The Real Reason People Use Religion to Police Bodies: The Truth Behind “Family Values”

Seen through glass, we mistake perception for knowing.

I recently read a conference paper by Ross Neir titled “Procreative Nationalism as an LGBTQ+ Hermeneutical Strategy.” If you want to read the full text, you can find it here: Procreative Nationalism 

I had that quiet, unmistakable reaction: yes… this names something I’ve been circling for a long time. Not because I agree with every claim or conclusion, but because the paper gives language to a pattern I’ve been trying to expose for years, especially in contemporary debates about gender, sexuality, religion, and what often gets called “the natural order.”

The phrase procreative nationalism may sound academic, but the idea itself is fairly simple: sexual ethics are often shaped less by timeless moral truths than by anxiety about survival, continuity, and replacement. In other words, who will carry us forward.

Before going further, it’s worth pausing over the word nationalism. In our current moment, it carries a sharp and often caustic charge, closely associated with exclusionary politics and authoritarian movements. On a surface reading, its use here could easily be mistaken for a blanket condemnation or an attempt to project modern political ideologies back onto ancient texts.

That isn’t what’s being claimed.

In this context, nationalism is being used descriptively rather than polemically. It names a way communities have historically organized identity and belonging around the survival of a people, whether defined by ethnicity, covenant, culture, or lineage. In the ancient world, this kind of thinking was common and often pragmatic. The issue arises when these survival logics are mistaken for timeless moral law, and when fear of disappearance hardens into control over bodies, sex, and family life.

What the Paper Does So Well

The paper traces how thinkers like Plato, Philo, and Paul link sexual behaviour to the survival of a people, a city, or a covenant. Procreation becomes a civic or religious duty. Non-reproductive bodies and desires become suspect, not primarily because they are immoral in themselves, but because they do not serve the larger project of preservation.

What struck me was not just that this logic appears in ancient texts, but how recognizable it feels today.

Modern debates about declining birthrates, “family values,” and the supposed civilizational threat posed by LGBTQ+ people are not new. They are contemporary expressions of a much older fear: What if we disappear?

Why This Resonates With My Own Work

I’ve been writing for a while about disgust as a learned response, purity codes as thin coverings over anxiety, and ideology as something that survives by presenting itself as eternal and unquestionable. Procreative nationalism fits directly into that framework.

At the core is a recurring pattern: a community experiences itself as threatened, whether demographically, culturally, or symbolically. That unease gets translated into moral language. Bodies, especially those that don’t conform to reproductive expectations, become the site where that anxiety is managed. Control is reframed as virtue, discipline is baptized as care, and fear is dressed up as moral clarity.

This is why appeals to “biology,” “nature,” or “God’s design” so often collapse under closer scrutiny. They are less about truth than about continuity. Once that becomes visible, many supposedly moral arguments begin to look more like strategies for managing collective fear.

Paul, Without the Need to Rescue Him

One of the things I appreciated most about the paper is that it refuses both rescue and reduction. It doesn’t rehabilitate Paul into a modern ally, nor does it vilify him as a misogynist or flatten him into a caricature. Instead, it treats him as a historically situated thinker, shaped by inherited frameworks of covenant, lineage, and promise.

Paul does not call his communities to reproduce in order to sustain an empire, but he still draws on procreative logic rhetorically. Israel’s survival matters. Descent matters. Language about nature, degeneration, and continuity does real work in his arguments, even as his eschatology complicates how that work functions.

This aligns closely with how I approach scripture now. I’m no longer interested in saving texts at all costs. I’m interested in understanding what they are doing, whom they serve, and what fears animate them.

This meant that sometimes clarity is more faithful than reverence.

Why This Matters for LGBTQ+ Readers Today

The paper frames procreative nationalism not as a divine mandate, but as a hermeneutical strategy. That shift matters.

Instead of asking, How do we fit into these texts? The question becomes, What social project are these texts supporting? And further, do we want to inherit that project uncritically?

If procreation has been moralized primarily because it supports a vision of survival rooted in exclusion, then questioning that vision isn’t rebellion. It’s discernment.

When non-reproductive lives are framed as threats, the problem may not be those lives at all, but the fragility of the systems that require constant replenishment to survive.

A Broader Synthesis

In my own writing, I’ve argued that disgust is taught, purity is policed, and ideology survives by pretending it has always been this way. Procreative nationalism is another load-bearing beam in that same fragile structure.

It helps explain why trans bodies provoke outsized reaction, why childless adults are often viewed with suspicion, why queer joy is cast as decadence, and why “replacement” language keeps resurfacing in religious and political discourse.

These are not merely theological debates. They are existential ones.

The paper doesn’t ask us to discard ancient texts wholesale. It invites us to read them clearly, to notice how fear of loss becomes moral authority. That, to me, isn’t an attack on faith. It’s a refusal to confuse survival anxiety with holiness.

Why I’m Sharing This

I’m pointing to this paper not as an authority to be deferred to, but as a lens worth picking up. It sharpens questions I already care about, it names patterns I already see at work, and it offers LGBTQ+ readers a way to stop arguing on terrain that was never neutral to begin with.

Sometimes the most honest thing we can say is this: this isn’t really about God, or nature, or truth. It’s about fear.

I’m reminded of something Jennifer Finney Boylan once said in an interview many years ago. Jennifer and I transitioned at almost the same time — she may have been a year ahead of me — and her words stayed with me. She suggested that if people would only listen to our stories in person, really listen, they would not be so afraid of us.

She was naming something simple and unsettling: fear thrives at a distance. When lives remain abstract — debated, moralized, controlled — fear holds its ground. But proximity disrupts it. Stories interrupt it. Listening makes policing harder to justify.

Fear loses much of its power once it is named.
It loses even more when it is met, face to face, with a human story.