California’s battle over same-sex marriage points to more than just the moral depravity of society
by Keith Bassham
We conservative Christians have been crowing about our success relative to the liberal mainline denominations at least a generation. While most of the country, certainly the majority of the nation’s media and academia, was fairly unaware of the rising strength in conservative Christianity in the 60s and early 70s, they had noticed the theologically liberal Protestant denominations were shrinking. A few sociologists dug a little deeper, among them sociologist Dean Kelley who wrote Why Conservative Churches are Growing in 1972, but many more were in agreement with Lutheran theologian Peter Berger, who told the New York Times in 1969 that religion in the U.S. would soon be composed of groups “huddled together in little enclaves, surrounded by a sea of secularity.”
As we watched the mainline Protestant denominations hemorrhage membership statistics, we felt vindicated for our doctrinal stands, for our continued faithfulness to God, His Word, the Gospel of Christ, the Cross, and all the other theological and cultural positions we believe to be important. We conservatives had more churches, larger churches, and not a small amount of political clout. The data indicated we had won, and we truly thought we had triumphed.
However, it is easy to miss something under the surface. Earlier this year, Christian Smith published Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. The book is a follow-up to his widely read volume on the spiritual lives of teens, and a few paragraphs from it challenge our sense of triumph. Smith writes,
“These are not the glory days of mainline-liberal Protestantism in America. Yet many observers are so focused on membership statistics and apparent political influences that they miss an important fact: that liberal Protestantism’s organizational decline has been accompanied by and is in part arguably the consequence of the fact that liberal Protestantism has won a decisive, larger cultural victory.”
He goes on to cite the work of N. Jay Demerath, who in 1995 wrote a journal article in which he argues that the reason the liberal Protestant churches declined is not because they failed, but because they succeeded! Far from representing failure,” he says, “the decline of Liberal Protestantism may actually stem from its success. It may be the painful structural consequences of [its] wider cultural triumph.… Liberal Protestants have lost structurally at the micro level precisely because they won culturally at the macro level.”
In other words, Smith says,
“liberal Protestantism’s core values – individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience – have come to so permeate broader American culture that its own churches as organizations have difficulty surviving. …In short, many emerging adults would be quite comfortable with the kind of liberal faith described by the Yale theologian H. Richard Niebuhr in 1937 as being about ‘a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.’”
I am not certain of the process, who influenced whom, whether we are talking chickens and eggs here, or what, but I can tell you the observations are spot on. Therefore, when someone asked me about my response to the Federal judge’s overturning California’s Proposition 8, the majority-supported act to define marriage as exclusively a one-man-one-woman relationship, I asked, “And what did you expect?”
Actually, this is the second time this issue has received a ruling in a high court in California, the first occurring two years ago. At that time, the California Supreme Court ruled that the state’s Defense of Marriage Act defining marriage in traditional one-man-one-woman terms, was unconstitutional. Backers of the law believed at the time the only way to prevent a similar overturning was to amend the state’s constitution, which they did in a voter referendum that fall. The amendment was contained in the language of Proposition 8 (“only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California”), and those who wanted to retain traditional marriage and prevent same-sex marriages in California thought that would put the matter out of the court’s reach.
In the meantime, the homosexual activists and liberal politicians favoring same-sex marriage geared up for the inevitable showdown. The American Civil Liberties Union posted a strategy document on their website: “Make Change, Not Lawsuits.” The downloadable document showed the logos of nine LGBT organizations and gave encouagement to the same-sex marriage proponents:
“The win in California was no accident. Cities in California started adopting Domestic Partnership policies in the mid 80s. The state adopted its first law in 1999, and expanded it over the next six years. Courts in California have been deciding important cases about discrimination since the 70s. With the victories in Massachusetts and California, we should be able to win marriage more quickly in other states.… Marriage in California will transform the national debate on the freedom to marry. It will do that because the decision is well-reasoned constitutional law from the most influential state court in the nation. It will do that because California is an American trendsetter.”
This more recent decision must be seen in the light of that earlier ruling and what we already know about the homosexual activist agenda.
I have demonstrated before that though homosexuality apologists deny there is any homosexual agenda, there is one. In their 1989 pro-gay book, After the Ball, Marshall K. Kirk and Hunter Madsen wrote, “The agenda of homosexual activists is basically to change America from what they perceive as looking down on homosexual behavior, to the affirmation of and societal acceptance of homosexual behavior.” These same-sex marriage declarations are important to the homosexual community because what they are after is not tolerance but broad acceptance, and as long as this legal marriage barrier stands, homosexuality will not be regarded as normal.
This position has been confirmed again and again. Outspoken homosexual activist Michelangelo Signorile wrote in a column for OUT magazine in 1994 of a strategy and goal, “to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society’s moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution.”
More than 10 years ago, Hadley Arkes, writing in First Things, said,
“For what drives the litigation for gay rights is the need to have the gay life recognized and confirmed in principle in every setting in which the issue may arise. Gay activists seem to understand that their interests will not be secured as long as there persists in the public a residual moral sense that there is something about homosexuality that is not quite right. Hence, the need to seek more and more occasions for inducing the public first to tolerate, and then, in small steps, to endorse or approve.”
Understand, this is not some plea for tolerance, a deliverance from culturally embedded and socially sanctioned physical persecution. Rather, the goal is, according to the same-sex proponents, a radical revolution in morality.
Nowhere is this more plain than in the language used by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in his ruling where he invokes the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas. Walker wrote,
“The arguments surrounding Proposition 8 raise a question similar to that addressed in Lawrence, when the Court asked whether a majority of citizens could use the power of the state to enforce ‘profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles’ through the criminal code.…They cannot. “
In fact, woven throughout Judge Walker’s ruling, just about any law based on a moral view, especially if related to religion, is suspect. That is, unless it corresponds with his view of morality. For instance, at one point in his decision he states as a fact (not his opinion, mind you) that “religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful…harm gays and lesbians.”
Again, though, I ask, what did you expect? Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia dissented in the Lawrence case in 2003, warning this very event was inevitable. He wrote then,
“This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest… Today’s opinion (i.e. the majority) is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. … So imbued is the Court with the law profession’s anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously ‘mainstream’…”
Later, he notes that the majority opinion of Court is careful to say the present case “does not involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter.” I’m thinking Justice O’Connor was using the last bit of her opinion to try to steer the homosexual activists away from using her as a legal basis for same-sex marriage arrangements in the future. Scalia saw it for what it was. His response: “Do not believe it.… Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned.”
Justice Scalia’s next few sentences presciently quote Judge Walker (seven years in advance) almost word for word, for Walker says there is no legitimate state interest involved in proscribing same-sex marriage, precisely what Scalia said would happen after the Supreme Court decided Lawrence.
And so what of the majority of the people in this country, religious or not, who still believe that these matters should be decided in a democratic venue? Matthew J. Franck, director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, writes, that according to Judge Walker and his allies,
“Citizens who wish to defend the institution of marriage as they and their families have known it all their lives, and for countless generations, are irrational bigots. Worse still, if they are moved to act because of the union of their faith with their moral opinions, they are crazy religious folk, bent only on harming others whom they merely ‘dislike’ on grounds that cannot possibly be defended before a tribunal of right-thinking people. And those others, the same-sex-couple plaintiffs? They must be rescued from the ‘harm’ to their feelings that results from their exclusion from a historic civil and moral institution that has never hitherto been thought to have been built for them.”
Let’s see if we can’t twist all these threads together to see where we are.
First, I was planning to publish an apologetics article this month, one dealing with the question, “Can we be good without God?” when the news on the California decision came in. What is the source for our sense of right and wrong? How do we know what is right? Why do right? Those kinds of things. I had no idea the Federal judicial system would provide such a ready illustration. For, casting themselves adrift from God as Creator and Lawgiver, much as Paul describes in Romans 1, modern American culture finds itself without a moral compass, let alone a rudder.
Second, this casting adrift was done in collusion with liberal Protestant theology as we described above. Not long ago, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reported in the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 56 percent of those from mainline denominational churches agreed with a statement that said, “Homosexuality is a way of life that should be accepted by society.” Only 34 percent said homosexuality should be discouraged. The number of evangelicals agreeing with acceptance was smaller (26 percent), but considerable. Christianity often is redefined so the new core value and evidence of morality is tolerance of just about anything except traditional morality.
President Obama, I think, gives us an example of this new type of “Christian” thinking. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, he mentions that his faith helped him to conclude that marriage is between a man and woman, a position he maintains publicly to the present time. Yet at the same time he favors repeal of the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, opposes a constitutional amendment declaring marriage is one-man-one-woman, and he opposed Proposition 8. Further, he advocates homosexuals openly serving in the US military, and unlike his immediate predecessor, has made two presidential proclamations for Gay Pride Month in 2009 and 2010. Finally, just a month or so back, in a statement honoring fathers on Fathers Day, he said, “Nurturing families come in many forms, and children may be raised by a father and mother, a single father, two fathers, a step-father, a grandfather, or caring guardian.”
Third, temporally, it is hard to judge success and failure. One could argue that liberal Protestantism sacrificed their institutions but in so doing they achieved great success embedding their core values in American culture. Meanwhile, evangelical churches have grown in numbers but appear to be losing clout in society at large. Some attribute this to a backlash against political activism, while others say we have not been as active in this area as we yet need to be.
One thing is clear. If there is ability to take this nation back to a more biblical worldview, it will require full effort over a long period of time among those with a serious allegiance to God and His ways.