Law and morality--What is not the role of the U.S. government
The same-sex marriage debate has sparked a lot of discussion among Christians about the nature of marriage: what it ought to look like, whom it ought to protect, and its general purpose. (See a recent World blog discussion on the subject.) In this series of postings, I am addressing a specific group of people: those who both consider themselves Christians and think homosexuality is immoral.
Scripture paints a pretty clear picture of what a godly marriage should be. But if you take a look at our present culture, even heterosexual marriage, as acknowledged by the government, often bears very little resemblance to what one might consider a Christian marriage.
Many Christians argue that those of us who have a moral objection to homosexual unions should not be forced to recognize them by a law that has decreed them to be legal unions. If that is a legitimate objection to allowing gay marriage, what do these same people do with marriages that are legal but are far from what someone following a strict moral code would consider virtuous, or what marriage “ought” to be. Following this line of thought, I am currently “forced” to recognize the marriage of a man who has divorced 4 wives previously and does not care for or support his children from any of those marriages. In what way is this type of marriage something that has been instituted for the sake of children or to ensure the unity of the couple during hard times? Is homosexuality really more morally repugnant than that? In other words, legalizing gay marriage would no more infringe upon our rights to recognize legitimate marriage than the current laws do. The battle for a a unilateral equation of legal marriage with moral marriage was lost long ago when the divorce laws were made much less stringent.
Such an argument seems to arise from the misguided expectation that our government be the moral arbiter of its people. It’s not. We’re supposedly “one nation under God”, but we’ve never been a theocracy. There are two problems with this expectation. The first is the erroneous assumption that our society is such that it is accurately represented by an elected government that writes law based on stringent biblical principles. We’re far from being a Christian society that happens to have a secular government, which is how some people seem to think of us. Call me cynical, but I do live in southern California and daily witness evidence of how little our culture resembles a Christian society. There has been a happy coincidence of public opinion and Christian morals for many years, but the two are diverging more and more. In a blurb in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” a few weeks ago, Henrik Hertzberg wrote about a massive generation gap concerning the issue: “To talk to younger people is to realize that for most of them, including many young conservatives, such notions as the idea that homosexuality is shameful, that it is a voluntary and/or contagious ‘life-style choice,’ or that it is some sort of threat to something or other… are simply bizarre curios from the past, like the belief that masturbation causes blindness.” He added that 61 per cent of Americans under thirty would approve allowing homosexuals to marry.
The second problem is that Christians seem to depend on the government to reinforce Christian principles of morality in lieu of the church, some even to the point of thinking that government defines the sacrament of marriage. Marriage is not defined by the state; it is recognized by it to protect the safety and financial interests of those who are married. (I will get into this more in my next post.) If the law changes, does that change the sacrament of marriage? Certainly, in many churches it already has. Some churches have even anticipated a slackening in the legal definition of marriage. But where there is legitimate desire to follow biblical principles, this question of the definition of marriage should not even arise. If Christian principles cannot withstand the opposition of the law, what good are they?
A constitutional amendment, even if it passed through all the various and tedious stages necessary for approval, would only delay the inevitable. At this point, it seems like a wiser use of energy and resources to back more concerted efforts to save individual souls than to attempt to give mass numbers of non-Christians the appearance of piety by forcing them to conform to moral strictures in which they do not believe. (Shouldn’t the former always be our primary concern?) I will not attempt to address the question of whether homosexuals have a right to be married here. I do question whether we have the right, or even ought to have an interest in forcing them to adhere to beliefs alien to their own and, increasingly, to the culture in general.
Posted by waltondammerung at April 21, 2004 12:47 AMI would simply note that you are in the under age 30 group. I would recommend that everyone in your age group read "The Seventies- How We Got Here" by David Frum to understand the actual foundations of your thinking.
Posted by: Mom at April 21, 2004 5:54 PMLet's hear it for the under-30 generation! :-)
Glad to hear your take on things. Becky and I have discussed this same issue, and our opinions line up with yours, it would seem. I don't think Becky and I should have been issued a marriage license by the Town of Danvers; rather, we should have been issued a "civil union license" by the town, and what I'd call a "decree of marriage covenant" by our church. The government has no business regulating marriage, which is a sacred covenant.
Of course, according to The Onion, Massachusetts has already ordered all of its citizens to gay marry, so I think we're in trouble either way. ;-)
Posted by: Peter at April 22, 2004 2:05 PMI will not pretend to be an expert in the field of marriage and/or the law behind it, but I do have an opinion on gay marriage being legalized. What most Christians seem to do is to argue the wrong point in their stance against gay marriage. For myself, it is solely the principle of allowing yet another basic biblical rule to be thoroughly destroyed. While I realize that heterosexual marriage is in no way what God intended in it's most common form in modern society(full of adultery, secular ideals and divorce), it is, however, still (in its basic structure) following God's decree. That is, a man and a woman becoming one through the act. My problem with gay marriage is that the basic framework of marriage is being dismantled to allow a sinful lifestyle the same "legitimacy" as what God intended to be holy. I know that not all heterosexual marriages fall under a "holy" union, but it is, at the very least, still within the original framework of God's law. To me, accepting gay marriage as legit is much the same as erasing Romans 1:25-28.
" For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet."
I'm not a doomsday fan, but I believe that it would be a serious error to allow such an injustice to occur solely in the name of not "forcing them to conform to moral strictures in which they do not believe..." or "forcing them to adhere to beliefs alien to their own and, increasingly, to the culture in general."
Christians need to follow the moral high-ground, whether following in the structure of the government or not. I, for one, will never be comfortable with a legalized gay marriage.
Just my long two cents.
Posted by: Valk at April 26, 2004 2:05 PMBy the way, Amy, great posts. I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. And I see your points as valid and I highly respect them (and you). I just wanted to provide another angle:) Just wanted to let you know that so you didn't become offended in any way by my comment.
Posted by: Valk at April 26, 2004 4:05 PMAfter reflecting on this post for a couple of weeks, I’ve decided to respond. Of course, now it’s May, and the post has been archived, but, oh well. I assume you'll still get an email telling you it's here.
If a hillside is eroding due to wind and water, the solution to the erosion is not to turn fire hoses on at the top of the hill and wash the entire hillside away. The solution is to divert the water and/or start planting the hillside in contours. The same is true of marriage. Yes, the Christian community is woefully wanting when it comes to living out God’s design for marriage, and the state of marriage in our culture is even further eroded than in the church, but the solution is not to open the floodgates by further redefinition of marriage, home and family. The solution is to begin rerouting and rebuilding: recognizing our mistakes and correcting them.
While it may feel comfortable to take a live and let live attitude toward cohabitation of any kind, our society does have an interest, a very serious interest in marriage. One has only to walk into an elementary school to see the effects of 30 years of “liberalized” divorce laws and “enlightened” attitudes toward bearing children out of wedlock. All the data point to lack of a two-parent (male and female) household as highly correlated to every negative cultural development with respect to children: poverty, behavior problems, learning disabilities, ADHD, the list goes on. As we watch the microcosm of an unraveling society in the first grade classroom, it is clear that, even without a Christian worldview, society must promote marriage in its historic sense to ensure its own survival.
You have reminded the church that its primary responsibility is to win souls to Christ, not to make unbelievers act as Christians. That is true, but only part of the truth. As Christians, we are called to be both salt and light. By sharing the Gospel, we are light. By influencing our culture, we are salt. As Christians, we know that God’s design is perfect. It works even if He is not acknowledged as its source. In the USA, we are in the historically unique position of being able to change our laws for the good, to reflect, as much as possible, God’s design for the home, for the protection of innocent, vulnerable future generations. The downward spiral of our culture is headed toward a point at which we will no longer have the freedom to be light, because we have failed to be salt.
The Church must be both. And we must pray, study, and deliberate as to how to do it. We are able to use our voice with our government, but we must also look at successful models of change on other cultural issues. The sea change on the issue of abortion comes to mind. This, too, was foisted on an unsuspecting American public by judicial fiat, not unlike the homosexual marriage issue. This sudden change in law resulted in a landslide of abortions, numbers swelling to 1.5 million a year for decades. A practice that was only whispered about became commonplace. We can expect the same result if homosexual marriage becomes law.
On the abortion front, a two-pronged approach is finally seeing results. The first prong was legislative and educational, the “light” (not “lite”) portion, if you will. This alone was not enough for the first 10 uphill years of the struggle. It was not until Christians decided to be “salt,” to meet women and girls faced with crisis pregnancies one at a time with solutions to their perceived need (clothing, housing, jobs, medical care), that they were able to really be light, and share the Gospel with them. The result is a measurable change in attitude regarding abortion across the country: decreasing numbers of abortions, fewer teenagers engaging in sex, more people opposed to abortion on demand. We were told we could not “turn back the clock,” but we have. We have begun redirecting the streams, contouring the hillsides, providing real solutions, not just watching the water rush by. The flood is not over, but our position has improved.
The Church must prayerfully consider what the perceived needs of individuals engaged in the homosexual lifestyle are, and direct our energy toward providing for those needs in a Christ-like manner, before the floodgates of legislative approval are opened. And we must work to forestall the day of the floodgates’ opening, so we will not be pushed farther down the hillside. Then we will be free to share the light to hearts that have been opened, made thirsty for truth by the judicious application of salt.
Pendostanets!
Posted by: Pendostanets at March 19, 2006 12:06 PM