You've heard about the Manhattan Declaration, in which an ecumenical group of conservative Christian leaders signed a pledge to resist governmental efforts to promote abortion, gay marriage and an erosion of religious liberty. In a long post about pop conservative Christianity, the Ochlophobist, a very conservative Orthodox Christian, expressed his deep, Stegall-like skepticism of the project. Excerpt:
I never encountered things like the Alliance Defense Fund [a Christian activist group whose president signed the Declaration -- RD] until I encountered Christians in the suburbs. I would guess these Funds get the bulk of their funding from bourgeois Christians who find abortion and homosexuality distasteful, and yes, there is a distinction to be made between a motivation to act based upon taste, and a motivation to act based upon the fear of God. In a culture which commodifies everything, what is called the fear of God is often actually a matter of taste - a consumer choice like any other.This is the I'll have my cake and eat it too phenomenon - I'll send my $500 to the Christians Rightly Allied Against Perversion (CRAAP) fund to have them lobby against homosexual marriage, but I still want my 4 large screen TVs in the house so that my 2 kids can each play their video games while my wife watches Desperate Housewives and I watch the instruction DVD which explains to me how to operate the DVD players in my new 26 foot long Ford Explosion. What I do not "get" when I do this is that when I live in a manner that assumes the correctness of grossly gratuitous consumption, I live in a manner that assumes that homosexuality should be socially accepted. Why? Because like calls out to like. Homosexuality as a lifestyle and as a moral act is a decadent, gratuitous form of consumption in which the human person becomes commodified. In fact the normative accoutrements which gays and lesbians themselves often heartily embrace as representative of their lifestyle convey a pervasive quality of consumer oriented decadence (yes, there are exceptions; they prove the rule). It would seem that such a false ontology would naturally follow from a relationship based upon a sexual act which can never rise above entertainment. But my intent here is not to analyze homosexuals, it is rather to note how much in common the bourgeois Christian living a decadent lifestyle has with the homosexual lifestylist on a fundamental level, and thus the ridiculousness of that Christian going all Dobson in his political life.
More:
This is the reason that none of these Statements or Declarations will bring about any real change in our culture - they do not address the fundamental problem, which is that the human being in our society has 'value' and dignity insofar as he or she can function as a consumer, and that the existential greatness of the human person lies with the person's ability to coordinate choices into a lifestyle which can be classified into various mimetic pattern groups. This is the sense in which these Statements play the same hand as those they oppose - for they position folks into the mimetic pattern of other consumers like them. The Statement may address, and may even address well, secondary or tertiary problems, but as such we remain in the determinism of our current order.The vast majority of abortion seeking people do not choose to murder their unborn child because they desire the blood of an innocent or a grisly killing or giving the flesh of the murdered to corporations and research institutions. They choose murder because they deify choice and what they deem to be the existential beauty of their own ordering of choices as they damn well see fit. Most people who defend homosexual marriages do not do so on the basis of strong held beliefs about human biology (though most assent to biological determinism in one form or another, this is not the basis of most defenses of homosexual marriage) or a firm conviction regarding the aesthetic beauty and natural goodness of homosex (indeed, for most of these folks aesthetic beauty and natural goods are in every instance deemed social constructs), but rather they defend homosexual marriage on the basis that the choice for or against it is an intrinsic aspect of human freedom as it relates to human identity - to paraphrase a pertinent Supreme Court decision, we choose the reality we want for ourselves. If you think about it, that is not that different than the role of the player in a number of video games. It is not that different from the way we are encouraged to decorate our homes, or choose options for our Iphones and car interiors.
Christians who actively support this culture of constant, gratuitous, decadent choosing and at the same time actively oppose the choice for abortion or the choice for a homosexual marriage, only achieve a seeking to rob a Peter they happen to find distasteful, while they continue to pay the Paul to whom they happen to be addicted.
Read the whole thing. The guy is onto something. I keep saying that we conservatives can't live as if the choice (usually called "freedom" by conservative politicos) were the summum bonum of human life, and expect to make sense when we deny that freedom to others.
See this earlier Ochlophobist dismissal of the Manhattan Declaration. Lots to ponder there about the efficacy of these initiatives, or lack thereof.
UPDATE: To clarify my own views, I disagree with Ochlophobist about the nature of gay relationships as by nature nothing more than "a form of consumption." That does not fit the reality I've personally observed with gay couples I know. I don't understand why opposing gay marriage, or even holding to traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality, requires one to believe something about gay relationships that simply isn't true. But I think his broad point about choice, consumerism and selective morality is worth considering.
I also still support the Manhattan Declaration in spite of recognizing the great worth of Ochlophobist's critique. As imperfect as the motivations of its signers may be, the fact is religious and social conservatives had better unite politically on this matter in some efficacious way, because there are big fights to come over important issues.
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The majority of social conservatives in the country, both the leaders and rank and file, rabidly supported a Presidential Administration that for 8 years tortured human beings.
There is no way you can get the Jesus of the Bible to say that waterboarding or even "enhanced interrogation" is Godly and righteous.
Yet where were the social conservatives on this issue? Silent, when they weren't outright cheering the practices on.
That these same people would think that they still have the moral authority of Christ and the Bible behind them only shows the vast narcisistic depravity of their own self-delusions.
What I do not "get" when I do this is that when I live in a manner that assumes the correctness of grossly gratuitous consumption, I live in a manner that assumes that homosexuality should be socially accepted. Why? Because like calls out to like. Homosexuality as a lifestyle and as a moral act is a decadent, gratuitous form of consumption in which the human person becomes commodified.
This is pure garbage.
In less than one paragraph, this guy turns faith, charity, righteousness and living a life sanctified by God into a political dogma - and worse, it is one completely void of God.
We oppose gay marriage because it is perversion of one of the core items that holds civilization together. It was the institution of Marriage - a sacred bond of a man and woman - which was created at Eden, that has made of life an existence of something higher than that of mere animals. Without it, civilization itself is not possible to hold together. Without it, just look at the images of post-apocolyptic worlds where no law and no morality hold sway.
But using wealth, a blessing from God, to live well, and to bless others with it as well, is NOT in any fashion, sence, or meaning, the same as promotion of gay marriage. One has nothing to do with the other.
Sadly, though, I think I may understand why he wrote it. For him, faith, hope, love, and charity have become just like the secular religion of the left. Enforced "charity" by paying large taxes to fund handouts for the "poor", taxing the rich to prevent them from becoming more rich, and other coercive laws and strictures, designed to control people's external behavior, according to sometimes arbitrarily chosen specifics. This forces them to NOT commit certain socially unacceptable sins.
In this world of thinking, "choice" is evil, except for those few and carefully exculpated "choices" which must be protected, and the real rationale behind the choice of the choices allowed often tends to be prurient indulgence. Thus, tobacco is a horrible sin, but smoking pot needs protection. Utter intellectual hypocrisy.
What I read into it, is that lacking conviction and the direction of God within his soul, he seeks to find a set of external rules, ones which remove his "choice", keeping him in the "righteous" behavior. Or, salvation by carefully chosen rules. Christ decried the pharisees for this kind of behavior - they were obsessed symbolic deeds of "great perception". They tithed the seasonings that grew on their land, and enumerated vast lists of choices you could NOT make and be righteous. They had precise distances set you could walk on the Sabbath, and even specific acts of food preparation you could engage in, and ones you could not. How you could not carry burden, but if you pinned cloth to your robe, it wasn't carrying a burden, so you could transported pinned, but not in your hand. Yet, they ignored the REAL matters of righteousness - love, charity, and kindness.
This is what I see in that nonsense I quoted above.
Salvation, however, is all about the matters of the heart. It's not whether you buy a Mercedes or a Kia or a Tahoe, it's why you make the choice you make. It is just as wrong to buy a Prius to show others how righteous you are about the environment, as it is to buy a Mercedes to demonstrate you have better class and more money than your neighbors.
That very thing is what he seeks - to avoid having to decide, by making up external rules to take away such choices, as if having some book list of "righteous decisions" and following it unquestioningly is going to make you good. By taking the choice away and adopting rules written by someone else, one does not by default become righteous. Instead, righteousness is a gift of God, one given in direct proportion to our willingless to accept it. By his denial of "choice", he refutes the very essence of God's power, substituting God's power for strictures written by man to control behavior, instead of adopting God's power to transform from within.
Campaigns against "choice" are of the Devil - not "choice" to hurt someone, but choice of being less than charitable, kind, and generous. That freedom was given by God at Creation. In essence, the whole story of man, and that of Christ, is the entire essence of the meaning of the universal question - is this all there is? God created a planet, gave our parents choice, like all the other beings in the universe. By whatever the mystery of Sin is, our parents fell. But this creates the most intense conflict of the entire universe - and may other universes beyond. How does a righteous God deal with rebellious people of free will? Is HE a tyrant? Or is the Devil? God is on trial, the devil is on trial, and in the end, our fates are determined by whose side we chose.
Railing against the freedom to choose right or wrong, good or evil, is merely to assert God is at fault for allowing it.
OK, let's try this. Individuals are free to make choices. Those choices may be correct, or incorrect, by objective or subjective criteria. They do not become worthy of respect merely because an individual is free to choose.
Divorce laws were relaxed because people, mostly women, but not always, were being tied into abusive and destructive marriages that had no sanctity to them. Unfortunately, too many of the people and institutions who tried to uphold the virtue of marrying for life had come to rely on the state as a prop, and when the prop was pulled away, had nothing to offer. The state should not keep people in destructive marriages by force of law, that said, it is beneficial and valuable, and virtuous, for people to choose, work, struggle, to remain in one marriage for life. It is the job of churches and families to teach that, without demanding that all marriage across the board be sustained by the handcuffs of the law.
Will some married people make bad choices? Yes. Will these choices include an easy divorce rather than making and effort to sustain the marriage? Yes. If the church can't motivate them to make the effort, what do you expect the state to do?
Do I know what motivates some people to prefer marriage, or some sustained relationship, to their own sex rather than the opposite? No, I don't. If the church can't persuade people who legally have a choice, to voluntarily make the choice the church advocates as pure, holy, and right, what do you expect the state to do?
There is one twist to Rod's presentation that doesn't make sense. He recognizes a great deal of genuine love, affection, stability, to same-sex couples who are friends of his... but a broad coalition must form to fight the battle to deny them recognition as such? I understand that a same sex marriage is arguably missing some of the significance of a heterosexual marriage -- it does not reunite and fully express the image of God. But, if the church can't persuade everyone to accept that, and we each have a choice, what is this nonsense about pressuring the state to deny something admittedly beneficial in the individual context, and parade wrapped in a sham pretense of "civil disobedience."
Rod,
For what it's worth to you -- and it may not be worth much -- I'm *not* an Evangelical and I *don't* have a chip on my shoulder.
It's quite possible to think that Jason Peters and Ochlophobist are -- like me -- jerks sometimes, for reasons other than those.
Usually, it's been my experience anyway that Orthodox Christians who disparage any attempt to put a dent in the horrific numbers of the slaughtered unborn do so in an attempt to distance themselves from Protestantism and Catholicism, as if they were above such matters. How pathetic, and un-Orthodox! I'm not saying that this particular critic is for a fact doing that, but being too materialistic and not giving a care about the daily massacre of unborn children (and the problems for their parents), or about the "queering" of elementary school education by those who would normalize by legalizing a perverted understanding of marriage just are not the same things. Not even close.
Frankly, if we can't be out there fighting for the dignity of the unborn and marriage, it's a perfectly legitimate way to use the wealth God has blessed us with to help others to do so.
The Manhatten Declaration cannot eradicate abortion, homosexual activism, or the trampling of religious freedom of say doctors, teachers, nurses, judges, marriage commisioners, etc. who are faced with these issues every day...any more than the laws against rape or murder can eradicate those evils. But no one would surely suggest not supporting those laws (or removing them) because there are still people who run afoul. The Manhatten Declaration has already got people thinking, talking, reflecting, and praying about those issues. If it stops at that, it will have succeeded.
But like all other ages in the life of the Church, we are called to stand up and speak the truth and live it. Certainly 3200 daily murders of unborn children in America alone, and all of the results of the homosexual activism in other countries (like Canada) should show people there is plenty to stand up to today, even if we're allowed to have churches and liturgies in relative peace.
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