The Only Way Back

Truth Alone Can Restore What’s Broken

Laura Becker was a depressed fifteen-year-old trying to come out of her shell when she learned about different gender identity expressions on social media and at school. At first, she enjoyed identifying as androgynous and gender queer, but after taking testosterone and undergoing a double mastectomy (“definitely one of the worst mistakes I’ve made”), she detransitioned and resumed living as a female.

Laura is one of several detransed young adults who tell their stories in the 2023 documentary No Way Back. Originally named Affirmation Generation (and reviewed in Salvo 65), No Way Back was set to premier in theaters in June until AMC Theatres abruptly cancelled all showings in response to objections voiced by a seemingly small, but well-funded and loud activist outfit called The Queer Trans Project. (See p. 10 for more on QT Project.)

A Spiritual Conflict

In her book Awake, Not Woke, Noelle Mering characterizes progressive ideology as a cult. While the term may not apply to all things “progressive,” it is certainly the hallmark of cults to try to squelch alternative points of view. Mering astutely observes that we are in a spiritual battle against architects of revolution propounding a counterfeit religion. In the introduction, she enjoins Christians not to retreat from the field. Her call to engage in the battle of ideas captures quite nicely what Salvo is about:

While it is easy to dismiss wokeness as being a movement on the fringe or “out there,” to do so would be shortsighted. We are called to engage with the world in which we find ourselves. . . . Charity demands that we make a real effort to understand, rather than just hold in contempt, the people falling prey to this ideology. People are looking for meaning in their lives and answers to human questions such as why we are here and how we ought to live. If we aren’t providing these answers in a compelling way, they won’t remain unanswered; they will be answered in distorted half-truths that promise but cannot deliver real solutions.

Restorative Truth

In transgender ideology, as in much of what passes for sophisticated modern thought, it is one’s “inner voice” that determines truth. But as John Stonestreet and Kasey Leander point out (see p. 64), without fixed reference points outside of ourselves, we cannot know ourselves or our place in the world. Moreover, to paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, apart from any transcendent point of reference, nothing temporal has any meaning. The quest to find truth and meaning by looking within is a losing game.

Salvo was launched in 2006 out of an effort to cover developments in intelligent design science, but it was decided from the beginning to also cover sexuality and societal issues—a decision made in the conviction that, just as there is design in the natural world that is detectable and knowable, so there is also a design for human sexuality and guiding principles for ordering a healthy society. That’s how Salvo became a magazine of “Science, Sex & Society.”

We believe the Judeo-Christian Scriptures reveal to us truth about reality so that we may know ourselves and the meaning of our existence by knowing God. Noelle Mering agrees, noting that only “the One True Faith brings restoration. It is this restoration—of the person, the family, and the Faith—for which we all hunger. . . [It] is the most fitting avenue toward a more harmonious and whole society.”

There is much brokenness in the world, but restorative truth exists and is knowable. We aim to draw it out because we believe it is exceedingly more beautiful and satisfying than anything dreamt of in the minds of the architects of revolution. Read on and see if you don’t agree.