Rod Dreher

Take this tour through some recent economic charts from the Federal Reserve to get a picture of how terrible our economy really is. Seriously, it’s staggering stuff.

Here are 15 questions Google asks potential employees. Can you answer them? They broke my dang head.

I wrote earlier about how useful it is to humble yourself and try to see what the world looks like through the eyes of your opponents. Jonathan Rauch, the gay journalist and same-sex marriage backer, does an exemplary job of that in a recent speech. Excerpts:

Contrary to what some of my friends in the gay-marriage movement believe, however, homophobia is far from the only reason for opposition. Another group, which I think is at least equally large, feels threatened–less by the normalization of homosexuality than by the abnormalization, so to speak, of the conventionally defined family. “Nothing personal, do what you want,” they tell us, “but leave the definition of family–of marriage–alone!”
One way to see that more is going on than homophobia is to reflect, for a moment, on a peculiar fact: gay marriage is far more controversial in America than either same-sex adoption or same-sex child custody.
Think about that. Isn’t it odd? The care of children, by definition, involves third parties who often have little or no choice about their situation. If there is a case for harm, one would think it would be strongest here–not in the union of two mutually consenting adults. In fact, the other side has a very hard time articulating any concrete harm at all that gay marriage would do. Yet efforts to make a political issue of gay adoption have consistently failed, while, wherever it appears, gay marriage finds it cannot not be a political issue.
What is behind the alarm raised by gay marriage?
To answer this question, I think one must widen the aperture and look at same-sex marriage in the context of a much larger cultural battle over the nature of family, of marriage, and even of adulthood: a debate over what it is that constitutes, and should constitute, the template for “normal” in all of those areas.

Rauch says that his side often likes to point out that the states that are most anti-SSM are those with the highest level of divorce and family dysfunction. But the pro-SSM side, says Rauch, takes the wrong lesson from that fact. The truth is, people in these states are worried about the failure of the family system to civilize young people. Excerpt:

That is what “families form adults” means. Many teenagers and young adults formed families before they reached maturity, and came to maturity precisely by shouldering family responsibilities. Immature choices and what were once called, euphemistically, “accidents” were a fact of life; but the unity of sex, marriage, and procreation, combined with the pressure not to divorce, turned childish errors into adult vocations.
This paradigm is a traditional norm-set, well rooted in the human condition for untold generations. What the traditional norms say is: keep sex, marriage, and kids linked and more or less synchronized, and things are basically okay. Disassemble the package and you get social chaos.

Rauch goes on, in ways impossible to summarize here — I strongly encourage you to read the essay — to explain why “Red America” sees the marriage issue so differently, in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with bigotry. Here’s the killer graf:

Same-sex marriage, in this view, is in some sense the ultimate symbolic assault on what is left of the unity of sex, marriage, and procreation. “Ultimate,” I might add, in both senses of the word: “extreme,” but also “last,” the blow that completes the most destructive demolition work of the sexual revolution. After gay marriage, in the Red view of things, how can sex, marriage, and procreation ever be put back together again?

Exactly. This point, and the religious freedom question, are why I am so concerned about SSM. Gay marriage is the final act of the Sexual Revolution, the thing that institutionalizes it. If you think the Sexual Revolution (which Rauch cannily defines as global information culture + birth control) was on balance a good thing, you’re happy with this; if not, not. What’s so insightful about Rauch’s analysis — and he’s quite clear which side he’s on — is that he explains why conservative first principles on the meaning of family in society lead logically to opposing gay marriage. I have never read a more clear, cogent, fair-minded explanation of why social conservatives oppose gay marriage. Here’s more (this gets long, so I’ll put it below the jump, but it’s very good):

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I saw recently a statistic saying that China today exports as much every six hours as it did in all of 1978, when Deng Xiaoping’s revolutionary opening of China to the world started. Thirty years ago, would anyone have foreseen China as prosperous as it is today? And would anyone have predicted that so many Chinese would be turning to Christianity? NPR is reporting all week on China’s Christianity boom. Why are so many Chinese accepting Christ? Excerpt:

In the past, she has left the village to work in Shanghai. She says her belief in Christ was a lifeline in the alien metropolis and her church acted as her family.
“Whether they know you or not, they treat you as a brother or sister,” she says. “If you have troubles, they help out with money or material assistance or spiritual aid.”
As China urbanizes and millions of rural migrants experience the social and economic dislocation of traveling to new cities, Christianity can provide them with an instant community.
Many believers sitting on the hard wooden benches of the village church are older. They tell stories of the rewards of faith and how prayer cured illnesses and ended beatings from husbands.

No one knows for sure how many Christians there are in China, which is still officially an atheist state. But most believe the real numbers far exceed the official estimate. Look at this:

Some recent surveys have calculated there could be as many as 100 million Chinese Protestants. That would mean that China has more Christians than Communist Party members, which now number 75 million.

Can you imagine? This might not technically qualify as a miracle, but it’s miraculous all the same. And Chinese evangelists are growing in strength and boldness:

[Government leaders'] powers to govern religion do, however, seem to be waning. That seems clear in a rural village in eastern China, where young people are openly trying to gain converts in defiance of the laws prohibiting proselytizing in public places. … China’s youth once trundled across the countryside spreading communism. Now, they’re spreading God’s word.

Amazing. The Spirit blows where He wills. By the way, Dr. Fenggang Yang at Purdue leads a scholarly effort to track and to understand what’s happening in China’s religious life (not only Christianity in China), via his Center on Religion and Chinese Society. By the way.2, one of my favorite books is “Christ the Eternal Tao,” a study by an Eastern Orthodox priest-monk of how Taoist themes and concepts in the life and teachings of Jesus.