation that has traveled furthest down this road confirms it. South Korea, with massive government investment in pro-natal policy totaling over $270 billion since 2006, recorded a total fertility rate of just 0.75 in 2024, the lowest of any OECD nation. Japan, Singapore, Italy, Spain: all have pursued some version of “support women in the workforce AND hope they have babies,” and all are watching their populations begin to disappear.

The logical end of this road is not mysterious. It is a society of highly productive, highly autonomous individuals who do not replace themselves. The economy hums for a generation, maybe two, then begins to buckle under the weight of an inverted age pyramid: too many elderly, too few young. Immigration can delay the math but cannot solve it, because immigrants assimilate to the same fertility-suppressing incentive structure within a generation.

At the terminus of Road One, you get a civilization that is rich, aging, contracting, and eventually unable to sustain its own infrastructure, pensions, or defense. You get a society that liberated the individual from the obligations of family and then discovered, too late, that the family was the engine of the future.

The cruelest irony is that this road also fails women on its own terms. The gender wage gap, as the paper shows, is primarily a motherhood gap driven by human capital depreciation. The women who do have children on Road One bear the full economic penalty in a system designed around uninterrupted individual productivity. The system doesn’t accommodate motherhood. It punishes it, and then calls the punishment a “gap” to be closed by making women behave more like men.

Road Two: The Complementary Family

The second road starts from a different premise. It takes the Chicago Fed data at face value and asks: what if men and women are not interchangeable economic units, but complementary ones? What if the institution that channels male earning power toward sustaining a family, while freeing women to invest their irreplaceable time in children, is not a relic of patriarchy but a rational, pro-child, pro-woman structure?

This is the road of marriage. Not marriage as mere sentiment or ceremony, but marriage as an economic and social architecture designed around a biological reality: children need their mother’s time in ways that are intensive, prolonged, and not fully substitutable, and someone has to underwrite that time economically.

The data supports this directly. When men earn more, fertility rises, because male income functions as household wealth that doesn’t trigger the substitution effect on women’s time. A husband’s raise doesn’t make his wife’s hours more expensive. It makes the family more secure. It is the one economic input that the data shows actually supports fertility without the corresponding suppression.

Road Two requires a fundamentally different set of investments. Rather than maximizing female labor force participation, it prioritizes household economic viability on a single or primary income. Rather than treating the wage gap as an injustice to be eliminated, it recognizes the gap as evidence that mothers are doing something valuable that the market doesn’t price. Rather than building ever-larger childcare systems to get women back to work faster, it asks whether the goal should be to make it possible for women to be with their children without economic ruin.

This road is culturally unfashionable. It will be called regressive. But its destination is a society that actually has a next generation.

The logical end of Road Two is a civilization that grows, or at least sustains itself. Where the default assumption is that families are the fundamental unit of society, not individuals. Where tax policy, housing policy, and labor policy are built around making it viable for one parent to be home, not as a quaint throwback but as a strategic investment in human capital—the small kind, the kind that packs lunches for school and reads bedtime stories and eventually grows up to fund your Social Security.

Road Two is not without costs. Women who invest years in caregiving are economically vulnerable if marriages fail, which means this road demands a legal and cultural framework that takes marital commitment seriously. Not as a trap, but as a covenant that protects the person who made the bigger sacrifice. It means fathers have to be present and provider-oriented, not optional. It means society has to say, out loud, that motherhood is not a lesser vocation.

The Wrong Lens

But here is what troubles me about everything I’ve written so far: it’s all still trapped inside the economic frame. And that frame is part of the problem. If you accept that human life is best measured in wages, productivity, and opportunity cost, then the Chicago Fed paper makes fertility look like a sacrifice. Road One is the rational path for the individual. Road Two is the dutiful path for civilization. That framing is a lie. Not because the economics are wrong, but because the economics are measuring the wrong things.

The data on what actually makes for a good life tells a very different story than the one our culture is selling. Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, has spent decades studying what predicts human happiness and flourishing. His findings, drawn from the General Social Survey, the University of Chicago’s research on well-being, and a joint study with the Wheatley Institute, are remarkably consistent: marriage is the single strongest predictor of happiness in America. Stronger than income. Stronger than education. Stronger than career satisfaction. Married men and women are nearly twice as likely to report being “very happy” as their unmarried peers.

And it’s not just marriage in the abstract. The 2022 General Social Survey found that 40 percent of married mothers between the ages of 18 and 55 reported being “very happy” with their lives, the highest of any group. Married mothers were more likely than any other group of women to say their lives felt meaningful most or all of the time. They reported higher levels of purpose, connection, and physical affection.

But here is the part that matters most for the argument: unmarried women without children reported being “very happy” at a rate of 22 percent. And unmarried mothers? Just 17 percent, the lowest of any group. Read that again. Women who had children outside of marriage were less happy than women who had no children at all. Children alone do not produce flourishing. What produces flourishing is children within the structure of marriage: a husband who is present and committed, a covenant that makes the sacrifice mutual, a partnership designed around the reality that raising children is too important and too demanding to do without the stability and dependability of someone doing it with you.

The data is not telling us that kids are the answer. It is telling us that marriage is the design, and children are the fruit.

The costs of choosing against this design are deferred. They don’t show up on a pay stub at 32. They show up in the data at 55. University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman has found that the decline in marriage is the primary statistical explanation for the decline in American happiness. The things we were told would make us happy, autonomy, career achievement, freedom from obligation, have coincided with the most anxious, medicated, and lonely generation in American history.

To be clear: this is not a claim that every person who does not build a family lives a meaningless life. Many people live with purpose and joy outside of marriage and parenthood. But a civilization that treats children as a lifestyle accessory rather than its central mission, one that penalizes having and raising them instead of honoring the sacrifice, is not a civilization that will exist for very long. And even setting aside the civilizational math, the data says most people who do build families are glad they did.

Children are not an economic cost to be minimized. They are the point. Marriage is not a constraint on freedom. It is the structure within which freedom finds its meaning. The economic frame cannot see this because it has no variable for joy, no coefficient for purpose, and no regression that captures what it feels like to be needed by someone who shares your blood and your name.

The Choice We Refuse to Name

We are standing at a crossroads, but it’s deeper than policy. It’s deeper than economics. It is a question about what we believe human beings are for. The Chicago Fed measured wages and labor supply and found that men and women respond to economic incentives in opposite, complementary ways. Brad Wilcox measured happiness and meaning and found that marriage and parenthood are where human beings actually flourish. The data from both directions points to the same destination:

The family is not an obstacle to the good life. It is the good life. And the institution that makes it work, that protects mothers, channels fathers, and gives children what they need, is marriage.

The nations that have chosen individual economic optimization are not happier. They are richer and lonelier and disappearing. The math doesn’t care about our preferences. But neither does the human heart, which keeps longing for exactly the things our economic models told it to abandon. The question is not whether we can afford to have children. It’s whether we can afford the emptiness of the alternative, and whether we’ll discover the answer before the choice is made for us.

-JW

About the Author:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.

Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good f…

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