The real victory in the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage was secularity, and its near final triumph as a social system. And the biggest loser is the non-modern worldview that is still common in many segments of American society. Particular losers are religious claims to be have something to say about social structures and processes of social change. In this new world the freedom of religion is essentially the freedom to be irrelevant.
This was not a victory for love, as some Christians claim. It was a victory for the irrelevance of such sentimental references to Christian values.
In the non-modern worldview the identity and role of human persons, as well as the social structures within which they live, were created by God along with the natural order as expressed in so-called laws of nature. And in this non-modern worldview rational observation of human nature, social structures, and natural law were complimentary to God’s revelation. Where revelation and rational observation appear to be in conflict then there is either a problem in rational observation or in the interpretation of revelation, with the church’s interpretation of revelation usually taking precedence over rational observation.
One could say that modernity arose out of a gradual prioritizing of rational observation over revelation, to the point that revelation was marginalized as a source of knowledge about human nature, social structures, or the natural order. Not that everyone came on board. Theologians moderated and changed their claims about revelation to suit modernity. Fundamentalism was a direct attack on modernism. And even today conservative Christians, Muslims, and Jews argue that revealed understandings of human nature and social order should have priority over, or at least critique and correct supposedly scientific arguments. In one way or another religious people still claim that science alone cannot really tell us what it means to be human and live in human society.
But as the founding documents of the United States suggest, God’s role in the human world is more limited than religion usually claims. According to the Declaration of Independence, God endows humans with certain inalienable rights. And as the Constitution makes clear, it is the human task to form societies and governments. And thus humans are free to decide what it means to be a human in society and enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What the Supreme Court has done is simply to carry this process of putting humans in charge of their own self-understanding further than was previously imagined in American society. The court has recognized that Americans have a constitutional right to decide that being fully human may include both being a LGBT person and establishing a marriage relationship with another such human. And thus it has removed from religion one of its final claims in the public realm – the claim to authoritative public knowledge of what it means to be human.
For Christians this poses two challenges. First – how to create a Christian discourse that goes beyond the decades of accusations concerning inclusion and exclusion, human rights, and Biblical interpretation to clearly address the true disagreement, which is how and whether God is relevant to the self-understanding of being human in the world. Religious people fundamentally disagree with one another about this. And American and European progressive Christians fundamentally disagree with the majority of Christians and religious people in the West and worldwide.
And secondly – to understand how Christians (or indeed followers of any religion) can make a credible witness in a realm of public discourse that has now given humans full autonomy to determine what it means to be human. Does the progressive Christian position add anything to our knowledge of what it means to be human that is relevant to decision making in the public realm?
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