I agree with the general point expressed here about the difficulty of interpreting the Bible , but it's worth dwelling on because recognizing the existence of--let alone being able to identify or produce--different interpretations of a text is one of those sophisticating reading skills that even well-educated adults have a hard time mastering. One has to recognize the parts of the text that are "in play," which, as the example attests, includes the silences in the text, and then imagine the background assumptions and rhetorical techniques that are required to be able to produce an alternate reading. Then one actually has to produce an alternate reading. It's no surprise that many people go completely from one interpretation to another with little or no way-station in between.

When I was teaching, I used to exploit this for pedagogical ends. At Chicago, we would start out the year by reading the Republic, which is notable for the wide variety of ways people have understood it and which has some famously ambiguous passages. First assignments are tricky, because one wants to set the proper tone: this class will be neither easy nor impossible, but will require work. The last is especially important for people who feel that writing thesis-essays is easy either because they were able to produce consistently in high school, or they don't take non-scientific forms of study seriously. Thus, the assignment: take one of the famous (pre-selected) passages of the early books and give two interpretations of it. No need for introductions, thesis statements, or anything else: just two interpretations. The success rate was usually around 25%. This would lead to office hours where the other 75% of students would come to ask what was wrong. I'd ask them to put aside their papers and just explain to me the difference between their two interpretations, and most of those explanations would end with the student realizing they had just written the same interpretation twice. Somewhat chastened, they were ready to work more seriously.

That's the reality, I think: it's difficult enough to pass along one complete interpretation in all its nuances--and a liberal Protestant reading of the Bible is about nothing if not an endless series of nuances--for a book that is highlighted by changing narrative modes, genres, and rhetorical styles, all of which lays on top of the more fundamental question of how to read a book originally written for a different audience. I've come to think of the Bible as the easiest difficult book to read, or the most difficult easy book, for exactly this reason.

Their Chartres and Ours

For reasons not worth getting into, a few years ago, I found myself in a cathedral in West Virginia. It was new and, in the manner of Catholic churches that follow ancient standards--few though they may be--it was impressive. The space was big, the proportions were right. There was just one problem: it was the tackiest, gaudiest church I had ever been in. Much of the interior was done in a combination of pastels and bright colors, and every last bit of space was filled with something designed to draw the eye. It looked not unlike how Socrates describes democracy in Book VIII of the Republic: the face of a woman in a statue where every element is made to perfection, at the cost of any coherent organization of the whole. It was, as W.H. Auden used to note, the sort of thing that would make any Christian wish the iconoclasts had won.

This is also, apparently, what is happening to Chartres during its restoration. Gothic architecture was notorious for polychroming everything, and the nicer the church, the more likely it was to be filled with endless amount of gold-set and jewel-encrusted trinkets. Over time, the polychroming came off; after the French revolution, most of the trinkets, crucifixes, reliquaries, and the rest disappeared from public view. Additionally, many gothic churches underwent substantial reconstruction in the mid-19th century; Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris is a clever advertisement for restoring the façade of the cathedral wrapped around a story about a poor woman and a hunchback.

The objection requires believing that the original design of the church is offensive to the eye which, to be fair, it is, and that the architecture--including the windows--represents the 'real' or 'true' design from which the decoration must be considered an unfortunate, if natal, error. Time and history corrected the mistake. In this sense, neogothic architecture learned a lesson that the original gothic architects and artisans never intended to teach.

When I was in Paris, and visiting St. Denis, I had an awareness of how really wonderful the space is: the intention Abbot Suger put into the design, the way the individual elements, each an innovation, create a space that is much more than the sum of its parts. But I also knew that had I seen it 300 years before, or at any other time between its inception and the Revolution, I would have hated it. What I saw was, in fact, only made possible by the Revolution that stripped the church of its least appropriate aesthetic elements. People like to look at gothic architecture and think that it has stood as it was for a thousand years; people deride neogothic architecture because it looks too new, but that façade at Notre Dame is perhaps 80 years older than the gothic buildings at Princeton. It looks like what we have reason to believe it looked like at some time before, minus a few details.

I sometimes wonder if the objection is not to any of the renovations except inasmuch as they no longer allow you to feel that magnificent, false feeling of standing someplace unchanged for a millennium.

J.S. Bach, Cantata 140: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140

On this particular Sunday morning, I found myself walking up to church with the head pastor, her husband, and their newborn child (she's still on maternity leave, and this was her first time seeing how her son would handle the noise of a service). I sat in the back pew along with the guy who is usually one pew behind me, and around the usual mix of people in the back-right; no one ends up there by accident, and most of us like it better than anywhere else. The service was one of the two "high" services of the year--Easter, and one in Advent before people leave for the holidays--and was welcomedly packed. The other hymns were a resetting of lyrics to the melody of "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded" and "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" I'm thankful for the typical Reformed mid-level liturgy in the average service, but glad to be at a church that will break out the full orchestra and choir on special occasions.

Agreement with Alan Jacobs on this:

But the intellectual exploration of the Christian faith, the pursuit of understanding Scripture and the great traditions of Christian thought, has been immensely nourishing to my soul over the years. It is through study and reflection, as well as through certain modes of worship that have come to saturate my being, that I am able to draw nearer to God, or rather, to allow Him to draw nearer to me. (I am, after all, asked to love the Lord my God with all my mind as well as my heart and soul.)

There's a contradiction, or a tension, at the heart of a good amount of American Christian experience: neither intellect nor emotion is considered a fit guide for faith. The evangelical churches I sometimes frequent like to say that it's not sufficient to merely understand a point to be true, but one has to feel it in order for it to become a part of one's life. Expressions along these lines will sometimes be joined to "I don't want to get deep into theology here," as though theology precludes discussion of ethics or norms. One rather begins to assume that people don't want to talk about theology not out of a high-minded concern for making things relevant, but rather because they don't know the theology in any depth. (I once attended a Mass at which the priest in his homily suggested that historical-critical uncertainty about the authorship of the New Testament epistles meant his parishioners should be aware that if they read the Bible, they would probably misinterpret it, so maybe they shouldn't bother. The occasional hostility to intellect comes from all sides.) Attitudes like this are baffling on their own, because Christianity is nothing if not composed of assertions about historic and metaphysical truths.

The dismissal of intellect is all the more strange considering there's an equal dismissal of being led by emotion or sentiment. On the Protestant side, there's an understanding that love and all other emotions are fickle, and relationships have to be built on something more enduring than that; this is why "stop dating the church" is commonplace advice (it is also terrible advice). Similarly, I've seen Catholic apologetic books that will ladle out of heavy dose of blame to anyone who isn't feeling it during communion--not having the right kind of reaction is taken as a sign there's something wrong with you, and you have to correct your emotions.

What's that Auden line...

...about wishing the iconoclasts had won? Yeah, that.

It turns out, to my surprise as much as anybody's, that I have something to say about the ongoing scandal at the 'neo-Reformed' Sovereign Grace Ministries (which I have been following through Rachel Held Evans), and the label 'neo-Reformed' in general. What's more, this observation is drawn from my academic research, and not any personal investment in the story itself. Here's the observation:

The central concern of Reformed Christianity was, and is, authority: what is power, who gets to hold it, what are the limitations on that power, what do we do when it is abused. In this, it is unlike the Lutheran Reformation with which it is sometimes associated. Luther was concerned with matters of doctrine. I tend to believe my sincere Lutheran friends who think that these doctrinal issues are all that separate them from Rome; were the Pope to come out tomorrow and announce justification comes through faith alone, the issue would be settled. The more characteristic Reformed concern is with the fact that there's someone in a position to make that assertion in the first place: no one given that kind of authority could possibly use it well.

(Substantively important aside: Reformed Christianity is sometimes referred to as 'Calvinism,' which is a bad term for it: Reformed was a wide movement in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Alsace-Lorraine that eventually had significant inroads in England, France, Poland, and all of central Europe. Calvin was undoubtably the brightest star in that firmament, but he was hardly the only influence. After all, Reformed churches decided against Calvin's preferred communion schedule, despite its centrality to his thought.)

Reformed Christianity is built around the attraction to and the skepticism of charismatic individual leaders. Both elements are important. If you've ever read about Calvin's relationship with Geneva, it should be obvious that it's a two-way street. Even when Calvin was at his most powerful and influential, the city existed as an independent entity that could place serious limitations on his ability to act, and so it went in all the other prominent centers of Reformed.

John Witte, Jr.'s book The Reformation of Rights tracks one important political dimension of this debate, in the question over whether monarchy is the proper form of government. Calvin initially thought so, and argued for something like quietism in the face of persecution as a judgment or test of God. As Witte shows, Calvin eventually eases off this position, and adopts a moderate skepticism about political power, allowing for resistance in some critical cases, which conveniently happen to be outlined in the final three paragraphs of the final edition of the Institutes. The most prominent of Calvin's followers, Beza and Althusius, expand this insight and create modern resistance theory, which then provides the seeds for rebellions in the Netherlands, England, and America.

Bottom line: in a properly constructed historical understanding, Reformed Christianity argues that leadership carries a heavy burden, but also a much higher standard of scrutiny: we can and should expect of our leaders things we don't expect of ourselves; not for nothing does the Bible repeatedly warn about the increased dangers associated with teaching and leadership. It's not surprising if no individual human being can withstand that for their entire lives, and therefore it is the business of the community to be on guard and remove those who have proven themselves unfit to lead.

All of which is to say that I agree with the argument here. This is precisely the wrong attitude:

Both women and children are taught that submission is part of a divine plan that should be embraced joyfully, and that even submitting to abusive men is noble and Christ-like. CLC pastor Joshua Harris quotes 1 Peter on this score, praising slaves who obeyed the masters who beat them as following Jesus’ example. Harris interprets this to mean that all Christians are called to submit, even when “suffering” under “unjust” leadership. Therefore wives are called to resist the “sinful” impulse to “fight back” against or even criticize husbands who misuse their “authority.”

...and drawing any implications from that attitude is therefore also wrong. It's not a Christian attitude, and it's not worthy of the proud history of Reformed Christianity on this subject, the one closest to its heart.

I want to add one small, limited point to Phoebe's discussion of contraception and abortion, which was raised in the comments by Britta but whose moment in that discussion has passed: it's true that religious arguments need not be of the no-abortions-ever-and-also-no-contraception variety. But, in fact, the truth is stronger than that: Roman Catholicism is (to my knowledge) the only Christian denomination that takes this position. Even in Orthodoxy, to the best of my understanding, the use of contraception is, if not entirely encouraged (certainly not in a premarital context), certainly not disallowed. The fact that Catholicism is the minority position even within Christianity is sometimes neglected in the rush to give attention to the Ross Douthats and Rick Santorums of the world.

It's for this reason that I find the recent tendency of conservative Protestant leaders to entertain this argument disconcerting: it's disrespectful to their own traditions, and the authority on which it is to be accepted is fundamentally opposed to the usual sources of Protestant knowledge.

On vocation, moral responsibility, and a few other things:

This:

I mean, think about that. Taxpayer-paid employees of the Justice Department had direct and exclusive knowledge that there may be hundreds of innocent people in prison, they knew that flawed forensics in these cases needed to be reviewed, and their justification for not doing more as these people continued to rot in prison was, Hey, we did the bare minimum required of us by law...

But even beyond the problematic ethical requirements, I'm having a hard time fathoming how no one on this task force felt morally compelled to go beyond those requirements -- to, you know, actually reach out to defense attorneys, or attempt to actually reach the convicts or their families. How in the world can you possess this sort of information, then still sleep at night, year after year, knowing that (a) the information obviously isn't reaching the people who have an incentive to actually put it to use, (b) you're one of the few people who could make that happen, and (c) because the information was only available to a select group of people, if you or one of your colleagues doesn't act, no one else will?

 Made me think of this:

Like Spark, Waugh attacks the Protestant and, by extension, secular - conception of vocation. Spark focuses more on vocation's over-reach - very few of us are equipped to single-mindedly devote ourselves to our work, and almost no secular work can merit such devotion in the first place, so in the end vocation is shown to be only sustainable in its Catholic sense of a calling to religious orders. Waugh, by contrast, points out its insufficiency - because it transfers the devotion that was to be reserved for God into worldly devotions - to war, or scholarship, or art - secular vocation is too thin for those who have a real vocation, which is to say, a vocation to the priesthood.

 ...and we can lump in the Joe Paterno/Penn State case as well to develop something like a theory. The idea is this: what Protestants (and the secular) correctly derive from the New Testament precept of the moral equality of all people is the equal moral responsibility of all people. Vocation, for Calvin and others, is a category that spreads itself wide because every person is obligated to act in a responsible manner at every moment, and the failure to do so is a moral failure; it may be common or human, but no less a failure for that. What the Protestant concept of vocation gets us is a specific account of the wrong being done in all these cases, where people believe fulfilling their legal or professional obligations renders any additional action supererogatory and therefore not required. In more theological terms: if everything is to be redeemed, then everything is properly a subject of vocation to the person who finds himself there. To do the minimum--or to expect someone else to do it--is a gross violation of duty. The difficulty with this idea is not that it's theologically incorrect but that--as almost everyone notes--it requires a lot from each person, and people don't like to have that kind of obligation (see also the Grand Inquisitor). But these people who failed and made the world worse because of their failure had it, and we have it, too.

I would like to underline and expand on what Phoebe says here, from a different perspective:

Natalism's immorality comes from the fact that it's about prioritizing non-existent beings over ones who already exist, namely women. Not fetuses, who are or are not babies depending your views on this. Entirely theoretical offspring of people who went out on a date this one time and didn't really click but by putting their own preferences over immediate procreation revealed their profound, selfish decadence.

Not just immoral, though certainly that: entirely unacceptable from a Christian point of view. People are not immortal, nor pre-existing souls who get bodies at the moment of conception. At whatever point a person becomes a person, there is now a morally-relevant being while there was no such being before. You're not denying potential future people the possibility of coming into being because there's nothing there waiting which is being meaningfully denied.

Further, hypothetical human beings have no moral weight whatsoever because their number is infinite and so they simply cannot count in any meaningful way. If one is prepared to adopt a utilitarian calculus, one could easily muster a sufficient number of them to prove any point at all, and, one presumes, muster an equal or greater number to establish the opposite point. For example: a world with the present number of people might be good to preserve civilization, etc; a world with double the population would present many undesirable problems for the people who lived in it. Bring your six billion future imaginary people, and I will bring another six, and let's see what happens.

I'm also skeptical of the idea that general future-oriented imperatives can possibly issue in any straightforward way as personal obligations: if you think it's easy to move from the general to the particular, you're wrong. As Millman notes, birthrates are a complex phenomenon: the advice one gives to some people has to be conditioned by the fact that everyone else in the world makes their decisions for whatever reasons feel sufficient to them. If the general imperative is to create enough-but-not-too-many, it has to take into account that some people will (irresponsibly!) have too many children and, therefore, someone will have to have fewer.

The point is not that any of these are unanswerable objections: the point is just that the issue is, and has to be, more complex than its made out to be.

On occasion I make note of the very strange state of dating and relationship theory amongst (particularly conservative) Christians. Having been through a few iterations of it in my life, it's a continual source of fascination, if only because it's one of those places where quote-unquote biblical or quote-unquote traditional norms are very clearly the preferred norms of a particular subculture rather than any sort of general standard or guide. In particular, the problem is to be found in the idea of 'roles,' which are the sort of things individual people can develop on their own, apart from relationships with people of the opposite sex. When a man who knows and understands his role comes together with a woman for whom the same is true, they get married and that's that. There's little recognition that people are individuals with idiosyncrasies that don't map onto this.

Which is why I found this post on male spiritual 'leadership' quite interesting: men can exhibit many different gifts, which are meaningful and important, helpful in a relationship, integrated into a serious adult personality, and yet not in any way resemble a vision of leadership. The post is good in that it recognizes that the problem is the expectation, and not the men themselves.

(Of course, in a later post on First Things, the following counterargument was raised: of course some men are like this. Men have access to all the gifts! Implicit was the idea that women do not, or at least not the gift of leadership. Thus does the attempt to give nuance to the role of men who do not fit particular culturally-bound masculine stereotypes become a means of asserting the superiority of men to women in all circumstances. I sometimes think that it's not so much that liberal Protestantism has a nominalism problem as that conservative Christianity has a realism problem--the inability to see any distinctions or particularities as mattering.)

I have a lot of respect for Joe Carter, but, seriously: if you haven't read the book, don't talk about it, because you're not in a position to judge whether the critical views are correct in their treatment of the book, or whether the people who praise it have somehow lapsed in their otherwise fine judgment (and, really, their quote-unquote otherwise fine judgment should probably give pause in dismissing their praise).

I find myself moderately in sympathy with Rachel Held Evans on a number of questions: i.e. not always in agreement, but finding the areas of disagreement to be reasonable enough. But nothing makes me as sure she deserves to be heard as the uncharitable responses which her work generates, of which the link is a mild example (I have seen others that doubt whether she's a Christian). Most of these reviews have a characteristic form: include many quotes, ignore any context which might be relevant to what's being said, and impute the worst possible motives to any action (she only did various things for a month because she doesn't take the Bible seriously!).

People: she's almost certainly right that the willingness of major Christian bookstores to carry titles (or, rather, their willingness to not carry certain titles) has an effect, even largely unobserved, on the sorts of books that get written and published. And that's a bad thing (those unclear on why should refer to The Captive Mind. Or perhaps Persecution and the Art of Writing). Also: if there is any one characteristic of American Christianity writ large, it's the inability to see that our personal lifestyle choices are not the only valid options for everyone else: gospel and culture are not the same thing, "I have become all things for all men..." etc. But hammering away at her does reinforce the idea that American orthodox Christians are people who are narrow-minded, distrustful of those who do not look and speak and think they way they do, and particularly threatened by women for whom any of those are true (someone could do useful work by looking through criticism directed at her for examples of 'mansplaining,' of which I think there'd be no shortage). So people: chill out.

On the one hand, I agree with Alan Jacobs that it doesn't make much sense to hold there to be value in old religious forms if one doesn't subscribe to the beliefs that underpin them. On the other, it seems like this might be a useful exercise even so:

In a late essay, Arnold argued that the prayer book “has created sentiments deeper than we can see or measure. Our feeling does not connect itself with any language about righteousness and religion, but with that language.” But this does not mean that we believe the prayer book’s teachings in any traditional way: “Of course, those who can take them literally will still continue to use them. But for us also, who can no longer put the literal meaning on them which others do, and which we ourselves once did, they retain a power, and something in us vibrates to them.” Arnold thinks this appropriate, since “these old forms of expression were men’s sincere attempt to set forth with due honour what we honour also”; therefore “we can feel” the doctrines of the prayer book, “even when we no longer take them literally.”

...because the unanswered question here is why something in a person still "vibrates to them." Serious reflection on that question (which is to say, reflection that does not simply credit the language, or the fact that these things are 'old,' or marvels at how comprehensive the Christian approach to life is or can be and laments this as irretrievably lost a priori, no need to worry about it*) will lead to a more positive or negative appreciation of that vibration.

(This reminds me, in a way, of the long conversations I've been having with my classes on knowledge and opinion in Plato. The tendency is usually to make any statement, when possible, subjective, and to hide it behind one's opinion, where for Socrates it's a half-step above ignorance and cannot, in any circumstances, be truth. If it touches on something truthful, it needs to be phrased in a stronger and more certain way to be of any use at all: opinion is never of any use. So much time is devoted to establishing that justice is not a matter of opinion and, if we think about it in the right terms and using the right examples, this is already something that they think (no one gets their opinion about genocide, for example). But it's hard to think through, and very little incentivizes that kind of thinking; and, as Kierkegaard could tell you, so much of life is devoted to preventing yourself from doing that.)


*For which Charles Taylor, e.g., has done as much damage as anyone, with his grand historical narrative of decline, which many people are happy to adopt and ignore his conclusion.

Somewhat inevitably, this is going to sound flip, but it's not intended that way. I've been watching with some interest the reactions of Rod Dreher to the mismanagement of the OCA and the continuing legal fallout of the Roman Catholic child abuse scandals. Understandably, Rod is having some difficulty squaring the promise of apostolic succession--that the hierarchy of leadership will always embody God's true teaching--with the personal failings of the people who are in leadership. He goes on about this problem at some length, e.g. here. Christianity has (wisely) rejected the position that moral purity is a condition for leadership, but when the leadership is so often and so thoroughly corrupt on ethics and worldly concerns, it's hard to place any faith in their ability to make decisions about matters of theology.

As it happens, there is a centuries-old stream of Christianity that is designed, at least in part, to address this problem: it's called Protestantism. A look at the 16th century creeds, especially in the Reformed tradition, shows a marked emphasis on the problems of church organization and leadership. The crisis of confidence Rod is undergoing is a good one, because human beings are not to be trusted with that level of authority (a positioned shared by a number of Catholics. Lord Acton, on papal infallibility: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means.").

One has to learn to have faith in the institution without faith in any of its individual members or leaders, at least not absolute faith. Protestant churches have leadership and hierarchy--even congregationalist churches not affiliated with a larger denomination--but the leadership only gets a presumption of correctness, and the presumption is defeasible (The sorts of Protestant churches that have big scandals are the ones where this presumption is forgotten, and one individual accrues too much power and is no longer questioned). It is well understood that this requires a higher level of attention from individual churchgoers, but what this costs in time and energy is repaid in other ways. At the fellowship I used to attend in graduate school (called GCF) used to say, "there's no GCF--there's just us". If you want something done, don't wait around for someone else to make it happen--go get it started yourself.

I would guess a large number of intellectual crushes on Wendell Berry just got significantly more complicated:

He does support Obama’s embrace of gay marriage. “I’m in favor of it, too,” he says. “It’s really only because they’re being denied the benefits of inheritance and so on — otherwise I don’t think it ought to be the government’s business.” He regards the entire debate as a distraction: “I really don’t understand how you can single out homosexuality for opprobrium and wink at fornication and adultery, which the Bible has a lot more to say about. The churches are not going to come out against fornication and adultery because there are too damn many fornicators and adulterers in their congregations.”

In other news, this might finally make him interesting enough to me to be worth reading.

An interesting post on SSM, interesting mostly in that it made something clear to me which I had otherwise not noticed: the debate over same-sex marriage is framed here, and in many similar arguments, as a question of religion, nature, law, culture, or war. What it is not framed as is a question of politics.

The absence of politics is strange, as is the emphasis on principles which can never anywhere be violated. The post is admirable in its commitment to the idea that both sides of the SSM debate are standing on principle and unwilling to compromise. Where it goes off the rails is the suggestion that the unwillingness to compromise is necessary and fundamental:

"The truth about something as important as marriage cannot be the price we pay to live with each other."

The statement is unconvincing because it does not mean what it might obviously be taken to mean: if compromise on marriage is the price we'd pay to live together, and it's not worth paying that price, we should not live together. In addition to being unconvincing, it's opposed to all the basic understandings of how to live in a modern polity. Rawls argues, to my mind correctly, in the introduction to Political Liberalism that the modern political project is launched as a response to the problem of plurality: how do we get people who don't agree on many things to live together? We find deeper, more fundamental principles on which they can agree (these are usually procedural or regulative principles) and build a society that focuses on those. The view expressed in the post is claiming that even a modus vivendi is impossible.

Except, so far as I can tell, that's not the claim: the suggestion is not that the United States should be dissolved, and each side allowed to regroup and found whatever marriage laws it likes. The claim is that, because compromise is impossible, my side should win an absolute victory. It encourages a rhetoric of threatening to take one's ball home unless one gets the ruling one wants; and this seems to me to be antithetical to any vision of pluralist politics, much less liberal or democratic norms. Even the classic examples of people who 'refused to compromise' were flexible on a number of political and policy expressions of their inflexible beliefs: the legislative and institutional histories of abolitionism and the civil rights movement demonstrate this well enough. I myself incline to a Blankenhorn-ish view of the underlying policy questions, in part because I think he understands the politics involved quite well. And, to be clear: the willingness to engage in politics is not compromise, or surrender, or attempting to curry the favor of powerful people in DC or elsewhere: it's choosing to engage in the most basic of obligations of a citizen.



(One of the odd features of conservative commentary on SSM that has been pushing things away from politics is the rise of the 'religious liberty' argument. The right or liberty in question is usually taken to be absolute, to function as a trump, and so to make any attempt to arrange trade-offs involving that right to be impermissible. Except, in my experience of dealing with human rights, there are almost no rights that are conceived of as being immune to trade-offs in all circumstances. The fact that the liberty exists doesn't tell us anything about whether a trade-off is acceptable in a particular case.)

(Also, given how much paragraph 3 of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration: "The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State," is quoted these days, it might be worth looking over the original meaning and legislative intent of the framers, especially with reference to paragraph 1, "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution," which was intended to extend marriage rights to the maximum set of people possible, and put as few conditions on marriage as possible. Obviously, no one particularly had SSM in mind, but as study will show, the clause was intended to have the broadest possible meaning, a fact not lost on Saudi Arabia, who abstained from the final vote on the UDHR specifically because they were aware of this intended broadness.)

Rarely do I have much to say about a post that I first saw linked on Postmodern Conservative, but this complain about the dating habits of twentysomething men demands a response:

It is sometimes, though not always, the case that amongst twentysomething women, the author of the post in question very much included, that the identity of the man they are to marry is the last, and least consequential, of the details that will determine their future happiness. They are, on their own account, smart, funny, gifted with appropriate social graces, professionally successful, but happy to give all that up to be someone's obedient wife and mother of their children. Because they are, in all these respects, complete and ready to be married, they fail to understand why it has not happened for them yet, why all the nice and supposedly serious men out there have failed to notice their many captivating qualities and just up and proposed. The worst are those men who will date them once, or twice, or for awhile, and never be prepared to commit. This failure can only be explained by some sort of generational malady, a problem with Men These Days.

Dear readers, it is a fine example of the Nice Girl trope, no less annoying that its companion Nice Guy trope: if I want to get married and there's nothing wrong with me, there must be something wrong with all the people of the other sex who fail to appreciate me. There are obvious and important differences between the situation for men and women, because the societal expectations of men and women are different, but the solution in each case appears to be more self-examination, rather than looking to the world to see what's wrong with it.

The difference between this and other equivalent instances is the role religion plays in justifying this whole system. Christianity has a difficult time dealing with single, post-college people. I have never been to a church that doesn't struggle with this problem. College-age kids can have a standard youth ministry: married people are functionally equivalent no matter what their age is. Single people are problematic because they don't like family-oriented activities and don't like to travel around in one big herd. They have busy professional lives and different social activities. They are not an easy group to deal with.

This is compounded by the tricky place of singles within Christian ethics. The New Testament conceives of people who are married, and importantly conceives of people who might be single intentionally and for their entire lives. There are no precedents for people who are single only for awhile. Ironically, the problem is worse for Catholics than Protestants because, as the post-writer points out, marriage being a sacrament designed to be complementary to taking on holy orders and the two intended to be universal and mutually exclusive, every obedient Catholic has to have one or the other. The men who are not marrying her are actively denying her a grace she might otherwise have. Ironically, the Protestant model, for all the trouble it has with the "intentionally single for life" category, is in a better position, because it can at least conceive a flexible roles and intermediate stages in the lives of non-marrieds.

There's one other difficulty that's worth mentioning here: the problem of viewing marriage as a set of roles that vary little from one marriage to the next. One of the problems with the Nice Girl view is that it begins from the assumption that the woman is basically set and won't need to change; the man can be any man who will fill the role appropriately. And the conservative Christian view of marriage, Catholic and Protestant, encourages women to think of it this way: once they are ready they meet a man who is ready and get married. The alternative is the view that relationships are between two people whose strengths and weaknesses imperfectly correspond to the roles they are 'supposed' to play. A woman doesn't earn or deserve a man because she is ready to be married, any more than a man deserves a woman because he wants to be in a relationship: at the very least, they neither have earned nor deserve the particular human being they are dating, or want to date. If desert enters into the situation at all, it can only be after a period of adjusting to the person they are with. But desert certainly doesn't enter into the situation: spouses are not a prize to be won, and merit doesn't matter.

While I am generally in support of the argument about marriage elaborated on here, I think it misses the essence of what the term "traditional marriage" is supposed to represent.

The key mistake made by most people who attempt to show that religious, legal, and social forms of marriage have changed over time is to assume that "traditional" means something like "historical," when it means no such thing to the people who use it. It suffices for those of us who find historical argumentation convincing that the meanings and purposes of marriage have changed significantly over time--e.g. that marriage was not public and legal until the Lutherans decided it should be--but that's not the argument that's being made (nor is it entirely correct to say that the preferred conservative conception of marriage is a 1950s Father Knows Best-style marriage).

"Tradition" as it gets employed here (and elsewhere) has two elements to it: a particular claim about nature, and a claim about what is essential to the definition and what isn't. The nature claim is that men and women were created as distinct sexes with particular roles to play in child-rearing, and that it is significant that only the male-female combination can create future life. From this follows the claim that because this biological reality is so apparent, all societies have recognized the necessity of carving out a special protected status to reinforce and support procreation in this way. Societies have added or subtracted additional requirements over time, but the central role of protecting those who would procreate remains. Therefore SSM is a threat to marriage, or cannot be marriage, and therefore also the variations made to particular marriage laws do not represent anything about the institution itself (indeed, though I've never seen this argument made, the wide variety of legal understandings of marriage seems to underscore the point that any meddling in the definition of marriage apart from giving protected status to couples who might procreate causes unnecessary problems).

Now, the problem is that this doesn't work unless you accept the underlying premise: that couples who can procreate deserve special protections from the state, and because laws have to be general, all heterosexual couples have to be included, and that there are no other sufficient reasons to grant similar protections to anyone else. And it's this that I think is and will be the largest source of trouble (states give out privileges all the time for all kinds of reasons; arguing that someone categorically shouldn't get privileges being given to comparable others is always going to be a problem).

It requires a certain (high) level of mental and emotional balance to maintain equilibrium when things are not going your way. This is as fine an example of that as I can imagine:

Here’s the thing: People are fallible, and people are sinful, but most of us aren’t just purely evil. The people who oppose you on this or any issue are complex people who, in most cases, just haven’t fully understood where you’re coming from or why it’s important. If you dismiss them as evil/bigoted/homophobic/stupid/whatever, what you’ve just done is to destroy your own ability to change their minds. The only effective way to change people’s minds is to first do the work to understand where they’re coming from and then work to educate them about the things they don’t yet understand.

It's disappointing to see how many people have failed at just this thing after Amendment One passed. This applies equally to my liberal friends who equate religious belief with bigotry, and my conservative friends who have taken the occasion of a substantial electoral victory to declare themselves a persecuted minority and behave in a most ungracious and arrogant manner.

On the one hand, I think Ross Douthat's argument here is pretty offensive, in its suggestion that secular morality is always and only reducible to Christian morality. On the other, Julian Sanchez here attempts to make the argument that moral reasoning never relies on religious thinking, or if it does so, it can only complicate things unnecessarily. It seems obvious to me that both positions are wrong: Christian moral philosophy does well to note the intellectual debts it owes to non-Christian traditions, and also that liberalism is not itself a debased form of Christian belief; the secular position does well to recognize that however optional the God thesis may seem to be now, it was (and is) frequently not perceived to be as such, and this may be something other than a millennia-long intellectual mistake.

Douthat:

Indeed, it’s completely obvious that absent the Christian faith, there would be no liberalism at all. No ideal of universal human rights without Jesus’ radical upending of social hierarchies (including his death alongside common criminals on the cross). No separation of church and state without the gospels’ “render unto Caesar” and St. Augustine’s two cities. No liberal confidence about the march of historical progress without the Judeo-Christian interpretation of history as an unfolding story rather than an endlessly repeating wheel.

And what’s more, to me, contemporary liberals’ obsession with the supposed backwardness of Christian sexual ethics—an obsession that far outstrips sex’s actual role in the preaching and practice of Christian faith—reflects a subconscious liberal knowledge that Christianity is their theological mother, and they’re its half-rebellious child. You can see in it the child’s characteristic desire to finally overthrow the last bastion of parental authority, joined to a continued desire for the parent’s approval for their choices and beliefs.

It's not completely obvious to me: Douthat wants to reduce the entire history of ethics to Christian ethics, and conservative Catholic ethics, at that. But it seems to me just as easy to get liberalism out of, say, Judaism (see Walzer's Exodus and Revolution as a test case), or, as Peter Euben has argued, out of Greek drama. Not a straight path historically, but not entirely out of the question either. And this is to say nothing of the actual influence of Jewish, Islamic, Greek, and other modes of thought, without which quote-unquote 'Christian' ethics would not have some of their characteristic features (see, e.g., 'virtue ethics'). And, yet further, while some of the founding figures of liberalism were certainly Christians--Locke springs to mind--they were certainly not orthodox Christians, or at least not orthodox in the sense Douthat wants. And let's not even talk about, say, Spinoza. The idea that much of liberalism emerges out of Christianity seems to me to be correct; the claim that this means it is nothing but a weakened form of Christianity seems obviously wrong.

Sanchez:

Ross is certainly correct that we owe a debt to thinkers in the Christian tradition—who in turn owe one to pagan thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome—but it’s far less clear that the value of their contributions rests crucially on their theistic metaphysical trappings. Aquinas thought that moral law could be derived by human reason from reflection on natural facts. John Locke may have peppered his political philosophy with a generous dose of theology, but it’s not at all obvious that what was always most interesting and compelling in his arguments requires supernatural support. For that matter, Newton was famously quite devout, and thought the physical laws he described ordained by God. But it turns out that F=MA even after you reject that premise: Physical law (like moral law?) does not require a lawgiver. None of which is to deny there’s plenty of hard problems left for modern moral philosophers to solve, but they’re mostly problems that were obscured rather than seriously addressed by theology.

The Locke sentence seems to me to be an actual, no-fooling case of begging the question: by stipulating that it's only what is "most interesting and compelling in his arguments" that matters, and allowing this to be, one presumes, those matters of greatest intellectual interest to Sanchez, then it's obvious that this will not include any of his theological reflections because they are assumed at the beginning to be additions that obscure, rather than 'seriously address,' moral questions. Walzer, to bring him up again, has a sentence near the beginning of "The Problem of Dirty Hands" in which he says "if popular attitudes are resistant to utilitarianism (and they are), there might be something to learn from that and not simply something to explain about it." It seems to me the same applies here: if the greatest minds in moral philosophy for a thousand years or more think that theological matters have some bearing on moral matters, there may be something to learn from that other than claiming that they obviously have not understood the point of the Euthyphro.