At least, so says Andrew Bacevich over at Front Porch Republic. In expressing relief that Romney did not win and chiding Republicans for being faux conservatives, the Boston College professor writes:
Second, conservatives should lead the way in protecting the family from the hostile assault mounted by modernity. The principal threat to the family is not gay marriage. The principal threats are illegitimacy, divorce, and absent fathers. Making matters worse still is a consumer culture that destroys intimate relationships, persuading children that acquiring stuff holds the key to happiness and persuading parents that their job is to give children what the market has persuaded them to want.
Third, when it comes to economics, conservatives should lead the fight against the grotesque inequality that has become such a hallmark of present-day America.
Call me old fashioned, but I believe that having a parent at home holds one of the keys to nurturing young children and creating strong families. That becomes exceedingly difficult in an economy where both parents must work just to make ends meet.
Flattening the distribution of wealth and ensuring the widest possible the ownership of property can give more parents the choice of raising their own youngsters rather than farming the kids out to care providers. If you hear hints of the old Catholic notion of distributism there, you are correct.
This sure makes more sense than the w-w folks who go on and on about God’s law and proceed to make opposition to gay marriage the test of culture warrior bona fides. If the Bible truly speaks to all of life, then perhaps it might say something about the economic conditions that produce middle-class families. That w-w types rarely extend their gaze beyond the blacks and whites of biblical law must be an indication that the Bible is limited in what it reveals.
Old Life 
“If the Bible truly speaks to all of life, then perhaps it might say something about the economic conditions that produce middle-class families.That w-w types rarely extend their gaze beyond the blacks and whites of biblical law must be an indication that the Bible is limited in what it reveals. ” Yes.
Charles Bowden said it well: “You have to pay more. Your standard of living is not going to be lowered if you have to pay more for goods. Your standard of living is going to be lowered if your neighbor is unemployed, if your streets aren’t kept up, if there’s high crime, if your schools are falling apart. Then your standard of living declines. Its immaterial how many objects you can buy after a point. What we have to do is create a population that thinks they can’t be happy unless the people that make the objects live a decent life.”
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“persuading children that acquiring stuff holds the key to happiness and persuading parents that their job is to give children what the market has persuaded them to want”
What does this say about my son’s passion for Lego sets?
If the plan is to get me (middle class guy) more of rich guy’s money, I need to see the fine print. Somehow the bureaucracy always manages to siphon it all off until it gets to me.
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D.G. – You are on your own at Kloosterman’s place now. If I want the experience of having my fingernails pulled out I’ll book that trip to the North Korean gulag I’ve been postponing. Gee whiz.
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The principal threats are illegitimacy, divorce, and absent fathers.
A few years ago, as sad as it is to see it, watching a church discipline an absent father, gave me hope. I kinda wish the church I grew up in would have practiced that, but I think it may have stalled church growth.
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Erik, thanks for the warning. I’ll be packing extra heat (politely, of course).
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I agree with Andrew Bacevich. We have over the last generation, because of stagnant wages and low economic prospects for the bottom 50-80% of Americans created a situation where the advances of the Victorian moral reformers are becoming lost. It is impossible to have a sexual morality based on marriage being effectually transmitted to people who live in cultures were marriage is becoming the exception. Conservatives in America are reproducing the lifelong grinding poverty of the 16th-18th centuries and then are shocked as they reproduce the sexual and social norms of the 16th-18th century. Destroy economic mobility as a norm and you destroy any reason that people should bother with the compromises marriage entails. We’ve created a situation where many young women are not incorrect in viewing marriage as an economic determent.
As for materialism that’s rather harder to battle against. I think things like a liberal as opposed to a vocational education in college are a good approach to help fight the crassness of materialism. American schools when they aren’t having to deal with issues like malnourished children, do well on this, though higher standards and nursery school would help.
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watching Theologians discuss economic policy and capital formation is a riot!
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Off Topic:
DG Hart, you got a shout-out from the American Conservative.Com:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-manzi-list/
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From the American Conservative:
“Which conservative/libertarian pundits do we wish had more influence within the GOP (and associated activists) or a broader hearing more generally among social conservatives? Here’s my list:
…D.G. Hart: thoughtful conservative protestant critic of evangelical/GOP fusion. Evangelical political activists would do well carefully consider his insight even if they ultimately disagree. Historical implications for political involvement by churches make for sobering reading.”
What, there are people who disagree with him?
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Good words.
Marriage, even in Christian circles, is a markedly different institution than it was just a half century ago. The notion of marriage as a social institution is largely gone. Today, marriage is largely viewed as a religio-legal ratification of two individuals’ affection for each other. Not too long ago, marriage reflected one’s decision to be a responsible member of certain social institutions. My grandparents, for example, met a mere 2-3 months before they married. Their affection for each other only blossomed well after their entry into the state of matrimony.
But when marriage is little more than a temporary arrangement that reflects two individuals’ present-state personal (and sexual) affection for each other (e.g., Kim Kardashian), it becomes harder and harder to argue that two gay people shouldn’t marry.
In my opinion, same-sex marriage doesn’t change the definition of marriage at all. The definition of marriage changed a few decades ago. Even American evangelicals seemed to prefer the new form of marriage over the old, and have gone about divorcing and remarrying each other at rates similar to the rest of the population. Marriage today is like an extended hook-up for post-college adults. Yet we worry that the institution will suffer damage if same-sex couples are allowed to marry!
Of course, it takes more than moralizing to repair the damage. I recently flew back to the Midwest to attend my 20-year high school reunion. As I drove my rental car through my hometown and gazed out on streets that I hadn’t seen in years, it brought me back to a time when that was the only world I knew. My family on both sides had lived in the same Indiana town for 3-4 generations. The same was true for practically everyone I grew up with. I never expected to live anywhere else. Oh, I knew that I would spend a few years away…to attend college and then law school. But before my 30th birthday, I’d be back. My friends all thought the same thing. We were all wrong. Instead, we find ourselves scattered across the country in various urban hubs, living rootless lives among our fellow “creative class” drifters.
There is no doubt that elites move the social dial and establish the trends that others follow. Three decades ago, the elite products of a small Midwestern town would have returned home after college to serve as the town’s doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. They would have married someone from a family that also had deep roots in the community. In that sense, the marriage was just one part of participating in a larger social fabric. Today, our elites go to college, and then move to some urban enclave filled with other talented vagabonds who have abandoned a hometown to wander the streets of some gentrified urban enclave. In such an environment, there’s no objective reason to be committed to anyone but oneself. So marriage becomes a relationship built on a desire for companionship and a desire for sex. But as good as those things may be, we all secretly would rather be back in the hometowns of our youth, where we could be embraced by the institutions that reared us.
But that’s not an option. My hometown stands in ruin. When the middle-class jobs left, the doctors and lawyers weren’t too far behind. There’s nothing to return to. So, in a few minutes, I’ll head out to have drinks with a group of friends who will all live somewhere else in 3 years. Heck, even I may live somewhere else in three years. I’ll probably get married in a few years, but that marriage won’t ever mean the same thing as my parents’ or grandparents’ marriage did. It can’t. There’s no institutional fabric to which it can cling, except for the plastic culture that surrounds me. And it will be the same whether same-sex couples can marry or not.
Traditional marriage was killed off long ago by our consumer culture. Same-sex marriage is just the tragic chorus announcing the truth to us.
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“Richard Smith” – Yesterday when I said I “I think I am in a really solid church” you said:
RS: Not really. I have listened to some of the stuff online. Sure, you could care less about my opinion, but I would argue that it is not that solid in terms of the Gospel.
I attend Providence Reformed Church in Des Moines, Iowa. It is a church in good standing in the United Reformed Churches in North America. It is a member of the Central Classis. The minister there is an ordained minister in the United Reformed Churches of North America and was trained at Westminster Seminary California by D.G. Hart, Rev. Scott Clark, Rev. Michael Horton, Rev. Robert Godfrey, and several other men with excellent reputations in the Reformed world.
You, on the other hand, are an anonymous person hiding behind a screen name. You have now slandered an actual, visual Reformed Church and minister by saying that it is “not even solid in terms of the gospel”. That is a very serious charge. People know who I am and can easily find out where I am a church member (unlike you I would tell them).
I would ask that you either retract and apologize for that statement or identify yourself to Dr. Hart (at least) and have the courage to make a formal charge. This is serious business – not just internet playing around. If you will not do that I would respectfully ask Dr. Hart to block you from commenting here and ask other men to do the same.
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M&M, just ask Mrs. Hart, Cordelia and Isabelle (though the latter two are not persons). Plenty of disagreement in the Hart household.
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Bob,
You overstate your case. There is no question that traditional marriage has taken a beating for some time, but “gay marriages” is a fundamental paradigm shift/watershed.
As for the orginal post, Bacevich is confused. That the Repug was unacceptable, does not sanctify the Dim candidate. Two, crony capitalism/corporatism/fascism is not free market capitalism and yes, Virginia, the Bible, as well as natural law, does have something to say about private property and theft whatever socialism says about equalizing things.
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Suden,
No one suggested that the President ought to be sanctified. The criticism is directed at the GOP’s effort to exalt hyper-individualism while wistfully hoping that we can remain community-focused in our social values. Frankly, you don’t build a lot of social capital in a community when you run your businesses in the way that Romney ran the companies he bought. There’s a reason why Santorum hung around so long in the primary. People had an inherent distrust of Mitt, and they were right to.
Further, if marriage is simply a arrangement that reflects two persons personal and sexual affinities for each other, then I don’t see that same-sex marriage is that big of a shift.
Frankly, the GOP has got to fix its problem with the Reagan Democrats. To do so, they’ve got to offer an economic program that promises to restore manufacturing to America’s Heartland. If the GOP wants to win next time around, it’s going to have to win in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, and maybe even Michigan and Minnesota. And if Hillary runs in 2016, that’s going to be a tall order. The Clintons have never really lost their popularity in the Rust Belt.
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Bob,
Good words re: marriage and consumer culture. The evangelical church, as you noted, is a willing participant in the ascendency of consumer culture. Its failure to understand this and its connection to the marriage debate is a failure of education, among other things. Homeschool or otherwise. The recent talk about a desire to avoid a ‘poverty theology’ (Driscoll, Macdonald, et al) is just one more disingenous step in that direction.
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Bob
Never said the Prez should be sanctified. Rather both were unacceptable candidates. Bacevich buys the nonsequitur that a bad R necessarily means a good D.
While I have heard arguments for both sides on Bain Capitol, conservatives had an inherent distrust of Mr. Romneycare because they didn’t trust him to overturn Obamacare, the Ron Paul primary vote totals would have put Romney over the top, but the party stiffed constitutionalism and Romney really doesn’t stand for anything anyway.
Of course if marriage is just about two people and their personal/sexual affinities than hetero/homo makes no difference. “If”.
Yeah, the GOP needs the blue dog dems, but it also needs the RPaul libertarians. But with a D in now, if the economy implodes the spin will have to be pretty good for a D to win in ‘16.
Wait a minute, the spin is already pretty good from both halves of the More Big Govt. Party. Guess that’s what we will get.
cheers,
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Bob (Good works: 11/16) in his lengthy comment on present sorry, too common view of life and marriage, described it well. My hometown experience in the Lehigh Valley, N.E. PA—N.W. NJ, along upper Delaware river was truly beautiful. So is my 60 year marriage. Both sides of my family were there before David Brainerd ministered to the Indians there at the Forks of the Delaware. c.1740. Like the other Bob, I know of no cure all society would embrace. Outside the Church, (and INSIDE)! The Biblical wisdom: “Love your wife as Christ loved His Church” is largely ignored. Love in Jesus, Old Bob Morris
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“illegitimacy, divorce, and absent fathers…” and perhaps deliberate childlessness (biological, adoptive, or otherwise) should be included in that list as detrimental to the Biblical model of marriage?
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