Reader Writes: Reviving Judeo-Christian Values

September 15, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

Editor’s Note: One of the purposes of Philosophical Fragments — and indeed of the Evangelical Portal at Patheos more generally — is to model the kind of conversation we want to see in the world.  It’s distressingly common to find matters of faith, culture and politics discussed in the crudest of ways, filled with ignorance and suspicion and scorn, with bad arguments and false ‘evidence’ and ad hominem attacks.  It was my frustration with the nature of our public discourse on matters religious that inspired me to get involved with Patheos and to commit my time and energy to creating a better — by which I mean a better informed and more charitable and truthful — conversation.

It’s in that interest that I publish the follow letter that I received from a reader named Basil.  Basil was responding to my recent post, Reversing the Great Moral Decline.  I will post my response to this tomorrow, and it will be a great way of getting back into the series I began on Christianity and Homosexuality (the last post of which you can find here, along with links to the earlier posts).  So, without further ado, and in unedited form, thus spake Basil.  Please feel free to offer your own responses, but do be charitable:

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Hi Tim,

There seem to be 2 themes in your post – that we are in a moral decline, and that reviving our Judeo-Christian values will help to reverse that decline.  I agree with the first, but want to talk a bit about my skepticism about the second.

I have a vivid memory of working the polls (on behalf of the Commonwealth Coalition) in my previous residence in Virginia on election day in November 2006, when Virginia voters ratified a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage (which was already barred by statue), civil unions, domestic partnerships, or even powers of attorney agreement or other joint contracts that same sex couples resort to in lieu of proper legal rights conferred by marriage.  I was passing out flyers to voters, and I remember being confronted by an older couple who asked “Are you queer?”, and then said “get away from me” and marched off to cast their vote for the amendment.  There was a second, younger couple who were similar — openly gleeful at the prospect of bashing the queers.  It was the first time I had felt gay bashed since I was a teenager (when the gaybashing came in form of fists – which still happens in too many schools), but the feeling was the same.  I knew that day I would sell my house and leave Virginia, and three years later (once local housing prices recovered somewhat) I moved to DC.  In the interim, I met the man who would be my husband, and we were married (by my congregation).  We know how Mildred and Fred Loving must have felt when they had cross the Potomac to build their lives together.  There are lots of ex-Virginians in the DC gay community.

Like many gay and lesbian persons, I am skeptical of Christians, since it is primarily religious beliefs that are used to justify a denial of civil rights to the LGBT community.  Given how little Biblical text actually is related to homosexuality (and that the word homosexual didn’t appear in the Bible until the 1950’s), the obsession is kind of perverse.  I remember the marriage equality hearings in late 2009 in DC (which has so far survived the introduction of marriage equality) — I testified, as did other members of my congregation.  The lady sitting next to me gave her testimony in opposition — as it turned out she was from Maryland, but the thought of queers getting hitched was just too much for her to stand and so she just had to come across state lines and testify before the council, with really lurid, graphic description of anal intercourse.  It was embarrassing to me, as a gay man, and most of witnesses the room, but won nods of approval from the anti-gay Christian pastors sitting around the room (including the infamous Harry Jackson — again from Maryland). It was a bizarre and distasteful scene.  (Because hetereosexuals never engage in….oh, never mind)

The fierce opposition to civil rights, the imperviousness to logic because “the Bible says” (knowledge of ancient Hebrew and Greek is more widespread than is otherwise apparent), the adamant refusal to acknowledge a separation between civil law and religious belief, the open condescension towards more LGBT-accepting denominations — all of those things are infuriating, but I suppose they are to be expected.  What is unacceptable are the open incitements to violence by pastors like Lou Engle, or Bradlee Dean, and the frequent and explosive accusations of pedophilia (by both mainstream as well as more fringy evangelicals) which tap into a deep cultural archetype of the gay man as sexual predator.  A lot of the anti-gay political advertising plays on this archetype, because it works.  (this was discussed at length in the federal district court trial over Prop-8).  As FBI hate crime statistics bear out, these types of political campaigns lead to increases in assaults, murders and hate crimes directed against LGBT citizens.  I expect the next year will be a bloody one in Minnesota and North Carolina.

What is more heartbreaking is the abuse faced by LGBT teens.  They bear the brunt of backlash, even as LGBT adults make progress in achieving our civil rights.  Bradlee Dean, Michelle Bachmann’s BFF – refers to gays as “child molestors”, and railed against anti-bullying efforts in the Anoka-Hennepin school district.  In the last two years, 9 teens have been driven to suicide in Anoka Hennepin by a climate of entrenched bullying, homophobia and violence.  Anoka-Hennepin is part of Michelle Bachmann’s district.  She has never spoken out in defense of those kids, or in support of their families and friends.  She’s too busy railing against the “homosexual agenda” herself.  She, as a self-proclaimed committed Christian, is complicit in the needless deaths of those children.  The silence of most other Christians makes all of them similarly complicit.  Homophobia is Christianity’s deadly sin.

On a broader note:  I have, on rare occasions, seen religion used as a positive force.  There are people I have met who undertake great works of charity and service to society because of their religious convictions, but these people are rare and special.  Maybe because I am of Middle Eastern background, and spent a lot of time in that part of the world, I have also seen how destructive religion can be for society.  What passes for religion is often just sectarianism – where people allow their religious affiliation to be politicized and supersede their national identity.  This happens even if with persons who are not particularly devout in their religious practice.  In the Middle East, you can meet a George or Muhammed or Ali or Omar, and they may be Greek Orthodox, or Eastern rite Catholic, or Sunni Muslim or Shia Muslim or Alawite Muslim or …, and all it really means is that they support a particular political party, or political leader, and view their countrymen, who are otherwise similar but of a different religious sect, as being inherently suspicious.  Belonging to a sect gives you a sense of group identity and a worldview, usually in opposition to that of other sects.

I see a very similar sectarianism creeping into our society.  For a lot Christians, being Christian is centered on anti-gay/anti-abortion/anti-woman culture war politics, and a fealty toward Republican leaders, particularly those who loudly proclaim their affiliation with the same group.  Given the dominance of Christian values voters in one of our two main parties, the idea that Christians are somehow politically marginalized or threatened, defies logic or evidence.  More generally, sectarianism is usually a negative force that leads to political division and civil conflict.  Perhaps the growth of sectarianism is evidence of the fracturing of our culture and the decline of broader civic values that we, as Americans, once shared.  Whatever the cause, we are not immune to the dangers that sectarianism holds.

I’m now 45 (and feeling older). When my father was 45 (in 1979), the wealthiest 1% percent took in about 9% of our nation’s income.  The most recent figures, from 2007, I found are that the top 1% now takes about 24% of the nation’s income.  The top 0.01% (4,588 top families with annual income above $11,477,000) took 6% of the nation’s income in 2007.  That inequality has been exacerbated since the financial crisis and economic downturn in 2008-09.   Here is a good paper on the subject.

I think you are hitting on some broad structural themes about our decline, but I don’t think culture really goes very far to explain the decline.  We are in an era of increasingly dangerous concentrations of wealth, and potentially destabilizing levels of inequality.  The culture war politics, over gay rights, or abortion, or the women’s equality, or immigration, or…are a bread-and-circus sideshows to distract voters’ attention away from an ongoing massive transfer of income upwards towards a very small elite.  They are symptoms of broader structural problems that are largely economic in nature.

To the degree that our culture has declined in the last 30 years, I think it is because we have been distracted by culture war issues, and allowed our morals to become inverted.  Greed has become a virtue and compassion has become a vice.   I’m not sure how that gets reversed.

With kind regards,

Basil

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Is Homosexuality Wrong?

August 17, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

Note: This is the latest in a series on homosexuality and Christianity. See the introduction and first, second and third parts.

I recently began a series of blog posts on Christianity and homosexuality, and then left off for a while.  The truth is that I’ve been dreading writing the next installment — this one — in the series.  Absolutely dreading it.  Why?  Many of my friends, colleagues and former students are homosexual.  I respect them, admire them, like them, and love them.  They are good people.  And while many of them would object to other parts of the series so far, this is the part that will bother them the most.  It pains me to think of paining them.

Yet the question in this case is not whether I dislike homosexuals.  (I do not.)  The question is whether homosexuality, in my view of things, is wrong.  My responsibility is to speak the truth as well as I can understand it.  Since I am far from infallible, since I am a limited creature and not immune to any number of wrong or irrational influences, and since I respect the opinions of many who have come to different conclusions on this question, I have to speak with humility.  Yet I do have to speak, in part because of the social importance of the subject, in part because I believe the truth matters for individuals and their own welfare, and in part because I began this series and many people have asked me to continue.  They wonder, for instance, how to speak with their gay friend or their lesbian sister, in view of their commitment to Christian teachings.  So let me try not only to give an answer, but to model a way of delivering that answer.

Is homosexuality wrong?  The answer is NO — and YES.

In other words, it’s time again for some finer distinctions.  In the question “Is homosexuality wrong?”, it’s imperative to define what we mean by “homosexuality” and by “wrong.”  (Fan though I am of Clintonian distinctions, I’ll assume we know what “is” means here.)  I’m going to use a similar but slightly different set of distinctions here than the one I used when we were asking whether homosexuality is voluntary.  It is:

  1. Homosexual desire: a single, discrete sexual desire for a person of the same sex.
  2. Homosexual inclination: an enduring predilection toward homosexual desires.
  3. Homosexual behavior: acting on a homosexual desire (this would be a single homosexual act) or acting regularly on homosexual inclinations (entering into homosexual relationships, whether serial or monogamous).
  4. Homosexual marriage: committing before God to a lifelong sexual, practical and spiritual covenant with one other person.

What, then, do we mean by wrong?  It’s important to distinguish what is unintended — meaning that this is not what God intended for creation from the start — from what is morally wrong or against God’s will now.  There may be some things which God did not intend, but which are morally justified in a fallen world under certain conditions.  For instance, I do not believe that God intended for divorce; divorce is not ideal in an ultimate sense; in a fallen world, however, and under certain conditions, divorce may be the right thing to do.  And let me be perfectly clear that whether something is wrong, and whether it is or ought to be illegal, are related but different questions.  I am leaving the state out of (4), for instance, because the question here is not legality but morality.  I can justify this at greater length in the comments, if someone has a challenge.

HOMOSEXUAL DESIRE: First comes the NO.  It is not wrong to have a homosexual desire.  Many people, even people who live their entire lives happily as married heterosexuals, have experienced, once upon a time, a spark of attraction for a person of the same sex.  Since conservative Christians who care enough to write about homosexuality are often accused of fighting their own repressed urges, I have to say, in all honesty, that I have never experienced such a desire myself.  When I look at other men, I feel no sense of sexual attraction, in the same way that some gay friends (they tell me) cannot imagine being attracted to someone of the opposite sex.

But I do not judge those who do feel such an attraction.  If I am right in what I’ve written in this series thus far, people who feel homosexual attractions probably do so because of a complicated interaction between genetic inheritance, perhaps the birth environment, and certainly their environment in early life.  You cannot be held morally accountable for these things.  Whether or not they will experience same-sex desires is probably, at least in most cases, determined before they have become conscious of themselves as free and sexual creatures.  It is not literally true, but is experientially true, that they were “born this way,” because they cannot remember ever feeling otherwise.

HOMOSEXUAL INCLINATION: Neither — for the same reasons — do I believe it’s wrong to experience an enduring proclivity toward same-sex desires.  I know some men who very much wish they did not experience these desires, but the desires are there and they cannot simply wish them away.

To be clear, I do not believe that homosexual desires or homosexual inclinations were intended by God from the beginning.  Here is where I am going to begin (if I have not already) to upset my gay friends.  So please understand: This is a question of what I feel bound to believe according to the authorities in my life.  I believe there is a Creator; in fact, I think it’s fairly obvious.  I also believe — though this is less obvious — that this Creator communicated his love and his grace, but also his will and his Truth, in Jesus Christ and through the books now gathered together in the Christian scriptures.  I spent many years studying the reasons why people reject these beliefs, but I feel that I have good reasons for them.  The consequence is that I am bound to submit my understanding of true and false, right and wrong, to the Christian scriptures.  Are they tough to interpret?  Of course.  But I do my best, and in many cases the proper interpretation is easily discerned.

I won’t go into the reasons now — I’ll save that for another part of this series — but I have come to believe that the scriptures depict sexual desire as something that men and women were intended to have for one another.  In their difference, in their creative complementarity, in their companionship, and in their capacity (in general) to produce life, I believe that men and women were intended to unite and become one flesh.  While I do not believe it is wrong to experience a homosexual inclination, neither do I believe that it’s what God intended.

HOMOSEXUAL BEHAVIOR: Here comes the YES.  Behavior is not merely to experience a desire or inclination, but to act upon it.  We are not always free to choose our desires or inclinations, but we are generally free in — and morally accountable for — our actions.  This is not to say we are completely uninfluenced by external factors, or internal factors over which we have no control; but it is to say that we have some remainder of free agency, an ability to do otherwise than our desires and inclinations would lead us to do.  So, I do not blame an alcoholic for wanting a drink, and I don’t blame a teenager for wanting to have sex with his girlfriend, any more than I blame a starving person for wanting to eat.  But we are morally accountable for what we do with our desires.  Do we act upon them at all?  Do we direct them rightly?  And if we find our desires are misdirected, or out of control, or leading us to harm ourselves or others, do we take the initiative to restrain or redirect or even refuse to satisfy those desires?  So just as we’re responsible for how we act upon our desires, we are also responsible for the extent to which we are able to cultivate our desires over time.  If it’s wrong to act upon a same-sex desire, then a person ought, if possible, to seek to diminish those desires and redirect them (cultivating his desires through a thousand minute decisions) over time.  If I sin consistently by looking at other women, then I should not act upon those desires, and I should seek over time to diminish and/or re-train those desires.

I hasten to add: while I believe it is a sin to act upon homosexual desires, I also believe that I sin in a thousand-and-one ways every day.  I do not believe that my gay friends are worse sinners than I am.  In fact, in a very real sense, that sort of comparison is meaningless.  St. Paul refers to himself as “the chief of sinners,” and the chief of sinners is always me myself.  The longer you spend striving to live out the will of God (whether out of legalism or out of gratitude), the more you understand just how sinful you are.  I’ve never been unfaithful to my wife, but I have many times fallen short in my thoughts and deeds.  So I have no interest in judging other people.  But I do have an interest in upholding the Truth.

I also hasten to add: I do not believe that homosexual sin cuts a person off from fellowship with God.  I was good friends with a dormmate my freshman year, and she “came out” in her sophomore year.  We met again in our senior year, and she told a heartbreaking story of how her Bible-belt church essentially told her that she could have no relationship with God until she stopped acting upon her desires.  This is insensitive, counter-productive, and theological nonsense.  We are always sinners — all of us, always, even when we are not counted as such in the grace of God — and we are often confused on what is right and wrong.  Those who have gay friends or relatives wrestling with their sexual and religious identities should not require them to stop sinning sexually before they can turn to God, but should encourage them to spend even more time with God everyday.  If we are right that gay behavior is against God’s will, then we should encourage our gay brothers and sisters to keep praying, keep worshipping, and keep listening — and we should trust that God will convince them in due time.  He is the author and perfecter of their faith — not us.

It is, ultimately, not my job to convict another person of sin.  The Holy Spirit will work through “the Law,” even “the law written upon their hearts,” to convict people of their need for grace.  I am sometimes asked, “Do I need to tell my sister that she’s sinning?”  In the majority of cases, people know when they’re sinning.  They can feel it in their heart of hearts.  And in those cases where they are confused, it is not our job to deliver the Law.  If we are asked, we should speak the truth we have come to know.  But generally people know, and generally people know what we believe.  More importantly, it’s goodness that leads to repentance (Romans 2:4).  It is not condemnation, threats and fear, hellfire and brimstone, that lead to genuine confession and transformation.  It’s the grace of God that saves and the grace of God that sanctifies.

I’m going to save HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE for the next part of this series.  Then I’ll explain some of the reasons why I believe the Bible makes clear that homosexuality is not intended and why acting upon same-sex desires is wrong.  What I’ve provided above is really just a formal analysis of the logic of my own position.  I’ve explained (in part) what I believe is wrong, but I’ve not yet explained why I believe it’s wrong.  I owe you that.

In conclusion, whatever I might want to believe (and, to be honest, I want to believe that same-sex inclinations and behaviors are perfectly okay), I am convinced that this is the truth of the matter.  C. S. Lewis called himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England,” and I likewise come to this view with great reluctance.  It doesn’t make me popular in intellectual circles, and it certainly doesn’t help my case with any future faculty hiring committees (not that I’m looking to re-enter academia right now).  So why speak up at all?  Why not keep my mouth shut, and just say the nice stuff about grace?

Because, ultimately, I think it’s self-destructive to do what is wrong.  I believe that God communicates his will to us for our own benefit.  We are most truly ourselves, living the life we were intended to live, when we are acting in obedience.  If disobedience is self-destruction, and if you care about someone, and they are acting in disobedient / self-destructive ways, and they ask you whether you think they’re doing something wrong, you owe them your true conviction.  The false binds us in confusion and sin; the truth sets free.  So, yes, I believe that my gay friends, my friends who act upon their homosexual inclinations, are doing harm to themselves.  I believe they are acting in self-destructive ways.  I know they feel otherwise, and they will not like me for saying this.  But I hope they believe me when I say that I only tell them this because I sincerely believe it’s the truth, and I sincerely believe the truth leads to freedom.

And because I care for them.  I don’t like conflict, and I don’t need the controversy.  If I did not care, I would just shut my mouth.

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Neville Longbottom, Barack Obama, Rick Perry, Nikki Haley, Joy Behar, and Jim Wallis: The Morning Report

July 15, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

Friday Morning Palate Cleanser: I don’t typically link to gossip articles, but…Pretty amazing that of all the young Harry Potter actors, the one that played Neville Longbottom has turned out to be the most handsome.  By far.

In the News

1.  In debt and Election 2012 news, Governors Rick Perry and Nikki Haley argue that now is the time to “Break the Spend and Borrow Cycle.”  Paul Krugman persists in his apoplexy over the fact that anyone would have beliefs markedly different from his own.  And Charles Krauthammer comes down hard on Obama for failing to take the debt issue seriously until, well, about a week ago – at which point he began excoriating Republicans for being unserious children:

President Obama assailed the lesser mortals who inhabit Congress for not having seriously dealt with a problem he had not dealt with at all, then scolded Congress for being even less responsible than his own children. They apparently get their homework done on time.

My compliments. But the Republican House did do its homework. It’s called a budget. Itpassed the House on April 15. The Democratic Senate has produced no budget. Not just this year, but for two years running. As for the schoolmaster in chief, he produced two 2012 budget facsimiles: The first (February) was a farce and the second (April) was empty, dismissed by the CBO as nothing but words untethered to real numbers.

Obama has run disastrous annual deficits of around $1.5 trillion while insisting for months on a “clean” debt-ceiling increase, i.e., with no budget cuts at all. Yet suddenly he now rises to champion major long-term debt reduction, scorning any suggestions of a short-term debt-limit deal as can-kicking.

The flip-flop is transparently political. A short-term deal means another debt-ceiling fight before Election Day, a debate that would put Obama on the defensive and distract from the Mediscare campaign to which the Democrats are clinging to save them in 2012.

Meanwhile, Gallup has a generic Republican candidate taking an 8-point lead over Obama (Nike Gardiner sees Obama’s prospects as increasingly “precarious“).  And the New York Times has the scoop of the decade: Rick Perry was once a Democrat!

2.  It’s the unavoidable issue today.  California schools will soon begin making a special effort, as young as Kindergarten, to tell the stories of successful and influential gays and lesbians, in the same way that schools and textbooks have made special efforts to highlight the contributions of women and ethnic minorities.  At the same time, Michele Bachmann is under fire after a man claims that the clinic her husband owns has counseled gays that they could convert through prayer to heterosexuality:

Minnesota congresswoman and GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is coming under fire from mental health professionals after ABC’s “Nightline” on Monday first aired a video released by gay rights group Truth Wins Out showing a therapist at a counseling center owned by Bachmann’s husband telling a gay client that he could convert to heterosexuality through prayer. Marcus Bachmann had previously denied that his counseling center offered so-called reparative therapy, which is opposed by the American Psychological Association.

3.  Allahpundit at Hot Air calls this “the most ominous pause in modern legal history.”  He also says, “It’s the first and last time we’ll ever have a chance to say, ‘Nice job, Joy Behar.’”

It’s the first and last time we’ll ever have a chance to say, “Nice job, Joy Behar.”

In the Pews

1.  Jim Wallis offers his usual good-guys-versus-bad-guys viewpoint on budget issues:

Our country is in the midst of a clash between two competing moral visions, between those who believe in the common good, and those who believe individual good is the only good. A war has been declared on the poor, and it is a moral imperative that people of faith and conscience fight on the side of the most vulnerable.

Jim is a kind man, and he means well.  We had an interview that went haywire about a year ago, when Jim denied receiving, but had received, funding from George Soros.  He said in a phone call afterward that he had honestly been unaware, and I give him the benefit of the doubt.  There were also some bad numbers that got around, as though Jim had received a much larger amount of money from Soros than he actually had.  (Well, we don’t know what individuals might have given to Sojourners, but I believe the total from Soros to Sojourners — at least back then — came to something like $325K.)  I felt bad at how much distress it brought to Jim, and I felt bad about the false numbers (at one point, BigGovernment reported Sojourners’ total budget number as the number they had received from Soros; it was quickly corrected, but the bad numbers stayed in circulation).

I was not particularly bothered that Jim received money from Soros.  What bothered me was the way he attacked Marvin Olasky of World Magazine.  He ultimately apologized, but it was the same good-guys-and-bad-guys approach he’s put across in his writing and speaking and teaching for many years.  We’re not playing cops and robbers.  Most people on both sides of the aisle are good, intelligent, compassionate people, with different ideas about what best serves the common good.  We need to move beyond these dichotomized, assail-the-motives approaches.

2.  Motherhood is a Calling, from the Desiring God folks.

3.  Sarah Pulliam Bailey on “How Christians Warmed to Harry Potter.”  Also, if you’re looking for a review of the new Potter movie, I recommend Rebecca Cusey’s review.  My feelings on the movie were a little different, though; I’ll post them soon.

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Can Homosexuals Change Their Desires? – From the Mailbox

July 8, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

A recent post, “Is Homosexuality Voluntary?“, asked whether homosexual desires, or sexual desires more generally, can be shifted (or “cultivated”) over time.  I received a letter from a good friend, whom I will call JH.  After saying some nice complimentary things that needn’t be repeated here, JH wrote:

…It seems to me that there are several categories of desire, each of which is caused by interactions of varying degrees of nature and nurture. I would argue that the causal mechanism for some desires, like the desire to eat food, is almost exclusively genetically inherited, while the causal mechanism for other desires, like the desire to eat haggis, is largely culturally learned. Other desires are probably born of a mix of genetic, hormonal, cultural, and familial causes. I won’t presume to know exactly how much of the desire to have same-sex relations is attributable to nature and how much is attributable to nurture, but I would argue that it doesn’t belong in the same category as either the desire to eat food or the desire to eat haggis.

The reason that I think that the distinction is vital is because the cultivation of a desire a la Aristotle or Confucius demands that the desire have its causal roots more firmly planted in nurture than in nature. No matter how badly I wish to cultivate a desire not to desire food, I’ll fail, but [it] might work given enough time and effort if I’m attempting to cultivate a desire not to desire haggis. So, if the desire for same-sex relations is more like the desire to eat food, which my anecdotal evidence suggests is closer to the truth than not, than the desire to eat haggis, then I seriously doubt that a person with the desire for same-sex relations can ever cultivate a desire for opposite-sex relations, especially if that person’s desires are exclusively for same-sex relations (some evidence exists to support the notion that sexuality is a spectrum, so my argument would be more applicable to those who are exclusively homosexual rather than to those who are bisexual). While it may be true that there have been cases of “former homosexuals” marrying, having children, and *self-reporting* exclusively opposite-sex desires, I doubt the validity of that claim…[T]here are still myriad reasons that a person would be less than candid with himself/herself and/or with others about his/her sexual desires. Given that researchers routinely find that statistics that rely on self-reporting are almost always skewed, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to doubt the validity of such conversion stories.

I agree with much of this – but not the end.

[Read more...]

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Three Red Herrings in the Gay Marriage Debate

June 30, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

The dust is settling from the battle of Albany, and the smell of red herrings is in the air.  Gay-marriage is now legally recognized in the state of New York.  Out of every 9 Americans, 1 now lives in a state that legally affirms gay marriage, and with California likely to follow soon, the proportion will soon swell to 1 out of every 6.  While the air is filled with commentary on gay marriage, I wanted to address three red herrings in the debate.  The idiom comes from the notion that one could use the pungent scent of a “red herring” to throw a hound off the scent of whatever it hunted.  A red herring diverts attention from where attention properly belongs.

When I hear people say these things, I know they’re not really informed on the reasons why social conservatives oppose gay marriage.  My purpose here is not to build an argument against gay marriage.  I have a longer series (most recently here) on basic matters of homosexuality and Christianity.  The point here is to help people — whether they oppose or support same-sex marriage — better understand and discuss the arguments.

“How could same-sex marriage possibly be a threat to my marriage?”

It’s not.  If Adam and Steve wish to marry in New York or Massachusetts, this will do nothing to harm your marriage in California or Georgia — or even in New York or Massachusetts.  But here’s the thing: no one ever claimed that the legal recognition of gay marriage is going to harm your marriage.  The claim is that it will harm the institution of marriage.  And, with all due respect, the institution of marriage is more important than your marriage.  Societies are built on the institution of marriage.  But I’m sure your marriage is nice too.

“Gay Marriage Has Been Legalized in [Pick a State], and Armageddon Hardly Seems to Have Broken Out.”

This too is true, and this too is irrelevant.  No one was predicting that demons would rise up out of the earth and slaughter humankind.  Nor was anyone foretelling that the legal recognition of gay marriage would provoke a sudden rash of divorces or instant social disintegration.  The concern was — and is — that the legalization of gay marriage contributes even further to the long-term deterioration of the institution.

Here’s one very important thing to understand.  Those who oppose same-sex marriage do not see the fight for same-sex marriage as a continuation of the Civil Rights struggle.  The Civil Rights struggle does not even enter their minds when they consider same-sex marriage, because they do not believe that a person has a civil right to marry a person of the same sex with the imprimatur of the state, or that a person has a civil right to adopt one course of action (marrying a person of the same sex) and have it treated legally the same as another course of action (marrying a person of the opposite sex).  In other words, in this view, there is no civil right to marry whomever you please, and “equal protection” does not enter the equation; people in themselves deserve equal protection before the law, but different courses of action can and should be treated differently.

Most social conservatives see the same-sex marriage movement as a continuation not of the Civil Rights fight, but of the sexual revolution.  The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s established a trajectory of greater freedom of sexual expression, of broadening the field of sexual behaviors that are accepted and celebrated, and of disapproving the judgment of sexual behaviors or identities.  Many social conservatives see the push for same-sex marriage as the next phase in the sexual revolution, the next phase in the deterioration of moral-sexual norms, and the next step toward the dissolution of the basic and God-ordained family structure.  The sexual revolution, they claim, has already done incalculable harm.  They see a direct connection in the past five decades between the sexual revolution and the breakdown of the family, with skyrocketing increases in divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and deadbeat dads — and all the poverty, stagnation and malaise those things bring.

It’s a slippery-slope argument made by people who believe they’re already halfway (if not further) down the slope.  Slippery slope arguments often seem exaggerated, because they invest all the importance of the whole downward path in the very next step.  Every step down a slippery slope only takes us a little way.  But it also creates momentum.  And when you look back, you realize how far you’ve fallen, how much ground you’ve lost.  Nearly 40% of American children are now born to unwed mothers.  And the disintegration of the American family has done the most harm in low-income African-American communities, where there was less stability and social capital to start with.  Over 70% of African-American children are born out of wedlock.  For all the heroic efforts of single mothers, the children of single moms are as a general rule less healthy and less educated, and more likely to enter gangs and engage in criminal activity.

The point is this: American society once built a bulwark around the traditional family structure.  Perhaps in some ways or for some people groups the removal of that bulwark has been liberating, but the conservatives who oppose gay marriage believe that the removal of the bulwark has, on the whole, been absolutely devastating.  The further and further we depart from the family structure God intended, they believe, the more damage we do to our society.

“If Christians Really Cared About Marriage, They’d Fight Against Divorce”

This is not so much untrue as uninformed.  Yes, Christians have made a mess of marriage all by themselves.  Yes, Christian churches have not stood against divorce as strongly as they should have.  But the implication — that conservative Christians are doing nothing to fight divorce — is false.

First, countless Christian ministries seek to improve marriages.  Many thousands.  And every Christian church in America is engaged in this fight.  Elders, deacons, pastors and pastoral counselors at churches spend a very significant proportion of their time training congregants in how to be good spouses and good parents and in helping couples and families stay together.  Some of the Christian ministries most well known for their opposition to gay marriage — like Focus on the Family — actually devote the greater portion of their time and resources to helping marriages and families.  Focus, for instance, funded 66,000 counseling sessions last year, many of them on marital problems, and most of their media is about building strong marriages and families.

Second, of course, this is not an either/or.  Religious conservatives can oppose gay marriage and take pains to reduce the divorce rate at the same time.  And they appear to be having success.   48% of marriages amongst non-Christians end in divorce.  Some who identify as Christians but rarely attend church actually fare worse.  But the rate for all Christians together is 41%, and the rate for all Christians who frequently attend church (once a week or more) is 32% (this according to the General Social Survey, 2000-2004).  Catholics who attend church frequently divorce at an even lower rate, at 23%.  So, many of the religious groups that oppose gay marriage also fight against divorce, and do so with some success.

Third, Christians too are influenced by culture, and the fight against gay marriage seeks to arrest a cultural movement that degrades the moral and spiritual foundations of marriage.  So the opposition to gay marriage and the fight against divorce are actually seen, by the people involved in the fight, as closely related.

Again, this was not an attempt to build an argument against gay marriage.  That would require other arguments, and deeper levels of explanation.  This was just an attempt to address some of the red herrings.  My hope is that people who find the opposition to gay marriage mystifying will understand it a little better, or at least understand why these bumper-sticker slogans are not found convincing by social conservatives.

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