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When I began this series, I said the battle to define marriage is not over—and I’m still convinced that is true. However, the issue in America has clearly passed the eleventh hour and I fear the clock has already begun to toll. The outcome of California’s Proposition 8 this November, which seeks to amend the state constitution in order to establish that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California”—thus reversing the state Supreme Court’s recognition of same-sex marriage in May—will figure prominently in the future of marriage in America. If the measure is defeated (and barring any intervention by God), I predict it will be nearly impossible to halt the homosexual movement and with it the radical redefinition of sexual morality.Monday, August 18, 2008In Defense of Marriage - Conclusion
This raises the important question of “What then?” How should the church respond in the wake of such profound moral and social revision? Should we continue to battle with homosexual activists? Will doing so distract us from our true calling and thus undermine the church’s mission and purpose? Should we persist in pressing the point even unto arrest and imprisonment? Is this how we are called to live in a pagan culture? These are the questions we must face. I wrestle with these, as I continue to address the church’s relationship to culture. I suggest that we all need to wrestle with these questions in an effort to find the most biblical answers, given our very real and possible future in America.
In his classic book Christ and Culture, Richard Niebuhr suggests that there are only a handful of postures the Christian can take toward culture. For example, we can emphasize the opposition between Christ and culture, what Niebuhr calls the Christ against culture position. This view sees the customs and advances of the day as inevitable affronts to Christ. Predictably, this position results in a withdrawal or separation from culture—a move that only renders Christianity less relevant and neglects to press Christ’s kingdom in the world. I certainly do not recommend this approach.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who feel there is a fundamental agreement between Christ and culture, in which Christ is equated with the apex of human achievement. Niebuhr labeled this the Christ of culture group. Far from simply identifying Christ with culture, it is more the alignment of certain aspects of culture with Christ—such as Western civilization, American nationalism, or conservative politics. With this position, Christ is recast in the guise of that culture’s predominant values. Rather than Christ standing over and against culture as judge and challenge, Christ is absorbed into the culture and appropriated for its ends. So you end up less with Christ than you do with culture. This appears to have been a dominant trend within the American church over the last fifty years, to the point that Christianity has been narrowed to the political realm as best seen in the “culture wars.”
This position has tended to neglect the whole missio Dei, or mission of God, in that it seeks primarily to promote and preserve certain values through civil or political means. While these values may be consistent with Christianity and their advocates may be well-meaning, there is no eternal value in morality apart from faith in Jesus Christ. The values of the Christian faith flow from conversion; they do not convert the lost. Furthermore, this response tends toward an “us versus them” mentality that all too easily operates “out of a conquering spirit or urge to control, vestiges of a former Christendom that no longer lives anywhere but in the impulses of our minds,” according to George Hunsberger (Hunsberger and Van Gelder, eds., The Church Between Gospel & Culture, [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996] 290).
But there is a third stance that can be taken, one that is neither a Christ of culture nor a Christ against culture position. It is a “conversionist” (and, I believe, the biblical) response that sees Christ as the transformer of culture. Yes, human nature is fallen, and culture not only reflects this perversion but often transmits it. Thus the opposition between Christ and culture is real and must be recognized. Yet rather than separation from culture, or accommodation and reliance upon the institutions of culture (such as politics), Christ in this scenario becomes the converter of humanity. This is the role of the church as Christ’s body. This distinct and called community of God’s people therefore lives as God’s instrument and witness to the redemptive work of God—the kingdom. It is from here that we go forth to express the values of the kingdom of God, sometimes by proclamation and at all times by demonstration.
This is precisely what the apostle Peter urged the Christians who were living among non-Christians to do. “Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Peter 2:11–12, NIV). That last phrase, “on the day he visits us,” is not a reference to Christ’s return but to God’s intervention in the world through blessing or judgment. Peter follows this by saying “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution … For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people (1 Peter 2:13–15, ESV). Peter later equates this to a believing wife who wins her unbelieving husband over “without a word” by the way she lives (see 1 Peter 3:1). Matthew underscores this in 5:16: “In the same way, let your light shine before men people, so that they can see your good deeds and give honor to your Father in heaven (NET).
I know this goes against our nature but that is precisely the point: kingdom living always goes against our nature, which is why we require God’s grace to persevere in the faith. The time may be soon approaching when we are forced to abandon our “conquering spirit” and submit to “human institutions” that, while they may suppress our proclamation of kingdom values (i.e., opposition to sexual immorality), can never stop the demonstration of these values (i.e., living sexually moral lives) within and among the faithful community of God’s people. Furthermore, the bearing of hardship because of conscience toward God is pleasing to the Lord (see 1 Peter 2:19–23).
America, under the sovereign hand of God, may be given over to sexual anarchy, immorality, and debauchery but the faithful church will endure in spite of the culture and may, by its life and witness, be the instrument God uses to bring a generation to repentance. This is the mission of God and therefore the mission of His people; I am concerned that our persistence in a moral battle lost may distract us from our true purpose—and this I personally do not want to do.
© 2008 by S. Michael Craven
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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. Michael is the author of Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Culturalized Christianity, published by Navpress and scheduled for release January 2009. Michael's ministry is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit: www.battlefortruth.org
Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.
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Monday, August 11, 2008In Defense of Marriage – Part VI
Soviet communism attempted to construct a society under a new social and ethical system, which subverted the natural moral order. In doing so, people were compelled to live in contradiction to their conscience. Without the influence of the conscience, moral governance shifts from the self to the state. The lesson here is this: when the society demands conduct that is in contradiction to what mankind knows in his heart to be right and true, the state will coerce such conduct. This principle is summed up in “Colson’s Law,” which essentially states that the more a society is governed by conscience, the less it requires outside enforcement or police. The less conscience, or self-governance, the more police will be required (i.e. totalitarianism).
This same pattern accompanies activist efforts, which seek to legitimize homosexual acts through the imposition of same-sex marriage (SSM). Unable to rely on the democratic process to advance their agenda, gay-rights advocates have instead employed activist judges, propaganda campaigns, indoctrination of youth, and intimidation tactics to impose their moral vision.
The essence of the homosexual agenda and its demand for legal marriage is not about the expansion of civil rights. It is, instead, committed to the complete reordering of our society. Paula Ettlebrick, the former legal director of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, as much as confirmed this when she said:
Being queer is more than setting up house, sleeping with a person of the same gender, and seeking state approval for doing so . . . Being queer means pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process transforming the very fabric of society (quoted in William B. Rubenstein, Since When is Marriage a Path to Liberation? Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Law [NY: New York Press, 1993], 398, 400.).
In the minds of such, it is Christianity (and religion, in general) that stands in the way of this social transformation. Therefore, it is only natural that as SSM gains traction, there will follow a suppression of religion and persecution of the religious. Harvard professor of law Mary Ann Glendon acknowledged this real consequence of legalizing same-sex marriage. She writes:
Religious freedom, too, is at stake…. Every person and every religion that disagrees will be labeled as bigoted and openly discriminated against. The ax must fall most heavily on religious persons and groups that don’t go along. Religious institutions will be hit with lawsuits if they refuse to compromise their principles (Mary Ann Glendon, “For Better or for Worse? The federal marriage amendment would strike a blow for freedom,” opinion post to online editorial page, The Wall Street Journal, 25 February 2004).
Under unrelenting pressure from this despotic minority, Western nations have already begun to criminalize and suppress any public criticism of homosexuality, encroaching upon our most fundamental rights of conscience and free speech.
In British Columbia, Dr. Chris Kempling, a school counselor, was suspended without pay for three months in 2005 for writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper criticizing the Liberal government’s same-sex marriage legislation. In 2006, Canadian professor David Mullan was fined $2,100 by Cape Breton University, after he told a student homosexuality was “unnatural.”
In January of last year, Christian Vanneste, a member of France’s ruling party, was fined almost $4,000 under French hate speech law for comments opposing homosexuality. What was so egregious? Vanneste dared to suggest that homosexuality was “inferior” to heterosexuality and said the practice would be “dangerous for humanity if it was pushed to the limit.”
Last year, the Brazilian Association of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transvestites, and Transsexuals (ABGLT) filed a criminal complaint against Christian activist Julio Severo and the National Vision for Christian Awareness for inciting “hatred” against homosexuals, and “homophobia.” The complaint was made because Severo regularly denounces homosexual behavior as immoral on his Web site, and opposes the goals of the homosexual movement. Severo and his ministry were successfully prosecuted simply for denouncing homosexual behavior as sinful during a campaign to promote family values. As a result, the ministry was ordered to cancel its campaign and all related events.
In America—the land of the free—a Christian photographer who declined to photograph a same-sex “commitment ceremony” was hauled before the New Mexico Human Rights Division (NMHRD) in January of this year. Elane Photography turned down the job because their beliefs were in conflict with the message communicated by the ceremony. The same-sex couple filed a complaint with the NMHRD, which is now trying Elane Photography under state antidiscrimination laws for sexual orientation discrimination.
Last year, June Sheldon, an adjunct professor teaching a human heredity course at San Jose City College, was fired for answering a student’s in-class question about heredity and homosexual behavior. Apparently professor Sheldon did not offer the student the “right” answer. Marcia Walden, a licensed counselor at Computer Sciences Corporation in Atlanta, was fired after she chose to refer a person seeking counsel in a same-sex relationship to another colleague. The New Jersey Division on Civil Rights threatened to prosecute the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association of the United Methodist Church after it refused to allow a same-sex civil union ceremony at one of its worship facilities. Students in Boyd County, Kentucky, were threatened with “suspension” and the “possibility of court referral” if they publicly voiced moral objections to the school’s diversity training, which normalized homosexual behavior. A Christian high school student in Michigan was suspended for refusing to remove an “I’m Straight” sticker from his t-shirt when other students were wearing duct tape over their mouths to show support for the pro-homosexual National Day of Silence.
And in a most ludicrous act, Christian publishers Zondervan and Thomas Nelson are facing a $60 million federal lawsuit for publishing “homophobic and prejudicial” translations of the Bible, from a man who claims he and other homosexuals have suffered based on what the suit claims is a misinterpretation of the Bible.
These are just a minuscule sampling of the many actions emerging as the push for SSM gains momentum. This is nothing less than tyranny and injustice under the banner of tolerance and acceptance. With the advance of the SSM movement there has followed an increased tyranny of the state—a concept unthinkable in America—and yet this is one predictable consequence of imposing a moral value that is in contrast to moral truth and the human conscience.
© 2008 by S. Michael Craven
Comment on this article here
Subscribe to Michael's weekly commentary here
Subscribe to Michael's podcast here
S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. Michael is the author of Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Culturalized Christianity, published by Navpress and scheduled for release January 2009. Michael's ministry is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit: www.battlefortruth.org
Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.
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All right, you say, so cohabitation is a poor substitute for marriage and may even undermine those marriages preceded by cohabitation. But how does allowing persons of the same sex to marry harm the institution of marriage? As advocates of same-sex marriage (SSM) are quick to point out, “the sky hasn’t fallen” since SSM became legal in Massachusetts in 2004, apparently convinced that four short years is adequate to produce the predictable and deleterious public consequence of redefining marriage. Remember, however, that Unwin’s research demonstrated that the effects of such modification would occur over generations and not be immediate. Nonetheless, there is some empirical evidence already emerging that indicates the acceptance of SSM will, in fact, harm the institution of marriage and, subsequently, society.Monday, August 4, 2008In Defense of Marriage - Part V
Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, reported in April of 2004 before the House Judiciary Committee that there is ample evidence available in Scandinavia demonstrating the effect of devolving marriage to include couples of the same sex. Dr. Kurtz holds a PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University and is regarded as both an excellent scholar and expert in this area. Commenting on the situation in Sweden, Kurtz writes:
The Swedes have simply drawn the final conclusion: If we’ve come so far without marriage, why marry at all? Our love is what matters, not a piece of paper. Why should children change that? (Stanley Kurtz, “The End of Marriage in Scandinavia: The ‘conservative case’ for same-sex marriage collapses,” The Weekly Standard, 2 February 2004.)
Indeed, in Sweden the out-of-wedlock birthrate is 55 percent, Norway is 50 percent, Iceland is approaching 70 percent, and in Denmark 60 percent of firstborn children are born out of wedlock. So what? you ask. So cohabitation has replaced marriage, big deal; men and women are still having children, only without the formality of a marriage certificate. What’s the problem? According to Dr. Kurtz, studies in these countries demonstrate that these unmarried families break up at a rate two to three times that of married couples. This has only exacerbated the welfare state that is unparalleled in Scandinavia. Kurtz points out that “no western nation has a higher percentage of public employees, public expenditures, or higher tax rates than Sweden.”
And what does this have to do with SSM? All of the Scandinavian countries mentioned embraced de facto same-sex marriage, beginning with Denmark in 1989. The out-of-wedlock birth rates mentioned experienced their most dramatic increases in the decade following the acceptance of SSM in these countries. The separation of marriage from procreation and parenting was already increasing, as it is here; SSM only widened the separation. “In Scandinavia, gay marriage has driven home the message that marriage itself is outdated, and that virtually any family form, including out-of-wedlock parenthood is acceptable” (Kurtz, “The End of Marriage”).
Dr. Kurtz offers further insight into the connection between cohabitation, rising out-of-wedlock birthrates, and same-sex marriage:
British demographer Kathleen Kiernan . . . divides the continent into three zones. The Nordic countries are the leaders in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births. They are followed by a middle group that includes the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain, and Germany . . . North American rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth put the United States and Canada into this middle group. Most resistant to cohabitation, family dissolution, and out-of-wedlock births are the southern European countries of Portugal, Italy, and Greece . . . These three groupings closely track the movement for gay marriage. In the late eighties and early nineties, gay marriage came to the Nordic countries, where the out-of-wedlock birthrate was already high. Ten years later, out-of-wedlock birthrates have risen significantly in the middle group of nations. Not coincidentally, nearly every country in that middle group has recently either legalized some form of gay marriage, or is seriously considering doing so. Only in the group with low out-of-wedlock birthrates has the gay marriage movement achieved relatively little success.
Kurtz concludes by saying, “This suggests that gay marriage is both an effect and a cause of the increasing separation between marriage and parenthood. As rising out-of-wedlock birthrates disassociate heterosexual marriage from parenting, gay marriage becomes conceivable” In essence, SSM is simply the extreme and final step in a culture’s descent from absolute monogamy.
Again, if marriage is only about a relationship between two people, and is not intrinsically connected to procreation and parenthood, why shouldn’t same-sex couples be allowed to marry? As Kurtz points out, “it quite naturally follows that once marriage is redefined to accommodate same-sex couples, that change cannot help but lock in and reinforce the very cultural separation between marriage, procreation and parenthood that makes gay marriage conceivable to begin with.” The die will be cast and the effects inevitable.
Furthermore, gay marriage has not strengthened the institution of marriage by promoting fidelity and commitment among gays in Scandinavia, as some suggest it will do here. In fact, take-up rates on gay marriage are exceedingly small. Yale law professor William Eskridge (an advocate for gay marriage) acknowledged this when “he reported in 2000 that only 2372 couples had registered after nine years of the Danish law going into effect, 674 after four years in Norway, and only 749 couples after four years in Sweden” (Kurtz, “The End of Marriage”). Here again, Kurtz is helpful in illuminating our understanding:
Danish social theorist Henning Bech and Norwegian sociologist Rune Halvorsen offer excellent accounts of the gay marriage debates in Denmark and Norway. Bech, who is perhaps Scandinavia’s most prominent gay thinker, dismisses as an implausible claim the idea that gay marriage promotes monogamy. He treats this claim as something that only served a tactical purpose during the difficult political debate.
According to Halvorsen, many of Norway’s gays imposed self-censorship during the marriage debate, in order to hide their opposition to marriage itself. The goal of the gay marriage movements in Norway and Denmark, say Halvorsen and Bech, was not marriage but social approval for homosexuality. Halvorsen goes on to suggest that the low numbers of registered gay couples may be understood as a collective protest against the expectations (presumably, monogamy) embodied in marriage.
While the sky may not have fallen, effects that have historically taken generations to produce have already begun to manifest within just twenty years of the acceptance of SSM in Scandinavia, the first nations to risk their future on this perilous social experiment.
© 2008 by S. Michael Craven
Comment on this article here
Subscribe to Michael's weekly commentary here
Subscribe to Michael's podcast here
S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. Michael is the author of Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Culturalized Christianity, published by Navpress and scheduled for release January 2009. Michael's ministry is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit: www.battlefortruth.org
Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.
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Marriage is designed for sex and sex is designed for marriage. Nonmarital sex ultimately harms the individual and society. Marriage, as I have already shown, is also exclusively heterosexual in that it conforms to the biological design for human sexuality and fulfills the reproductive principle. While same-sex couples may enjoy an emotional bond and engage in sexual acts, they are unable to achieve this one-flesh union because there is no biological communion such as that achieved through procreative acts. In the absence of this biological principle, sex becomes merely instrumental for self-satisfying pleasure and therefore falls into the same destructive category of self-centered acts that characterize all nonmarital sex.Monday, July 28, 2008In Defense of Marriage – Part IV
Any deviation from this proper relationship for sex (i.e., marriage), as well as its proper biological design (i.e., homosexual), is a perversion of human sexuality; history demonstrates that such deviations will inevitably undo those societal goods associated with marriage and the natural family.
So what are these “goods” that derive from marriage? According to the eminent University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite, there are a multitude of documented benefits unique to natural marriage that would be nullified if marriage were altered. For example:
Married people live longer, are healthier, have fewer heart attacks and other diseases, have fewer problems with alcohol, behave in less risky ways, have more sex—and more satisfying sex—and become much more wealthy than single people. (As quoted by Robert Browning in a book review of The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher).
Regarding mortality, studies reveal that “mortality rates are 50 percent higher for unmarried women and 250 percent higher for unmarried men than they are for married women and men” (Waite and Gallagher, The Case for Marriage [New York: Broadway Books, 2000], 47). In regards to men matched in every respect except marital status, nine out of ten married men who were alive at age forty-eight made it to sixty-five; only six out of ten bachelors lived to the usual retirement age (Waite and Gallagher, 50).
Mortality rates for homosexual men are even higher. According to a study that appeared in the International Journal of Epidemiology, which examined the homosexual community in Vancouver, Canada, “Life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men” (Robert S. Hogg et al., “Modeling the Impact of HIV Disease on Mortality in Gay and Bisexual Men,” International Journal of Epidemiology, 26 [1997]: 657).
Another overlooked benefit of marriage is that of physical security for women. While some may want you to believe that marriage facilitates the oppression and subjugation of women, the reality is that spousal abuse is not the primary source of domestic abuse in this country; it is nonspousal abuse. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey conducted by the US Department of Justice, of all violent crimes against domestic partners (male/female) that occurred between 1979 and 1987, boyfriends or ex-husbands commit the overwhelming majority of crimes. In total, 20 percent of women report having been assaulted by their partner. However, husbands presently living with their wives committed only 9 percent of these crimes. The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that being unmarried puts women at a much higher risk of domestic abuse.
Abuse within male homosexual relationships is as high as 46 percent (“Domestic Violence in Gay and Lesbian Couples,” www.psychpage.com/gay/library/gay_lesbian_violence). Among lesbian couples, some research shows that the lifetime prevalence of physical assault among women living with female partners was 35.4 percent. Given that same-sex “marriage” would exist in name only without its essential defining elements, its application to homosexual couples would, most likely, not serve to arrest the high rates of domestic abuse among gays.
To illustrate that marriage is unique and its benefits derive from a particular social understanding that is beyond the mere fact of men and women living together in a sexual relationship, consider cohabitation. Cohabiting couples seldom accumulate wealth in the same way married couples do. They are far more tentative about their relationship, less inclined to invest together in homes, stocks, and furniture, and more likely to do such things as keep separate bank accounts and take separate vacations (Waite and Gallagher, 110–123). And finally, the physical and sexual abuse of children is much higher in cohabiting families than in married families (Waite and Gallagher, 135).
Many believe that living together prior to marriage serves as an effective testing ground, increasing a couple’s chances for a long-term, healthy marriage. However, four decades of sociological evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that just the opposite is true. In fact, cohabitation not only fails to prepare couples for marriage, but actually contributes to decreased marital stability in the future. According to studies, couples that cohabitate prior to marriage have substantially higher divorce rates, ranging from 50 to 100 percent higher (Axinn and Thorton, “The Relationship Between Cohabitation and Divorce: Selectivity or Casual Influence?” Demography 29, 357–374).
Cohabitation is not related to marital happiness, but it is instead related to lower levels of marital satisfaction, higher levels of marital disagreement, and marital instability (Booth and Johnson, “Premarital Cohabitation and Marital Success,” Journal of Family Issues 9, 261). The dissolution rates of women who cohabit premaritally with their future spouses are, on average, nearly 80 percent higher than the rates of those who do not (Bennett, Blanc, and Bloom, “Commitment and the Modern Union: Assessing the Link Between Premarital Cohabitation and Subsequent Marital Stability,” American Sociological Review 53, 127–138).
One possible cause for the instability inherent in cohabitation is the lack of social reinforcement for fidelity that is implicit in marriage. Research again reveals that currently cohabitating and postmarital cohabitating individuals are less committed to their present partner in regards to the possibility of sexual encounters with others outside of the current relationship (Cunningham and Antill, “Cohabitation and Marriage: Retrospective and Predictive Comparisons,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 11, 89).
In regards to homosexual couples, the concept of fidelity is a popular myth. In the book The Male Couple, the author reports that in a study of 156 males in homosexual relationships lasting from one to thirty-seven years, “Only seven couples have a totally exclusive sexual relationship, and these men all have been together for less than five years. Stated another way, all couples with a relationship lasting more than five years have incorporated some provision for outside sexual activity in their relationships” (McWhirter, The Male Couple [Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall] 252, 253).
Cohabitation among heterosexual couples is much closer to marriage—yet even here we see the adverse affect this modification of marriage and the natural family has had on the deterioration of the family and the loss of essential societal benefits. In short, marriage and the natural family function as the cornerstone of civilization; even the slightest deviation from this absolute definition destabilizes this vital institution and begins to produce a series of deleterious effects. Do we really believe that redefining marriage in even more radical terms will somehow improve the situation?
© 2008 by S. Michael Craven
Comment on this article here
Subscribe to Michael's weekly commentary here
Subscribe to Michael's podcast here
S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. Michael is the author of the groundbreaking book, Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Culturalized Christianity, published by Navpress and scheduled for release January 2009. Michael's ministry is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit: www.battlefortruth.org
Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.
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Monday, July 21, 2008In Defense of Marriage - Part III
Thus far we have established that monogamy is central to the health and prosperity of a given civilization, and that marriage has proven the only effective means for regulating monogamy. Additionally, we countered the charge that homosexual monogamy would prove equally beneficial by demonstrating that procreative acts are essential to defining marriage and that it is only marriage defined by such essentials that proves efficacious to society.
Now let’s examine the historical findings relative to those cultures that once held to a strong sexual ethic—in which monogamy is strictly reinforced through marriage—but later compromised that ethic, as we are now doing. According to Unwin’s thorough survey of history, any and every culture that embraces a philosophy of sexual freedom for a period of at least three generations will inevitably experience cultural decline (Unwin, Sexual Regulations and Cultural Behavior, 1935).
There is not one single example in all of human history where this cultural pattern appears and there does not follow cultural demise consistent with Unwin’s conclusions. (I would estimate that we are in the latter stages of the second generation.)
History is replete with examples that testify to this fact. The Greek, Roman, Babylonian, and Sumerian empires are just a few examples of cultures that began with a strong marriage-centered monogamy and later degenerated into liberal sexual practices (including homosexuality), which, according to the sociological and anthropological evidence, was central to their downfall. Of course, our own culture has suffered enormously in the wake of the American sexual revolution; the societal costs of paternal absence, divorce, and out-of-wedlock births have been staggering.
Pitirim A. Sorokin, the renowned Russian-born sociologist who founded the sociology department at Harvard, describes the basis for this degenerative pattern:
If more and more individuals are brought up in this sex-saturated atmosphere, then without deep interiorization of religious, moral, and legal norms of behavior, they will become rudderless boats controlled only by the winds of their environment. (Sorokin, The American Sex Revolution, Boston, MA: Porter Sargent, 1956, p. 55.)
Sorokin conducted his own study of history and likewise stressed that marriage is “the most decisive factor in the survival and well-being” of society (Sorokin, p. 6). Based on his sociological study of historical civilizations, Dr. Sorokin warned that “any change in marriage behavior, any increase in sexual promiscuity, and illicit sexual relations is pregnant with momentous consequences,” adding that a “sex revolution drastically affects the lives of millions, deeply disturbs the community and decisively influences the future of society” (p.7). We have already seen changes in marriage behavior with the extension of sexual opportunities outside marriage beginning in the 1960s. Predictably promiscuity increased exponentially within the subsequent generation, as manifested in today’s “hook-up” culture; now a revolution of unprecedented proportions threatens in the form of legalizing same-sex marriage (SSM), a first in human history.
It is the height of arrogance, ignorance, or both that argues against the unique nature of marriage and its necessity to social stability and well-being. However, with more than four decades following the American sexual revolution, this should not be surprising because, as Sorokin pointed out, “in the conditions of spiritual, moral, and mental anarchy … it is difficult to maintain sexual sanity” (Sorokin, p. 55).
The imposition of sexual morality and the restraint of that morality to marriage between one man and one woman serves to mature men and women into adulthood, which properly understood occurs when their narcissism is subdued. Marriage, unlike any other relationship, serves this purpose. As I said earlier, it is the one relationship that properly prepares and conditions us for living in community with others. Conversely, a sexually hedonistic society grows increasingly selfish and narcissistic. Sorokin makes the point that “illicit sexual relations rarely go beyond a shortlived ‘copulational’ union. Each partner remains a mere sex apparatus for the satisfaction of lust of the other. The partners remain largely unknown to each other; their egos are not merged into one ‘we’ nor is their selfishness tempered by mutual devotion and love” (p. 6). Sorokin concludes, “In the long run, such a society would be increasingly composed of self-centered egoists incapable of acting altruistically and of being true good neighbors” (p. 12).
This might help explain the motivation of SSM advocates, so driven to redefine marriage to suit their own selfish interests regardless of the larger effects upon the family, children, and society. They only care about what they want—and what they want is not marriage but social affirmation of a perverse and illicit lifestyle. They hope that calling it marriage will both legitimize their conduct and assuage their sense of degradation and shame.
Civilization and social order are directly related to the ideal of marriage as perceived by a given society. When society allows the extension of sexual opportunity outside the exclusive relationship of marriage, or in our present case redefines what is essential to marriage, the value and necessity of marriage is diminished. Once sex is separated from marriage, society’s expectations of procreative couples decrease. With a decreased expectation upon potential parents, the family is gradually redefined to accommodate different structures as being equal. These alternative family structures are devoid of the same societal expectations of traditional marriage, i.e., commitment, fidelity, and selflessness. Once the social reinforcement to lifelong marriage and parenting are removed, history demonstrates that family dissolution and infertility rates increase, thus producing the inevitable negative impact on civilization and social order.
The proposal of redefining marriage to accommodate persons of the same sex is an unprecedented social experiment that all available evidence demonstrates will only further erode, if not destroy, an already weakened institution that is vital to our very survival.
© 2008 by S. Michael Craven
Comment on this article here
Subscribe to Michael's weekly commentary here
Subscribe to Michael's podcast here
S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. Michael is the author of the groundbreaking book, Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Culturalized Christianity, published by Navpress and scheduled for release January 2009. Michael's ministry is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit: www.battlefortruth.org
Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.
