7
The Goddess of Choice Is Dead
From Social Contract to Social Meltdown
When seminary student Philip Holck got married, his wedding ceremony included two sets of vows: the first with his bride, the second with her five-year-old son. Kneeling to face the boy, he said, “I, Philip, take you, Matthew, to be my son, to join with you, to share my life with you, to play with you, to teach and love you until death parts us.”1
It is a touching story, but theologian Ted Peters twists it to support a new and dangerous view of the family. He argues that every parent should be required to make an explicit, articulated legal contract with each of their children—preferably with a public ceremony akin to a wedding.
The foundation of the family, he says, must shift from biology to contract.
Until recently, the standard in law and in the public mind was the biological family. Of course, there are couples who generously reach out to adopt children who are not biologically related to them. But the reason adoption works is that parents take the natural family as the norm. They strive to treat their adopted children as if they were biological offspring. Adoption does not deny the value of biological bonds but presupposes it.
Peters wants to turn that around. He wants to require even biological parents to make a legal contract with each child. Biological ties would no longer be the norm. Parents would treat their biological children as if they were adopted. The basis of the family would be transformed from biology to choice.2
Peters teaches at a Lutheran theological seminary, yet surprisingly he says we must jettison Christian morality as “outmoded” and “prescientific.” In fact, he says we must reject “any premodern formalism based on divine dicta or traditional authority or natural law that would try to make an end run around choice.”
Even “divine dicta”—God’s laws? Yes. Peters writes, “Whether we like it or not, the end of the road for a disintegrating liberal society is individual choice. There is no escape.” He adds sternly that it does no good to “whimper about individual choice and decry the pursuit of self-fulfillment. These are simply the cultural givens of our epoch.”3
As we have seen in earlier chapters, the elevation of choice over biology has indeed become “the cultural givens” in regard to life and sexuality—both for secularists and for Christians who take their lead from secular thinking. In those chapters, we focused on how the two-tiered body/person dualism affects the individual. Now we turn to how the same dualism damages relationships, especially how it disparages the biological ties within the family. Peters is joined by many other prominent thinkers advocating that the basis of the family should be shifted from biology to contract. Where did that idea come from? Is it really a good idea to elevate choice to the defining feature of family relationships?
Raising the question of relationships takes us into social theory. In this chapter, we uncover the social and political philosophy that shapes many people’s thinking, even if they are not consciously aware of it—both in the West and wherever Western ideas are disseminated around the globe. It is a theory that downplays natural communities like the family in favor of communities built on choice or contract. As a result, it represents yet another expression of Western society’s devaluation of the body and biological bonds—with disastrous consequences.
It seems pretty obvious that if the foundation of the family were transferred to choice, children would be cut adrift, without any moral claim on their own parents. The implication is that parents are not responsible in any special way for their own children unless they choose to be. Does anyone really believe parents would be more committed to their children if they thought they had no natural obligation to them?
The ideology of choice also has ominous political implications. For if children must be chosen, if they do not belong to their biological parents as gifts from God, to whom do they belong? Answer: the state. If you read scholars like Peters carefully, you consistently find statism lurking as an underlying assumption. In one passage, Peters writes, “Society places its children in the care of rearing parents as a trust.”4
Stop right there: Society gives us children? Society gives us its children? This view reduces both parents and children to atomistic dependents on the state.
Statism has been a recurring theme in treatments of the family since the dawn of Western culture. To an astonishing degree, Western political and social thought has been hostile to the role of the family in proposed visions of the ideal society. Secular intellectuals from Plato to Rousseau to B. F. Skinner to Hillary Clinton have been enamored with the idea of putting the child directly under the care of the state. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century—erected by Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Mao—all sought tight state control of education, down to the earliest years, to inculcate unquestioning acceptance of the regime’s ideology.
History shows clearly that when biological bonds are downplayed in favor of choice, individuals end up forfeiting choice to the state. Demanding freedom from natural relationships means losing freedom to the state.
The Abolition of Marriage
Despite the testimony of history, leading thinkers today continue to call for demolishing family bonds in favor of contracts. The internationally renowned feminist legal theorist Martha Albertson Fineman, in her book The Autonomy Myth, calls for “the abolition of marriage as a legal category” to be replaced by contracts. Fineman wants to replace the words husband and wife with the gender-free term “sexual affiliate” and to replace families with state-subsidized “caretaker-dependent relationships.”5
In a similar vein, influential British sociologist Anthony Giddens says marriage and family should require separate contracts, with each individual parent signing a contract with each individual child.6
What exactly is a contract? It is a limited exchange of goods and services. Its defining feature is that in a contract, we define the relationship, we choose the terms, we choose the conditions under which we stay or leave, and so on. The terms and conditions are not preset by God or moral law or human nature. If the agreement no longer yields the desired benefits, it can be terminated. A contract is a deal we strike with others, which we can make or break at will.7
That idea resonates today because, in practical life, many of our relationships are contracts: our mortgages, leases, and cell phone plans. In a contract, we say, I will give you something (money) and in return you will give me a service or product. If it is defective, I can return it. It is psychologically easy for people to extend the contract model to all relationships. The economic metaphor tends to cannibalize all other relationships.
By contrast, the Bible presents our deepest relationships—with God and with our families—as covenants. In a covenant, we do not agree to perform a service but rather we acquire a status: as child of God, as husband or wife, as mother or father. We do not agree to provide a product; we pledge our very selves, for better or for worse. A covenant is not limited in duration; it is forever. And we do not set our own terms: They are already defined. We accept an array of obligations and responsibilities that are prior to our choice, defined by God, expressed in the moral law, and based on human nature as God created it.
This whole-person commitment is what we lose when we redefine all relationships as contracts. Our relationships become thin, fragile, self-interested, and easily broken.
Beginning with Atom
Why, then, do so many leading thinkers today urge us to redefine all relationships as contracts? Where did the idea come from that society should treat individuals as independent agents establishing contracts based on choice? That idea has a history, and we will respond more effectively if we understand that history.
From time immemorial, the most basic human relationships were regarded as intrinsic to human nature. It is natural for people of the opposite sex to be drawn to one another and raise children together. Despite the richly varied norms and rituals that surround marriage, the nuclear family has formed the core of society. In classic Christian social thought, it was God who established marriage, family, church, and state, and who defined their essential nature—their tasks, responsibilities, and moral norms.
Then, in early modern Europe, the novel idea arose that human relationships were neither natural nor intrinsic to human nature—that humans invented them, and therefore humans could change them. Where did this strange idea come from?
After the scientific revolution, people were so impressed by its astonishing success that many began to apply what they thought was a scientific worldview to every other field of knowledge—including social theory. The apex of the scientific revolution was Newtonian physics, which pictured the material world as atoms bumping around in the void under the forces of attraction and repulsion. The same metaphor was soon applied to the social world as well. Social philosophers constructed what they called a “social physics” modeled on Newtonian physics. Civil society was pictured as so many human “atoms” who come together and “bond” in various social relationships.8
This image gave rise to what is called social contract theory, first proposed by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is at the core of classical liberalism, which gave rise to both what Americans call liberalism and conservatism. Thus it has impact across the entire political spectrum.9 Today most Americans absorb social contract theory with the very air they breathe. A Princeton professor says it is the unconscious assumption that students bring into the classroom: “Without ever having read a word of Locke, they could reproduce his notion of the social contract without a doubt in the world.”10
Since this is the theory that gave rise to the contractual model of civil society, it is crucial to get a handle on what it says—and the way it is undermining marriage and family today.11
The goal of the social contract theorists—Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau—was to start over from scratch and rethink civil society from the ground up. They hypothesized what human nature would be like if we strip away the accumulated centuries of morals, laws, customs, traditions, social institutions, and religions (especially religions). If we pare away all the marks of civilization as with a scalpel until we reach bare human nature itself, what is left?
The social contract theorists imagined some time in the misty past, prior to all civilization, when humans supposedly existed in an original, primordial, pre-social condition. This they called the “state of nature.” As yet there was no marriage, no family, no church, no state, no civil society. All that existed were disconnected, autonomous individuals, driven purely by self-preservation. These were the “atoms” that pre-exist all social institutions.
In the beginning was the atomistic individual. Hobbes even asks us to “look at men as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other.”12
And if humans originally pop up like mushrooms, with no natural obligations, where do social relationships come from? Answer: They are created by choice. Like Newton’s atoms, individuals come together and bond in various arrangements when they find that doing so advances their interest.
What are the implications of this physics-based metaphor? First, it means relationships are not part of human nature as it existed originally. Instead they are secondary, derivative, created by choice. And if they are created by choice, the implication is that they can be re-created by choice. We can redefine them any way we want.
Second, social duties are no longer thought to arise from moral principles such as justice or the common good. Instead they are based on utilitarian grounds—when people decide it is in their interest to contract away some of their rights. Society is merely an aggregate of individuals asserting their desires. The sole source of moral obligations is the individual will.
In this way, social contract theory reduces all relationships to, well, contracts. It has become an acid dissolving all organic or natural bonds that transcend sheer choice. Its basic tenet is that no individual can have an obligation to which they have not consented. This vision is always presented in terms of liberating the individual from the oppression of convention, tradition, class, and the dead hand of the past. That’s why Rousseau’s most influential work, The Social Contract, opens with the famous line, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The contract was seen as the only appropriate basis for a free society because it is based on choice and thus preserves the original autonomy enjoyed in the hypothetical state of nature.
A Secular Garden of Eden
When social contract theorists first proposed the concept of a state of nature, it was clearly an alternative to the account of origins in Genesis. Political philosopher John Hallowell calls it a secularized version of “the Christian myth of the Garden of Eden.”13 Standing at the dawn of modernity, these thinkers sensed that in order to propose a new political philosophy, they had to ground it in a new creation account. Instead of recognizing social structures as ordained and defined by God, the new myth treated them as inventions of human will.
Political philosopher George Grant says the social contract theorists were “substituting the state of nature for the createdness of nature as the primal truth.” They were “giving up the doctrine of creation.”14
At first, the contract model was applied primarily to the public realm of politics and economics. As political philosopher Michael Zuckert explains, the claim “that all governments rest on consent is another way of saying that all government is a human artifact.”15 The implication is that the state is not ordained by God or rooted in human nature. It is created by the consent of isolated, autonomous individuals calculating their self-interest.
Today the contract model is bleeding into the private realm. After all, if “we the people” can create our own government through contract, then why can’t “we the people” create our own definition of marriage, family, and every other social institution as well?16 Political philosopher Michael Sandel of Harvard says the prevailing concept of the individual today is the “unencumbered self,” by which he means “unencumbered by moral or civic ties they have not chosen.”17
The same philosophy is being embedded in law. In Rights Talk, Catholic law professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard says American law is now shaped by social contract theory’s depiction of “the ‘natural’ human person as a solitary creature.” It is “based on an image of the rights-bearer as a self-determining, unencumbered individual, a being connected to others only by choice.”18
Yet as we will see through the rest of this chapter, the contractual view of marriage and family has disastrous consequences. In particular, says Sandel, it has led to the massive abandonment of children. Shocking numbers of fathers desert their families; millions of mothers abort their children. The vast majority of child abuse cases are at the hands of a genetically unrelated male—a stepfather or the mother’s boyfriend.19 And as family bonds grow more fragile, the state takes over more of the family’s functions, growing ever more powerful and oppressive.
Contractual thinking has become an acid corroding organic and natural communities.
We Are Not Robinson Crusoe
What makes social contract theory so corrosive? The central problem is that it favors acts of consent over natural or organic bonds. It is therefore yet another expression of Western society’s negative view of our embodied existence—its Gnostic devaluation of the body. As Oliver O’Donovan says, liberalism “has followed the path of devaluing natural communities in favour of those created by acts of will.”20
The social institutions of marriage and family are rooted in nature—in the natural fact that humans are embodied creatures who reproduce sexually; that mothers devote a large part of their mature life to pregnancy, lactation, and child care; that during that period, they need the economic support of the father; that children are helpless and socially needy, taking a long period of time to mature, which means they require a stable, long-term commitment of love and support from both parents. Finally, families are connected to biological networks of grandparents, aunts, and uncles because the nuclear family needs the support of a wider community. These are basic facts of nature. As Hallowell writes, “Individuals do not create society but are born into it. . . . And that fact alone imposes obligations.” These obligations do not require our formal consent. They are not “a matter of choice but a matter of fact.”21
Because these are facts of nature, people’s attitude toward the family (not any particular family but the social institution itself) reflects their attitude toward nature. Do they regard nature as inherently good, a source of commitments and obligations that are beneficial and enriching? Or do they treat nature as a set of negative constraints on their independence and autonomy—limits from which they aspire to be liberated?
Social contract theory is based on the autonomous individual, apart from any natural relationships. The atomistic creature running around under the trees appears to be an independent, fully developed adult—say, a twenty-one-year-old male. But this Robinson Crusoe image is not true of anyone. Contrary to Hobbes, we do not pop up overnight like mushrooms after a rain. Each of us begins life as a dependent, helpless baby, born into a pre-existing family, clan, church, town, and nation. We grow into mature adults only because other people, especially our parents, commit to us sacrificially—to love, teach, and care for us.
Contrary to what Rousseau said, we are not “born free.” Humans are intrinsically social beings who thrive on interdependence and nurturing. As philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenal noted, social contract theories “are the views of childless men who must have forgotten their childhood.”22 A realistic political theory must begin not with rational adults calculating their interests but with the helpless infant who needs a network of love and care to become a rational adult.23
Christianity teaches that nature came from the hand of God, and thus natural bonds are good. The commandment to “honor your father and your mother” (Exod. 20:12) points to the truth that societies are based on the foundation of the male/female couple and their children. Of course, humans are more than biological beings. We are also emotional, intellectual, and spiritual beings. And when the family is functioning as it ought, it provides an ideal that reaches beyond the limits of blood and kin. Jesus said, “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt. 12:50). The metaphor Jesus uses—that Christians are brothers and sisters—assumes a radically positive view of the family. Our experience of familial love is meant to “school” us in the sacrificial love that binds us to one another in the family of God. The bonds of biology train us to extend love beyond biology.
That’s why we should be concerned that the acids of autonomy are dissolving biologically based bonds. We are losing the “school” that trains us how to function with love and responsibility beyond the family. Consider a few key issues, starting with abortion.
The Fetus as Alien Intruder
Many ethicists have developed arguments in favor of abortion claiming that we have no obligations to others unless we consent to them. The mother’s body is not treated as naturally oriented toward her child. Instead motherhood is redefined on the model of a social contract—as though the baby in the womb were a trespasser on the mother’s private property and required a formal agreement to continue living. One feminist wrote, “I own my body and I decide what I allow to grow in it.”24
Some arguments go so far as to present the pre-born child as though it were an aggressor that must be stopped from injuring the mother. An article on the leftist Daily Kos blog puts it bluntly: “A fetus is a damn parasite and it invades the mother’s body like one, too.” On a more academic level, political scientist Eileen McDonagh writes that if the fetus “makes a woman pregnant without her consent, it severely violates her bodily integrity and liberty. . . . The fetus’s imposition constitutes injuries sufficient to justify the use of deadly force to stop it.”25 Abortion is treated as an act of self-defense against an intruder.
It is not true, however, that we acquire responsibilities toward people only by consenting to them. We also acquire responsibilities to those we are biologically connected to—not only our children but also our parents, brothers, sisters, and grandparents. As philosophers Patrick Lee and Robert George sum up: “To ignore or downplay these bodily connections that generate specific responsibilities—claiming that all duties arise from acts of consent—is another manifestation of a general disregard for the significance of the bodily nature of human persons.”26 That is, it is another manifestation of the two-level body/person dualism. A low view of the body leads to a denigration of biological bonds.
Biological relationships transcend mere rational choice. Consider mother-infant bonding. During pregnancy, the mother’s body produces oxytocin, the bonding hormone, which primes her to form a close attachment to her newborn.27 “I have never been a baby person. I could take them or leave them,” my friend Patricia Samuelsen told me. “But when my first child was placed in my arms, there was an explosion of emotion unlike anything I had experienced before.”
I had the same experience when I gave birth to my first child. Many new mothers report being completely unprepared for the intensity of the emotional bond that overwhelms them.
Father-infant bonding can be equally intense. Studies find that holding their baby stimulates the release of oxytocin in fathers.28 A new father wrote that when he held his newborn son for the first time, “it was as if my very brain chemistry itself changed dramatically, as I realized that the glorious creature I held in my arms would now be the most important thing in my life, a sacred responsibility.”29
His article was titled “Fatherhood Killed the Cynic in Me.”
One of my students, Will Roberts, describes a similar experience. As a college student, he got his seventeen-year-old girlfriend pregnant. Because the university was an hour’s drive away from home, in his words, “I was not really involved in her pregnancy. I was at college just hanging out and having fun, putting all my time and energy into my classes.” But when he accompanied his girlfriend to the hospital for the birth of their baby, he was astonished by the intensity of his emotions: “The moment my son was born, my entire mindset and love changed, and at the point I held him for the first time, it was over. I was head over heels in love with our son! He was a miracle from God and I could not explain my unconditional love for him.” The intense experience bound the couple together and they decided to marry.
This depth of connection is not a product of mere rational choice. It is something far deeper. It is rooted in our nature.
Our natural bonds make moral demands on us that inspire us to grow and mature. In the classic movie The Magnificent Seven, a gunman played by Charles Bronson tells a group of village boys, “You think I’m brave because I carry a gun. Well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility: for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. . . . They do it because they love you, and they want to. I have never had this kind of courage.”30
When we accept the moral responsibilities that stem from our natural bonds, our character deepens. We become brave. We acquire courage.
Lines of Descent
It’s true that biological ties represent a limitation on our freedom. We do not choose our parents; we do not choose our siblings; we do not choose to be born within a particular time, place, kinship group, ethnic group, or nationality; we do not choose who our children are. Yet these unchosen bonds form a significant aspect of our identity. We cannot deny them without losing a part of who we are. As Meilander puts it, we are not just “free spirits but embodied creatures. Lines of kinship and descent locate and identify us.”31
Moreover, we are called to be thankful for these biological bonds: to honor the parents we have not chosen and to love the children we have not chosen, receiving them as gifts from the hand of God. We learn to love by first loving those who are given to us in these lines of kinship. The question is, do we accept that “givenness” or do we reject it?
My husband was adopted from a German orphanage, and when our first son was born, it was the first time he had the opportunity to see someone biologically related to himself, sharing some of his physical traits. It was life-changing for him. Yet it is an experience most of us take for granted. We rarely reflect consciously on how much our identity is shaped by being integrated biologically and genetically into an extended family. My husband is deeply grateful to his adoptive parents. Yet it was an emotionally moving experience when he sensed for the first time a biological connection to another family member.
We are not merely disembodied wills. We are biological creatures who procreate “after our kind.” The family provides a rich metaphor for the kingdom of God precisely because it is the primary experience we have of an obligation that transcends mere rational choice and is constitutive of our very nature.
Sex without Strings, Relationship without Rings
In marriage, too, we see the deadly fruit of the atomistic, contractual view of society. To be sure, marriage begins in consent—but it is consent to enter into a covenant, not a contract. In a covenant, we do not merely agree to perform specified services for a limited period of time. Instead we pledge our very selves, “for better or for worse, until death do us part.” We promise to sacrificially care for any children that result from the marital union.
To use modern language, marriage is a social institution. The term means that when we enter into marriage, we accept a set of rights and obligations that pre-exist our personal choices. Just as we know what behavior is acceptable in school or at work, so the institution of marriage tells us what kind of behavior is acceptable toward our spouse and children. In this way, when we marry, we submit to external expectations that help us reach our own highest ideals. Public institutions lend strength to our private commitments.
By contrast, a contractual view of marriage turns each person into an independent transacting party seeking his or her own enlightened self-interest—akin to the autonomous individual in the state of nature. Indeed, Rousseau’s description of the temporary, impersonal sexual liaisons that supposedly occurred in the state of nature sounds eerily like today’s hookup culture: “Males and females united fortuitously,” he writes, “and they separated with the same ease.”32 When these disconnected individuals do marry, they treat marriage as a contract for meeting their own needs. (Since the rise of no-fault divorce, marriage is actually less than a contract: Under other contracts, at least there are legal penalties for breaking the agreement, whereas in no-fault divorce, the wronged party has no recourse.)
Judge Richard Posner, the most cited legal theorist of all time, spells out in a striking way the implications of the contractual view. The difference between marriage and prostitution is “not fundamental,” he writes. In “marriage, the participants can compensate each other for services performed by performing reciprocal services, so they need not bother with pricing each service, keeping books of account, and so forth.” Prostitution is simply a case of those same services being traded for ready money.33
People may not like this view of marriage, but many have accepted the contractual view that inevitably leads to it.
Some pundits are even starting to express outright hostility toward marriage. An article in the New Republic says, “The current model of lifelong, cohabiting monogamous partnership has never been such an outdated ideal. . . . I would rather retain my single status with a few rewarding lovers to fulfill different needs at different times of my life.”34
Because marriage is being painted in such negative hues, not surprisingly, fewer people are getting married. In 2016, census data showed that the rate of marriage has been declining steadily since 1960.35 A study from the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University found that many of today’s young adults are deciding that saying “I do” has become too risky—that it’s not worth the trade-off involved in giving up their autonomy. “Today’s singles mating culture is not oriented to marriage,” the study says. “Instead it is best described as a low-commitment culture of ‘sex without strings, relationship without rings.’”36
Support Science? Support the Family
Yet the data from social science shows incontrovertibly that a non-marriage culture has tragic consequences. Children of unmarried or divorced parents are far more likely to suffer emotional, behavioral, and health problems. They are at higher risk for crime, poverty, depression, suicide, school difficulties, unmarried pregnancy, and drug and alcohol abuse. One study found that the absence of fathers during childhood may even lead to brain defects: “This is the first time research findings have shown that paternal deprivation during development affects the neurobiology of the offspring.”37
Liberals sometimes argue that children do not really need their own parents, they just need another adult in the home to provide a second paycheck and a second set of hands for caretaking—in which case, children’s needs can be met by cohabitation or by remarriage after divorce. But surprisingly, studies find that neither cohabitation nor remarriage offers the same measurable benefits as marriage. One study concludes, “The advantage of marriage appears to exist primarily when the child is the biological offspring of both parents.” Even the left-leaning research institute Child Trends had to admit, “It is not simply the presence of two parents . . . but the presence of two biological parents that seems to support children’s development.”38
Two Princeton sociologists conclude, “If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children’s basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent ideal.”39 Those who respect science the most should also be the most pro-marriage.
Of course, there are encouraging exceptions. Adoptive parents take on daunting challenges, often overcoming the impact of trauma and neglect in a child’s early years. Godly single parents can also accomplish wonders. (People like the renowned brain surgeon Ben Carson, who was raised by a single mother, give eloquent proof of that.) Nevertheless, the statistical trend is undeniable. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says, “The collapse of marriage has created a new form of poverty, concentrated among single parent families.” This trend is creating a divide in American society that is as deep as the historic racial divide, Sacks says, and “the injustice of it all cries to heaven.” It will go down in history as a tragic example of the arrogance of thinking “we know better than the ages, and can defy the lessons of biology and history.”40
In the past, most poverty had economic causes: unemployment and low wages. Today, most poverty has moral causes: family breakdown and non-marital childbearing. The children of unmarried or divorced parents are more likely to require social services through the educational system, the healthcare system, the mental health system, the welfare system, and the criminal justice system. All these interventions are intrusive and costly. A 2008 study found that divorce and unwed childbearing cost taxpayers $112 billion each year.41 The nanny state does not come cheap.
The upshot is that as marriage weakens, the state grows more invasive and more expensive. And as the state regulates ever more aspects of family life, citizens lose their freedoms.
Because the costs of marriage breakdown are borne by the entire society, it is reasonable for the entire society to work together to support marriage. On purely rational grounds, marriage is the least restrictive and most economical means for a society to ensure that children are well taken care of. If you care about children, and if you care about freedom, you should work to create a strong marriage culture.
Why Marriage Is “Uniquely Dangerous”
Children are not the only ones who suffer from marriage breakdown. So do adults. Statistically, those who divorce suffer higher rates of alcoholism, illness, depression, mental illness, and suicide. Though that may not be true of every individual case, the statistical trend is clear. A Yale researcher found that the effect of divorce on your health is the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.42
In developing nations, most health problems are infectious diseases. But in the First World, health problems tend to be related to behavior. Science is giving dramatic confirmation of the wisdom of the biblical view of marriage.
When asked about marriage, Jesus quoted Genesis. The early chapters of Genesis are crucial, because there we learn what was normative for human nature before the entrance of sin into the world. “At the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’” Jesus said, then added, “So they are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matt. 19:4, 6).
What does the phrase “one flesh” mean? Obviously, flesh does not mean simply body, because spouses do not literally become one body. Yet they do become a biological unit. The reason cultures formalize marriage with a multitude of rites, rules, rituals, ceremonies, vows, and promises is that, in marriage, two individuals who are not biologically related are integrated into a biological network. The couple becomes the source of new kinship lines within that network, as they and their children join an interconnected web of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews.
In essence, the nonbiological relationship of marriage must begin to function as though it were a biological relationship—a node in a multigenerational family. In Genesis 2:23, when Adam sees Eve for the first time, he bursts into poetry. “At last! This is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh” (ISV). Elsewhere in Scripture, phrases like this are used for family relationships: Laban tells Jacob, his cousin, “You are my own flesh and blood” (29:14). David tells his tribe, Judah, “You are my relatives, my own flesh and blood” (2 Sam. 19:12). The implication is that marriage functions as the foundation of family relationships—that husband and wife function as if they were a biological unit within the kinship network.
And in one significant sense, they are just that. A couple performs a biological function that is unique to the man-woman relationship: They have children. Most of the things required for life can be performed by individuals on their own. They can walk, eat, sleep, and work. The one thing they cannot do on their own is create children. Creating new life is unique to the male-female relationship, functioning as a biological unit.
For this reason, Eve Tushnet, a writer who identifies as “gay and Catholic,” is nevertheless opposed to same-sex marriage. She points out that opposite-sex unions have serious consequences that same-sex unions do not have—they can create babies. Man-woman “relationships can be either uniquely dangerous or uniquely fruitful. Thus it makes sense to have an institution dedicated to structuring and channeling them.”43
The state has never had a political interest in regulating romantic relationships or any other form of intense emotional relationship. You can form any sort of friendship you want, and you don’t need a license from the state. But the state has always had an interest in regulating marriage. Why? Because it is uniquely generative of new life. It is the biological source of the citizens, workers, voters, teachers, and entrepreneurs without which any society cannot survive.44
Losing a Public Ethic
Tragically, the redefinition of civil marriage to include same-sex unions is destroying whatever is left of a marriage-supportive culture. In the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, the lawyer defending Michigan’s marriage law tried to explain that legal marriage did not develop to give special status to people’s romantic relationships but rather, “It developed to serve purposes that, by their nature, arise from biology”—that is, to protect any children that are conceived when a man and woman engage in sex. But Justice Kennedy airily dismissed biology and declared that the purpose of legal marriage is to protect the “personhood” of same-sex couples. (“It would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right [to marriage].”)
The Court thus enshrined into law the body/person dualism in regard to marriage.
Some argue that the Supreme Court merely expanded marriage to allow more people access to its benefits. But in reality, it de-naturalized marriage. Just like gender (see chapter 6), marriage is being treated as though it has nothing to do with the biological complementarity of the sexes or the biological relationship of parents and children.
The Court’s cavalier dismissal of biology is a common theme in liberal legal reasoning. When Judge Vaughn Walker overturned California’s pro-marriage Proposition 8, he defined marriage as “the state recognition and approval of a couple’s choice to live with each other, to remain committed to one another and to form a household based on their own feelings about one another.”45 There is nothing in this definition about sex. Nothing about having children. The judge did not even say that sex and procreation are one of the purposes of marriage. They are off his list entirely. He defined marriage as a choice based solely on feelings.
The problem with this definition is that it could apply to committed roommates or polygamous unions or multiple other combinations and permutations. It does not acknowledge anything distinctive about marriage.
On a similar note, Evan Wolfson, executive director of the gay rights group Freedom to Marry, defines marriage as a “relationship of love and dedication to another person.”46 Columnist Andrew Sullivan, who identifies as homosexual, defines marriage as “primarily a way in which two adults affirm their emotional commitment to one another.”47
This is an unbelievably insipid definition of marriage. It does not explain what makes marriage different from other emotional commitments. Nor can it explain why marriage makes distinctive demands on us, such as faithfulness, exclusivity, and permanence. Other relationships don’t make those demands. Why should marriage?
Yet this is the definition of marriage the Supreme Court wrote into the law of the land in Obergefell. And in the process, it has undermined marriage for everyone. After all, how strong is a contract based on a purely emotional connection, considering how our emotions fluctuate and change? We are losing a public ethic that puts backbone into people’s private commitments.
“We’re Lying about Marriage”
Tragically, it was only because marriage had already lost much of its distinctive character that it was possible to give same-sex unions the same legal status in the first place. Many heterosexuals have embraced a recreational view of sex, and in the process they have lost the expectation that sex belongs within a marriage relationship characterized by fidelity, exclusivity, and permanence. Katz writes, “As pleasure pursuits, heterosexuality and homosexuality have little to distinguish them. Heterosexuals are more and more like homosexuals, except for the sex of their partners.”48
That’s why political scientist and gay rights activist Dennis Altman calls the acceptance of recreational sex the “homosexualization of America” (in a book by that title). He writes, “Heterosexual ways of life no longer differ essentially from gay and lesbian life modes.”49
In Obergefell, the Supreme Court made that equivalence official: It demoted marriage to nothing but an emotional attachment and pronounced it to be identical for opposite-sex and same-sex couples.
But if marriage is based merely on emotional commitment, what grounds are there for limiting it to same-sex couples? Why not give legal status to other emotional commitments? Where should we draw the line? The burden of proof is now on anyone who wants to limit marriage to any group.
In fact, for some people, that is precisely the purpose. They support marriage for same-sex couples because they regard it as the first step to transforming marriage from a public institution with shared moral expectations to a private choice where anything goes. Judith Stacey, a professor at New York University, writes, “There are few limits to the kind of marriage and kinship patterns people might wish to devise.” For example, “Two friends might decide to marry without basing their bond on erotic or romantic attachment.” Others might form “small-group marriages.”50
Journalist Masha Gessen, who identifies as a lesbian, says the real goal has always been the elimination of marriage altogether. In a widely quoted conference speech, she said, “the institution of marriage should not exist.”
Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there—because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist.51
Cultural commentator Richard Pearcey (who is also my husband) summarizes: “The endgame is not to make marriage equally available to all, but to make it equally unavailable to all.”52
If eliminating marriage is the homosexual movement’s real goal, we are well on our way to meeting it. For if marriage is not based on the biological complementarity of the sexes, there is no rationale for the other norms and obligations connected to marriage, such as permanence, faithfulness, and exclusivity.
Already the majority of same-sex couples reject those norms.53 Most embrace “open” unions, meaning the partners agree to have sexual relations with other individuals. One study found that even same-sex couples who self-define as Christian reject the norm of exclusivity.54
Publications like the New York Times have sought to give infidelity a positive spin with articles claiming that the nonexclusivity of same-sex couples actually strengthens their emotional bond.55 These articles claim that unions are stronger when couples essentially say, “Who cares about what you do with your body, as long as you stay committed emotionally?” It is another expression of the body/person divide.
Some people may, for religious or philosophical reasons, be able to resist this utterly deflated view of marriage. But humans are social beings; they are affected by the society around them. As a result, many may find their commitment to a more robust view of marriage being eroded. If marriage rests on a nonexclusive emotional attachment, how stable and enduring will it be?
As social institutions like marriage grow more fragile, people are becoming more isolated and disconnected—in fact, more like the atomistic individuals in the hypothetical state of nature of social contract theory, prior to the rise of civilization. We seem to be reversing social contract theory: Instead of moving out of the state of nature populated by lone, autonomous individuals, we are moving into a state where adults are isolated individuals, connecting with others temporarily and only when it meets their needs. We are regressing to a pre-civilized condition.
In the process, we are losing freedom to the state. As Hannah Arendt explains in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the people most vulnerable to totalitarian control are disconnected, atomistic individuals. The reason is they have no competing identities or loyalties, no social structures to protect them from the state using its power to enforce its ideology. The isolated individual is easy to manipulate and control.56
Secular Marriage among Christians
Sadly, even many evangelicals have lost the idea that marriage is about anything beyond romance and emotional connection. A teacher at an evangelical college, Abigail Rine, says her students are unable to recognize how civil same-sex marriage redefines the concept of marriage because they hold the same concept with only a thin religious veneer. As a result, “To them, the Christian argument against same-sex marriage is an appeal to the authority of a few disparate Bible verses, and therefore compelling only to those with a literalist hermeneutic.”57
The students fail to recognize that what is at stake is not a few scattered verses but an entire worldview. Do we live in the universe described by social contract theory—an empty cosmos of atoms bumping around in the void driven by sheer self-interest? Or do we live in a cosmos shaped by a personal God who created us to be in ordered relationships directed toward the common good?
In the biblical worldview, marriage is not something humans may simply redefine at will. It comes with its own definition as the first community, reflecting the community in the Trinity. In a healthy society, young people in the throes of romantic love do not have to decide for themselves how to create a marriage from scratch. Their extended family, the church, the law, and the public ethos all help shape young couples’ expectations of what marriage is and what responsibilities it involves. That’s how public norms help us have healthier, happier marriages than if we functioned as isolated individuals making up our own life script as we go along.
In a wedding sermon, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer told a young couple, “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”58 A commitment to marriage, with its norms and obligations, keeps husband and wife connected through the ups and downs of their emotional life.
Children of Same-Sex Couples
Redefining legal marriage also has serious consequences for children. Dawn Stefanowicz, who was raised by a homosexual father (with multiple partners coming and going), writes, “Over and over, we are told that permitting same-sex couples access to the designation of marriage will not deprive anyone of any rights. That is a lie.”59 Legal marriage for same-sex couples denies children the right to either their mother or their father or both. In effect, the state is putting its stamp of approval on the idea that children may be intentionally deprived of their biological parents.
Supporters of same-sex marriage often argue that you don’t need both a mother and a father to form a family. Same-sex parents can adopt or obtain children through artificial insemination, surrogacy, or in vitro fertilization. Of course, all of these methods still require contributions from both a male and a female. It’s just that one or both of those parents is denied.
And children still feel the pain of their missing parents. Speaking from her own experience, Stefanowicz writes, “Children in same-sex households will often deny their grief and pretend they don’t miss a biological parent, feeling pressured to speak positively due to the politics surrounding LGBT households.” Yet we all know that children feel a painful void when they lose (or never know) one of their biological parents because of death, divorce, or adoption. Stefanowicz says, “It is the same for us when our gay parent brings his or her same-sex partner(s) into our lives. Their partner(s) can never replace our missing biological parent.”60
Heather Barwick, who was raised by her mother and a lesbian partner, reports a similar experience of loss. “Same-sex marriage and parenting withholds either a mother or father from a child while telling him or her that it doesn’t matter. That it’s all the same. But it’s not. A lot of us . . . are hurting.” Until she was in her twenties, Heather was an advocate for the LGBT movement. But now she wants people to know her secret sorrow. “My father’s absence created a huge hole in me, and I ached every day for a dad. I loved my mom’s partner, but another mom could never have replaced the father I lost.”61
Children raised by same-sex parents report that when they express their feelings of sadness, they are chastised by family members, friends, teachers, and counselors for being politically incorrect.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that every child has, “as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.”62 Ironically, today that position is being rejected as discriminatory and insulting to same-sex parents.
The legal impact of same-sex marriage goes even further, however—in ways that will affect all parents. In most states, the “presumption of parentage” means the law defines parenthood by the woman who gives birth to a child, with her husband presumed to be the child’s biological and legal father. Their names are put on the birth certificate, which serves as the foundation for a lifetime of parenting rights and responsibilities. But when a same-sex couple has a child, at least one of them is not a biological parent. Whose name goes on the birth certificate? Who has parenting rights?
In the past, if a biological parent had a same-sex partner, that partner was not listed on the child’s birth certificate. The implication of Obergefell, however, is that a same-sex couple has the same presumption of parenthood as an opposite-sex couple. As law professor Douglas NeJaime explains, homosexual advocates have long sought to elaborate a new model of parenthood that is not based on either biology or gender. And that’s exactly what Obergefell gave them: The Court “affirmed a model of parenthood based on chosen, functional bonds rather than biology alone. . . . Biology and gender took a back seat to actual family formation” based on choice.63
In other words, by accepting a contractual view of marriage, the state will now also be required to accept a contractual vision of family formation and parenthood.
The underlying reason is clear: When same-sex couples have children—whether by divorce, adoption, or third-party reproduction—those children are not biologically related to one or both parents. Therefore, if same-sex parents are to have the same legal status as heterosexual parents, logically the state must erase the assumption of natural parenthood based on biology.
The definition of parenthood must be de-naturalized.
Until now, the state has been called on to define parenthood only in cases of contested custody when an adult who is not a biological parent wants parental rights, such as a stepparent, grandparent, or a same-sex partner. The state then asks questions such as: Did the child call this adult “mother”? How much time did they spend together? and so on. The court has to decide who counts as a parent on relatively subjective grounds.
However, if parenthood is detached from biology, then the state will define parenthood for all children. The state will decide who counts as a parent. Instead of recognizing parenthood as pre-political reality that is logically prior to the state—which the state is morally obligated to respect—parenthood will be treated as something created by the state.
And if parenthood is created by the state, then the state has the right to define and control it. It will be much easier for state authorities to intrude into the family, make decisions about how children are raised and educated, or even take them away if state officials disagree with their parents’ beliefs. Jennifer Roback Morse predicts that “natural biological relationships will be systematically and routinely overridden by socially constructed government-created relationships.”64
Thus a de-naturalized definition of marriage leads inevitably to a de-naturalized definition of parenthood. “Civil marriage provides the entire basis for presuming the rights and responsibilities of biological parents to raise their own children,” Morabito explains. “If we abolish civil marriage, these will no longer be rights by default, but rights to be distributed at the pleasure of a bureaucratic state.”65
In this way, paradoxically, a choice-based model of the family ends up empowering the state.
In Canada it is now considered “discriminatory” for state entities (like public schools) to argue for male/female marriage or parenting. In the province of Alberta, the government has issued guidelines instructing teachers and school administrators not to use the terms “mother” and “father” when talking to students. Instead they must use only non-gendered terms such as “parents/guardians” or “partners” or “caregivers.”66
Central planners have always wanted to bring the family under greater government control so they can inculcate their own ideology into young minds and create docile citizens. It is no accident that when government power grows overweening we refer to it as “paternalistic,” or we talk about the “nanny” state. “Paternalism is what you get in a society without fathers. Nannies are what you get in a society without mothers,” writes theologian Brian Mattson. That is a clue to an “important principle: that nuclear families are one of the chief means of limiting the state. They are the foundation of civil society, a buffer zone between the individual and raw power of the state.”67
The family is the first of what political theorist Edmund Burke called the “little platoons” that stand between the individual and an overweening state. The family is a fundamental bulwark protecting the unalienable rights recognized in the Declaration of Independence.
Offspring, Inc.: Contract for a Baby
A contractual view of parenthood is also encouraged by the growing use of artificial reproduction. An article on the subject starts off dramatically: “‘No sex! No sex was used to produce this child!’ That was the proud proclamation made by one of the girl’s two ‘fathers’ as she was hoisted up high and shown off” at a sexuality conference.68 What happens to our view of children when they are separated from act of sex between loving parents and become products created in the laboratory?
On one hand, assisted reproduction has helped many married couples have children when a biological malfunction prevented the normal process of conception from taking place. In these cases, in vitro fertilization is used in a medicinal manner—to repair or bypass a natural process that isn’t working, helping it to achieve its natural purpose or teleology. Like other forms of medicine, it uses technology to overcome the effects of the fall, to repair or compensate for a deficiency or malfunctioning in nature. And like other forms of technology, it can be an expression of the biblical principle of dominion over nature.69
Today, however, an attitude is spreading that anyone who wants a child has the right to have a child—even if they face biological barriers such as being single, past the age of menopause, or in a same-sex relationship. In other words, even if they cannot have a child through natural means. Technology has gone from being an assist for natural reproduction to being a method to defy nature—to assert choice over natural reproduction.
If you cannot create a child, you can contract for one.
In these cases, artificial reproduction is not being used to bolster the natural bonds between parent and child but to replace them with bonds created by choice. When producing children in the lab, says a Catholic writer, “intent conquers biology, desire triumphs over nature.”70 It is another example of exalting choice while denigrating the body. The technocratic mindset celebrates unlimited dominion over the body and its functions.
When pried loose from its connection to natural parenthood, artificial reproduction can feed into the dehumanizing mindset that children are commodities to be manufactured through technological processes for paying customers. The babies that result may come to be regarded as artifacts—as depersonalized products that we plan, create, modify, and improve. In addition, the costs of high-tech reproductive services may “make procreation look more and more like business deals and consumer purchasing,” warns Peters. Children become merchandise to be “evaluated according to standards of quality control.” And “if the paying parents do not believe they are getting their money’s worth, they may reject the product.”71
In recent years, there have been several cases when surrogate mothers were asked to abort when the unborn baby turned out to have a disability—when the paying parents did not think they were “getting their money’s worth.”72
The technological mindset is apt to see everything, even children, as raw material subject to human control and remaking. In applying technology to reproduction, warns Meilander, “We are tempted to see ourselves as only a free spirit detached from the body. . . . What we risk here is a separation of person and body that demeans the body and makes of it a ‘thing.’”73
Notice that the problem, again, is the two-story dichotomy—a “separation of person and body that demeans the body.”
A “Freedom” That Dissolves Freedom
Every forward movement of the secular moral revolution is hailed as an advance for freedom from the oppressive moral rules of the past. But in reality, every step empowers the state.
As we saw in earlier chapters, a rapid expansion of state power began with abortion. In the past, the law recognized personhood as a pre-existing reality, something that followed metaphysically on being biologically human. The law merely recognized it as a prior fact. But the only way the state can legalize abortion is to deny the relevance of biology and declare that some biological humans are not persons. The state has taken on itself the authority to decide which humans qualify for the status of personhood, defined in terms of mental abilities—the capacity to think, feel, and desire. The same reasoning is being applied to euthanasia and assisted suicide as well.
What about marriage? In the past, the state recognized marriage as a pre-existing biologically based reality, something that followed naturally on the fact that humans are a sexually reproducing species. The law merely recognized it as a prior fact. But the only way the law can treat a same-sex couple the same as an opposite-sex couple is to deny the relevance of biology and declare marriage to be a state of mind—what you think, feel, and desire. In the process, the state has taken on itself the authority to define what marriage is—which emotional commitments qualify as marriage.
What about gender? In the past, the state recognized gender as a pre-existing reality, something that followed metaphysically on your biological sex. The law merely recognized it as a prior fact. But the only way the law can treat a trans woman (born male) the same as a biological woman is to deny the relevance of biology and declare gender to be a state of mind—what you think, feel, and desire. The state has taken on itself the authority to define legal gender independent of your biological sex.
Finally, what about parenthood? In the past, the state recognized parenthood as a pre-existing reality, something that followed metaphysically when a mother and a father gave birth to a child. The law merely recognized it as a prior fact. But the only way the law can treat same-sex parents the same as opposite-sex parents is to deny the relevance of biology and declare parenthood to be a state of mind toward the child—what you think, feel, and desire. The state is taking on itself the authority to define what a parent is, and who qualifies as one.
Significantly, in each case, the state has taken the postmodern approach of dismissing natural realities and substituting legal fiat. It refuses to be held in check by respect for the created world.
The concept of contract is sold to the public as a way of expanding choice. But in reality it cuts us off from natural, created relationships and hands over power to the state.
Do We Live in an Empty Cosmos?
In every decision we make, we are affirming a worldview. We may think we are just acting on our feelings of the moment, but in reality we are expressing our convictions about the cosmos. Either we are expressing a biblical worldview or we are being co-opted by a secular worldview. The secular moral revolution is built on the conviction that nature has no moral meaning, and that we are inherently disconnected, autonomous atoms connecting only by choice. As Morse writes, when we follow the dictates of the sexual revolution,
We act as if we believe that we are alone in a meaningless and indifferent universe, as if we ourselves have no intrinsic value, that our sexual acts have no meaning apart from the meaning we assign them, that our sexual acts are simply the actions of mindless particles bumping into each other from no particular cause at all, and with no particular purpose in mind.74
Christianity offers a genuine alternative to an empty, pointless cosmos. It says that we are not alone, that the universe is meaningful, that we do have intrinsic value, that sexuality has its own purpose or telos, that human community is real, and that there is objective truth, goodness, and beauty. Most of all, we are not products of mindless chance but the creation of a loving Creator.
Each one of us was loved into existence, and we have the high calling of inviting others into the astonishingly rich experience of living in a cosmos centered in love.
The Primordial Community
The key to rebuilding society is to recover respect for natural communities. God did not create humans as social atoms. He created us for relationship. The picture of ultimate origins given in the Bible is not one of disconnected solitary individuals wandering under the trees in a state of nature. The picture is one of a couple, related to one another from the beginning in the social institution of marriage. The biblical doctrine of creation tells us that marriage and family is a social pattern that is original and inherent in human nature itself. Its essential nature cannot be remodeled at will. Any utopian scheme that seeks to cast the family into the dustbin of history will find itself working against human nature itself.
Yet biblical morality is not a straitjacket. Throughout history and across the globe, people have created variations on the basic structure of marriage and family—diverse social roles for husband and wife, varying conventions for raising children, contrasting ways to divide up economic functions, differences in the size and constitution of the extended family. God has granted humans a great deal of freedom in the way they shape and reshape the givens of creation.
The cornerstone of Christian social theory is the Trinity.75 God is a tri-unity: three Persons so intimately related as to constitute one divinity. God is not “really” one deity, who only appears in three modes. Nor is God “really” three deities, which would be polytheism. In the classic theological formulation, God is one in being and three in person. Both are equally real, equally ultimate, and equally integral to God’s nature.
That might sound paradoxical until you realize it is a way of saying that ultimate reality includes a perfect balance of both individuality and relationship. Or, as philosophers say, it includes both unity and diversity, both the one and the many. Each of the three persons of the Trinity is individually unique, yet they are so united they form a single deity. In the same way, writes John Wyatt, “each human person is unique, yet made for relationship with others. Personhood is not something we can have in isolation—in Christian thinking it is a relational concept.”76
The Hebrew word for “oneness” is the same in reference to God and to marriage: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one [echad]” (Deut. 6:4). And husband and wife “become one [echad] flesh” (Gen. 2:24). We “image” God not only as individuals but also in our relationships.
When is the first time in Scripture that God declares something “not good”? Surprisingly, it happens before the fall—before the entrance of sin and evil into the world. Having created Adam, God says, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (v. 18). The Genesis account underscores that relationships are central to what it means to be human.
The implication is that, contrary to social contract theory, humans are not originally and inherently disconnected individuals. Relationships are not the later inventions of autonomous individuals who can make or break them at will. They are part of the created order and thus “very good” (Gen. 1:31). And the moral requirements they make on us are not impositions on our freedom but expressions of our true nature. By participating in the civilizing institutions of family, church, state, and civil society, we fulfill our social nature. And we develop the moral virtues that prepare us for our ultimate purpose, which is to become citizens of the heavenly city.
Working On “the Relationship”
The biblical answer to social contract theory is that we do not create marriage so much as we enter into a pre-existing social institution with its own normative structure. As the elegant language of the older marriage ceremony says, we “enter into the holy estate of matrimony.”
This language may sound abstract, but think of it this way: Everyone who has experienced a relationship knows that it is more than the sum of its parts. You will hear couples talk about “you” and “me” and “the relationship.” At times they will say, “We need to work on the relationship.” They sense that their relationship is a reality that goes above and beyond the two individuals involved.
Marriage is a moral entity that draws individuals into a reality beyond their own separate existences. This idea was traditionally spoken about in terms of the common good: There was a “good” for each person in the relationship (God’s moral purpose for the individual). Then there was a “common good” for their lives together (God’s moral purpose for the marriage). This larger common good enriches our lives in a way we cannot experience if we remain autonomous individuals.
Finally, marriage was not an end in itself. It was to be directed to the glory of God and the common good of the community. Puritan John Cotton warned couples against being “so transported with affection” for one another that they aim “at no higher end than marriage itself.” Instead they should see marriage as a means “to be better fitted for God’s service and bring them nearer to God.”77
Contrary to social contract theory, Christianity teaches that the social and political order is not merely an expedient strategy devised by individuals to protect their rights. It is part of the created order, the context for developing our full human nature—for achieving our telos. It is not motivated by the lower instincts of self-interest and self-preservation but by higher moral ideals such as justice, mercy, duty, service, and sacrificial love.
Who Are the True Multiculturalists?
The biblical answer is not merely theoretical. Christians are called to form a model society—the local church—to demonstrate to the world a balanced interplay of individuality and relationship, of unity and diversity. The church is meant to be not just a collection of individuals but a corporate, integrated body united by a common good. Before his death, Jesus prayed for the disciples he was about to leave behind, asking the Father “that they may be one as we are one” (John 17:11, italics added). Jesus is saying that the communion of Persons within the Trinity is the paradigm for the communion of members within the church.
“The Church as a whole is an icon of God the Trinity, reproducing on earth the mystery of unity in diversity,” writes Orthodox bishop Timothy Ware. “Human beings are called to reproduce on earth the mystery of mutual love that the Trinity lives in heaven.”78 And as we learn to practice unity in diversity within the church, we can bring that same balance to all our social relationships—our families, schools, workplaces, and governments.
This larger vision means Christianity is not reductionistic: It values the biological realm but it does not reduce us to the biological level. Relationships rooted in biology are meant to train us in a quality of love and unity that transcends biology. Christians are reborn into a redeemed community that surpasses all natural communities.
Even the family, the most basic biological community, does not determine our primary identity. Our relationship with God does. John writes that all who become Christians are “children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will [to have a child], but born of God” (1:12–13). This verse is especially empowering for those whose natural families are unhealthy or dysfunctional. The Bible’s liberating promise is that it is possible to transcend the sin and brokenness of our natural communities because our primary identity is to be children of God.
This trinitarian view produces a wonderful balance in practice. Within our churches, differences based on biology—family, gender, ethnicity, nationality—can be celebrated with gratitude as gifts from God. Our diversity gives rise to richly textured communities. Even in heaven we will still be recognizable as coming “from every nation, tribe, people and language,” each with its own cultural heritage (Rev. 7:9). Christians are the true multiculturalists.
At the same time, these biologically based traits do not ultimately define Christians or separate them into hostile, warring factions. Christians are united by the wonder and joy of their spiritual unity. “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (Col. 3:11). They are adopted into a redeemed community that transcends all human categories.
Rescue Mission, Not Culture War
As we work through controversial moral issues, it is crucial to bear in mind the main goal. It is not first of all to persuade people to change their behavior. It is to tear down barriers to becoming Christian. No matter who we are addressing, or what moral issue the person is struggling with, their first need is to hear the gospel and experience the love of God. The most important question of their life is whether they will have a relationship with the living God that lasts into eternity.
I received an email from a woman saying her eighteen-year-old niece was wrestling with whether she was transgender. The woman had heard me speak on a Focus on the Family radio program, and asked if she should send her niece my book Finding Truth. My answer was, certainly. The book is not about moral questions but it addresses the most important question facing all of us: Is Christianity true and how can we know it? How does it stack up against competing worldviews and religions? Is there a strategy we can use to test ideas and be more confident that we are finding truth?
Once a person is convinced that Christianity is true, then they can ask what that means for their sexuality. And only then will they have the spiritual strength and resources to find solutions to their sexual issues.
The main reason to address moral issues is that they have become a barrier to even hearing the message of salvation. People are inundated with rhetoric telling them that the Bible is hateful and hurtful, narrow and negative. While it’s crucial to be clear about the biblical teaching on sin, the context must be an overall positive message: that Christianity alone gives the basis for a high view of the value and meaning of the body as a good gift from God. In our communication with people struggling with moral issues, we need to reach out with a life-giving, life-affirming message. We should work to draw people in by the beauty of the biblical vision of life.
As one Christian psychologist puts it, the goal is “more rescue mission than culture war.”79
It is rarely effective to criticize someone else’s view from within your own perspective. That just means they disagree with you. It is much more persuasive when you step inside the other person’s perspective and critique it from within, showing how it fails on its own terms. To do that, Christians have to become familiar with secular worldviews and learn to uncover their dehumanizing and destructive implications. Only then will the other person be open to considering Christianity as a credible alternative.
How to Engage Globally
What are the implications for our own families and our global engagement? It was a family that helped me become a Christian. As a teenager, I had walked away from my Lutheran upbringing and had no intention of going back. Later, while attending school in Germany, I took a train to L’Abri, an evangelistic ministry founded by Francis and Edith Schaeffer in the stunningly beautiful Swiss Alps. (The name is French for “the shelter.”) I did not intend to stay; I was only meeting up briefly with family members who were traveling through. But while at L’Abri, I was struck by two things. First, I heard arguments for the truth of Christianity that were more compelling than any I had heard before. And second, I witnessed a Christian community that was more loving than any I had seen before.
The Schaeffers first went to Switzerland in connection with the formation of the International Council of Christian Churches and Child Evangelism Fellowship. When their daughters reached college age, they went down the mountainside to attend the university in Lausanne. When friends raised questions about God and religion, they would respond, “You ought to talk to my dad. He’s good with questions like that.”
Because the Schaeffers’ home was nestled in a tiny farming village high in the Alps, the students who visited would often stay for the weekend. Then they would tell their friends about it, who told their friends, until the Schaeffers’ chalet was overflowing with students sleeping on the couches, in the hallways, and on the balconies.
In this way, L’Abri Fellowship grew organically into a residential ministry where young people could stay for several months and witness firsthand Christians living together in community. As the ministry grew, other couples and singles joined the fellowship and opened their homes to students. For many of the students—myself included—a major factor in converting to Christianity was seeing its truth embodied in the day-to-day activities of Christian families, fleshing out the gospel with their lives.
The biological connections that bind the members of a family together are not intended merely to meet their own needs but also to provide a matrix of loving relationships for ministry to others—to serve the common good. Before the Industrial Revolution, the home performed a host of practical functions. It was the place where people educated children, cared for the sick and elderly, ran family industries, served customers and the community, and produced a surplus to help the poor. The home reached out to the wider society. Today we are likely to think in terms of serving a larger good through our jobs or political activism or volunteer organizations. But what about through our families? Do we nurture and build up our family relationships with the goal of forming a network loving enough to draw others in? Do we think of creating a home base strong enough to serve those in need?
Scripture says, “God sets the lonely in families” (Ps. 68:6). Who is building the strong, healthy families that God can use to minister to the lonely, the wounded, and the outcast?80
Alysse ElHage grew up in a chaotic home. Her parents divorced when she was two years old, and afterward a string of men came and went in her home. She writes, “My mom was married several times, which meant there were always different men (and sometimes children) coming in and out of our lives. One day, I would have a stepbrother or a stepsister, and then just as suddenly, they would be gone.” How could any child survive that kind of chaos without developing massive dysfunctions?
“Thankfully, I had a lifeline,” ElHage writes. Her mother took her to church regularly: “Through the faith community, I was exposed to unbroken families, where kids had a married mom and dad who loved each other and their kids, and were raising them in generally stable, happy homes that I envied so much. I was able to see that there were men in the world who did not leave or harm their families.” These men were not perfect, ElHage writes. But, “I found hope in knowing that happy and whole marriages were not just fairy tales, and that faithful fathers and husbands really existed.”81
Are you turning your home into a place that gives hope to the lost and the lonely, the hurting and the hopeless?
This same strategy may be the church’s best solution for those struggling with sexual sins. Shame and guilt leave many feeling isolated and alone. Rosaria Butterfield is a former lesbian who spent more than a decade as an English professor specializing in queer theory at Syracuse University, where she was faculty advisor to several gay and lesbian student groups. Today she is a convert to Christianity, married to a man, and a homeschooling mother of four. It is not enough, Butterfield writes, to state clearly what the Bible teaches about sexual morality. Christians must also practice radical hospitality. She calls it sharing the gospel with a house key. “If you are not sharing the gospel with a house key, especially with people for whom crushing loneliness is killing them faster—if you are not doing that, why not?”
God promises that his help is available for those who are tempted: “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man [and] with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape” (1 Cor. 10:13 ESV). But how does God provide a way? What is your responsibility? “What if your house is a way of escape,” Butterfield asks, “but you are too busy?”82
People who are physically starving will eat even unhealthy food, and those who are emotionally starving will be drawn into unhealthy relationships. It is close to impossible to follow the biblical sex ethic if it is understood solely as negative chastity (don’t do that, it’s wrong, it’s a sin). The church must provide the healthy relationships that people hunger for.83
The apostles commanded Christians to “offer hospitality” (1 Pet. 4:9), inviting people into their homes and treating one another as members of a common spiritual family. And not only other Christians—we are also called to “show hospitality to strangers” (Heb. 13:2), welcoming those who are different and who may make us feel uncomfortable.
In his widely read book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre writes that as the surrounding society loses its connecting glue, the most important response is to build local, small-scale forms of community, teaching our children and our congregations how to re-establish strong, life-giving relationships in a world falling apart: “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.”84 Our families and churches must become centers of civilization that reach out beyond themselves with a model of human community.
The strongest Christian communities (families, congregations, groups of singles) are the ones driven by a larger vision—a sense of ministry. If God has given you a dependable income, a loving spouse, a strong church community, a reliable group of friends, those gifts are not just for you. They are to equip you to reach out and draw in those who are broken and searching. God is giving you the opportunity to bring hope that Christianity is real and not just words—to put flesh and bones on the message of hope and healing.
Christians must be prepared to minister to the wounded, the refugees of the secular moral revolution whose lives have been wrecked by its false promises of freedom and autonomy. When people are persuaded that they are ultimately disconnected, atomistic selves, their relationships will grow fragile and fragmented. Those around us will increasingly suffer insecurity and loneliness. The new polarization can be an opportunity for Christian communities to become safe havens where people witness the beauty of relationships reflecting God’s own commitment and faithfulness.