In his book Moral Reconstruction, a history of moral lobbying and legislation between the Civil War and Prohibition, Gaines M. Foster recalls a period at the turn of the century when Christian lobbyists and special interest groups were pressuring the government for stricter laws regarding marriage and divorce. Interestingly, among the measures proposed was an amendment to the Constitution which would explicitly give the federal government power over marriage. In all, forty-two resolutions to give the government power over marriage were introduced to Congress between 1892 and 1920, none of which received so much as a favorable committee report. Given the striking parallels between the moral polity of the period and the current political climate (a secondary purpose of Foster's book), the three reasons given for the widespread failure of reformers to achieve such federal legislation is intriguing:
1) Such legislation met with overwhelming opposition in the South because many southerners feared it would result in federal intervention in state antimiscegenation laws.
2) The American Bar Association and the Interchurch Conference opposed the measures because they preferred state measures to regulate marriage and divorce.
3) Christians could not effectively mobilize support for legislation because there was widespread disagreement about precisely what the Bible said about marriage and divorce.
The obvious, superficial irony is immediately apparent. Unlike contemporary movements to grant the federal government powers over marriage, Christians and southerners were the key to opposing extending federal powers. The role reversal becomes even more pronounced when one considers that the new support for such measures in the South is born out of the desire of southerners to have their peculiar discriminatory marriage laws universalized. In the past, southerners feared for their idiosyncratic conception of a "true" marriage. A look at the history of moral legislation would seem, thankfully, to justify the fears of nineteenth century southerners rather than bolster the aspirations of those in the 21st century. Granting moral power to the federal government tends to have a liberalizing effect on public morality. Which makes almost amusing the fact that so many supposed supporters of "states rights" also support an amendment granting the federal government a new and unprecedented field of power, while their predecessors had the foresight one hundred years ago to oppose federal involvement in marriage consistent with a belief in restricting the power of the federal government.
In the interest of learning from history, it is perhaps time to realize that whether moral legislation fails (as did federal marriage legislation at the turn of the century) or succeeds (as did Prohibition), in the long term the tendency of the federal government is never toward stricter moral codes. If American history is any judge, progressive moral ideologies win the war of attrition, and time is a surer constant than political favor.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Saturday, October 8, 2011
The Wisdom of J. D. Tant
The following sentiment is so near to that of J. W. McGarvey, that for a moment I thought I had incorrectly attributed the quote when I shared it this summer. While the sentiment and even the manner of expression are very much the same, the following--in my opinion--bears repeating as often and in as varied a way as possible:
I would as soon risk my chance of heaven to die drunk in a bawdy house as to die on the battlefield, with murder in my heart, trying to kill my fellow man.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
A Plea for Persuasion
In 1810, following the passage of a controversial law requiring post offices to be open every day, outrage arose among the American religious community over the patent immorality of requiring a government official to work on Sunday. From that point onward, all the way up to and through the Civil War, there was a powerful and outspoken lobby in Washington to end Sunday mail service. There were appeals to divine law, protections for religious freedom, and even the temporal benefits of Sabbatarianism. While we now know that the concept of no Sunday mail would eventually prevail, it would be 1912 before the religious lobby would win out after more than a century of effort.
In 1829, the prevailing mood in the government more nearly reflected that of Democrat Senator Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky. Johnson was a staunch opponent of ending Sunday mail service, reasoning that to do so would be an endorsement of the religion of the majority, to the exclusion of minority groups, such as Jews, who observed a different Sabbath or no Sabbath at all. Johnson argued that the "principles of our Government do not recognize in the majority, any authority over, the minority, except in matters which regard the conduct of man to his fellow man." Johnson did not, however, necessarily believe that Christians were wrong about the propriety of work on a Sunday. He merely saw an alternate route to their goal. In his address to Senate in 1829, Johnson exhorted churches, arguing that if achieve their goals through instruction of
Here Johnson makes a powerful and persuasive argument the superiority of moral persuasion. One need only look at the history of moral legislation to discover that the "strong arm of the civil power" is always ineffective in achieving genuine moral reform. Take the ongoing history of Sabbatarianism as an example. In 1912, the government stopped delivering, for the most part, mail on Sundays. Yet are we today any more reverent of the appointed day of rest because of this? Plenty of Americans, including no small number of Christians, gladly work on Sundays. Those who don't primarily abstain as a luxury rather than a moral conviction. Even then, what they are doing is hardly setting aside a day for the Lord. If they are devout, Christians set aside their morning for Jesus, leaving their afternoons free to devote to the more passionate religious exercise of professional football. The only moral result of stopping the mail on Sunday is to tempt me to rage that I have to wait one more day for the book I ordered from Amazon.
Examples could be easily multiplied. Prohibition did not make Americans any soberer. Sodomy laws never stopped homosexuals from having intercourse. Anti-piracy laws have not resulted in the abatement of illegal downloading. Abstinence only education certainly hasn't prevented teenagers from being sexually active. While you might debate the merits of each of these programs and discuss whether they are really attempts to make society more moral (as is probably the case with abstinence only education) or merely formalities to allow punishment when its immorality inevitably manifests (as is probably the case with anti-piracy laws), one thing ought to be clear: the government is powerless to legislate morality.
Given what ought to be this obvious fact, one cannot but wonder at the wholesale abandonment of persuasion by the religious right in favor of civil coercion. Are we, as Christians, so doubtful of the appeal of the divine ethos that we have been reduced to the belief that we can only convince people to live righteous lives by the forceful application of morality through law? More importantly, have we honestly been so deluded into believing that a homosexual who is unable to marry or legally to admit to sexual intercourse is somehow better off for our moral coercion? Righteousness acheived by force is no righteousness at all.
It is time for Christians to recapture the art of moral persuasion, to have faith again in the appeal of Christ and the truth he came to teach, and to take our cue from our Father who had the wisdom to realize that it would have been meaningless to force humanity to be moral. We need to stop using unholy means to acheive unholy ends, no matter how religious they appear. Instead, we need to emulate our Savior who revolutionized the world not through the power of his might but through the persuasiveness of his teaching and the example of his life.
In 1829, the prevailing mood in the government more nearly reflected that of Democrat Senator Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky. Johnson was a staunch opponent of ending Sunday mail service, reasoning that to do so would be an endorsement of the religion of the majority, to the exclusion of minority groups, such as Jews, who observed a different Sabbath or no Sabbath at all. Johnson argued that the "principles of our Government do not recognize in the majority, any authority over, the minority, except in matters which regard the conduct of man to his fellow man." Johnson did not, however, necessarily believe that Christians were wrong about the propriety of work on a Sunday. He merely saw an alternate route to their goal. In his address to Senate in 1829, Johnson exhorted churches, arguing that if achieve their goals through instruction of
the consciences of individuals to make them believe that it is a violation of God's law to carry mail, open post offices, or receive letters, on Sundays, the evil of which they complain will cease of itself, without any exertion of the strong arm of the civil power.
Here Johnson makes a powerful and persuasive argument the superiority of moral persuasion. One need only look at the history of moral legislation to discover that the "strong arm of the civil power" is always ineffective in achieving genuine moral reform. Take the ongoing history of Sabbatarianism as an example. In 1912, the government stopped delivering, for the most part, mail on Sundays. Yet are we today any more reverent of the appointed day of rest because of this? Plenty of Americans, including no small number of Christians, gladly work on Sundays. Those who don't primarily abstain as a luxury rather than a moral conviction. Even then, what they are doing is hardly setting aside a day for the Lord. If they are devout, Christians set aside their morning for Jesus, leaving their afternoons free to devote to the more passionate religious exercise of professional football. The only moral result of stopping the mail on Sunday is to tempt me to rage that I have to wait one more day for the book I ordered from Amazon.
Examples could be easily multiplied. Prohibition did not make Americans any soberer. Sodomy laws never stopped homosexuals from having intercourse. Anti-piracy laws have not resulted in the abatement of illegal downloading. Abstinence only education certainly hasn't prevented teenagers from being sexually active. While you might debate the merits of each of these programs and discuss whether they are really attempts to make society more moral (as is probably the case with abstinence only education) or merely formalities to allow punishment when its immorality inevitably manifests (as is probably the case with anti-piracy laws), one thing ought to be clear: the government is powerless to legislate morality.
Given what ought to be this obvious fact, one cannot but wonder at the wholesale abandonment of persuasion by the religious right in favor of civil coercion. Are we, as Christians, so doubtful of the appeal of the divine ethos that we have been reduced to the belief that we can only convince people to live righteous lives by the forceful application of morality through law? More importantly, have we honestly been so deluded into believing that a homosexual who is unable to marry or legally to admit to sexual intercourse is somehow better off for our moral coercion? Righteousness acheived by force is no righteousness at all.
It is time for Christians to recapture the art of moral persuasion, to have faith again in the appeal of Christ and the truth he came to teach, and to take our cue from our Father who had the wisdom to realize that it would have been meaningless to force humanity to be moral. We need to stop using unholy means to acheive unholy ends, no matter how religious they appear. Instead, we need to emulate our Savior who revolutionized the world not through the power of his might but through the persuasiveness of his teaching and the example of his life.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Newt Gingrich endorses marriage by rape...by implication
There are few things that upset me more than a bad argument for a good position. In view of this, I was understandably unnerved when I saw that Newt Gingrich is making waves (third-tier GOP candidate size tsunamis) for suggesting that homosexual marriage is "a temporary aberration that will dissipate." The fuller quote reads:
In short, Gingrich attempts to overcome homosexual marriage on two grounds: intuition and history. We'll leave aside the former, since it would seem that Gingrich is woefully out of touch with presently goes against everything his culture knows. What is left is the question of history. As the linked article shows, many are content only to go so far back as Gingrich's own checked marital past and dismiss his argument at that. The problem with this, however, is that such a shallow engagement doesn't address what ought to be the startling truth of Gingrich's historical assertion, at least on the surface. Same-sex marriage is a historical novelty, such that even in cultures where homosexual behaviors were tolerated and even idealized the idea of a homosexual marriage was unthinkable.
The real problem with Gingrich's argument is not his personal disqualification on the basis of adultery and serial monogamy or even an incorrect assumption that same-sex marriage has some kind of historical precedent. The quandary arises when anyone attempts to apply Gingrich's historical canon to marriage more generally. For example, a majority of societies historically have permitted if not widely practiced polygamy, and the practice has been historically permitted in four of the five major world religions: Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Numerous contemporary cultures continue the practice, including sub-cultures within the United States itself. By the historical logic of Gingrich, polygamy should be permissible under US law.
We might apply the same historical logic to the proper age of marriage. In ancient Greece, the ideal age for a woman to be married was her early teens. This expectation carried into that other archetypal Western culture, and is enshrined in Roman law which permits marriage before the age of twelve provided the consummation does not occur until twelve years of age. The Corpus Juris Civilis even includes this curious law which addresses what happens to a wife who cheats on her husband prior to that age of consummation: "Where a girl, less than twelve years old...commits adultery...she cannot be accused of adultery by her husband, for the reason that she committed it before reaching the marriageable age." Medieval law proves more telling, in that Gratian allows that a girl may consent to be married as young as seven. In Elizabethan England, a girl could consent to marriage at twelve and could not revoke that consent after fourteen. By Gingrich's historical logic, I ought to be able to marry a girl on the very cusp of pubescence--though it is perhaps up for debate what legal recourse I have if my eleven year old wife elects to have sex with another man.
The implications of applying such a historical logic for marital practices raises countless more problems. Should we allow for arranged marriages that do not have the consent of those involved or perhaps have a coerced consent? Should women have the right to file for divorce? Should we go back to the borderline chattle slavery system of marriage in classical Athens? Or to the guardianship system of Rome? Will we go back to a system of marriage by capture (in which case, can someone find me Jena Malone's address)? Which parts of recorded history do you suppose Gingrich is interested in endorsing?
There is no doubt that I do not think people of the same sex ought to be having intercourse, cohabitating, raising children, or getting married. My arguments, however, are moral and religious. Attempting to appeal to history as an arbiter in the discussion of the legal permissibility of same-sex marriage raises more problems than it solves, in large part because the history of human dependence on prolific procreation--only recently escaped--is an appeal to a dead priority. More obviously, it is an appeal to the human race which has proved more than willing to shape legal and cultural norms to its whims for the entirety of its history. That means that if marrying multiple young girls through rape was expedient and enjoyable (and why wouldn't it be), then it was culturally and legally enshrined until countervailing ideological (or more commonly military) forces dislodged it. Unfortunately, much like advocates of the amusingly oxymoronic "civil Sabbath" in the nineteenth century, opponents to same-sex marriage are forced to find a secular logic for their fundamentally religious opposition the practice because admitting their exclusively religious motivation would disqualify their position from consideration. Of course, if Gingrich were to admit this it might represent a frightening step down the road toward incurable Ron Paul.
I believe that marriage is between a man and woman. It has been for all of recorded history and I think this is a temporary aberration that will dissipate. I think that it is just fundamentally goes against everything we know.
In short, Gingrich attempts to overcome homosexual marriage on two grounds: intuition and history. We'll leave aside the former, since it would seem that Gingrich is woefully out of touch with presently goes against everything his culture knows. What is left is the question of history. As the linked article shows, many are content only to go so far back as Gingrich's own checked marital past and dismiss his argument at that. The problem with this, however, is that such a shallow engagement doesn't address what ought to be the startling truth of Gingrich's historical assertion, at least on the surface. Same-sex marriage is a historical novelty, such that even in cultures where homosexual behaviors were tolerated and even idealized the idea of a homosexual marriage was unthinkable.
The real problem with Gingrich's argument is not his personal disqualification on the basis of adultery and serial monogamy or even an incorrect assumption that same-sex marriage has some kind of historical precedent. The quandary arises when anyone attempts to apply Gingrich's historical canon to marriage more generally. For example, a majority of societies historically have permitted if not widely practiced polygamy, and the practice has been historically permitted in four of the five major world religions: Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Numerous contemporary cultures continue the practice, including sub-cultures within the United States itself. By the historical logic of Gingrich, polygamy should be permissible under US law.
We might apply the same historical logic to the proper age of marriage. In ancient Greece, the ideal age for a woman to be married was her early teens. This expectation carried into that other archetypal Western culture, and is enshrined in Roman law which permits marriage before the age of twelve provided the consummation does not occur until twelve years of age. The Corpus Juris Civilis even includes this curious law which addresses what happens to a wife who cheats on her husband prior to that age of consummation: "Where a girl, less than twelve years old...commits adultery...she cannot be accused of adultery by her husband, for the reason that she committed it before reaching the marriageable age." Medieval law proves more telling, in that Gratian allows that a girl may consent to be married as young as seven. In Elizabethan England, a girl could consent to marriage at twelve and could not revoke that consent after fourteen. By Gingrich's historical logic, I ought to be able to marry a girl on the very cusp of pubescence--though it is perhaps up for debate what legal recourse I have if my eleven year old wife elects to have sex with another man.
The implications of applying such a historical logic for marital practices raises countless more problems. Should we allow for arranged marriages that do not have the consent of those involved or perhaps have a coerced consent? Should women have the right to file for divorce? Should we go back to the borderline chattle slavery system of marriage in classical Athens? Or to the guardianship system of Rome? Will we go back to a system of marriage by capture (in which case, can someone find me Jena Malone's address)? Which parts of recorded history do you suppose Gingrich is interested in endorsing?
There is no doubt that I do not think people of the same sex ought to be having intercourse, cohabitating, raising children, or getting married. My arguments, however, are moral and religious. Attempting to appeal to history as an arbiter in the discussion of the legal permissibility of same-sex marriage raises more problems than it solves, in large part because the history of human dependence on prolific procreation--only recently escaped--is an appeal to a dead priority. More obviously, it is an appeal to the human race which has proved more than willing to shape legal and cultural norms to its whims for the entirety of its history. That means that if marrying multiple young girls through rape was expedient and enjoyable (and why wouldn't it be), then it was culturally and legally enshrined until countervailing ideological (or more commonly military) forces dislodged it. Unfortunately, much like advocates of the amusingly oxymoronic "civil Sabbath" in the nineteenth century, opponents to same-sex marriage are forced to find a secular logic for their fundamentally religious opposition the practice because admitting their exclusively religious motivation would disqualify their position from consideration. Of course, if Gingrich were to admit this it might represent a frightening step down the road toward incurable Ron Paul.
Monday, October 3, 2011
War and Peace (A Short Post)
While it must be remembered that Harry S. Stout's stance in Upon the Altar of a Nation is outspokenly not pacifist and that he uses the following quote as a launching point for a discussion of jus in bello, I was struck by the truth of the following quote and its at least superficial harmony with the transformative ethics espoused by, among others, St. John of Sinai:
There are no ideal wars. Peace is the only ideal, and every war is at some level a perversion of it.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
You have been weighed in the balance...
On this Lord's Day, let us give thanks for the punishment which is dolled out against that most heinous sin of apostasy. Particularly those apostates Colorado, Nebraska, and Texas A&M, each of whom suffered upsetting losses yesterday in their new home conferences. Texas A&M's sins must have been particularly heinous, since--to match their loss to a middle-of-the-pack SEC team this week--they had an equally embarassing loss to a middle-of-the-pack Big 12 team last week. Clearly, "the LORD watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish." (Psalm 1:6)
Saturday, October 1, 2011
In Other News
Yet another Muslim nation has implemented measure which will passively and unintentionally suppress Christianity within its borders. Here is the news out of Kazakhstan:
Maybe, if they're lucky, the Kazakh Christians will get a taste of the Arab Spring. Other Christians seem to be thrilled about it.
Kazakhstan's upper house of parliament approved a bill Thursday that backers say will help combat religious extremism, but that critics call a blow to freedom of belief in the ex-Soviet nation.
The bill approved by the Senate will require existing religious organizations in the mainly Muslim nation to dissolve and register again through a procedure that is virtually guaranteed to exclude smaller groups, including minority Christian communities.
Passage of the bill marks a reversal of authoritarian President Nursultan Nazarbayev's earlier attempts to cast Kazakhstan as a land of religious tolerance. One activist estimates that two-thirds of existing religious groups could be abolished as a result of the new law.
Maybe, if they're lucky, the Kazakh Christians will get a taste of the Arab Spring. Other Christians seem to be thrilled about it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)