Principles or Pressure?

From The Commentator, in 2011, when Vaclav Havel died:

The central insight of Power of the Powerless is described in an image Havel created that spread like wildfire in dissident circles across the communist world. He asked his readers to imagine a communist era shopkeeper putting the slogan “Workers of the World Unite” inside his shop window along with the onions and the carrots.

What is he up to?

“The slogan is really a sign,” Havel explains. “and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally it might be expressed this way: “I, the Greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon… I have the right to be left in peace.”

The communist party does not need people to believe in its ideology, but it does need them to pay homage to it. Society as a whole thus becomes infused with lies and deceit.

How many of those rainbows I see on Facebook are the same thing?  How many people now voting for and supporting gay marriage have really had a change of heart?  Is it possible for so many millions of people to have such a fundamental change in outlook in just ten years?  Or is it just the pressure of the elites to go along to get along, so those that didn’t have much principle to begin with see which way the wind is blowing?

Gay Marriage isn’t the problem

Dr. Stephen Baskerville makes the case that the current push for gay marriage is really just the result of a long push against families that started in the past, especially with no-fault divorce, as that fundamentally altered and degraded the role of fathers in society, and expanded the power of the state as a result.

G. K. Chesterton once suggested that the family was the main check on state power and that weakening it would destroy freedom. Chesterton was writing about divorce, and here another critical difference emerges between today’s debates and the way the issue was framed by Dawson and Zimmerman and theorists they cite. While homosexuality, abortion, pornography, and other cultural issues on today’s family-values agenda do appear in their writings, they are not central. The recurring issue throughout Western history that seems to be the most direct cause of marriage and family breakdown is divorce.

 Given that 80 percent of divorces are unilateral, divorce today seldom involves two people simply parting ways.[10] Under “no-fault” rules divorce often becomes a power grab by one spouse, assisted by people who profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, counselors, mediators, and social workers.

The most serious consequences involve children. The first action in a divorce is typically to separate the children from one parent, usually the father. Even if he is innocent of any legal wrongdoing and did not agree to the divorce, the state seizes his children with no burden of proof to justify its action. The burden of proof (and the financial burden) to demonstrate that they should be returned falls on him.

The reason for this is that intact families, and especially fathers that are present in the lives of the children, are one of the greatest checks on the power of the state.

From Henry Dampier who has additional thoughts.

Male and Female

Genesis 1:27 says, “male and female created He them.”  The male-female dichotomy is part of the creative order from the beginning, and that dichotomy was there by God in the initial plan and intention for humanity.  Humankind was to glorify God and represent God’s likeness and image, and humankind does this as “male and female”.

That refutes any possible normalization of homosexuality, polygamy, or transgenderism.  It refutes the contempt, oppression, and abuse that men have so often directed toward women throughout history, but also refutes the rejection of gender distinctions and roles that is such a feature of our current age.

God made women to be female, to be distinct from men.  You cannot claim to be pro-woman if you are not pro-femininity.  This fact remains true both more men who hold women in contempt and women who hold their own femaleness, as God created it, in contempt.

More here, from Sunday’s sermon.

Falling Short of the Glory of God

“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

What is the glory mentioned here?  Isn’t it our natural state to fall short of the glory of God?  Was Adam equal in glory to God?  Are the angels themselves?  Nothing is as glorious as God.

But God made Adam to be like Him, to reflect His glory.  Adam and Eve were indeed glorious, a shining example of God’s greatness.  He said, when He made them, that it was “very good.”  But of course Adam and Eve sinned against God and fell from that glory.

The glory of God referred to here in Romans 3:23 is not then the glory which God Himself possesses (for everything created falls short of that) but the reflected glory which God gave us.  To sin then is to fall short of that glorious state in which God made us, which God intended for us.  To sin is to fail to be what God has made us.

And so we see sin is extremely pervasive.  Sin defines our very being in our current state.  It’s not something we just do some times.  It’s what we are.

I’ve been reading a book about depression called Christians Get Depressed Too by David Murray which is a really good book in a lot of ways.  One thing that bothers me about it, though, is the way that Murray is anxious to show that depression is not always the result of sin.  He says that it can be the result of personal sin but also can be caused by false or wrong thinking or stressful lifestyles.  He also spends time talking about possible physical causes.  I’m no doctor and can’t really address the medical side of it at all, which I agree is real.  But why would we say that a lifestyle which causes stress from overwork is not sinful?  Perhaps that work is compelled through slavery.  But most of the time in our modern lives, people fall into a habit of overwork because of wrong habits of thought or values, which are themselves sinful.  False thinking is likewise a sin, regardless of when and how we learned that false thinking, even if we learned it as children on our mother’s knee.  Sometimes it seems like Christians believe that for something to be sinful, it must be consciously chosen and able to be resisted.  But sin is “falling short of the glory of God.”  Sin is failing to be what God has made us.  Sin is not something we do, it’s something we are.

This is why the gospel of Jesus Christ is so important.  It’s not just a matter of making better choices.  We need to be transformed.  On the subject of depression, we can recognize that the person did not consciously choose the sinful thought patterns or the particular debilitating reaction to trauma or abuse in their lives, and yet still recognize that it is nonetheless a sinful reaction, as it falls short of the glory of God.  The solution is often much more complex than simply telling the person to stop it.  And yet the solution still lies with Christ, with repentance, with the long-term work of the Spirit in replacing our heart of stone with a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:25).  Even those lifetime habits of thought that we learned from our parents or childhood before we even knew we were learning anything, are either true or false, righteous or sinful, and therefore to say simply that something was not a matter of choice, was not something someone had control over when it started, and is therefore not a matter of sin, ignores the nature of the Biblical teaching on what sin really is.

The same thing is true regarding the homosexual debate.  Christians often fall into simplistic language, saying that someone chose to be homosexual.  We know it’s a sin, and therefore they must have chosen it at some point.  Yet the reality is much more complex.  Lots of factors, genetic, environmental and social, can go into the development of homosexual tendencies.  As Christians, we can recognize this and have compassion over it, and yet at the same time say that it is a sin, which requires repentance.  Now of course this is not to say that depression and homosexuality are the same kinds of things.  But there is this similarity, that both of them often have very complex roots that the individual usually had little or no control over, and yet both of them “fall short of the glory of God.”

To say that something is a sin is not so say that it has an easy quick fix of just “stopping it”.  If that were the case, we would not need Christ, or the Spirit.  But we do.  At the same time it is never compassionate to tell people who are stuck in the mire of sin that they have no choice, that they can simply manage the symptoms but that there is no real cure.  There is always a cure, in the blood of Christ and the power of the Spirit.  It’s a process, and it takes time, and that process will not be complete until Christ comes again.  But by His grace, all His people will achieve the glory that God intends for us.

Conservatism and Homosexuality

Instapundit pointed me to this article on The Right Coast, referring in turn to this article from the WSJ opinion page about homosexuals and gay marriage or civil unions. It calls to my mind the opinions or positions of several different conservative bloggers and pundits on the issue of gay marriage or gay civil unions. The criticism that many have of social conservatives is that their position on gay marriage is really just based on their personal moral opposition to homosexuality, and not on any practical argument. If that were actually true, then it would certainly be a violation of the conservative philosophy itself, which teaches us among other things that public policy should never be based on the moral or ideological leanings of a few. Some conservative Christians have argued essentially that Christians ought to accept that our culture is no longer a Christian one, and concede the issue of gay marriage as a way of protecting ourselves, in the belief that if we support the civil liberties of an opposing group, our own civil liberties will be more secure.

However, as time goes on it becomes increasingly clear that homosexuals are not going to be satisfied with simple tolerance. They and their political allies have promoted laws in a great many places to make it illegal for anyone to even speak against the lifestyle. They have promoted educational initiatives that encourage, not just tolerance of, but the practice of, a homosexual lifestyle. In some cities and other countries, these laws are reality. We don’t have to speculate about whether this will happen. It’s happening now. Every concession and retreat by the social conservatives has only resulted in emboldening the advance of the enemies of traditional values. With the exception of a few moderates such as Andrew Sullivan, the gays will not be satisfied until the Christians are completely muzzled. But that’s really beside the point.

We don’t have to make homosexuals out to be perverts, child molesters or predators to understand what’s at stake here. To understand it, let’s look at why the state supports marriage in the first place.

Governments and societies for almost all of recorded history have recognized that it is in the context of marriage that children will be most successfully raised. For society to perpetuate itself, a number of things have to be passed on from generation to generation. These things include property, education and values. If these things are not passed on, then society falls apart from one generation to the next. So, the state and society itself have an interest in ensuring that children are brought into the world in an environment where this will occur. Giving benefits and preferential treatment to married couples in legal and financial matters ensures that the couples who actually bring the children into the world are the ones who do that in most situations, and discouraging procreation outside of marriage further ensures this favorable environment in the majority of child-rearing situations. The state has never had the resources to pursue the large-scale raising of children until very recently, and given the usually less-than-ideal results when it does, should not be encouraged to pursue it anyway. This is the basic reason why religion and government for most of human history has encouraged marriage for the purpose of raising children, and discouraged raising children in any other arrangement.

Those who marry and are unwilling or unable to raise children still get these state benefits, because the practical and political obstacles to considering people only officially married if they have children or intend to have children are enormous, and end up destroying many of the benefits to supporting marriage in the first place.

Outside of the link to childrearing, civil unions or marriages become just another transfer payment, just another subsidy and interest group, just another welfare case. The state doesn’t subsidize love, straight or gay. It subsidizes childrearing. Heterosexual couples are not given benefits because they love each other, but because they are presumed to be undertaking the enormous challenge and burden of raising children.

What social conservatives are arguing is that breaking this link between marriage and childrearing is deadly to society. We don’t have to speculate about this, sadly. We’ve seen it happen already. No-fault divorce, child custody laws, the foster care system and the welfare state have all made it easier and easier to raise children outside of the bounds of marriage, and the results have been disastrous, as practically any conservative and most moderates and libertarians agree. All of the social indicators- addictions, criminal behavior, poverty, education- crash when marriage and childrearing are not in most cases occurring together.

This is not a civil rights issue. It’s entirely beside the point whether homosexuality ought itself to be outlawed or discouraged, or whether it is immoral or not. Most of us agree that homosexuality probably does not need to be outlawed. I certainly don’t think it should be. But civil unions or marriage actually confers the benefits of marriage on them without any presumption of the corresponding burden of raising children.

Anyone who calls himself a conservative ought not be rushing to dismantle the very fabric of our society. Part of being a conservative is recognizing that there are lots of issues far bigger than any one person’s ideas or desires or experiences. This idea is not something society wants now or has ever wanted. It’s being foisted on us gradually and not so gradually by a few. Any conservative worthy of the name needs to get behind the effort to slow or stop this disastrous experiment. This will not be the first time that an elitist few have shoved their destructive ideas down the throats of a society, or the first time that a society was destroyed by the dreams of their leaders.