Sexuality, Gender & God’s Design w/ Hillary Morgan Ferrer

Episode 290: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

Hillary Morgan Ferrer, founder of Mama Bear Apologetics, joins the show to equip parents for navigating today’s most challenging conversations about sexuality and gender identity with their children. Drawing from her newly updated book on sexuality and gender, Ferrer reveals how seemingly sudden cultural shifts have been decades in the making—and gives parents practical tools to recognize false worldviews, engage with compassion, and plant biblical truth in their children’s hearts before confusion takes root.

Episode Transcript

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (00:00):
So I think that would also be a good way that we can help our kids to understand this may not be clear, but what is this pointing to? What does this look like? What can you understand about reality with these two things together that you’ll never be able to understand if they’re apart from each other?

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:21):
There are a few areas in our culture that have changed as rapidly as the understanding of sexuality, gender, and identity. For Christians, these conversations are vital. What does it mean to be male or female? What is our sexuality for? Where does our identity ultimately come from? How can we uphold biblical truth while genuinely loving our neighbors? What do we do when we face situations in our culture where ungodly values are being openly promoted and our kids are right there watching?

My guest today is Hillary Morgan Ferrer. She’s founder and president of Mama Bear Apologetics. This is a ministry, you’ll want to know about this. They are dedicated to equipping Christians to think critically and biblically about the ideas shaping our culture. She’s the general editor and a contributing author of several books, including the newly updated and expanded Mama Bear Apologetics: Guide to Sexuality and Gender Identity. You’re going to love this show. Let’s welcome Hillary. Hillary Morgan Ferrer, welcome to the Truth Change Everything podcast.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (01:26):
Hi, thank you for having me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:28):
I love Mama Bear Apologetics. I’ve been able to be on the show several times with you and your colleagues. The books you guys produce are amazing and it is fun to see mama bears all across the world grabbing onto biblical apologetics, wanting their children to know scripture and know God’s truth. Thank you for your work.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (01:49):
Oh, thank you so much. It’s been an honor that the Lord has allowed me to be a part of it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:54):
Now your husband, Dr. John, was on this show a little bit earlier in the year, and the two of you were the faculty and residents at Summit Ministries a little bit earlier in the summer. So we’re grateful for your service there, but you guys are a power duo of apologetics.

Today we get to talk about biblical worldview and sexuality and gender. It’s something that we’ve covered on the show quite a bit, but I don’t think we’ve specifically talked about what you guys have focused on in the Mama Bear Guide to Sexuality and Gender Identity.

Well, I would say in the last decade, this whole debate has transformed pretty dramatically. It used to be just middle-aged men who had a sexual fetish and they were transsexuals, but in the last decade there have been some big shifts. What do you see from your perspective about our culture’s current understanding of sex, gender, and identity?

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (02:55):
Yeah, I would say that we saw a lot of the seeds for what’s happening now being kind of planted 20, 30, 40 years ago, just the concept of eroding that there is objective truth, eroding the concept of how do we find it? Is it grounded in nature? Is it grounded in my mind?

And it’s basically what we’re seeing now is people think that this happened all of a sudden, but it’s kind of like if you’ve ever been in the spring where all these things you planted suddenly blossom overnight or like my husband and I, we have a couple mushrooms that’ll just come out of nowhere and get this big within a day or two. And I think that that’s kind of what we’re seeing with all the outworkings of these ideas that have been embedded for the last 30 years.

And what’s happened is now that we have paved the way for those ideas, we’re seeing it enter not only just within the adult sphere, but the thing that we’ve never seen before happen, I think within just at least the American tradition is that this is being taught to children.

(03:55):
It was always something that was out there. It was maybe in the universities or it was in the, like you said, middle-aged kind of deviant men that were having just all different sexual proclivities. We are seeing for the first time that it’s being taught as normal, natural, good from kindergarten on up. And I think we’re only going to see this spread even more.

And this is why parents are so important because we cannot rely on the schools, we can’t rely on even the Sunday schools sometimes just to start undermining these beliefs and saying, “Hey, this is not biblical. Not only is it not biblical, it’s just not true. It doesn’t match reality.” So I think that’s really the big difference that we’ve seen is just the age range that it’s permeated as opposed to what we’ve seen in the past.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:45):
On the day we’re recording this, there’s been a news item about Roaring Forks, Colorado and their school district here putting in a sex ed curriculum that goes all the way down to kindergarten. And they’re asking children as young as I think first grade, how do you like to be touched? I mean, it’s unbelievable.

This would’ve, in previous generations, been a clear case of child abuse. And now every child does it unless the parent goes through a specific complicated opt-out process. How did we get to the place where we normalized child abuse in schools?

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (05:29):
Well, we really see this play back into Aldis Huxley’s Brave New World. It actually describes something very similar to that. It talks about sexual play in children. In fact, they call the game Hunt the Zipper in the Brave New World where kids are taught to go in pairs behind bushes and stuff and hunt the zipper. It’s like a child’s version of sexual play so that they can begin normalizing it because in that society, the selfish thing to do is to only be with one person. It’s the generous, broad community saving activity to be with as many people as you possibly can.

So we can’t even say that this is a surprise if we saw people foreshadowing this and really predicting this as far back as that. But yeah, I think people don’t really understand the concept of grooming. It’s like they hear it, but they hear it almost as a buzzword, but if you ask them to define it, they don’t know.

(06:24):
But grooming really is teaching from in small little increments, making something that should not be normal, making it normal. Because what we see as normal, we see as being true and we see as being good. I would say that anytime someone has something that this is their general experience, they’re like, “Oh, this is normal, it’s true and it’s good.” Those three concepts tend to go together.

And if you have normalized something in a child and then later on you say, “Hey, this is not good,” they’re going to say, “Well, that’s what everybody does. How could this not be good? It hasn’t hurt any of my friends.” It’s basically the frog in the kettle.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:01):
I’m writing that down because I just feel like that’s so important. Norming, we had talked about that in all of our psychology classes and sociology classes back in the day, but now it’s actually become the way that we try to make a new stand on what the new truth is, what the new standard of goodness is.

I feel like you’ve got your finger on the pulse and you and your colleagues at Mama Bear Apologetics more than anyone else about what moms and dads are really feeling confused by and where they feel unequipped. Could you just talk a little bit about, because all of this is so unsettling and I mean, I hate the fact that we have to talk about this on a show, but we need to bring to light what is happening. But I just think a lot of people just feel stunned and almost like they’re psychically numbed.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (07:56):
Yeah. And I think there is a little bit of a denial that’s going on, but if I were to tell parents to compare it to something, I would compare it to common core math. And the reason why I’m going to compare it to common core math is I tried to, I think it was like 10, 12 years ago, I tried to help my third grade nephew with his math homework and it was just multiplication and I could not figure out what he was trying to tell me and how to do this multiplication.

I mean, there was just everything everywhere to where I was like, I can’t help you with your homework. It’s like I can show you how to multiply things. It’s really, really easy to do it like this, but whatever way you’re doing it, I have no clue. And so what we have is such a stark divide in the generations that in general, our parents could help us with our homework, their parents could help them with their homework because what they saw in the schools was pretty similar.

(08:46):
We had the same teaching going down from generation to generation to generation. Now, even with something like mathematics, the parents cannot help the kids because it’s so different. And I would say we have the same thing that’s happening within the realm of the body, within the realm of reproduction, within the realm of gender, sexuality, identity, all the things that it is so different that the parents don’t even know how to talk with their kids.

And they finally just throw up their hands because unless they’re willing to really dig deep and to learn what the kids are being taught right now, they’re not going to be able to speak meaningfully into that. And so there’s a phrase that I repeat in the Mama Bear Guide to Sexuality and Gender Identity book. I said, “You cannot refute that which you don’t understand.” And that’s kind of where we are.

(09:35):
And I think that’s why a lot of parents are so, kind of, it makes them so nervous and they kind of put their blinders on. They don’t want to think about it because they don’t even understand what’s being taught or what things they’re having to come against. And so that’s what we really try to do in the Mama Bear book is to really break down not just… A lot of sexuality books will talk about, well, this is God’s plan and this is why it’s good, that kind of stuff.

We really try to go back into the philosophy and where these ideas came from so that parents not only just, you don’t just weed a weed here and there plucking it out, you can actually unroot that entire foundation. And so that was my goal for that book, is for them to understand from seed to small weed to big weed, where is this coming from so that when they saw it, when they heard it, they would recognize it and they could nip it in the bud at that point.

(10:29):
And one of the best things if someone really wants to see what are some of the seeds that are being planted, we have a passage or something in, not the appendix, but it’s an afterword called things to repeat to your kids until they want to gag. And the things to repeat to your kids until they want to gag are little bite-sized pieces of a worldview that I think will undermine what they’re being taught.

It’s things like what you do with your body matters. It sounds like such a simple concept, but what you do with your body matters. And then you say, well, why does it matter? Because God gave you your body to take care of it, to be a steward of it. We’re not even saying you own your body, which is what all the, I think the new sexuality, there’s so much about autonomy and consent that as long as someone consent to something, it’s fine.

(11:13):
But no, no, that’s not what we’re teaching. You got your body to take care of it. That is your duty to your body. And then maybe something along the lines of gender identity, personality, interest and aptitudes are on a spectrum. Gender is not. Personality, interests and aptitudes are on a spectrum. Gender is not. If you can just keep repeating that over and over again till your kids are like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t want to hear this anymore.”

When one of their friends starts coming out saying, “Well, I think I’m a boy or I think I’m a girl because I have this interest or my personality is like this or I feel like that,” your kids will hear your voice going, “Personality interest and aptitudes are on a spectrum.” Gender is not. It undercuts all those arguments from the beginning and it does it in just these short little phrases that you can use.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:00):
Yeah. So good. Let’s talk about those worldview assumptions a little bit and dig into it some because I think when you talk about the root, that’s so huge. We’re fighting elm trees at our house. We always fight them. They just come up everywhere. And you cannot just pick the leaves off of an elm tree and then it goes away. You have to dig down to the root and then trace the root back to the mother root in order to try to get rid of it.

But we don’t think that way often in the world of ideas. We just see, oh, well, my child was taught this, I’m against that. Or my child was taught this. Well, by the end of the school year, there could be a hundred things that you’re trying to battle all at once. Nobody can fight a war on a hundred fronts.

(12:51):
So go down to the root a little bit. What are some of the worldview assumptions under the cultural messages that we see today? And I mean, let’s cover it all. Beliefs about what actually is true, what actually exists, happiness, freedom, what it means to be a human, all of those kinds of things. Kind of give us some parent language for that.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (13:12):
Yeah. So I guess one of them would be the idea that truth is rooted in biology, truth is not rooted in psychology. And that would be a big switch that we’ve had in terms of gender, that my gender is determined by my psychology, not my biology. And one of the things that you can do to really show the ridiculousness of an idea is to sometimes take that same concept and apply it to something that has not been normalized yet.

So for example, race, we are seeing some people coming out and saying, “Well, why can’t I say I’m Black? I identify as a Black person. I was assigned white at birth, but I identify as Black.” People would say, “Oh, well, that’s ridiculous.” But the same people who would say, “That’s ridiculous,” will say, “Oh no, it makes total sense for male and female.” So you need to say, “Okay, why is this different than the sexuality?” And they’ll say, “Well, you can clearly see that.” And be like, “Well, you can clearly see gender.”

And just kind of start getting them to realize, “Oh yeah, maybe I have bought into this false lie.” Also, the idea that you can change your body, your mind’s harder to change than your body, that is completely foreign for almost all of psychology.

(14:22):
It has always been since the birth of psychology, which we’ve only really had that for 150 years of modern psychology, that if something needs to change, you go for a mental illness, you go and you try to change the mind because you can have wrong ideas, but you can’t change reality. Again, that’s completely been flipped on its head, this idea that I can’t change my mind, but I can change reality. I can change my body. I can change the physicality of it.

One of the beautiful things about a lot of sexuality, and especially gender identity, it’s self-refuting. The idea of, oh, there’s a spectrum of genders. Okay, then why do we only have someone going from male to female and female to male? Or they say they’re non-binary. Okay, so you’re either binary or non-binary. That sounds like a binary. And so you just kind of have to listen to what they’re saying to be able to debunk those.

(15:15):
What are some other examples, can we think of, for core? Oh, I would say one of them, this concept of consent as being the only litmus test for if something is good. We see this even coming into the criminal justice system where I get all these random videos on Facebook where it’ll be someone being pulled over by a police officer who’s saying, You need to get out of the car, and they just keep screaming over again, I do not consent to be touched.

As he’s putting their hands behind their back, putting handcuffs and they keep screaming, I do not consent to this. I do not consent to this. As if he’d be like, oh, well, if you don’t consent to being arrested, well, I’m going to stop. You can see these ideas where they don’t stop at sexuality. They go onto other things. And if you can see, I mean, really the world is your lesson plan.

(16:04):
When you start looking at just the videos and craft fairs and throw pillows, the kind of comments that are on there, the world is your lesson plan where you can start pointing out how these ideas have placed themselves. Consent is not the highest good. I mean, you do need to have consent for someone to do anything to you, but that doesn’t make it right. You can show them all sorts of ways that you could consent to something that is actually very, very damaging, that we do not base good and evil based on if someone has consented or not.

So yeah, just kind of keep listening for these buzz phrases and then take it to something that the child will understand that clearly does not follow that same pattern in order for them to see that the logic over here with sexuality is just as ridiculous as the logic that we apply to whether or not you consent to being arrested or not. They’re just as ridiculous. You just have to be able to see the common theme of consent is the only litmus test.

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:03):
Hillary, the word consent, that’s such a critical one. And I’ve had that conversation with students at Summit Ministries. Students ask very honestly and genuinely, what is it besides consent that should govern my approach to sexual relationships? Because they don’t also have a concept of love or their understanding of acceptance and tolerance and servanthood and all of those things, they’re all messed up.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (17:35):
Yeah. Or commitment. I would say that would be the main thing because it’s like the only place you see that commitment is within the marital realm that… One of the things that I like to do with kids is to say that sex is pointing back to a promise that was already made. And so you give them an example.

I’m going to say for a child that I don’t want to go into all the mechanics of sexuality, I’m going to do this little secret handshake with them. We’re going to say, let’s create a secret handshake between mommy and you. This secret handshake, every time we do this handshake, it means I will always be your mother and you will always be my child and I will love you forever. And so anytime they’re feeling bad, okay, let’s do our secret handshake. What does that mean? What that does is it ingrains into them that you can have a physical representation of a promise that was already made.

(18:21):
That way, if you do some other handshake and you’re like, what does that mean? They’re like, I don’t know. You’re like, you’re right. It doesn’t mean anything because it doesn’t point back to a promise that we made. I can make a promise, but there’s nothing keeping me to it, but we’re going to make this so that physicality and promises are together.

That way, when they start asking themselves later, oh, is it okay to have sex when we’re engaged? Is it okay to have sex? You’re like, nope, they haven’t made that promise before, friends, family, and the government. Once you make that promise, then you can point back to that promise, but you can’t point back to a promise you haven’t made yet. And so I think even beyond love would be commitment that we need to have sexuality really embodying.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:02):
So good. Let’s talk about tolerance and acceptance for a little bit. I think that as long as I remember, I was just going through some old papers yesterday and I found a newspaper article from a college that I had picked up and it was saying everybody’s going to wear jeans to school on a particular day to show their acceptance of LGBTQ. Everybody’s going to wear jeans on this particular day. It was 1991. It was from 1991.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (19:34):
Every day.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:35):
Yeah. Everybody wore jeans every day, but 1990, that’s 30 some years ago and it was still the same ideology. Is it changing or is it still just sort of a battle that we’re fighting, tolerance and acceptance being defined in a way that actually is coercive?

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (19:58):
Where were you in 1991? I’m just curious because I know they didn’t have stuff like that in Texas that I know of.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:03):
The newspaper, I believe, was from Colorado College. Okay. In Colorado Springs, Conservative Colorado Springs, Colorado, Colorado College, 1991. They were already doing these forced marches, kind of LGBTQ affirmation. Wow. So you were coerced. If you just ended up wearing jeans to school that day, you were essentially coerced into that meaning that you supported an agenda that you may or may not have supported.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (20:36):
Yeah. I had a mama bear contact me several years back and she’s like, “My child has to wear orange to celebrate. What do I do? Because if she doesn’t wear orange, she’s going to be clearly saying I don’t agree with this, but if she does wear orange, she’s going to be tacit.” So I was like, “It sounds like a great day for a dentist appointment.”

If you don’t want to deal with it, then don’t deal with it. But yeah, the wearing jeans, it’s like if you want to support LGBT, don’t paint your face. Okay, so everybody who’s not wearing face paint that day is supporting it. Yeah, that is very underhanded.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:11):
Yeah. Well, I think underhanded is, I use the word coercive and I would stick with it because essentially you’re forcing children into a place where they’re having to debate something or stand on something that they don’t even think about. It’s not even part of their…

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (21:34):
They don’t understand it yet, but yet they just stood in solidarity.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:38):
Yeah. Wow. What do we look at from scripture about male and female and sexuality and God’s design for marriage? I’d love to dig into that a little bit too, because I want parents to be conversant in how to use scripture to help their kids.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (21:58):
I mean, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that people really want to get very detailed in, what does it mean to be a biblical man or a biblical woman? And there aren’t a lot of things in scripture that say a man has to be like X, Y, Z and a woman has to be by X, Y, Z.

If you look at the Proverbs 31 woman, I mean, she was a little bit of everything. She was good at home. She was good in business. She was good in the kitchen. She was good with her servant girls. There’s nothing that a woman can’t do. It’s not limiting. The only thing that I can really tell within the genders is within marriage and it’s within that hierarchy of submitting to your husband, but that hierarchy means that he is already loving her like Christ loved the church.

(22:43):
And we have a chapter in the mama bear book that says a pretty great design when followed. And I basically go through and I brag about my father and I brag about my husband, about how amazing they were, the way that they have both loved me so well that submitting to them to me, submission meant safety.

To be under the headship of someone meant this is the person who’s protecting me. This is the one who’s looking out for my best interest. This is the one who’s providing for me. And I just joyfully love living under their authority because that’s been my experience. Very few women have that experience. So I would say that we need to stop limiting what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman, but just say it’s this fear within marriage that it really becomes distinct.

(23:32):
Now we do still look at biology to say, what does biology tell us about our, the big fancy word teleology, about our design, about our purpose? Well, clearly women’s bodies are created for that nurturing of life, that taking care of life. We’re softer.

(23:52):
We naturally want to protect in a different way than men do. I love Katie Faust when she’s given her talks and she asks people, who here has ever seen kids being tossed up in the air really high and thrown around and thrown on the couch and stuff? And everybody’s like, “Yeah, it was so much fun.” And then she says, “Keep your hands up if you saw it being done by a woman.” All the hands come down because sometimes we don’t have to be taught what male and female is. It comes out naturally.

We can’t not live according to our design. So sometimes we can observe what that design is rather than being taught, now I have to fulfill this design. It’s just known that fathers teach kids how to be more rough and tumble. They teach them how to be more independent, how to basically stand up, brush off, shake the dirt off and go along your merry way.

(24:45):
Women are the ones that want to kiss the booboos, are the ones that nurture, the ones when you need that protective cuddling, you go back to them to get the poor baby. Okay, now go out into the world. You need both of these things. You need a safe place to go. And even just women’s bodies and their psyche, we want to be a safe place.

And men are kind of the pioneers. They want to help propel you forward. It’s such a beautiful design. So we need to look not only at scripture, we need to look at the roles within male and female, but we need to look at God’s general revelation, which God’s general revelation is our physical world.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:23):
When you’re talking about this, it reminds me of the doctoral work that I did long, long time ago about communication, how children learn to communicate. And they do it obviously in the context of the home, but I was working on whether the moms and dads had a different role to play in it.

(25:43):
And all of the literature at that time, Hillary, said it’s all moms. It’s all moms. Moms are the ones, it’s mothers. They’re the ones who bring out the verbal nature of their children and which brings out their intellectual nature. So the moms are the critical component. Dads are irrelevant. And the reason we know dads are irrelevant is because there are more communication breakdowns and they are not as nurturing. That’s the literature of the day.

But what we were able to find in our research is, the fathers play a significant role in being a bridge to the outside world. You need someone in your life who makes you repeat what you just said until it is clear, because that’s what the world is going to require of you.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (26:24):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:25):
Yeah. So the idea of the mother being that nurturer, the father being the bridge to the outside world really emerged very clearly in the research. It was hard for the research to go anywhere because it was so politically incorrect, but the data was super clear that that’s exactly what happens when you have this well-functioning mother and father relationship in the home.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (26:49):
Yeah. You have that kind of the micro language and the macro language, the micro, the mom teaches. Women just naturally, you look at women with their dogs and they’re like, they immediately go into this childlike language. And even with kids, you’ll hear the kid go… She’s like, he’s saying he wants to go to the potty and you’re like, “I didn’t hear any of that.” So she is breaking it down to the very smallest syllable, and then she’s translating from those basic syllables to the rest of the world.

But like you said, the father usually doesn’t break his words down. He’ll sit there and be… I remember seeing this video of, I think it was Charlie Kirk with his son, and he was teaching his son about something like astrophysics or something like that by drawing stuff on the table. And if that child tries to say something, he’s going to be like, “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

(27:40):
“I don’t know.” And so the kid has to work harder. So anyway, that was just profound. I didn’t even think about that. The dad won’t let you say something and just translate. He’s going to be like, “Use your words and make me understand,” where they have to push further. I love that. That’s a great example.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:55):
Yeah, it’s really fun. Those are fun things to see. And also it’s fun, and you and Stephanie and John and I have talked about this some, the harmony that comes from the differences in male and female design, the fact that women have more receptors in their retina to focus on color and texture, men have more receptors to focus on contrast and motion. And you have to have color, texture, contrast, and motion to accurately see the world.

(28:26):
Men and women, husbands and wives, but also brothers and sisters and workmates, men and women need each other to accurately see the world. The different ways we respond to stress, we talk about this a lot at Summit. Students get a huge kick out of this because they all know females and males respond very differently to stressful situations.

Women tend to think more, focus, ruminate, men tend to act, even if it’s rash. Well, thinking without acting is not an optimal response to stress. Thinking without acting or acting without thinking, those are non-optimal, but when you put them together, it works. There’s a harmony there that’s so cool to see in God’s design.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (29:12):
I like what you said about the concept of harmony, because if we really want to say, what is the role of men and women and how does this reflect God? If you were to take two notes and play them separately and ask which one’s in harmony, you’d be like, “I don’t know.” You need to have something else. You need to have another note to say whether that note’s in harmony. And this note might be in harmony with that note, but you put it with that note and it’s not in harmony. It’s completely clashing.

And so that harmonious relationship, if we try to define it by itself, we cannot do it. It can only be defined in the presence of the other. And there’s a lot of freedom within that harmony in terms of what note you’re going to play. You can be all these different things and still be in harmony with your spouse. And I think that really is the freedom that we have. I’m going to use that in the future. Thank you for that word picture. I love it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:05):
And I’m going to use the way you just talked about harmony as well, because I think that is so cool. You could just put a piano there and play some different notes. Is there any real limit to the number of songs that could be created? There isn’t. But the rules are there of what these notes actually mean. And when you follow those rules, you open up infinite possibilities.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (30:31):
Yeah. And a woman doesn’t need to be in harmony with men. Women as a whole don’t have to be in harmony with men, but a woman and her husband need to be in harmony. And that’s why that unit together displays the glory of God.

That’s one of the things that we emphasize in the book is that there is something about that male and female together that is not interchangeable. You get two women and it’s just two of the same note. You get two men and it’s two of the same note. You have to have male and female together to really get a fuller picture of who God is saying that he is, that marriage is supposed to represent something that’s more divided. It’s supposed to make us look past this world.

I like the idea of if you’ve ever had a dog and you’ve tried to point and say, “Go get the ball, go get the ball.” Everybody knows the frustration of the dog staring at your finger and you’re like, “Not my finger, the ball, the thing that I’m pointing at.” Male and female relationship within the family, within gender, within marriage, within sexuality, it is all like God’s finger pointing to something.

(31:38):
And we keep staring at the finger instead of looking at what that finger is pointing to. So I think that would also be a good way that we can help our kids to understand this may not be clear, but what is this pointing to? What does this look like? What can you understand about reality with these two things together that you’ll never be able to understand if they are apart from each other?

Dr. Jeff Myers (32:00):
Love it. I’m so excited by this conversation. I want to take it to the place where parents and their kids actually experience things that are uncomfortable. So let’s say they’re walking through the grocery store and you notice that there’s a bearded man there wearing a dress. Your child knows. They see it. They may conclude, oh, well, that’s just what some bearded men do.

(32:31):
But they might also ask you, why is that man wearing a dress? How do you help your children? How do you help them through a situation like that so they realize we want to be compassionate and kind, but at the same time not accept that? How do you debrief that?

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (32:56):
So this is one of the ones that I think it’s easier to preempt than it is to debrief in the moment. And I actually have a description, I recommend that people also get the study guide to the sexuality and gender identity book because I’ve a lot of extra activities to do. Without that book becoming like an 800 page tomb, I could not get that all in there.

But one of the things that I say to preempt this is this kind of three stages. It starts out with something called the image of God game. I got this idea from Kim Van Vleer’s Deep Roots curriculum that she was showing me for, it’s a Bible curriculum. So the image of God game is identifying who is made in the image of God. Is that person? Is that person? Is that homeless man? Is that the woman that’s screaming over there?

(33:44):
What about the puppy? Nope. The puppy, as cute as it is, is not made in the image of God. What about that flower? Nope. As cute as it is, not made in the image of God. What about that pregnant woman over there? Yes, made in the image of God. What about the baby inside of her made in the image of God? So you first establish a category, things that are made in the image of God, which we know would be humans.

Next you move to the stage of how does someone made in the image of God deserve to be treated? And I say with, oh golly, I changed it from dignity and respect because people have really changed that definition. I say with worth and value. Worth and value. You treat them as having worth and value because people want to say, well, in order to respect me, you have to do X, Y, Z, but treating them with worth and value.

(34:30):
And so you constantly are emphasizing that. So now that we have who’s made in the image of God, how do we treat people made in the image of God? Now we’re going to move to the third step, which is, is the thing that person did, does that reflect the image of God? So when that person cut us off and gave us the finger, did that reflect the image of God? No, that didn’t reflect the image of God. Are they still made in the image of God? Yes.

How do we treat someone made in the image of God with worth and value? Now we can say, when you hit your brother, was that reflecting the image of God? No. How about when mommy yelled at you, was I reflecting the image of God? No. Because what this is doing is, it’s establishing the wide variety of ways that we cannot reflect the image of God, which doesn’t change how we treat someone made in the image of God.

(35:22):
Then the final stage is so that we don’t treat sexuality and gender identity sins as other than and worse than every other sin. Now when you see the bearded man, you say, is he made in the image or the bearded woman? Is she made in the image of God or however you want to say, is he the man dressed as a woman? Yes.

How do we treat people made in the image of God with worth and value? Is what he’s doing reflecting the image of God? He’s a man who is trying to be a woman. No, that doesn’t reflect the image of God. Just like mommy didn’t reflect the image of God when she yelled at you before we came to the store, just like you didn’t reflect the image of God when you cheated on your math homework. All of us equally don’t reflect the image of God in different ways.

(36:08):
This person has a different way that they don’t reflect that image than maybe us, but we are all still failing to be good image reflectors and that puts us all equal at the foot of the cross. But again, it’s something you need to build up to and I think it’s easier to build up to that because then they just kind of shrug their shoulders and go, oh, okay. That’s another way someone cannot reflect the image of God just like me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:30):
Yeah. Yeah. And it gives them something aspirational then. Oh, I think I can reflect the image of God. Yeah. Okay. Well, this is really great. So we’ve been talking with Hillary Morgan Ferrer about the Mama Bear Guide to Sexuality and Gender Identity. Briefly just tell us the core book on apologetics too, because I don’t think we’ve talked about it on this show, just the Mama Bear Guide to Apologetics.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (36:59):
Oh yeah. So the first book is Mama Bear Apologetics: Empowering Your Kids to Challenge Cultural Lies. So kind of the theory behind this book was I was approached to write a Mama Bear book for Mama Bear Apologetics book, and I didn’t want to write a book that was already out there. That’s one of just my core values. I don’t want to write a book that’s already out there.

And one of the things that I’ve seen is, and it’s been done really well, is a whole bunch of questions and answers. This specific question, how do you answer it? This specific question, how do you answer it? And I would point to someone like Natasha Crane’s books, I think do it fabulously. There’s no sense in me recreating a book like that because she’s already done it really well. So what I did is I actually listed out all those questions and then I started categorizing them and say, these all come from the same root problem.

(37:48):
Okay. These are all coming from, kind of a scientific materialist naturalism root. These ones are all coming from, kind of a feminism. These ones are all coming from postmodernism. These are all coming from a hyper skepticism. And I kind of categorized them like that.

And so then we started going through what we call each of these isms and breaking down the ism and then showing how that ism basically undermines the gospel. So it really is more about how to think than specific questions and answers or I’m proving the reliability of scripture, I’m proving the resurrection or supporting it. And it really is kind of more like tilling the soil before we get into all the specific questions.

And we have had such a good reception to it. I’ve heard from people that are at Houston Christian University, they have an apologetics program there in Denver Seminary that I’ve heard back from professors saying every woman that is in our program sites Mama Bear Apologetics is the place that she got interested in apologetics.

(38:53):
And I think it’s because we were able to show how these ideas play out in the real world. It was suddenly like, oh, that’s how that’s going to affect my child. And if you show a woman how something is going to affect her child, she will become fierce and ferocious in a way that you just better watch out. And I love how we have just seen women rising to the occasion.

And then once they’re there, once they love apologetics, then they can find all these other resources, something specifically on the resurrection or inerrancy or the concept of truth, Nancy Pearcy’s work. They can discover all these other things because that world has kind of become open to them of realizing the importance of all this.

But that was what the original book did was, how do we recognize these ideas in their seed form? I compare it to, It’s really fun to blow dandelions.

(39:43):
You wouldn’t recognize that that seed is what causes all those pernicious little yellow flowers that have these hideous leaves in your yard that it takes forever to go away. And if someone’s playing around with the dandelion when it’s all cute and puffy and flowy and don’t realize that’s why their yard looks so horrible, once you can identify the seed that’s causing that, it’s like, oh, that’s not so cute anymore.

And so I think that’s really what we did with that first book. And by the way, we have the video curriculum that is now coming out. It should be out this fall. We are getting it out on our own platform. People can email. We are making it available for free because we want people to be able to go through the book and we are in talks with Right Now Media as well to include it with their platform. So just so you know, that is coming and I am very excited about how well that curriculum came out.

Dr. Jeff Myers (40:34):
Well, that’s fantastic. Most churches have a subscription to Right Now Media, so you can get this for your Sunday school class, your small groups or whatever, but you’ll want to be following Mama Bear Apologetics and the work that they do, just like Hillary did in this podcast that we’ve just recorded. They break it down.

And you’re not the only one doing this. There are other people on your team as well. So you get a variety of voices from women who are mama bears wanting to raise great kids and help them understand and know the truth and just breaking it down so you can actually imagine having these real conversations with real kids. So it’s fantastic. Thanks Hillary for coming on the show today.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (41:19):
Oh, absolutely. Thanks for having me and thanks for having us out this summer at Summit. I have to say that was just the absolute highlight of my whole summer being with those high school kids. It just gave me so much hope for the future. I’ve told everybody about it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:33):
Keep telling more. Keep telling more.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer (41:36):
I’m doing my part.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:38):
Thank you to my guest, Hillary Morgan Ferrer, for coming on the show today. Be sure to check out this latest book from Mama Bear Apologetics. It’s called Mama Bear Apologetics: Guide to Sexuality and Gender Identity. You can also visit mamabearapologetics.com to find more of Hillary’s work and resources.

This podcast, Truth Changes Everything, is a resource of Summit Ministries. We are equipping and supporting rising generations to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview. Well, in a culture that is filled with horrible messages about sexuality, gender, and identity, we don’t need to respond with fear, but we do need to respond by firmly holding to God’s truth and doing it in a way that shows love for our neighbors.

If we can help you, if you’d like to learn more about the work of Summit Ministries, if the resources we have will help you with your family, we’d love to help. Just go to summit.org and we’ll become friends. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.