This is why gay marriage negates Christian
cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and
other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the
post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.
It also remains to be seen whether we
can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity. Sociologist
Christian Smith’s research on what he has termed “moralistic therapeutic
deism”—the feelgood, pseudo-Christianity that has supplanted the
normative version of the faith in contemporary America—suggests that the
task will be extremely difficult.
Conservative Christians have lost the
fight over gay marriage and, as we have seen, did so decades before
anyone even thought same-sex marriage was a possibility. Gay-marriage
proponents succeeded so quickly because they showed the public that what
they were fighting for was consonant with what most post-1960s
Americans already believed about the meaning of sex and marriage. The
question Western Christians face now is whether or not they are going to
lose Christianity altogether in this new dispensation.
Too
many of them think that same-sex marriage is merely a question of
sexual ethics. They fail to see that gay marriage, and the concomitant
collapse of marriage among poor and working-class heterosexuals, makes
perfect sense given the autonomous individualism sacralized by modernity
and embraced by contemporary culture—indeed, by many who call
themselves Christians. They don’t grasp that Christianity, properly
understood, is not a moralistic therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois
individualism—a common response among American Christians, one denounced
by Rieff in 2005 as “simply pathetic”—but is radically opposed to the
cultural order (or disorder) that reigns today.
They are fighting the culture war
moralistically, not cosmologically. They have not only lost the culture,
but unless they understand the nature of the fight and change their
strategy to fight cosmologically, within a few generations they may also
lose their religion.
“The death of a culture begins when its
normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain
inwardly compelling,” Rieff writes. By that standard, Christianity in
America, if not American spirituality, is in mortal danger. The future
is not foreordained: Taylor shares much of Rieff’s historical analysis
but is more hopeful about the potential for renewal. Still, if the faith
does not recover, the historical autopsy will conclude that gay
marriage was not a cause but a symptom, the sign that revealed the
patient’s terminal condition.
Extract of Rod Dreher blogs at www.theamericanconservative.