The Axe at the Root

Why the issues we fight keep growing back, traced from fruit to root

Christians who think of themselves as conservative fight abortion, same-sex marriage, men in women’s sports and a long list of other things one issue at a time. The fights are real, and some have been won, but the issues keep coming back in new forms. Our earlier genealogies traced a line forward, from the late medieval schools to the modern will. This paper runs the other way. It starts with the fruit, issue by issue, and follows each one down until they meet. They meet at one denial, the denial that things share real natures with purposes God gave them, and once that is denied, the will has nothing to answer to but itself.

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The heads and the root

On 24 June 2022 the Supreme Court held in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that “Roe and Casey must be overruled” and returned the issue of abortion “to the people’s elected representatives.” That November, Michigan’s voters added a section to the state constitution: “Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” a right that reaches every decision about pregnancy, “abortion care” among them. It took effect on 24 December 2022. The Court removed the rule from the federal Constitution in June, and by Christmas Eve it stood in Michigan’s.

The fight in Washington was not wasted. Law teaches, and Dobbs ended a rule that had bound every state for forty-nine years. But Dobbs did not say what the child in the womb is. The Court wrote that its opinion “is not based on any view about if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth,” and it left that question with the voters. Michigan’s voters answered it within five months. A law can protect what a thing is only while the people who make law believe what the thing is. Cutting the head off a weed is not useless, because it keeps the plant from going to seed. It does not clear the yard, because the root sends up another.

John the Baptist preached judgment on men who bore no fruit: “And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire” (Matt. 3:10). He spoke of men, not ideas, and we take one thing from his words and no more. The axe goes to the root.

Our genealogies The Chain and Nominalism and the Genealogy of the Modern Self traced the line forward, from William of Ockham in the 1300s to the sovereignty of the will. This paper is an inverse genealogy. It begins with the fruit a Christian man sees, takes each in its defenders’ own words, and asks what it has to deny in order to stand. We have left out the issues we cannot trace to this root by the standard of Out of the Root, the Fruit, gambling and drug use among them. What remains is life, marriage, sex, male and female, father and child, and the conscience of the men who disagree. Stated as a syllogism, the case runs as follows.

What the root is

William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), an English Franciscan, held that “everything that exists is individual or particular,” as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states his view. A word like humanity names a concept in the mind, not a nature every man shares. His logic became the via moderna, the modern way of the late medieval universities, against the older realism, which held that common natures are real.

The older view held more than that natures are real. It held that a nature carries its own purpose. An eye is for seeing, a mother is for her child, and marriage is for one flesh and the children it brings. A man can learn what a thing is for by looking at what it is, and when he does, he learns a law he did not write. Scripture speaks the same way: “God made the wild beasts of the earth according to their kind, and cattle according to their kind” (Gen. 1:25), and the invisible things of God are “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Rom. 1:20).

If the natures men share are only names, nothing has a given purpose, and nothing tells the will what a thing is for. Ockham did not draw that conclusion. He held a strong form of the view that right and wrong rest on God’s will, but the Stanford Encyclopedia also finds a kind of natural law in his ethics, in which God conveys His commands partly “by giving us the natures we have.” The claim of our earlier papers concerns what came after him, through the via moderna and the writers in section 03, as the will was kept and what it answered to was removed. Our genealogy of nominalism ends on that point, with the body as material and the will as the only law.

Put the three questions to the root. It came from the schools of the 1300s. The truth it twisted is that God is free and that names have power. God is bound by nothing outside Himself, and He gave Adam real authority to name. He brought the beasts “to Adam, to see what he would call them, and whatever Adam called any living creature, that was the name of it” (Gen. 2:19). Adam named what God had already made. He did not make it by naming it. The error keeps the name and drops the common nature it named. Where it leads is the rest of this paper.

How the root grew

The forward line is the work of our earlier papers, and we summarize it here only so the fruit has a trunk to hang from. The timeline marks where the premise was stated plainly at each stage. It does not claim that each man read the one before him. Where we make that claim, the earlier papers give the evidence, and where the evidence is a citation, section 04 gives it.

Ockham kept God and denied common natures. Kant kept the moral law and placed its source in the will. Mill kept a limit and placed it only where another man is harmed. The Court’s sentence of 1972 treats a marriage as nothing beyond the two individuals in it, and by 1992 the Court stated self-definition as the heart of liberty itself. Each step kept something, and each step left the will with less to answer to.

The fruit, traced to the root

Each fruit below is taken in its defenders’ own words, the words of a court, a statute, a church or a document written to persuade. Those words do not state the premise outright. We infer it from what they require, and for each we name the nature it denies and the truth it twists, because an error that lasts is built from a truth (None Gives What He Has Not, section 06).

Life. In 1992 the Court placed at the heart of liberty the right “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” and it said those considerations “begin our analysis of the woman’s interest in terminating her pregnancy” (Casey). Applied to abortion, a right to define the concept of existence becomes a right to decide whether the child in the womb is a person. Five years later the same reasoning was carried to the end of life. In Washington v. Glucksberg (1997) the Supreme Court reported that the Court of Appeals had found Casey “highly instructive” and “almost prescriptive” for deciding whether a terminally ill person has a right to choose suicide. The Supreme Court refused the inference. It held that the fact that many rights “sound in personal autonomy” does not protect every intimate decision. The lower court’s reasoning still shows the line of dependence, because the lower court named its parent.

In Dobbs the Court went further. It said that appeals to a right to define one’s concept of existence “prove too much,” because at that level of generality they “could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like.” The Court has twice refused to carry the premise further, and it has not named the nature the premise denies. The same premise decides the standing of the embryo, and section 06 shows what happened when a state court named an embryo a child.

The nature denied is that a human being is one from his beginning: “Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee” (Jer. 1:5), and “thou hast helped me from my mother’s womb” (Ps. 138:13). The truth twisted is choice. God gave man real choice and told him which to make: “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse: choose thou life” (Deut. 30:19). The error keeps the choosing and removes the life that was to be chosen.

Marriage. In 1972 the Court wrote that “the marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup” (Eisenstadt v. Baird). If marriage is two individuals and nothing more, either individual can end it, and the law had already begun to say so. California’s Family Law Act, signed in 1969, allowed divorce without proof of fault, and Michigan followed with a law that took effect on 1 January 1972. Michigan’s statute still speaks the old language. A complaint for divorce states only that “the objects of matrimony have been destroyed and there remains no reasonable likelihood that the marriage can be preserved,” and the statute forbids the plaintiff to give the grounds in any other words. The law still names the purposes of marriage, and it no longer asks either spouse to show that the other broke them.

In 2015 the Court held that liberty includes rights that allow persons “to define and express their identity,” and that this liberty reaches marriage between two people of the same sex (Obergefell v. Hodges). The Chief Justice answered in dissent that “much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.” That is a logical claim. In June 2020 the city council of Somerville, Massachusetts, voted unanimously to extend domestic partnership to relationships of more than two adults. A column in BU Today reported that the first discussions came from unmarried residents who struggled to be added to a partner’s health insurance during the pandemic. The cause was practical, and we do not claim the council read the dissent. We claim the premise gave the council no reason to stop at two.

Christ answered the question of divorce from creation, not from consent: “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19:6). The truth twisted is consent itself, which Scripture honors. Rebekah was asked, “Wilt thou go with this man?” and she answered, “I will go” (Gen. 24:58). Consent has its place in making a man and a woman husband and wife. It does not decide what a husband and wife are, and it cannot undo what God has joined.

Sex. The same opinion of 1972 reasoned from privacy, though it decided the case on equal protection and said it need not decide the larger question of access: “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” The words married or single carry the change. The Court reasoned that the decision to beget a child belongs to the individual, whether or not he has a wife, and for that sentence it cited Stanley v. Georgia (1969), which had held that “the mere private possession of obscene matter cannot constitutionally be made a crime.” Once sex has no purpose of its own, the only question left about any sexual act is whether the people in it agreed, and section 05 shows where that leaves the law.

The nature denied is that sex has its ends in the one flesh of husband and wife and in children. The truth twisted is that the body and its pleasures are good. Scripture honors the marriage bed and judges what is done outside it: “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge” (Heb. 13:4). It also answers Mill’s sovereign over his own body: “ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Cor. 6:19–20).

Male and female. In November 2006, twenty-nine experts in human rights law adopted the Yogyakarta Principles, which define gender identity as “each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth.” Two words do the work. Identity is internal, so the body does not decide it, and sex is assigned, as if someone at the birth had put a label on the child. The body’s sex becomes a label, and the inner sense becomes the real thing.

Children now hear the premise in plain words. One of the storybooks at issue in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025) came with a discussion guide that told its readers, “at any point in our lives, we can choose to identify with one gender, multiple genders, or neither gender.” Once the body does not decide sex, nothing grounds a girls’ team, a women’s locker room or a pronoun, and the medical transition of a minor becomes the body brought into line with the will.

Scripture answers from the body: “male and female he made them” (Gen. 1:27). The thing formed does not overrule the one who formed it: “Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Thou didst not form me?” (Isa. 29:16). The truth twisted is that God looks past appearance: “man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart” (1 Kgdms. 16:7). God looks at the heart to judge it. He does not let the heart rewrite the body He made.

Father and child. In 1993 the Supreme Court of California had to decide who was the mother of a child carried by one woman from an embryo made with another woman’s egg. It held that when the two ways of establishing motherhood do not meet in one woman, “she who intended to procreate the child—that is, she who intended to bring about the birth of a child that she intended to raise as her own—is the natural mother under California law” (Johnson v. Calvert). The woman who intended was also the woman whose egg it was, and the court still made intention the test. It used the word natural for the mother that test picked. Where the two kinds of motherhood divide, the rule makes the will the measure of who a child’s mother is.

The same premise moves the forming of a child from his parents to whoever teaches him what he is. In Mahmoud the Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland introduced storybooks on gender and sexuality, and less than a year later it rescinded its policy of letting parents opt their children out. The Supreme Court held in June 2025 that the parents were entitled to a preliminary injunction. Scripture places the child with his father and mother: “Behold, the inheritance of the Lord, children, the reward of the fruit of the womb” (Ps. 126:3), and fathers are to “bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4).

The truth twisted is adoption. Scripture knows a parenthood taken up by will, and honors it. Believers have “received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Rom. 8:15). Adoption takes a child who already has a nature and brings him into a house. It does not claim that intent made him. The error takes adoption and makes it the definition of every parent.

Conscience. A definition built on the will has no ground of its own, so it has to be enforced. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (2023) a web designer wished to make wedding websites only for marriages she endorsed, and the Supreme Court described the State’s aim plainly: “Colorado seeks to compel speech Ms. Smith does not wish to provide.” The Court ruled for the designer, and the State’s case still shows the last fruit. When marriage is whatever the will says it is, the man who says otherwise is not only wrong. He is in the way, and the law that defined the thing turns to the men who will not repeat the definition.

Scripture pronounces woe on a people who rename things: “Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil; who make darkness light, and light darkness” (Isa. 5:20). The truth twisted is love of neighbor: “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour” (Rom. 13:10). The error makes affirmation the test of love, and Scripture makes truth the test.

In the church. The root grows inside churches, and it grows in the same words. In March 2015 a majority of the presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) approved new language for its Book of Order: “Marriage involves a unique commitment between two people, traditionally a man and a woman.” The word traditionally carries the change. Man and woman moved from what marriage is to what marriage has usually been, which is the step from nature to custom. Out of the Root, the Fruit (section 03) sets out a parallel case in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

The last line: consent

Where the natures are set aside, the law’s gravest line around commercial sex is drawn by the will. Federal law defines the severe forms of sex trafficking as commercial sex “induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age” (22 U.S.C. § 7102). Amnesty International’s policy of 2016 uses the term sex work “only in regard to consensual exchanges between adults.” The two documents draw different lines, and both turn on consent and age. Neither asks what sex is.

Trafficking is evil, and Christians are right to fight it beside men who share nothing else with them. The line still deserves a look, because of what it is made of. Consent is real, and Scripture honors it. But consent cannot decide what a thing is, and a line made only of consent has nothing under it but the will. Age is different, and Mill shows why. His doctrine, he wrote, was meant “to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties.” The maturity of a child’s faculties is a fact about what a child is. Mill limited the sovereign will by appeal to a nature, and every defender of the age line does the same.

Where that line goes is a forecast, and we label it a caution and not a proof. What follows from it now is a logical claim. The man who holds the age line has to say why it holds, and if the reason is what children are, he has granted that some persons have a nature that decides what they can do. He has borrowed from the root he denies, and a borrowed ground has to be argued for again each time the line is pressed.

Why the heads grow back

A court that names a nature can be answered by lawmakers who will not be bound by it. On 16 February 2024 the Supreme Court of Alabama held that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children” under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, a law first passed in 1872. On 6 March the governor signed legislation meant to assure providers and patients of in vitro fertilization that they would not face legal liability for the treatment. The court said what an embryo is. Within three weeks the legislature protected the practice from the consequences of the court’s definition. Alabama’s lawmakers did not deny in words that an embryo is a child. They acted as though the answer did not bind them.

The Dobbs majority said the premise proves too much, and it still protected by name the decisions that rest on it: “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Justice Thomas, concurring, wrote that “we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” No other justice joined him. The Court rejected the premise for abortion, named no nature in its place, and left the premise standing for marriage and sex.

Some heads stay down. In United States v. Skrmetti (2025) the Court upheld Tennessee’s law barring puberty blockers and hormones meant to help a minor live as an identity inconsistent with his sex, and it left the law’s policy to “the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.” The law stands in Tennessee on the same condition Michigan’s voters did not meet in 2022. It holds while the people who make law there believe what a boy and a girl are.

A law that names a nature holds only while the men who make law believe in the nature, and the men who make law are formed long before they vote. Christ put the order plainly: “Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit” (Matt. 12:33). The fight in law trims the fruit. The fight over what things are goes to the tree.

What we do

Each session of our series ends with what a man does about what he has learned, in four places: himself, his home, his church, and what he asks of rulers. Going to the root comes down to these.

He names things by what they are. In his own speech he says man and woman, husband and wife, mother and child, and he does not take up words built to deny a nature. Sex is not assigned, and a wife is not a partner. Paul’s rule is his rule for his own body, “ye are not your own” (1 Cor. 6:19). He keeps his eyes and his body for the purposes God gave them, and he refuses pornography, which uses sex for an end it was not made for.

He teaches his house what things are for. A father gives his children the first answer before any of the fruit reaches them: “he made us, and not we ourselves” (Ps. 99:3). At his table he asks what a thing is for, an eye, a body, a marriage, a child, and his children learn that the answer comes from the thing and its Maker, not from the person who wants it.

He asks his church to confess what God made. He asks his elders whether the church’s teaching on marriage, sex, and male and female rests on creation or on custom. The PC(USA) wrote traditionally, and the word shows what happens when a church grounds marriage in what has usually been done. He asks his church to teach the first article of the creed, God the Maker of heaven and earth, as a doctrine about men and women and not only about the heavens (The Sound of the Cornet).

He argues from nature in public. When he supports a law, he gives the reason that answers the root, what the thing is, and not only the reason that wins the vote. He backs laws that name natures plainly, and he knows they hold only while men believe them. When someone defends one of the fruit, he asks where the principle stops and on what ground (Out of the Root, the Fruit, section 06), and when the answer is consent, he asks why one spouse’s will is enough to unmake a marriage of two and the will of three adults is not enough to make one.

Seven objections

Sin is the root, not a medieval friar. Sin is the taproot in every age. The serpent promised that “ye would be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5), and men have wanted to decide good and evil for themselves ever since. Men killed children, broke marriages and sold their bodies long before Ockham. Sin explains why men want these things. It does not explain why the law began to call them liberty, or why a church began to call marriage between a man and a woman a tradition. That change is what this paper traces.

Some of these sins are older than Ockham. So are most sins. We claim the root for the defense of each fruit, not for the appetite behind it, and we cut from this paper the issues we could not trace by that standard, gambling and drug use among them.

The pill and the internet did this, not philosophy. Technology made these things cheaper, easier and more private, and we grant it as a cause of how far they spread. This paper does not measure how much. A tool does not make an argument. The pill made contraception reliable, and in 1972 the Court reasoned that the decision to beget a child belongs to the individual, married or single. The internet carries pornography, and Stanley v. Georgia had already held that possessing obscene material at home could not be made a crime, a rule the Court later refused to extend to child pornography (Osborne v. Ohio, 1990). A tool explains spread. A premise explains why the law and the church stopped calling the thing wrong.

Ockham was a Christian. He was a Franciscan friar, and we do not judge his soul. He also taught more than his critics usually grant, as section 02 says. Our method forbids the argument that convicts a tradition because an error rose inside it (Out of the Root, the Fruit, section 03). The claim is about a premise and what was done with it after him.

Catholic countries reached the same place. They did. Spain allowed same-sex marriage in 2005 and Ireland in 2015 (Out of the Root, the Fruit, section 03). The root in this paper grew in the universities before the Reformation divided the church, so it was in Catholic and Protestant soil alike. A Catholic arrival counts against a genealogy that runs through the Reformation alone. It is consistent with one that runs through the schools.

Fighting the issues won Dobbs. It did, and section 01 says so. Dobbs is also our evidence. It removed one fruit from federal law without naming the nature the fruit denies, and that November Michigan’s voters wrote it into their constitution.

Nominalism is too abstract for a young man to fight. He does not fight a word from the schools. The root shows up in plain words, assigned, traditionally, choose to identify, and he answers it in plain words, in his speech, his home, his church and his vote (section 07).

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It does not prove here that the premise descends from Ockham. That claim and its evidence belong to our earlier genealogies, and this paper does not claim that each man in section 03 read the one before. It claims a shared premise, inferred from each fruit’s own words.

It does not claim that the root explains the desire for any of these things. Sin does.

It does not claim that technology, money or politics played no part. The third objection grants them a part.

It does not claim that fighting the issues in law is wasted, or that every head grows back. Section 01 says the first, and Skrmetti shows the second.

It does not claim that everyone who supports one of the fruit holds the premise knowingly. Many hold a fruit and have never looked at the root, and naming the root lets them look.

It does not turn the forecast in section 05 into a proof. The logical claim stands on its own. The forecast is a caution.

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Texts and editions

Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, trans., The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (London, 1844).

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise §95.

Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, second section.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), ch. 1.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), trans. H. M. Parshley (1953), 267, as quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Simone de Beauvoir.”

The Yogyakarta Principles (adopted November 2006), Introduction.

Amnesty International, Amnesty International Policy on State Obligations to Respect, Protect and Fulfil the Human Rights of Sex Workers, POL 30/4062/2016 (26 May 2016).

Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Amendment 14-F to the Book of Order, Directory for Worship, as reported in the Presbyterian Outlook, 17 March 2015.

Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969).

Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).

Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103 (1990).

Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).

Johnson v. Calvert, 5 Cal. 4th 84 (1993).

Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702 (1997).

Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), opinion of the Court and Roberts, C.J., dissenting.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), opinion of the Court and Thomas, J., concurring.

303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 600 U.S. 570 (2023).

LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, SC-2022-0579 (Ala. 16 February 2024).

United States v. Skrmetti, No. 23-477 (U.S. 18 June 2025).

Mahmoud v. Taylor, No. 24-297 (U.S. 27 June 2025).

California Family Law Act (1969). Michigan Compiled Laws § 552.6, as amended by 1971 PA 75, effective 1 January 1972.

Constitution of Michigan of 1963, art. I, § 28, approved 8 November 2022, effective 24 December 2022.

22 U.S.C. § 7102, definitions.

Epstein Becker Green, “In Alabama, Pre-Embryos are ‘Extrauterine Children’ Under the State’s Wrongful Death Statute,” Health Law Advisor, 26 February 2024.

American Health Law Association, “Alabama Enacts Legislation to Protect IVF After State Supreme Court Ruling,” Health Law Weekly, 8 March 2024.

Kimberly Rhoten, “POV: Somerville, Mass., Delivers a Big Victory for Those in Polyamorous Relationships,” opinion column, BU Today, 30 July 2020.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “William of Ockham” and “Simone de Beauvoir.”

The Chain. Nominalism and the Genealogy of the Modern Self. The Sound of the Cornet. Out of the Root, the Fruit. None Gives What He Has Not.

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament from Brenton’s Septuagint with its numbering (King James Psalms 100, 127 and 139 are Psalms 99, 126 and 138, and 1 Samuel is 1 Kingdoms). New Testament from the King James Version. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com