Easter is the holiest day of the Christian calendar, because it celebrates the Resurrection (not mere physical resuscitation) of Jesus Christ. Christians believe that Jesus is truly “the man who lives,” at once fully human and fully divine, whose abiding presence portends a Kingdom of mercy and judgment that is finally “not of this world.”

Until not so long ago, America was a democratic republic that saw itself as a Christian or “Judeo-Christian” nation, and it would be unthinkable for politicians of any party to insult Christians on the holiest of feast days. But that America is increasingly on life support as the religious “nones” (those with no religious affiliation or identification) proliferate, particularly among the young, and as secularists grow both more ignorant and hostile to all the old religions and to religiosity as such. American progressives grow ever more contemptuous of what used to be called the “moral law” (the Decalogue and its secular derivatives), or even of the idea of a human nature that in decisive respects doesn’t change. The venerable old distinction between good and evil has largely been replaced, in elite circles and beyond, by the fundamentally ideological distinction between “progress” and “reaction.” With it comes an accompanying non-judgmentalism, a relativism that turns out to be more coercive, authoritarian, and intolerant than the old morality and the old religions.

Secular progressives, it turns out, adhere to an ersatz religion that confuses science with scientism, that holds on to an ill-founded, and remarkably unreasonable, faith in the inevitability of Progress that treats abortion as a secular sacrament beyond all reproach, and which believes fervently in a History which has right and wrong sides. Transgenderism is the latest and most fervently held article of faith in the ever-radicalizing progressivist religion, with its ritualistic invocation of “LGBTQI++” (the fictive world of ever-proliferating “genders” which in principle know no numerical limit) accompanied by an unending war on common sense and lived experience. To affirm the non-arbitrary reality of men and women, as someone like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has done with no great fanfare, to show respect, or even esteem, for the essential complementarity of men and women, biological or otherwise, is to risk ridicule, cancellation, and social oblivion. A denial of the most elementary realities is now a precondition for being tolerated by those who adhere to the new morality and who control the commanding heights of our society. In decisive respects, it was safer to be a (discreet) atheist in medieval Europe.

With all this in mind, we should not be surprised that President Biden declared this Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024, to be “Transgender Day of Visibility,” the same Joe Biden who banned any “religious symbols” from the art contest that accompanies the White House Easter Egg Roll. At once a faux moderate and a faux Catholic, and a prisoner of the progressive wing of his own party, Biden knows full well that the “transgendered” are far from “invisible” in an America that is subjected to unprecedented social engineering of the most surreal kind.

In the real America, young people are subjected to gender indoctrination in many states and school districts long before they hit puberty. There is an epidemic of sexual confusion among teenage girls, and the most desperate victims of the trans cult, those who are subjected to medical or surgical mutilation, will mostly come to regret “transitioning.” A recent poll showed that 40 percent of students at Brown University identify as “LGBTQI++,” most as a badge of ideological honor or of shameless conformism (it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two). In his proclamation dishonoring Christian Easter, Biden highlights the ongoing threats to the “safety” of the transgendered in an effort to create and sustain an artificial sense of crisis.

At the same time, Biden regularly makes an ostentatious display of his Catholic faith, regularly and embarrassingly referring to his dead son’s rosary beads. But his Church, despite some confusions generated by Pope Francis’s own misplaced “non-judgmentalism” (with its non-stop appeal to mercy without sin and repentance), sees gender ideology as a grave threat to human dignity and the integrity of the human person made in “the image and likeness of God.”

The Christian Church has always opposed abortion. It was forcefully condemned as early as 75-90 A.D. in the esteemed Didache, “The Teachings of the Twelve Apostles,” an early, authoritative guide to becoming a faithful Christian. This doesn’t deter Biden from seeing in abortion on demand the fundamental freedom, a precious and unassailable human right under threat from “Christian nationalists” and assorted reactionaries. The American bishops have not been silent on Biden’s abuse of the Catholic faith (and of “right reason” to boot). But they have been more tepid than they should be for fear of “taking sides,” and no doubt because Rome is preoccupied with other issues, such as climate change (a matter about which the Church has no particular authority or expertise).

Some good Americans indulge gender ideology because they wish to be kind to troubled souls. As motives go, that is an understandable and decent one. But as Peter Kreeft argues in his excellent book Ethics for Beginners: Big Ideas From 32 Great Minds, we would all be better off if we could relearn the old Augustinian imperative to hate the sin, but to love the sinner, however demanding that might be. We do confused young people no good by imposing on them fundamentally false and corrosive ideas about the human person. No good comes from encouraging a worldview that promotes the spiritual and physical mutilation of the most vulnerable among us.

“Tough love” is demanded by both reason and faith, the “two wings” as Pope John Paul II called them, that give us access to the truth about human nature and the human person. Without it, we will witness further desecrations of the kind we experienced this Easter Sunday. That bodes ill for our republic and the common life that sustains it.