By Brian Fahling
Writing for Slate magazine recently, Steven Waldman asked, “Why exactly are religious folks opposed to gay marriage?” Waldman posed the question after quoting the responses Gary Bauer and I had to the court ruling in Massachusetts that redefined marriage to include same-sex individuals.
In response to the court's ruling, Bauer's e-mail newsletter announced, “Culture Wars Go Nuclear,” and I said “the Court has tampered with society's DNA, and the consequent mutation will reap unimaginable consequences for Massachusetts and our nation.” Waldman concluded from these statements, which contained no reference to God or biblical morality, “they've figured out that the most effective argument for religious conservatives is not, in fact, a religious one.”
I hope Waldman is right.
“Religious conservatives” have a habit of approaching public policy as though our culture is identical to 18th-century America. It is not. The only remaining similitude between who we were and who we are is found in our form of government.
The evangelical battle cry, “America is a Christian nation!” is ill-suited to meet the challenges of what political philosopher Leo Strauss described as “political atheism.” Strauss identified political atheism as a distinctly modern phenomenon, noting that “[n]o pre-modern atheist doubted that social life required belief in, and worship of, God or gods.” American society no longer has the shared assumptions of even pre-modern atheists.
Times have changed.
Theologian David F. Wells, echoing Strauss, has observed: “Ours is the first major civilization to be building itself deliberately and self-consciously without religious foundations.” Moreover, says Wells, “[t]his is the first time that a civilization has existed that, to a significant extent, does not believe in objective right and wrong.”
Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb explains that “[i]t was not until the [twentieth] century that morality became so thoroughly relativized and subjectified that virtues ceased to be 'virtues' and became 'values.'” The difference, says Himmelfarb, is that “[o]ne cannot say of virtues, as one can of values, that anyone's virtues are as good as anyone else's, or that everyone has a right to his own virtues.” The disengagement of morality from its mooring in objective truth is unmistakable evidence that we are experiencing what Arnold Toynbee described as “a schism of the soul.”
The loss of a sense of the transcendent, of otherness, in our society has left us morally vacant and intellectually moribund. In the words of Heinrich A. Rommen, “the objective basis of natural law, the ordo rerum and the eternal law, has vanished.” This has tremendous practical implications for Christians who desire to effectively engage the culture; at a minimum, it means we can no longer meaningfully discourse with political society in the language of the Bible.
This is not at all the same as saying Christians must set aside their faith when they step into the public square to advance their faith-based social agenda. To the contrary, the Christian's ultimate reasons and justification for participating in the political life of the culture must remain intact and vibrant. It is a change of means only that is required, not of purpose and ends. Waldman thinks that this approach “doesn't really get at the true feelings” of religious conservatives. He is right. Post-modern men like Waldman know that if religious conservatives continue to talk in the language of their “true feelings,” i.e., the language of the Bible, they will never find ground for agreement with non-Christians on society's great issues.
Religious historian Robert Louis Wilkin has said, “the truth about man is not a private dogma of Christians, but a truth for all reasonable persons.” That is to say, one need not be a Christian to recognize what God has inscribed on his heart. Saint Paul confirms this verity in the Book of Romans.
The failure of Christians today to persuade others on issues such as homosexuality is, in part, because they have made the truth about man their private dogma. This is reflected in the fact that Christians condition agreement with non-Christians on these issues with an insistence that they accept our ultimate justification for action.
Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain compared this problem of Christian thought and behavior toward non-Christians with the paradoxical task of securing intellectual agreement between nations where men “belong not merely to different civilizations, but to antagonistic spiritual families and philosophic schools.” The analogy Maritain draws is particularly compelling because in many ways the divisions in American society are as trenchant as the divisions that exist between nations.
Maritain marked the outlines of his thought on this subject in a speech entitled “The Possibilities of Cooperation in a Divided World,” delivered in 1947 to a conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Agreement among UNESCO's members could be spontaneously achieved, said Maritain, “not on common speculative notions, but on common practical notions; not on the affirmation of the same conception of the world, man and knowledge, but on the affirmation of the same set of convictions concerning action.”
In other words, though Christians are fully convinced that Holy Scripture teaches that certain conduct should be prohibited, that conviction should not prevent them from agreeing with others who are convinced that their way of justifying their belief (on the practical principle that certain conduct should be prohibited) is entirely different from or opposed to the Christians. The Christian, says Maritain, “is not entitled to demand that others subscribe to his own justification of the practical principles on which all agree.”
Concord with non-Christians in our fractured society on issues such as homosexuality and abortion must, then, be sought upon the ever-shrinking common ground of practical notions.
Truth is superior. “But on the level of action,” said Maritain, “there are practical truths toward which viewpoints mutually opposed on the level of speculative truth can converge. That is why … there can be agreement and cooperation in regard to action and purely practical principles between men who are divided in their deepest convictions.”
It is beyond argument that agreement and cooperation grounded in biblical theology and morality is infinitely preferable to the fragile accord that is sustained by agreement achieved only at the point of common practical notions. But that is not an option available to us today. Christians tilt at windmills when they require that non-Christians accept their ultimate justifications for action as a condition to agreement.
It is admittedly an unhappy circumstance that Christians are left to persuade others on moral questions in a culture that lacks even common philosophical assumptions, let alone common theological beliefs. Agreement of thought on common principles which are merely practical is the final outpost for rational discourse; it is, as Maritain said, “the last refuge of agreement among minds;” failing that, there is “nothing left but inexpiable conflict.”
In the absence of common theological or philosophical ground there is only history, science, and self-interest, the point of common practical notions, to connect us to a political and cultural regime that despises and rejects the “true feelings” of Christians.
Christians, then, are left to agree with non-Christians that marriage has never had a meaning other than the union of a man and a woman. They can agree that marriage is organic to civilization; that it is literally civilization's life-giving and sustaining force. They can agree that homosexuality breeds disease and despair among its practitioners. And they can agree that injecting same-sex coupling as an organic element into our social fabric tampers with our cultural DNA to such a degree that it will inevitably destroy our society.
The Christian's ultimate justification, the spiritual and intellectual pedigree of his conclusion, of course, is firmly grounded in his belief that the Bible is God's Word and in his faith in the Lord Christ. These beliefs are indispensable requisites to being a Christian, not, however, to reaching agreement with non-Christians on the issues that plague us today.
The possibilities of cooperation in our divided culture are few; we reject them at our own peril.
Brian Fahling is a senior trial attorney with the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press).
