Christian Objection to Marriage Equality and Chesterton's Fence
Why did this tradition arise in the first place?
Today's video is another on the question of the @CRCNA in their civil war over SSM
I continue to be torn on this topic because on the one hand living in a place where same sex couples are so part of the mainstream it just seems odd excluding them from the normal life of the church.
On the other I find much of the Protestant argumentation in favor of changing the traditional standard so terribly weak. In this video I apply "Chesterton's fence".
I find that progressives are getting pretty lazy. They don't need to find new arguments. They are letting the vast Hollywood cultural influence-social-bullying machine do their heavy lifting for them. This is a bad strategy.
A common assumption in the church from those who want to change the stance sort of argue a morality-subtraction story to the case. "Well back in the day Xians were ignorant Bible readers before we had science and stuff but now we know SSA is just a 5% variant on human sexuality."
This is really a dumb argument that pays zero attention to historical context. If you read even the widely known Plato's Symposium you get a very clear picture that sexual moral standards in the pre-Christian Classical world were very different from ours.
Most of our current sexual morality today, even the portions relatively untouched by the sexual revolution is a product of the long history of Christian influence in our culture. In my opinion both women's liberation and gay liberation are culturally seeded by Paul and Christ.
Paul and Jesus introduce a radical egalitarian streak in Christianity that slowly made its way even to the most basic levels of our moral imaginary. If you want more on this watch/listen to the video/podcast.
On the other hand what it seems hardly anyone wants to tackle is the question of the source of the preference for heterosexual eroticism. SSM in the ancient world seemed oxymoronic. Ancient sexuality was regulated by concerns of social status more than anything else.
SSM made no sense because marriage was about the production of legitimate heirs. The reworking of marriage as expression of an idealized romantic relationship is a relatively recent trend. You had sex with someone socially available if you wanted to. Marriage was something else.
Conservative Christians get frustrated with me because they want to say "the Bible said it, that settles it, forget it" and I'm find with their position, but that argument only works if you assume their assumptions about the Bible.
The history of the Bible's relationship to a lot of moral questions is stranger than many on the conservative side wish to admit, yet also sometimes clearer than other progressives wish to. Paul brings arguments to the circumcision debate.
Progressives like to argue that historical/contextual elements make some prohibitions moot for us today but they struggle to account for the presence of those elements in history at all.
Many from the conservative side looking for a more secular argument like to bring out "natural law" but that word "natural" has its own complexities. The rage today is to look to evolutionary biology or psychology to settle moral guidance questions. I'm dubious.
"Nature" struggles to afford a non-instrumental ought, only is-ness. We might try to go back in the archeological record to look at brain, but generally speaking we require writing to even attempt to read our ancestor's MINDS.
Even when we have some written material, like from the Greeks, the larger the record of their MIND the more we realize that mind-reading them is terribly fraught. Was Socrates a pedo? Weren't almost all the men with status?
Somehow this moral notion arose. Can we account for it evolutionarily? In terms of social evolution? Historical development? Gilgamesh was happy to be best buds with Enkidu. Enkidu seemed fashioned by the gods to be his perfect match. Genesis is way different.
Ideals and achievements have an interesting relationship with time. Today we find a very old fence in the church and lots of people are in a rush to take it down. I think we need to work harder at figuring out why it was placed where it was.