The death of Gloria Steinem this week closes the book on one of the most influential figures of the modern feminist movement, but it doesn’t close the book on the revolution she helped advance. Steinem didn’t create feminism, the sexual revolution or America’s rebellion against traditional marriage and family, but she became one of their most recognizable evangelists. The ideas outlive the icon. And when you look around America today—sexual confusion, abortion celebrated as liberation, marriage diminished, motherhood treated as optional or even burdensome, and a political Left increasingly determined to construct morality without the God who gives morality meaning—you begin to see something much bigger than Gloria Steinem. In this week’s Friday Sermonette, I called it the Cult of Chaos.

Five minutes only gives me enough time to make the argument. Here in the Clarity Report, we can open the Bible and examine it, because none of this started with Gloria Steinem, second-wave feminism or the sexual revolution. If you really want to understand the rebellion, start with Genesis. Then turn to Romans chapter one.

Long before Gloria Steinem, long before modern feminism, and long before LGBTQ+, there was Romans 1.

🔥 CLARITY CHECK

Genesis begins with God bringing order out of chaos. He separates light from darkness, water from land, day from night. God establishes boundaries and distinctions. Then comes a distinction at the very heart of human creation: “Male and female He created them.”

God creates. Therefore God defines.

That seems almost embarrassingly simple until you realize how much of modern Western culture depends upon rejecting it. If there is a Creator, creation has meaning independent of our preferences. My body isn’t raw material waiting for me to assign it an identity. Male and female aren’t inventions of society. Marriage isn’t ours to redefine simply because cultural attitudes change.

But what happens when mankind decides the Creator no longer gets to define His creation?

Romans 1 answers that question.

🔥 THE GREAT EXCHANGE

Romans 1 doesn’t begin with homosexuality. It begins with God. Paul says what may be known of God is evident through creation, but mankind “suppresses the truth in unrighteousness.” That’s important. Paul doesn’t describe people desperately searching for God and simply failing to find Him. He describes people suppressing what God has made evident.

Then the exchanges begin. Mankind exchanges the glory of the incorruptible God for images of created things. Then mankind “exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” And then comes another exchange—this time involving sexuality.

See the progression? The Creator is exchanged. The truth is exchanged. Eventually even the created order expressed through our bodies becomes something mankind believes it has the authority to exchange.

Paul says mankind knew God but refused to glorify Him as God. Their thinking became futile. Their foolish hearts were darkened. Then comes the line that could be carved over the entrance of half our universities: “Professing to be wise, they became fools.”

Remove the Creator and somebody still has to define reality. So who does? We do. Who defines morality? We do. Who defines marriage? We do. Who defines male and female? Apparently, we do.

How are we doing?

🔥 LONG BEFORE LGBTQ+, THERE WAS ROMANS 1

This is where modern readers begin getting uncomfortable because Paul specifically uses sexuality as evidence of humanity’s rejection of the Creator. Romans 1:26–27 describes women exchanging natural relations for those contrary to nature and men likewise abandoning natural relations with women and becoming inflamed with desire for one another.

Paul wrote nearly two thousand years before Pride flags, queer theory, same-sex marriage, gender identity or gender-affirming care became part of the American vocabulary. But the underlying theological issue isn’t new.

The vocabulary is new. The rebellion isn’t.

Why sexuality? Paul hasn’t suddenly changed subjects. Sexuality fits the argument he’s been making from the beginning. He’s talking about creation and Creator, and sexuality takes us directly back to Genesis: “Male and female He created them.” The male-female distinction isn’t something Christianity invented or Western civilization dreamed up. According to Scripture, it is part of the architecture of creation itself.

Notice Paul’s language. He speaks of what is “natural” and what is “contrary to nature.” The Greek word is physis—nature. His argument isn’t merely that Roman society had certain sexual customs Christians should follow. Paul appeals beyond social convention to the created order.

That’s important because the modern sexual revolution increasingly makes the opposite argument. Our culture says the body doesn’t possess an authoritative meaning. Biological sex can be separated from identity. Male and female become categories increasingly defined by internal perception. Desire itself becomes a source of identity.

Paul begins somewhere completely different: the Creator gives creation its meaning.

🔥 FEMINISM AND THE REVOLT AGAINST LIMITS

This is where feminism enters the discussion, and precision matters. The problem isn’t women voting, receiving an education, owning property, having careers or participating fully in public life. Those aren’t the things I’m criticizing when I talk about feminism.

I’m talking about the strand of modern feminism that increasingly treated the natural differences between men and women, marriage, motherhood and eventually the family itself as structures from which women needed liberation. Gloria Steinem became one of the most effective voices for that revolution, but the revolution didn’t stop where second-wave feminists imagined it would.

The sexual revolution accelerated a series of separations: sex from marriage, sex from procreation, marriage from permanence, and eventually identity from the sexed body itself. These movements aren’t identical, nor did everyone involved share the same goals. But there is a common philosophical impulse running through them: human freedom increasingly becomes defined as liberation from limits we did not choose.

Christianity says something radically different.

Some limits aren’t oppression. They’re creation.

The modern world says freedom means having the authority to define myself. Scripture begins with the recognition that I was created by Someone who already knows what I am.

And here is one of history’s great ironies. A feminist movement that fought to elevate the social standing of women eventually helped produce a culture struggling to answer the question, “What is a woman?” That isn’t an argument against women’s dignity. It is an argument for the reality that made the category “woman” meaningful in the first place.

🔥 THREE TIMES GOD “GAVE THEM OVER”

Romans 1 contains another repetition that deserves attention. Three times Paul says God “gave them over.” In verse 24, God gives them over to uncleanness in the lusts of their hearts. In verse 26, He gives them over to dishonorable passions. In verse 28, He gives them over to a debased mind.

That’s chilling because judgment in Romans 1 isn’t necessarily fire falling from heaven. Sometimes judgment looks like God allowing human beings to pursue the rebellion they demanded. You don’t want the Creator? You want autonomy? You insist upon defining good and evil for yourself? There comes a point when mankind experiences the consequences of getting what it demanded.

Sometimes chaos isn’t merely the consequence of judgment. Sometimes the chaos is part of the judgment.

But don’t make the mistake of stopping at verses 26 and 27. Paul doesn’t. After sexual disorder comes a much broader catalogue: unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness, pride, disobedience to parents, and people who are unloving, unforgiving and unmerciful.

Romans 1 isn’t “the gay chapter.” It is a diagnosis of human rebellion. That means the self-righteous churchgoer doesn’t get to point at everybody marching in the Pride parade while conveniently skipping greed, envy, deceit, pride and being unmerciful.

Paul isn’t merely giving conservatives ammunition. He’s describing humanity in rebellion against its Creator.

🔥 WHEN REBELLION BECOMES VIRTUE

Then we arrive at verse 32, and this may be the portion of Romans 1 that most closely resembles our cultural moment. Paul says people not only practice these things but “approve of those who practice them.”

Human beings have always violated moral standards. Something different happens when the standard itself is inverted. We move from “I know this is wrong, but I’m doing it” to “There is nothing wrong with what I’m doing,” then to “What I’m doing is good,” and eventually to “You must agree that it is good.”

That’s when rebellion becomes virtue and disagreement becomes sin.

Put a flag on it. Give it a month. Teach it to children. Put it in corporate advertising. Require affirmation. And when somebody refuses to celebrate it, call them hateful.

That’s why I use the phrase Cult of Chaos. I’m not saying every gay person, feminist, Democrat or progressive consciously desires chaos. Many sincerely believe they’re pursuing compassion, equality, authenticity or freedom. I’m talking about the worldview—and worldviews have destinations.

If every individual creature becomes the final authority over truth, morality and identity, eventually there is no common authority left above us.

We shouldn’t be surprised by the confusion. We removed the reference point.

🔥 THE CONSERVATIVE TRAP

Now my conservative friends need to hear something. If we read everything I’ve just written and conclude, “That’s why we need more Republicans,” we’ve missed the most important point.

I want better government. I want constitutional judges. I want children protected. I want unborn life protected. I want parents to have authority over their children. I want marriage and the family strengthened. Elections matter.

But none of that gives eternal life.

You can restore every good law in America and still have a nation filled with spiritually dead people. Our greatest problem isn’t that mankind is insufficiently conservative. Our greatest problem isn’t even merely that mankind is rebellious.

Our greatest problem is that mankind is spiritually dead.

Dead men don’t need better politics. Dead men need LIFE.

🔥 LIFE FROM ABOVE

And that brings us to Nicodemus.

If anybody should have been okay without Jesus, Nicodemus looked like the guy. He was a Pharisee—educated, moral, religious, respected, a ruler of the Jews. If religion could give a man life, Nicodemus should already have had it.

But Jesus tells him that unless one is born anōthen, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Most of us grew up hearing “born again.” The Greek word anōthen can mean “again,” but it also carries the meaning “from above.” And John’s narrative makes wonderful use of the misunderstanding.

Nicodemus hears Jesus on the earthly level. How can an old man enter his mother’s womb a second time? Jesus is speaking about something entirely different: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

Nicodemus is looking down here.

Jesus is pointing above.

The answer isn’t down here. Life comes from above.

Then Jesus takes Nicodemus back to Numbers 21. Israel is dying from serpent bites. God tells Moses to lift up the bronze serpent. The dying Israelite doesn’t heal himself, reform himself or promise to behave better. He looks at what God has provided and lives.

Jesus then tells Nicodemus, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up,” so that whoever believes in Him has eternal life.

There it is. Not reform. Not religion. Not works. Not cleaning yourself up first.

Believe and live.

Nicodemus is perhaps the most religious man in the room, and Jesus still tells him he needs life from above. Government can’t give life. Feminism can’t give life. Socialism can’t give life. Islam can’t give life. Religion can’t give life. Life isn’t found in a political system, an ideology or a religion.

Life is found in a PERSON—Jesus Christ.

🔥 CLARITY CHECK

This is where salvation and discipleship must remain distinct. Eternal life isn’t the reward for successfully fixing your politics, sexuality, marriage, behavior or theology. Eternal life is the gift Jesus promises to the one who believes in Him for it.

Once a person has life, discipleship begins. Now the believer learns to walk in truth, renew the mind, resist conformity to the world and live consistently with the life already received. That’s why Christians should tell the truth about sexuality without believing sexual morality saves anybody. Tell the truth about male and female. Tell the truth about marriage. Tell the truth about unborn life. Tell the truth about God’s created order.

But never confuse moral reform with eternal life.

🔥 FINAL WORD

The great mistake of our age is believing mankind can reject the Creator while retaining the order of creation. Romans 1 says otherwise. Suppress the truth and thinking becomes darkened. Exchange the Creator and eventually creation itself becomes negotiable. When mankind insists upon becoming its own authority, what begins as rebellion works its way through our minds, our bodies, our relationships, our families and ultimately our culture.

But despair isn’t the Christian response. The answer isn’t down here. Life comes from above. Jesus Christ is still the resurrection. He is still the life. He is still the Higher Ground.

And when the Cult of Chaos offers you death—LOOK UP AND LIVE.

Faith alone in Christ alone for eternal life.