The federal court decision on California’s Prop 8 legislation has prompted many responses. One significant theme is that conservative Protestants, who oppose gay marriage, whether from the pulpit or in ordination standards and hiring practices, should prepare for continued marginalization and even legislative harassment if they continue to publicly oppose gay marriage. In this vein, Carl Trueman writes:
Those evangelical leaders, academics and evangelical institutions that prize their place at the table and their invitations to appear on `serious’ television programs, and who enjoy being asked to offer their opinion to the wider culture had better be prepared to make a choice. As I have said before in this column, we are not far from the place where to oppose homosexuality will be regarded as in the same moral bracket as white supremacy. Those types only appear on Jerry Springer; and Jerry generally doesn’t typically ask them their opinion on the ethics of medical research, the solution to the national debt, or the importance of poetry to a rounded education.
(BTW, Trueman adds that the older generation of conservative Protestants dropped the ball on this one and failed to produce an exegetical argument against homosexuality. He remembers that for his peers, “now in middle age, dislike of homosexuality . . . had more to do with our own cultural backgrounds than with any biblical argumentation.†He even admits that “we were basically bigots and we needed to change.†Trueman may be too young and too English to remember – if he is middle-aged, what does that make me? – that when John Boswell’s much read and discussed book came out, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality [1980], this geezer remembers any number of evangelicals responses to Boswell, all before the age of the Internet, peppered with important historical and exegetical arguments about biblical teaching on homosexuality.)
I may be as naive as I am old, but I do not agree with Trueman’s assessment that opposition to gay marriage will become synonymous with white supremacy and other crack pot ideas from the perspective of the cultural mainstream. At a deep level, Americans identify with the underdog. Homosexuals have used this to gain acceptance, even though people with the kind of access they appear to have to cultural elites are generally not eligible for the category of the oppressed.
Minority groups in the United States do oppose homosexuality and they do so without any noticeable threat. For instance, Muslims are not keen on gay marriage, nor are orthodox Jews, or African-American Protestants for that matter. And yet, the thought of the state threatening these groups with penalties for their stances on homosexuality seems far-fetched. If Andrew Sullivan were to come to a place in policy debates where he wound up on the other side of a dispute with Jesse Jackson, I bet Sullivan would have enough sense not to charge Jackson with bigotry – something that rarely sticks on minorities. And if Jackson were a spokesman for African-American ministers opposed to homosexual marriage, I doubt he would be banned from the Sunday morning talk shows for doing so. I could actually see lots of bookings (though I wouldn’t be at home to watch them).
The problem for evangelicals is that they are the minority who thinks like a majority. It would be one thing to look at the numbers, recognize you don’t have the votes, and look for ways to protect your own sideline institutions. This was the approach to public life in the United States by Roman Catholics and they found their political outlet in the multi-cultural Democratic Party. But evangelicals have readily identified as the mainstream tradition in the United States, with claims about the nation’s Christian founding, and an accompanying political theology that says God loves republics and freedom. Evangelicals have also tended to approve of the Republican Party’s efforts to impose cultural uniformity on the nation. In which case, evangelicals may like to think that they are a minority only seeking toleration for themselves what other minority groups want (or have). But they have a uniformity-by-majority disposition that seeks to establish their norms as those of the nation.
This is the main reason for quick and ready dismissals of evangelicals as bigoted and intolerant, not their actual views or practices on homosexuality. Gay marriage is an emblem of a deeper cultural divide that prevents white conservative Protestants from embracing some form of cultural diversity. If they could concede ground to homosexuals (I don’t know if it should be civil marriage), they might be able to gain concessions for their own churches, schools, and families. But for the better part of 200 years, evangelicals have approached public life as a zero-sum game.
Scott Clark is sensitive to the particular consequences that gay marriage would have for the entire culture, and not for a certain sector of it, and argues plausibly for considering the social consequences of gay marriage. Scott is particularly concerned about the fallout for the family:
By analogy it is not possible to re-define the fundamental units of society without a cost. Consider any society. Assuming a certain degree of natural liberty and mobility, if people are living together in a defined space, those people have consented voluntarily to live together. They have made a society. What is the basic unit of that society? It cannot be the isolated individual if only because no mere individual is capable of forming a society or of perpetuating a society. There must be a basic social unit. Historically that social unit has been understood to be a heterosexual family, a father, mother, a grandfather, a grandmother and their children and grandchildren because it is grounded in the nature of things.
I tend to agree with this but sense it is almost impossible to use this line of reasoning in a plausible way. For forty years our society has been experimenting with a host of new social forms. Some of those were surely welcome – racial integration, and redefining women’s roles. But the impetus to overturn unwanted hierarchies did not leave much room for recognizing the value of hierarchy more generally and the way that social order depends upon other kinds of order. And so along came sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll as the baby boomers’ favorite idioms for resisting cultural and moral conventions.
Evangelicals may have taken longer and been more selective in appropriating the cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s, but when it came to worship and sacred song they did so with abandon. Granted, it is a leap even to suggest – let alone argue – that Praise and Worship worship was a step on the path to gay marriage. But if Christian rock did to religious conventions what rock did to cultural conventions, it is possible to wonder where the bending of conventions ultimately leads.
Scott points in the direction of his observation when he writes of the generational differences on opposition to homosexuality. The younger generation has:
been raised in a culture which not only tolerates homosexuality but celebrates it. Consider the contrast between the way homosexuality was regarded in popular culture in the first half of the 20th century. Liberace was openly effeminate and made only the thinnest of attempts to protest his heterosexuality. Homosexual movie stars regularly went out of their way to create a heterosexual image and especially when it was contrary to fact. Some movie studios had a policy requiring single male actors (e.g., Jimmy Stewart) to visit a studio-run bordello in order to demonstrate their heterosexuality.
In the second half of the 20th century the old conventions, which has lost their grounding in nature and creational law, were deconstructed. . . . All of this took decades but it happened. It’s a real change of culture, of attitude, of stance, of definition of what constitutes acceptable social and sexual behavior and norms.
If Scott is right, and I think he is about the gradual ways in which the culture has changed since 1960, then evangelicals may want to rethink why it is that their disregard for what the created order reveals as appropriate for Christian worship is okay but homosexual disregard for the created order of sexual reproduction is not. It could be that Trueman’s point about bigotry has a point: can you really sing Christian rock in praise of God and oppose gay marriage with a straight face?
57 Comments
Jeff, Jonah and Habakkuk had direct instruction. I don’t see the church called to the same kind of prophetic voice other than the ordinary means of preaching and teaching the word. Anyway, “prophetic” makes me jumpy. It’s either what liberal Protestants say, or what Jack Van Impy does.
Wuff. What happened to my “duck and cover”?
I will need to discipline myself to stop here. Thanks for the interactions all, and may God continue to move us all towards unity in the faith and in the knowledge of Jesus.
Final thoughts:
Bob: I haven’t done statistical surveys, but I can say that several pro-choice arguments (including the line of reasoning in Roe) deny that abortion is murder. If you are not familiar, I encourage reading Judith Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” From there, you might consider the arguments that personhood begins with consciousness, and that embryos are simply “masses of cells.” (See Singer’s works for the extreme example of this argument). Both of these lines of reasoning are common in discussions I’ve had.
As far as ethical intuitivism, I’m arguing that it’s not more persuasive than a principled Divine Command theory.
Further, I’m arguing that it is perilous for a Christian to adopt ethical intuitivism because God saw fit to give us more than our consciences. Put another way: it is necessary for a Christian to follow the Scripture even in his common affairs (cf. WLC 95-97, 122-148). It follows therefore that general revelation and ethical intuitivism are not sufficient for Christians in their own personal ethical reasoning. To set aside Scripture in favor of ethical intuitions is simply wrong, as I think all here would agree.
To my mind, there is or ought to be a connection between the public arguments we make and the private reasonings we undertake. If my real reason for opposing gay marriage is the creation mandate of Genesis, then oughtn’t I own up to it?
I fear that too many evangelicals prefer the-Bible-tells-me-so types of explanations over “ethical intuitivism†because they are intellectually lazy, not because of any inherent shortcomings of God’s general revelation.
The phenomenon you describe is deplorable, but the solution is not to embrace GR. Rather, the solution is to provoke deeper thought, starting with asking people to distinguish between “the Bible says so” from “someone on Christian radio said…”
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Jed, DGH: I’m fine with limiting the church’s voice to evangelistic prophetic utterances. My main concern, as you know, is to think through how the Christian in a position of authority is to be loyal to the Lord while simultaneously existing in a non-Christian society. It’s one thing to say “submit”, which works fine for non-magistrates. It’s quite another to be a magistrate, in a position to actually make decisions.
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Zrim: Sorry I made you sound too cavalier. I perhaps over-read the “who cares” sentence, which did strike me as rather blase.
What I am saying is that when I say to my pagan neighbor that one segment of the human population shouldn’t have the right, at will or whim, to take the life of another segment of the human population simply because the former houses the latter, and he says he agrees, I see very little point in begrudging him his epistemological rationale.
Well sure! If we get to agreement, I’ll stop. (Heck, if we could ever get to agreement here I could be content…
). But that wasn’t the situation under discussion. The situation was, the Hindi disagrees with me and asks me to justify myself. Perhaps that doesn’t happen to you, but it does to me. So what then? Do I fancy-foot around about ethical norms that we “all” have — even though we all really don’t acknowledge? OR, do I answer honestly: My sense of right and wrong is grounded in God’s Word.
I would consider the latter to be a form of prophetic pre-evangelism: putting forth the law forthrightly in a 1st use sense.
And when my Reformed brother says the federal government should have the right to criminalize abortion in every nook and cranny of the union, I simply disagree.
I disagree with your disagreement. If in fact fetuses are persons, they are entitled to Constitutional protection. That’s why Roe had to find that the personhood of fetuses was in doubt, so that it could deny 5th and 14th Amendment protections to the fetus. Admit personhood and states are obligated to extend protection of the law to fetuses. I’m not a lawyer, but that’s how I read it.
Jeff,
Thanks for the response. I will make the following remarks, as we seem to have misunderstood some of my statements.
First, I nowhere suggested that special revelation should not play a role in guiding the ethical reasoning of the Christian. After all, as Christians, we are to love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind. But general revelation or ethical intuitivism doesn’t give us much guidance in doing that. So, contrary to your suggestion, I do believe that Scripture plays an important role in the personal ethical reasoning of Christians.
Second, I don’t see why it’s disingenuous to submit myself to certain ethical practices–as a Christian–and yet determine that I need not demand that others necessarily submit to those same ethical practices. As a Christian, I believe that gluttony is a sin. Am I therefore compelled to advocate publicly for criminal laws that would punish people for eating too much?
Third, what’s the rational basis for asserting that ethical intuitivism is no more persuasive than divine command ethics, particularly to someone who is not a Christian? Do you really expect that someone will submit to an ethical precept because “God says so” if the Spirit has not moved her to believe that there is even a God? C’mon.
Fourth, I nowhere suggested that ethical intuitivism could supply arguments that would be persuasive to the more extreme proponents of abortion or to those who concur wholeheartedly with the reasoning of Roe. Rather, I said that ethical intuitivism could be used to engage “middle-of-the-road” folks, such as the 1/3 of the population who believe that early-term abortion is wrong but who do not support criminalization of it. I also noted several reasons that middle-of-the-road folk typically proffer to support their uneasiness with criminalization of early-term abortion. I note that you passed over those reasons without comment, and instead directed your response to the reasons typically proffered by the more radical proponents of abortion (of whom I made no mention). After all, one may accept the personhood of the early-term fetus, and yet conclude that criminalizing early-term abortion is legally and practically unworkable.
Fifth, you seem to forget that our exegesis of Scripture is no less plagued by the effects of the fall than our efforts to interpret God’s general revelation. So, even if the special revelation speaks without error, it certainly does not speak exhaustively on all matters and still needs to be interpreted by a fallible human being whose faculties are plagued by the fall. Thus, I don’t see how ethical intuitivism is somehow more “perilous” or less “honest” than alleging that the Bible gives clear black-and-white answers on complex social policy questions.
Sixth, what do you mean by saying that we should “not embrace GR”? God made the created order; it is His handiwork and His image pervades every bit of it! If you elect “not [to] embrace GR,” then I fear that you are turning away something good that God has granted to us for our enjoyment and as an aid to appreciating his glory and majesty (even if the created order is only a scant foretaste of what we will someday experience).
Peace, brother.
Well there ya go … who knew that the President of the United States reads the comment section of OldLife!
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/news/ap/politics/2010/Aug/19/white_house_says_obama_is_christian__prays_daily.html
JRC
Jeff, your last-final comment got buried.
I know you’re done, but my point up there wasn’t to debate the disagreement per se, it was to make the larger point that believers can politically agree with unbelievers and politically disagree with fellow believers, which seems to make hay of your notion that epistemology counts in political discourse. So if a guy thinks states should be able to govern themselves on the question of abortion, I really “don’t care” if he also doesn’t think God exists. And my hunch is that in practice you agree with that, since likely the only criterion you use in voting for candidates isn’t whether s/he is a member in good standing in your church.
Jeff, you can’t fool me, Obama is United Church of Christ.
I completely agree with the other comments!!