The most important question we can ask about ourselves is, “What is man?” It is not, let me emphasize, “What does it MEAN to be human?”, but “What is a human being?” This is the question asked by the psalmist in Psalm 8 asking of God: What is man that you are mindful of him? This is the essential existential question, the question whose answer answers all other questions about our lives, our religion, our politics, our nationhood. It is THE question.

It is THE question and the one about which we think little. A podcast came across my feed this morning, almost by “accident,” that grabbed my attention. It was a New York Times hitpiece on American evangilicalism and the coming mid-term elections in November. It began as a conversation between two journalists who were raised in the conservative evangelical church but have since become too wise to believe the tenets of Christianity. They delighted in tarring evangelical Christianity with the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Because, they said, some of those storming the barricades were praying and waving about Christian symbols and flags, this is The Handmaids tale come to life. Yes, it was a slander, but it is how the secular view a Christianity that takes its theology and practice seriously, and it is well worth the time to listen and understand.

The second half of the podcast was an interview by the podcast host of Al Mohler – yes, that Al Mohler who is often slandered by the relgious right for being too accomodating of “on the other hand” thinking. But unlike many whom I call brother, I like Al Mohler. He is a thinker, and Christianity demands more than blind submission. God created us to think and to do, and we can’t fulfill our purpose without thinking and doing.

But enough about Al Mohler. The interviewer could not understand how Mohler could say he would not, could not, vote for a Democrat because of that party’s embrace of abortion on demand and the LGBTQ agenda. Are there not, he asked, other issues of great importance, that go beyond those two issues? And this is where I wish Al had used my verbage instead of his. Al answered that the sanctity of life in womb and the institution or marriage are the paramount issues for our time and place.

What he said is true, but what I think would have been a better response would have been, “The question that is before us, and before every person in every place and in every time is this: What is man?”

Why is abortion an issue? Well, “What is man?” If humanity is the product of millennia of evolution, then man is nothing more than a biological accident whose life is of no more value than that of a parmicium. But if man is a creature, a created being, made according to scripture “in the image of God,” an animated by the divine Spirit breathed into him at his creation and having that animation passed from generation to generation through the process of conception and birth, then every human being in every stage of life is special and deserving of special consideration and care. Black lives, indigenous lives, asian lives, white lives, poor lives, rich lives matter because all living are because God created man in his image, male and female he created them.

And that brings Al’s second paramount issue, marriage – what it is, and what it cannot be. The lifelong union of a man and a woman for the purpose of producing the next generation and nurturing those children to become themselves the parents of the next generation is premised on creation and the creation of humanity as male and female. All other expressions of human sexuality and sexual identity reject the notion of creation in the image of God and thus make our very existence meaningless. So, again the question to be answered is, “What is man?”

No other question pressing in upon us is more important than, “What is man?” Having the right answer to that question lays the foundation to address every other question that confronts us. Casting aside the hand of God in creation casts aside the very worth and meaning of being human. Hence, says Al Mohler, having the right and true answer to this question must be THE issue on which a Christian is to vote. To do otherwise is unthinkable.