Marriage - The Definition is the Issue

I’ll take a stab at the hot button topic of the day.  

Why is it that conservative Christians are opposed to gay marriage in this enlightened post-modern age?

Let me begin by saying it is not that Conservative Christians are opposed to “love”.  I don’t think there is anything anyone would say against two people of the same gender having a certain affection for each other.  It is true that affections can sometimes be unhealthy – even simple friendships and heterosexual romances.  Still the issue isn’t “love” as in a “feeling” two people have for each other.

Christianity is a faith that exalts a set of high moral standards and then tells us that none of us can keep those standards.  It responds to this dilemma with grace – a deep, deep well of forgiveness.  The result is that the moral law of God which none of us keep perfectly ceases to be a source of condemnation, but remains a goal.  We are not always honest, but we strive for honesty.  We are not always faithful, but we strive for fidelity.   The moral standards affirmed in both the Old and New Testament are not a means of salvation but they remain ideals by which we examine ourselves and seek to be better people.  So – the issue is “what are our ideals?” (Read more)

Ideals are not what we experience in reality.  Ideals are what we pursue imperfectly.  We can pursue honesty even though we sometimes fail to be honest.  We can pursue a perfect game at the bowling alley even if we’ve never scored above 180. 

The Bible is not utopian.  It does not hold out hope that all human beings will behave in caring, compassionate and righteous ways.  It assumes there will be evil, selfishness, injustice and violence, and where there is sin, there is a need for ways of pragmatically regulating and dealing with human weakness in society.  

Christianity has generally upheld the notion, taken from the teaching of Christ and the apostles, that marriage is between one man and one woman and that two biological parents should raise their biological children. 

Jesus, when questioned about divorce in the Old Testament, specifically affirmed the union of man and woman and that divorce was not the intent “from the beginning”.  And he gives a clue into some of the seeming contradictions in the Old Testament regarding morality.   Jesus said Moses “permitted” divorce “because or your hardness of heart”.  Regulating the moral compromises of fallen men was a civil necessity even if it fell short of the spiritual ideal.  So Moses permitted divorce – because without that concession in a nomadic agrarian society some individuals, presumably women, might have fared even worse.   

Yet in the New Testament, Jesus reaffirms the ideal.  Divorce is only permitted in the case of infidelity.  One cannot divorce “for any reason” - one needs a significant justification based on moral failure of the partner.  His reasoning goes back to the intent of the creation of male and female.  The two shall become one flesh – affirming the Genesis narrative which includes the command to be fruitful and multiply – linking marriage to children and the family.  Paul holds up the ideal further in stating that a leader in the church should be the husband of one wife.  Husbands are to love their wives sacrificially as Christ loved the church.  Fathers are to discipline their children without “exasperating” them.  There is to be mutual submission, each seeking the good of the other, including the reminder that wives should submit to their own husbands - a truce in the war of the sexes.

Christians thus see as an ideal the union of one man and one woman who remain united until death, being fruitful in the production of a new generation and teaching their children the basics of faith and righteousness.

We know that none of us lives up to this ideal.  Even in the best of marriages there can be tension and conflict.  Some marriages are ended by the premature death of a spouse.   Some marriages are tested by illness or infertility.  All too often one or the other partner is unfaithful.  In some cases there is abuse and in some cases there is abandonment.    Jesus exception for divorce in the case of unfaithfulness acknowledges that one person alone cannot make a marriage work – so if one partner is adulterous, abusive or simply abandons the relationship it is not the fault of the other.  We are not condemned for another’s sin.

And there is grace for all of us when we fail.  Wives and husbands forgive.  Churches ideally create an atmosphere for repentance and restoration.  We pick up, dust ourselves off and get back to the pursuit of the good.

Still the ideal remains.  We are asked to be faithful, to be good spouses and parents, to care for each other into our old age, to take care of our families (including our aging parents).  It is not the reality we achieve, it is the ideal to which we aspire.

So here is the problem. 

Activists in the gay community do not merely ask of us compassion upon those with homosexual tendencies for coming short of the ideal – they want us to change the ideal itself.   That is the rub.

Christians by and large do not condemn gay persons for having attractions to the same sex or even for having acted on those attractions.   Folks commit sexual sins of all types and divorce, adultery, incest, prostitution, pornography and homosexuality have been realities Christianity has addressed in one way or another for 20 centuries.  Clearly Paul in his letters to the Corinthians understood that there were those who had been involved in homosexual activity in the Corinthian church – and they were portrayed as having left that lifestyle and having a genuine place in the church alongside all the other sinners.

But the central issue is that the agenda of the gay rights movement is to redefine marriage – to completely separate human sexuality from the “male-female” definition that results in “being fruitful” in the raising up of the next generation. 

(Some object that a couple who remains childless for any reason undercuts this argument.  But we live in broken world.  A childless heterosexual couple does not alter the definition of marriage any more than a person who has lost the use of his limbs changes the definition of human.  At issue here is the definition of “family”, not particular instances of infertility.  The point is that gay relations can never be "fruitful" in the sense that gay relations can never lead to the birth of a child biologically related to both parents.)

Many forms of sexual sin are harmful to the individuals involved, a point that should not be ignored.  Sexually transmitted disease is a potential consequence of heterosexual sin as well as homosexual activity.  AIDs has been an epidemic among heterosexuals in some countries where anal sex is used as a form of birth control.  One cannot ignore the consequences of illicit sexual activity for the individual and certainly many practices engaged in, particularly by promiscuous gay men, have to be acknowledged as hazardous.

But the larger point is that Conservative Christians see the family unit as the essential building block of society – the place where, ideally, children see in their parents the masculine and feminine role models, cooperating, loving and supporting each other.  They learn cooperation, respect for others, respect for authority, constancy, faithfulness.  They learn the basics of government and in this way the family serves the larger society.  

Some have rightly pointed out that it is inconsistent for Christians to be “soft” on “no-fault” divorce while going overboard in the condemnation of other sexual sins.  Divorce is harmful to a marriage and it is harmful to society for destroying the smallest of government units.  But redefining marriage completely redesigns the building blocks of society at a primal level.  Society will change as the family changes.

And Christians see in the family unit a picture of the relationship between God and humanity.  The reason gender roles matter is in part because the members of the church are collectively described in scripture as feminine – the bride of Christ.   Christ is the bridegroom.  God is the Father.  That language is not incidental – it is specific to what the majority of human beings have seen since the dawn of time – a distinction between the sexes – male and female, mother and father, a growing and expanding family under their care.

So the issue of the day is not condemnation of gays simply for being gay or “showing sinners out the door” as Scot McKnight falsely and unfairly charged earlier this week.  The issue is moving the goalposts so that what is ideal - the goal for which we stumble and strive - is something different, something optional, something fragmented and ambiguous.  

Some activists in the gay rights movement have intentionally misrepresented the traditional view, often accusing Christians of universally being haters, of having a phobia, of being judgmental, irrational, bigoted. 

But as a rule, Conservative Christians do not oppose gay people.  They oppose a particular political and sociological agenda that they believe will be damaging to society and which fails to correspond to and make sense of the reality of Creation – male and female, one flesh, fruitful. 

In this context God’s condemnation of those who “lie with a man as with a woman” in the Old Testament and Paul’s lament over men forsaking their natural relations with women and women forsaking their natural relations with men makes sense, not as an arbitrary religious prohibition against “love” but as a warning to those who would try to swim against the current of reality itself.  If Christianity is true, then we were designed for this and not for that – and to fight against the physical reality of male and female are can only be destructive.

That is the specifically religious reason for opposing same-sex unions.  There are practical and pragmatic secular reasons for opposing it as well.  But that would be another discussion.