Christian defenders of biblical sexual morality stand at the tipping point. Will our faith be consigned to the same medical waste dumpster as eugenics and racism? Both of those ideologies once held sway over elites and the masses alike, but public campaigns by highly motivated groups dismantled their arguments and shamed their defenders into silence and obscurity. And rightly so.

Should Christianity follow them into the trash bin? Even should the faith deserve to prevail, will it be crushed in America anyway? We can’t count on the sheer numbers of self-professed Christians in America to save biblical morality from being pathologized and punished. People change their minds, especially when they’re being kicked in the head, or slyly seduced. As Soviet interrogators learned, most effective of all is to alternate threats and bribes. Resist, and you’ll be locked out with the bigots and psychopaths. Collaborate, and all the really cool people will praise you. Exorcists report that they get the same treatment from the hostile spirits they try to expel: a constant switcheroo between buttering up and bullying.

It’s gruelingly hard to keep the faith when the most prestigious voices in the culture are all chanting the same slogans, backed up by the coercive power of the government, the financial weight of billion-dollar companies, and the new shaming mechanisms of social media. Muslims ground down the once-mighty churches of North Africa not so much by massacre as by degrading social restrictions and heavy taxes on “dhimmis.”

If we do intend to stand firm, we need to counter the opposing argument at its heart, which is simply this: Gay people have the right to form erotic relationships and receive the exact same public recognition and endorsement in same-sex relationships that people do through opposite-sex marriage. If you oppose that, you’re being as irrational and evil as Americans who opposed interracial marriage and imposed Jim Crow laws to prevent “race-mixing.”

In an April 3 column, Jonah Goldberg did a fine job of explaining how religious freedom laws are not remotely comparable to legal segregation. But he didn’t touch the central question, which is the “problem” those segregation laws were intended to solve. And that was “miscegenation,” or race-mixing. It was that, much more than black political power or economic advancement, which racists considered the ultimate threat to the “white community.” (The irony that most mixing of the races occurred when white masters raped black female slaves was almost entirely repressed.)

I finished a Ph.D. in English that focused on Southern literature, and saw in detail how much of it is shot through with the profound anxieties of Southern whites about the sexual power and reproductive activities of non-whites, especially black men — and the fear that white women might find their vigor irresistible. From D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, and Allen Tate’s The Fathers, you feel the ripples from this deep-seated cultural superstition.

Laws prohibiting interracial marriage were among the first that whites imposed after Reconstruction ended, and they were often the last repealed. If you read the demagogic rhetoric of white racist leaders from decades past, you’ll see incessant references to the “honor of Southern womanhood,” and “female chastity.”

Racist theory posited that black men had primordial sexual power, insatiable desires, and an animal allure which must be controlled through violence — through laws that rendered it criminal for black men even to speak to white women, and through lynch mobs that often hanged black men without trial. An imaginary epidemic of black men raping white women provoked a genuine plague of lynching across the country — and “respectable” Southern Democratic senators fought anti-lynching laws tooth and nail. A key reason for segregating public schools and swimming pools was to keep white girls and women “safe.”

This is the background of Jim Crow laws, and the basis for the comparison between conservative Christians today and yesterday’s segregationists. Because this much is true: There are couples who want marriage licenses, which we don’t think should be granted. Thus far the parallel holds.

Now before hyperventilating here because this appears to prove gay activists’ case, remember that almost everyone still agrees that the state must pick and choose which kinds of relationship contracts it will ratify and enforce. Here is a short list of sexual relationships which states refuse to grant official status:

1. Covenant marriages. In most states, there is no provision for people (for instance, Christians) who wish to make their marriage indissoluble, or less dissoluble than no-fault divorce laws make every marriage nowadays. You might write such a contract, but the state will refuse to enforce it.

2. Polygamous unions. Saudi princes who bring their harems here will have to pick just a single wife to enjoy that legal status. Mormons who wish to revive their ancestors’ practice can face arrest for trying it.

3. Incestuous unions. Brothers still can’t marry their sisters, or fathers their grown-up daughters.

4. Sadomasochist contracts. You might decide that you’re somebody’s “slave,” and sign a contract to that effect, but the 13th Amendment prevents the state from enforcing it.

I could go on into even more lurid territory, but you get the idea. The state protects the common good, and the interests of children, and sometimes decides that these outweigh the wishes of consenting adults. This is a point that Rick Santorum made ten years ago, and was brutally cyberstalked and vilified for daring to mention — a sure sign that he had grasped the nub of the issue.

Christians don’t oppose same sex “marriages” because we think that they are less ideal than heterosexual unions, or tacky or icky or gross. We think that they are impossible. By the very nature of what it means to be human, people of the same sex simply cannot marry, any more than they can sprout wings and fly. To say so is not to commit hate speech against either birds or human beings. It is simply and starkly a fact.

The state already is, and needs to be, in the business of deciding which marriage contracts to enforce or prohibit — just as it decides which employment contracts are legal, forbidding wages below the legal minimum, for instance. The only deciding question here is this: Are the grounds for not equating same-sex relationship with natural marriage rational and grounded in solid arguments about the nature of man and society? Or are they based on pseudo-science that’s covering up for irrational hatred or contempt?

In Part Two, I will do a side-by-side contrast between the spurious arguments used to oppose marriages that dared to mix the races, and those that insist that a real marriage must mix the sexes. (See “On Same-Sex Marriage, Are Christians No Better Than Racists?”, originally posted HERE)

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The first part of Cardinal Francis George’s prophecy, or warning, or cautionary tale, has just come true. As some will recall, Cardinal George warned a group of priests that he expected that he would “die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

That great and good man has indeed died in his bed. After many years of fearless, compassionate witness to the truth of Jesus Christ, and years of suffering with illness, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago has gone to his last reward. One of the brightest flowers to bloom during the long Catholic spring we enjoyed under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, his words and deeds embodied the best of the Christian tradition, that inextricable tapestry of fidelity and freedom. Without fidelity to the fatherhood of God, freedom is a bleak and empty, sterile exercise, as shallow and adolescent as the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo. Without freedom, acts of fidelity are not one whit more pleasing to God than marches on May Day in Stalin’s Moscow.

Cardinal George was a stirring example of what English writer Evelyn Waugh foresaw as the “American moment” in the Catholic Church. He carried on the tradition of Charles Carroll, Orestes Brownson, John Courtenay Murray and Fulton J. Sheen, who each in his own way despoiled the Egyptians — took for Christ’s Church the best and highest and purest that the secular world could offer. For these men, as for George, what they took were the political truths that inspired the founding of a deeply virtuous Republic, the United States of America, where the Church could live and thrive under much more wholesome conditions, with fewer degrading temptations, than under the so-called Christian monarchies that trammeled the Church with favors, which she too often was tempted to accept in place of her freedom. Here on these shores we were offered no mess of pottage, and so we could keep our birthright. That is now what we’ll have to fight for.

Cardinal George’s Warning

Today we face the question of the rest of Cardinal George’s warning. Will his successor indeed die in prison? Will that man’s successor in turn meet his end as “a martyr in the public square”? The hysterical hatred that has erupted in America for defenders of natural marriage and the family will tempt us to assume that this will be true. And it indeed it might. If we flag in the ferocity of our efforts at self-defense it surely will be — and our children should not forgive us for our failure.

The prospect of real persecution contains within it a subtle, more sinuous snare for the Christian soul — the blissful escape of Gnosticism. That’s the comforting option of pretending that we few, we happy few, have been blessed with a higher vision that teaches us to disdain this earthly life, the needs of society and the claims of the common good.

All that we’re called to do is to decorate our own souls, and keep our children “clean” of the vast corruption that surrounds us. We are not obliged to fight in the squalid arena of politics, or to wade down into the “culture.” Instead, we can please Our Lord by fashioning tiny, private gardens, where reverent liturgies and wholesome lifestyles will somehow survive amidst the ruins. When the pagans around us finally collapse in their filth and futility, it’s to us (or to our sturdy, fearless great-grandchildren) that they will look, and our scions will rise from the rubble to build another Chartres from the broken pieces of abortion clinics and international airports.

Yeah, that sounds great to me. We’ll get our payback then, and we’ll sing Easter hymns on our enemies’ unmarked graves.

It would be possible to take such Gnostic comfort by willfully misreading Cardinal George’s final prophecy, that the heir of the martyred bishop “will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” But Cardinal George was not such a cruel or callous man as to wish that future on us, or see it as something hopeful, a promise of vengeful glory after a temporary setback.

Instead, what the cardinal told us was that if the worst should happen, if the world which we are called to redeem for Christ should instead choose the Prince of this World, its follies could not last forever. The structure of human existence as made by God and redeemed by Jesus is incompatible with sin. The Fall doesn’t make us comfortable with evil. It will always irritate us, and goad us to seek something better. Now that Christ has come and assured us that His Church will always endure, we know that the Christian answer will be available always, in one form or another — whether it’s a battered parish in a ghetto where the prayers are chanted in Latin, or a storefront full of Pentecostal immigrants, calling on the Holy Spirit to bless them. The truth once set loose in Bethlehem cannot be hunted down and silenced, any more than Jesus’ body could be contained by a stone at the tomb.

A Profound Obligation

We face a profound obligation today to fight the Culture of Death with all the tenacity that God gives us. We must indeed fight as Churchill promised “on the seas and oceans, on the beaches … on the landing grounds … in the fields and in the streets.” We cannot take comfort in the prospect of escape, of a “Benedict option” whereby we will hide from evil in tiny enclaves of fellow believers. Because evil will find us there, as wolves can sniff out lambs. In a closed, self-protective environment, evil is all too likely to take over, among folk whose guard is down.

No subculture is safe. Indeed, the bleak facts of the sex abuse crisis should teach us that preachers are not immune. So should stories like those of the Legionaries of Christ, and the Society of St. John, each of which set itself up as a militant, separatist alternative to the culture — and proved to be the vehicle for some to prey upon the unwary. The further we retreat from the cold, clear light of day, the more vigilant we must be about our motives and our leaders. In fact, I think that a better name for the separatist imperative is not the “Benedict” but the “Denethor Option.”

It is unhealthy, unnatural and un-Christian to separate entirely from the world, except for the tiny number divinely called to live as monks, nuns or hermits. The rest of us are ordered to emulate the earliest groups of Christians — who worked, played, prayed, and even fought in the Roman army, and set themselves apart only in subtle, profoundly powerful ways: They were faithful to their spouses, and honest in their dealings. They did not murder their infants, but instead went quietly to the walls of that pagan city to rescue babies abandoned by their parents. They loved life too much to recklessly court martyrdom, and Christ too much to betray him by worshiping the Emperor.

They were not radical but moderate, pursuing in fact the Golden Mean which Aristotle had called for. The vital center they found, for which they lived and died, grew over time into the beautiful, humane civilization we call the West — whose side-effects are freedom, beauty, and even material wealth. These are the scraps which the pagans are squabbling over, the shell of the egg hatched at Easter.

We owe them more. Our fellow-citizens and fellow souls who lack the gift of faith deserve our kindness, our wisdom, our witness. And right now, more than anything else, they deserve our courage and perseverance. They deserve to feel us push back against the evils they thoughtlessly follow. Maybe someday they will thank us, as we pause today to thank Cardinal Francis George. (See “Cardinal George and the Denethor Option”, originally posted HERE)

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