Over 75 Pediatric Gender Clinics Across America?–Jay Richards

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “We’re in this moment in which the culture is on the edge of a precipice. And people from all walks of life and different metaphysical views are all seeing part of that picture and seeing where we’re going, and trying to figure out: okay, what do we do here? We’ve all been on this train going 120 miles an hour, we see it’s about to go off a ravine. We’re all getting off on this last train station, and we’re all very different and trying to figure out how to work together.”

In this episode, I sit down with Jay Richards, an author, philosopher, and professor. He is the director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family and the William E. Simon senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is the co-author of “Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War.”

“To queer something is to destabilize and de-center it. So, the point of queer theory is to destabilize and decenter our categories of sexual reality, which include—of course—male and female. But they also include, by the way, adult and child. Those are contested in queer theory,” says Mr. Richards.

We dive into the dangers of gender ideology and comprehensive sex education.

“For most of us, our minds are not adapted to the speed in which information can be transmitted now in 2024,” says Mr. Richards.

We also reflect on the separation of church and state, and the various definitions of the popular phrase “Christian nationalism.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Jay Richards, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Jay Richards:
It’s great to be with you.

Mr. Jekielek:
We met at an event that you organized of a coalition of folks targeting gender ideology as a huge problem. Now, these new WPATH [World Professional Association for Transgender Health] files have come out. Please tell us about that.

Mr. Richards:
The WPATH files have just been released by the organization that Michael Schellenberger is a part of called Environmental Progress. These are the documents, emails, and correspondence of people and physicians and activists affiliated with WPATH, which is the international organization that promotes gender equality in the world. They’ve been doing a lot of work to promote gender ideology and gender transition medicine worldwide. These are correspondence between doctors talking about the techniques, payment schedules, how much it costs to do different surgical techniques, the ages of kids that undergo different surgeries, and the resulting complications.

Here is why WPATH is significant. Other organizations, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, American Psychological Association, have essentially accepted WPATH’s standards and their guidelines for gender medicine, as if they are some kind of science-based, objective standards of care that you would use in medicine. In fact, these standards are highly ideologically driven. If you read some of the correspondence, it quickly becomes very obvious that what you have is a bunch of ideologues.

Essentially it’s like the medical Wild West, with experimenting and trying things that are not based on long-term studies of procedures or the benefits to the patients. It’s an ideologically-driven campaign that has the appearance of science and medicine. That’s why the report itself, about 90 pages long, is so important, because it finally unmasks what those of us that have been fighting this crazy ideology have known all along.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of the early interviews we did on this topic was with Dr Miriam Grossman. We covered how WPATH had basically taken on the veneer of being a standards of care association. Yet, there really was no evidence base at all for what they were advocating in the first place. How is it possible that so many professional organizations took on these so-called standards of care?

Mr. Richards:
You can’t explain it without looking at the role of ideology. Some people will say that this is all financially driven, and they’re just wanting to make money. It is the financial motives that have created this. But I don’t think that that’s what got this thing started. The reality is there is this pervasive ideology.

The Germans have this great word for it, zeitgeist, meaning spirit of the age. It just takes over people’s minds. I don’t know how else to describe it. You can compare it to history a century ago when they had the eugenics craze. It was supposedly based upon scientific evidence and scientific research.

The idea was that it was correct social policy and medical policy to forcibly sterilize undesirables against their will. You can imagine what that means. In many ways this was invented in the U.S. and then exported elsewhere. We might still be dealing with eugenics today, except that the Nazis destroyed the brand in the 1940s.

But this is the same situation where you have medical organizations, scientific research labs, and even the Supreme Court of the United States all immediately on board, but not based on 40 years of research. That’s what we have again now in 2024, almost a century later. This is the 21st century’s equivalent of the eugenics craze. That’s really what it is.

The evidence for is precisely that there was no lead time on any of this. We don’t have long-term studies and data about the effects of cross-sex hormones on children. It’s now going on 30 years and we still have none, and yet that’s what we’re doing with kids in the United States right now. That’s a sign of intellectual, social contagion. When we’re talking about these medical organizations, it’s a misconception to think of The American Academy of Pediatrics as if it’s a science organization.

It’s a membership organization intended to represent the interests of pediatricians. In some ways it’s a lobbying organization, so it’s fairly easy to be captured. It’s not like the Academy of Pediatrics polled all their members on this gender transition issue. They set up a committee who issued some guidelines drawing heavily on the WPATH guidelines.

If you look at WPATH, it’s not a scientific organization. You don’t have to be a physician or a scientist to be affiliated. It was started as an organization to push gender ideology and gender medicine worldwide. That’s just what it is.

Mr. Jekielek:
A very small number of people with very extreme views have this incredibly large effect. We’re supposed to believe these ideas and we’re not allowed to question them.

Mr. Richards:
That’s right. That itself is a sign that we’re dealing with an intellectual orthodoxy and not an honest scientific debate. This is an ideology that claims that people can be born in the wrong body. If you feel discordant with your biological sex, the way to fix that is not by adjusting your thinking to your body—it’s adjusting your body to your thinking. That’s gender ideology as applied to medicine.

They have been very good at institutional capture, whether you’re talking about UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization] at the UN, or the medical associations in the United States. They have been very good at capturing these institutions that people generally trust. If there’s a case in court trying to restrict these ghoulish practices against kids, the judges don’t have time to study these organizations, so they’re going to implicitly trust organizations that claim to be speaking for science and doctors. Strategically, it’s very clever to capture organizations like this.

But they have limited time, because other national health organizations in places like Finland, Sweden, and the UK have done their own systematic reviews of the evidence. The clock is ticking on these other organizations who at the moment are doubling down and insisting that the so-called affirmative approach is good science and good medicine. I believe that in 10 or 15 years from now it will be obvious to virtually everyone that this was a ghoulish experiment, and no one will want to admit that they were on the wrong side of this.

Mr. Jekielek:
Except every day there are more people being harmed. This country is still going full steam ahead and with this imprimatur of all sorts of organizations which have these very important sounding names and outsized influence.

Mr. Richards:
Yes. At last count, the U.S. has 79 gender clinics around the country dedicated to these medical interventions; cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries for adolescents. Then you have to add the 600 or so Planned Parenthood clinics, which are now dispensing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. This is an unbelievable, uncontrolled experiment on American children.

I’m a policy guy, and from a policy perspective, our job is to try to limit the damage as much as we possibly can. But ultimately, these clinics will be dealt with through the civil courts with lawsuits brought by detransitioners, and by kids and young people who were harmed by these clinics, who will sue them into oblivion. That’s how the story ends with these clinics. But that’s just one battle in the larger war against this insanity.

Mr. Jekielek:
I understand that WPATH has invented these so-called standards of care.

Mr. Richards:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
What do these files really show?

Mr. Richards:
They show how much the people that are in the middle of this are just shooting from the hip. They present the facade that they know what they’re doing, that this is evidence-based medical care, that they know the effects, and that they know the benefits. They always have a sunny, glittery presentation about how wonderful this is going to be for people, when in fact it’s often catastrophic. Many of these surgical interventions are multi-step procedures with all sorts of risks. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to understand this.

You’re trying to remove the natural genitalia of a person, then create a facsimile of the other sex’s genitalia, which, of course, aren’t real. You literally can’t create a penis from parts, for instance. You are creating these facsimiles from other body parts, like from skin off the arm or off the thigh. Even in the best light, these are very unusual procedures that are extremely high risk. At the very least, you would want to make sure that the benefits were overwhelmingly positive before you would ever consider doing anything like this.

Mr. Jekielek:
Whereas, we know that with a watchful, waiting approach, gender confusion can be resolved in the vast majority of cases.

Mr. Richards:
That’s right. At least that was the case prior to this recent social contagion. In fact, the DSM, [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], has said this. Earlier, for most cases, it was essentially about prepubescent boys and adult men. But for the young boys, if allowed to go through puberty, the vast majority had their symptoms resolved. In other words, puberty itself seems to fix this in many cases.

Now, they are putting kids on the transition pathway starting with social transitioning, changing their names, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones. People will say that puberty blockers are just a pause button. In fact, it’s a fast-forward button. It fast tracks kids. The kids that start these interventions are much more likely to continue through with them than we saw in the past. The intervention itself ends up fast tracking kids to the outcome that the ideologues desire.

Mr. Jekielek:
It takes a while to figure out what’s really going on with all of this. But when you use these puberty blockers, you’re basically wiping out a part of that child’s life.

Mr. Richards:
Yes, that’s the thing. Even if it were in some physical sense reversible, if you put a child that is going through natural puberty on puberty blockers, that child is always going to be out of sync with his or her peers, by definition. Unless you can reverse time, that part is not reversible. Also, we are starting to realize that these drugs have significant physical effects. Lupron, for instance, was initially approved for older men with metastatic prostate cancer. It is now being given to young boys and girls as an aid to gender transition. It’s just absolutely extraordinary.

Mr. Jekielek:
In some cases, the drug used as a puberty blocker is the same one used for chemical castration.

Mr. Richards:
That’s right. In some cases, it is also used off-label for chemical castration, because it just flattens out whatever your normal sex hormone profile would be.

Mr. Jekielek:
Your book, “Fight the Good Fight,” is targeted towards Christians. At the same time, you’re advocating for bringing people of different viewpoints together who actually agree there is a problem in our society. In this case, it would be around gender ideology and this ideological push in medicine around this specific area, but this actually applies to many other disciplines.

Mr. Richards:
Absolutely, and that is our argument in the book. That’s why the
subtitle is, “How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War.” This comes from my own experience in fighting gender ideology. I realized the culture itself changes over time. For a long time, the secularist claim in the public square was that everything was based on reason and objectivity. Now, we’re passing into a time in which the most influential and elite institutions of our culture are positively anti-rational and anti-common sense. You could think of it as a shift from a modernist to a postmodern framework.

In a sense, this is what’s happening with gender ideology. We’re passing from a modernist to a postmodern framework. Before, a conservative Christian and an atheist evolutionary biologist might find themselves on the opposite side of some cultural battle. All of a sudden, they find themselves working together. Now, why is that? It’s because today there is a fundamental denial of reality on the part of these leading institutions.

Before, somebody might have been pushing the principles of the sexual revolution, but they still recognized that there were two sexes. They recognized that there were males and females. The idea that sex is something we discover and observe out there in the world is contrary to the position of the gender ideologue.

The gender ideologue says, “No, your internal sense of gender, called your gender identity, is who you really are. Your sex is something that’s assigned to you by the doctors at birth, but it’s not really something that describes who you really are.” That is a profoundly radical and anti-rational position. We have moved beyond the most basic thing that every human being at every time and place has recognized, namely that there are males and females and they’re not the same thing. We know that scientifically and understand that scientifically.

That’s one of a number of examples where we need to create a space for building a new coalition of the willing. It doesn’t mean liberals have to become conservatives or vice versa. But we have some mutually shared territory that we should defend, protect, and advance and then reserve some time for later to have a deeper conversation about the things in which we disagree.

Mr. Jekielek:
This reminds me of queer theory. James Lindsay has a new book, “The Queering of The American Child,” that just came out about all of this. Essentially, this approach to the world is about normalizing everything that is not normal. It has become a catch-all for all these critical theories, because ultimately, whatever is not normal, must be normalized.

Mr. Richards:
Queer theory, for people who don’t know about it, sounds pejorative, but that’s the intended objective of queer theory. In this sense, it is understood as a verb. To queer something means to destabilize and decenter it. The point of queer theory is to destabilize and decenter our categories of sexual reality, which include male and female, but also include adult and child.

Those categories are contested in queer theory. If you look at gender ideology and which is related to critical race theory, these things don’t hold together as tight philosophical worldviews. They fall apart very quickly, but I think that misses the point.

They’re not intended for that purpose. They really are cultural wrecking balls. They are designed to confuse, destabilize, decenter, and disorient our thinking and our culture, and then destroy the present order. The folks pushing this stuff apparently have some utopian vision of what is going to grow up from the ashes of the present order they are attacking and wish to destroy.

But ultimately, that is what this is all about. As a philosopher, I am tempted to analyze this idea of gender identity, but it’s not even really intelligible. But maybe that’s the point, it is designed to confuse.

Mr. Jekielek:
This all has been adjacent to this discipline of comprehensive sex education, which has been around for quite a while.

Mr. Richards:
Yes, absolutely, for decades. If you work your way back a few decades, the boundaries were always changing. There was always something that was just outside the bounds of public respectability. The activists on the other side always push the envelope. They release trial balloons.

That’s the stage where we are now with respect to the campaign to dissolve the age of consent. Most of us know the fundamental difference between children and adults. Most of us realize that children should not be sexualized. We’re at the trial balloon and envelope pushing-stage of that part of the campaign.

You can look at the origins of so-called comprehensive sexuality education, [CSE]. It was started in 1964 by Mary Calderone, an official at the Planned Parenthood Federation. It was supposedly designed to educate and inform kids on sexuality and help them understand sex. If you’re looking at it from a distance, you would think, “Okay, it’s to help kids learn the birds and the bees.” But that is not what it’s about now.

With the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States [SIECUS], their acronym has now become their name. If you go to their website, it’s called, “SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change.” They’re quite explicit that it is about the fundamental change of society. According to the most recent CSE guidelines and curricula, sex education is designed for social revolution. They don’t even hide this.

It is extraordinary that this stuff finds its way into American public schools. It finds its way into UNESCO and other agencies at the United Nations to be pushed on unsuspecting countries that would hate this stuff if they knew what it really was. It’s not even hiding in plain sight, it’s just a Google search away. They’re not hiding what they’re doing at all.

Mr. Jekielek:
Many parents have heard this term, comprehensive sex education, because it has been used in their school, but how does that actually work?

Mr. Richards:
It essentially works the way it was developed and you’re going to see different manifestations of it. Most of us have this idea that it has age-appropriate content. What we think might be okay for a kid in the 10th grade would be very strange to introduce to a five-year-old. Normally, they’ll have the same kind of guidelines. They say, “Okay, here’s what we do from age one to five. Here’s what we do from age five to 10.” But if you look at the details, it’s a constant violation of any kind of normal understanding of what would be age-appropriate.

Rather than helping kids learn something about their body parts or the difference between boys and girls, it’s about thinking of themselves as fully realized sexual beings. They are taught about the pleasures of sex and introduced to sex acts and other topics that would normally be completely off limits. You can ask even the most left-wing secular parent, “Do you want your five-year-old to learn about anal sex? Do you want your five-year-old to know about oral sex and how to perform these things? Does that make sense to you?”

I’ve asked liberal parents who seem to be advocating for this stuff what they think. They don’t say, “Yes, that’s good.” They say, “No, that’s not happening in school.” Even folks on the other side generally recognize, “OK, that would be bad if we were telling kindergartners about how to perform oral sex. That would be bad. But that’s not happening.” There is a disagreement about what is actually happening. It doesn’t take a lot of work to discover that this is precisely what is happening in many schools in this country.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is a progression to this. The first stage is, “It’s not happening.” The second stage is, “Maybe it’s happening.”

Mr. Richards:
Then they will say, “But it’s very rare.” Number one is, “It’s not happening.” Number two is, “OK, it may be happening, but it’s very rare.” Number three is, “You’re darn right it’s happening, and this is a good thing.” We’re kind of in between steps two and three at the moment.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s almost like with every area of inquiry, there is this same kind of progression. Is this part of a plan that is written up somewhere?

Mr. Richards:
If you look at it historically, the way in which social change takes place is fairly obvious. We could never have imagined a situation like this.
We would never have imagined a situation where officials in the government could tell people that they can’t go to church, go to work, or go to the grocery store. Yet, with very little effort on their part, we complied with this, because we were told it was for our own good and for the good of other people.

Mr. Jekielek:
But with the help of massive propaganda.

Mr. Richards:
Yes, massive propaganda. That is how to transform the thinking of a culture as a whole, and it can happen almost instantaneously. In the 1930s, people didn’t have instant access to high-definition, real time video. In 2020, one video clip of an elderly man in China falling over on the street corner could be on everyone’s social media within a few minutes. All it needed was the interpretation that said, “This is what Covid will do to you, so stay inside.”

In some ways, it’s the same with gender ideology. People ask, “How did this happen so quickly? In part, it was because the ideologues had been infiltrating institutions for a couple of decades. But it also required a kind of disease vector. In this case, the disease vector was social media. For good or or bad, social media allows ideas to spread everywhere around the planet almost simultaneously. Honestly, our minds are not adapted to the speed at which information can be transmitted now in 2024.

Mr. Jekielek:
There was this idea during the pandemic that if you did the wrong thing, you would kill grandma. That phrase was actually tested in focus groups to figure out the most manipulative method to achieve their desired outcome.

Mr. Richards:
Notice the power of that. They didn’t tell us, “Stay inside for your own good.” I honestly think if they had said, “Stay inside, because you might get sick,” Americans would have much more naturally said, “Come on, I can decide that for myself. “ It would have triggered us.

Instead, we had our compassion and our altruism weaponized against. They said, “Okay, you may be fine, but you may be an asymptomatic carrier that’s going to kill someone’s grandma.” It’s the very odd person that wants to kill you and resists that appeal. Even if you don’t believe it, you generally don’t want to appear callous.

That’s where we are, though. That’s where we are with almost all of these topics. This is why lots of well-meaning people have accepted the claims of gender ideology for as long as they have. They assume it is about caring compassion for the rare child that simply doesn’t fit into gender stereotypes. It is a desire to be compassionate and to help kids like that. But it has nothing to do with that.

In fact, if you look at the kids that are preyed upon by the gender ideologues, very often they are the awkward kids that we were told they are trying to help. To be discerning in this moment, we can’t have our compassion weaponized against us, but we also can’t sear our conscience. We need to be able to channel our proper concern for other people, but also to understand things that are genuinely harmful.

Mr. Jekielek:
We have been observing the weaponization of empathy, probably the most powerful weapon.

Mr. Richards:
Yes, and socialism is the same thing. Socialism always appeals to people’s concern for the poor, for instance. It only works on a population that is generally decent. If people didn’t have empathy, they wouldn’t be able to push it. For others, it would be useless. Appealing to Hitler’s empathy or to Stalin’s empathy would have gotten you nowhere. But for ordinary people, they either genuinely care about others, or at least want to appear to care about others.

Mr. Jekielek:
This stuff works in a society where people are genuinely concerned about being improper towards minorities, because they care. It’s almost like in order to apply this weapon on society, that society has to be the opposite of what is claimed.

Mr. Richards:
That’s right. It’s so their compassion can be weaponized against them. The danger is that as this happens more and more, some subset of our population might say, “The way to avoid this is to not care.” I see this online sometimes with those on the Right. There’s almost a desire to be an edgelord and to just simply deny compassion for the weak and the downtrodden.That’s the wrong way to do it. We don’t want our compassion to be weaponized against this. We don’t want to give up compassion.

Mr. Jekielek:
What you’re describing creates the exact circumstances which are the goal of these ideologies which you very aptly described as a cultural wrecking ball. It’s very difficult to defend against this.

Mr. Richards:
Our friend James Lindsay writes so well about this. These are dialectical methods. These critical theories have at least partial origins in Marxism, refracted through a kind of cultural analysis, which is dialectical. In other words, there’s a desire in the actions of the revolution to give rise to the opposite, because it’s destabilizing.

For instance, they might accuse someone of being a racist. They want some crazy person to lash out in a racist way precisely to confirm their claims. They’re not interested in increasing the boundaries of compassion. They’re interested in destroying the present order. The best way to do that is to create conflict between these warring parties. In responding, we have to avoid the dialectical debate of the revolutionaries. But we also have to respond in a way that can defeat the program.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s get back to the coalition of faith and reason that you describe in your book. How do you envision this happening? We can definitely see there is a growing movement to counter all of this chaos. We’ve seen changes to legislation and huge action at the local level with school boards. At the same time, there is the exact kind of backlash that you have described.
But it’s not going to get us to a solution, as you’re suggesting. You actually deal with some strategies in your book.

Mr. Richards:
That’s the reason James Robinson and I wrote this book. First of all, I wanted to model what this would look like. What arguments should we conservatives be making in this new moment? It’s one thing to say, “Okay, I need the rhetorical strategy to build up the base of people that are exactly like me.” It’s another thing to say, “Okay, we need the people in the base like me to be able to argue and defend in a way that helps build this larger coalition of people that may disagree with us on a lot of things.”

Michael Schellenberger is a perfect example of this. He is a California progressive, environmental journalist and activist. But he broke with the radical catastrophism that you see in the environmental movement, not because he ceased being concerned about the environment, but because either they were misrepresenting what the science said, or they were anti-human. He said, “Any good environmentalism should be concerned with humans as a part of the natural environment.”

That’s why Michael now refers to himself as a leftugee. He doesn’t say, “I’ve become a conservative.” That’s all right. He is on the front lines doing some of the most amazing stuff. If it was a fellow conservative doing it, great. But this is something that’s honestly different from 10 years ago. I was writing on this in 2012, another presidential election year, and there really wasn’t anything like this. It was much more of a traditional Left-Right way of understanding these things.

Now, there’s a growing recognition that there is a complete denial of reality. As a Catholic philosopher, I think of this in terms of natural law. Even if you’re not religious and don’t have sectarian religious beliefs, you have access to certain moral truths, just as you have access to your sight and your hearing, simply by virtue of being human. Even if you’re an atheist, it’s wrong to torture children for the fun of it. Religious conservatives are not used to arguing in that way.

How do you develop an argument for a particular position? Let’s say you’re positioned on unborn human life or on marriage or on the role of religion in the public square. How would you frame that if you were trying to persuade someone that’s with you on some really important issues, but still kind of suspicious about conservatives? Honestly, I’m interested in making friends with people that 18 months ago thought I was a bigot. They were wrong.
But now I have an opportunity to model and to do something that is really important, to show them that, in fact, they misunderstood my motives or my views.

Mr. Jekielek:
When it comes to Christians in general, these days it’s about making the Christian faith look somehow weird or problematic.

Mr. Richards:
That’s right. The media is doing their very best job right now with this phrase, Christian nationalism.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell us what Christian nationalism means.

Mr. Richards:
First of all, it doesn’t have a stable meaning, but the media has spent decades weaponizing the term.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s not just the media, it’s being used extensively, everywhere.

Mr. Richards:
That’s right, it is used very widely. But I’d say a large segment of the media uses it as a pejorative and in a very imprecise way. It ends up meaning a person who thinks Christianity played an important role in American history and that we should be able to more broadly defend Christian moral views in the public square.

That ends up being called Christian nationalism when that just was standard American practice through the 1990s probably. Barack Obama, prior to becoming president, gave a famous speech where he said that it’s absurd that religious people should have to leave their faith.

Mr. Jekielek:
Except when I hear Christian nationalism now, and perhaps I’ve already been brainwashed, I imagine people who want to impose Christian rule on America.

Mr. Richards:
Exactly. That is the meaning intended when it’s used as a pejorative. On the other hand, there are some Christians who imprudently said, “Oh, fine then. We’ll just embrace the term.” Stephen Wolfe has a book, “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” in which he makes a very particular, eccentric argument for his version of Calvinism. He pictures the United States to be something like Calvin’s Geneva. Now, look, it’s imprudent to argue that.

At the same time, there are two ways to take the bait on this. Either you say, “I’m not a Christian nationalist,” and then you deny things that you should perfectly well be able to defend, or you spend all your time attacking so-called Christian nationalists when it’s only five or ten people with very little cultural power that are actually arguing for it. Notice the dialectic either way.

My view is that the American founding basically had this right. There is not going to be an established national church, but there will be the free exercise of religion. It means that we can bring our arguments and our perspectives into the public square and use persuasion rather than coercion.

Sometimes that means being like Martin Luther King who appealed to specifically theological premises. Sometimes it means making arguments that are based on science or just on natural law. That’s not Christian nationalism or at least anything insidious or un-American. It’s not an attempt to impose sectarian religious beliefs on people that don’t believe it. That would be contrary to the American founding and generally a bad thing. But that’s not what the average Southern Baptist is interested in doing at all.

Mr. Jekielek:
In your book, you discuss the origins of the separation of church and state. It’s something that is constantly referenced as if it were a canon.

Mr. Richards:
This Politico reporter that has gotten involved in this controversy over Christian nationalism very recently said something about the separation of church and state being a constitutional idea. First of all, it’s not in the Constitution. It’s not in the Bill of Rights. It was in a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Church Association, who was being persecuted at the time by another Christian group.

He invoked this metaphor, which he had gotten from someone else, of this wall of separation between church and state. It’s not a constitutional idea. The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That’s what the Constitution says; no national church shall be established, and there shall be no restriction on the free exercise of religion. That’s a wonderful kind of balance in which you could have a broadly religious culture with a shared, Christian-inflected, theistic consensus.

This is how I would describe the public culture of the United States of America for most of its history. It has limited government that doesn’t make claims or have jurisdiction over different religious people. That was how the courts understood it. This is how the federal government and the states understood this relationship. Yes, you can have an institutional separation, even a wall, if you like, between the institution of the church and the state. It is not a wall between politics, public life, and religious ideas. That’s a completely different thing.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is the role of the church in governance?

Mr. Richards:
I’m Catholic, so Protestants and Catholics might sometimes have a different answer to this. Jesus himself established the general principle of different jurisdictions. He was asked in the Gospels, “Are we supposed to pay taxes to Caesar?” What did he do? He said, “Bring me a coin.” Whose image was inscribed on the coin? It was Caesar. He said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

He implied that there is this principle of different jurisdictions, so that the church has a legitimate, real jurisdiction, and the state does, too. In thinking about the First Amendment, people often think it’s designed to limit the church. If anything, it is designed to limit the jurisdiction of the state. A vibrant, institutional church outside the state, limits the state in the same way that individual rights and the existence of families as pre-political institutions limit the jurisdiction of the state.

When the church is doing what it’s supposed to do, it is tending to things within its jurisdiction. That will profoundly and positively influence questions of politics, even though the capital here in Washington, D.C. is not the same as the National Basilica. Those are separate institutions and separate buildings, and that’s just fine.

Mr. Jekielek:
In America right now, there are a great many Christian denominations and a great many other faiths, so it’s the same principle.

Mr. Richards:
Yes, it is. In some ways, that’s why the American experiment worked so well. At the time of the founding, some of the colonies still had established churches, which in this case were Protestant denominations. James Madison said, “Maybe the Congregationalists and the Anglicans would like to have an established church, but the Baptists will challenge them. What will they come together with?” Will they come together around the principles of the natural law that they have in common, rather than their sectarian, doctrinal distinctives?

That’s something that we have lost. We understand the public square, not as this realm of moral argument and disputation around shared moral principles, but rather this place where we just fight for power and control.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s the view of Marx and of all of these critical theories, which say that these are just power relationships and it’s just an exertion of power.

Mr. Richards:
Exactly, that’s all it is to them. If that is true, if there are literally no moral principles or principles of reason that we can appeal to, that justifies their use of arbitrary power, so it’s self-justifying. It is also utterly toxic.

Mr. Jekielek:
You are doing some remarkable work bringing people together around these principles of natural law.

Mr. Richards:
Yes, absolutely. That is exactly how I think about this. Sometimes the natural law is literally like the laws of physics and biology. Other times it’s these broadly shared principles. But it’s not just about shared moral principles, because our reason is not just this narrow thing that can only look at telescopes and microscopes. It also has the capacity to know moral truths, and even people who deny that generally presuppose it.

Even the professor who teaches you moral relativism acts with moral indignation if one of his students slashes the tires on his car. At some level we all know that’s true. We’re in this moment in which the culture is on the edge of a precipice. People from all walks of life and different metaphysical views are all seeing this and trying to figure out, “Okay, what do we do here?”

We’ve all been on this train going 120 miles an hour. We see it’s about to go off a ravine. We’re all getting off at this last train station. We’re all very different and trying to figure out how to work together. That’s the task that we have before us, but it’s something that inspires me. Gender surgery, boys competing against girls, and males going into women’s prisons were the triggering points. That’s the station where a lot of people got off.

How did we get to this point? How did we get to a point of denying basic biology and the binary of male and female? That didn’t drop out of the sky from Alpha Centauri. That’s the result of a set of historical ideas and practices that have been happening for a few generations. At some point, we will need a conversation about the rest of the train ride and how to get back in the other direction.

But at the moment, let’s fight and let’s enjoy a couple of victories together. Let’s stop this attempt by ideologues to go after our children’s bodies and minds. When we see that victory can be had, we’ll be in a much better position to have a longer conversation about other issues on which we disagree.

Mr. Jekielek:
Jay Richards, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Richards:
Great to be with you.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining us. Thanks for joining Jay Richards and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.