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One of the issues to first spark debate among evangelicals after our definitive split with the mainline in the early twentieth century was how to relate as evangelicals to non-evangelical communities. Originally the question was how evangelical churches should relate to the mainline churches. Another question followed about how evangelical churches’ worship should relate to evangelism, which is often addressed to those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with evangelical culture. But more pertinent here is the question of how evangelical Christians should conduct ourselves in fields like academia and politics.
Some people are able to win respect in both worlds. And that can be a very valuable role, able to accomplish things that few others can. But there is always a risk of “going native,” claiming to be more sophisticated than those rubes who hold to their evangelical convictions because you have accepted your field’s secular norms on the Bible, property, sex, abortion, other religions, etc.
There is a widespread perception within evangelicalism that David French has compromised more and more of his evangelical convictions to be seen as “one of the good ones” by the secular commentariat. I think that this explains his position on transgenderism in the public square, for example, better than principled classical liberalism does. So I don’t see French as an exemplar of classically liberal evangelicals.
Evangelical support for George W. Bush was much earlier and more heartfelt than evangelical support for Trump has been. Bush’s faith is, as far as I can tell, sincere. But while he himself may have had sympathy for the religious right, he also shared his father’s neoconservative convictions, and virtually all of his political appointments reflected the latter rather than the former. Bush didn’t move the needle much for conservative Christians during his terms: His political capital was spent on the War on Terror.
The Obama administration, by contrast, saw a flurry of progressive activity. The president did not shy away from using either the federal bureaucracy or the judiciary as a weapon against social conservatives. His administration issued a series of Dear Colleague letters threatening schools and colleges into complying with progressive norms on discipline, sexual assault accusations, and gender identity. He told the (Roman Catholic) Little Sisters of the Poor that they had to pay for contraception and the (Evangelical Protestant) owners of Hobby Lobby that it wasn’t enough to pay for several forms of contraception, they had to include those with abortifacient effects. Thankfully the Supreme Court forbade this, basing its decision on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 rather than the Constitution. At about the same time, Justice Anthony Kennedy (who had the deciding vote in such matters) wrote two decisions on same-sex marriage, imposing the socially progressive view by judicial fiat.
In 2015, Indiana passed its own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it was signed by Governor Mike Pence. Seeing that this could protect conscientious objectors to gay rights legislation, the NCAA and a legion of big companies made a stink, threatening to withdraw economic activity from the state. In reaction, the legislature passed another law effectively gutting the RFRA.
Trump didn’t do very well among evangelical Christians in the 2016 primary, but he did win evangelical support in the general election – running, of course, against Hillary Clinton. Picking Mike Pence as his running mate didn’t hurt. Trump promised to look after our interests. We mostly didn’t believe him; I don’t think he even knew what our interests were. But he rolled back Obama’s attacks, and he appointed conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices who would later overturn Roe v. Wade.
Yes! When it becomes clear that certain institutions are only used against us, why would we want leaders who leave them lying around?
I had hoped that Pence would come out of the first Trump administration with an awareness of the threat from progressive-controlled institutions and the need to fight them. Combined with his strong evangelical convictions and his small-government conservatism, that had the potential to make him a fantastic future president. But it’s not the lesson he took from his time under Trump, and maybe January 6 would have cut off that opportunity anyway. It remains to be seen what lessons (Catholic convert) J. D. Vance will take from his term as V.P.
I am not sure what happened here. One moment, several Roman Catholic thinkers were exploring various critiques of American liberalism and alternatives to it; the next, they all fell in line behind some version or other of integralism. It’s like there was something in the water.
I would call it a semi-retreat, or maybe a fighting retreat to a more defensible position. But the question is: Is it defensible? I think the lesson of the Obama presidency is that socially progressive activists will not tolerate enclaves that do not submit to their norms. If you built such a community – and you were successful enough to be noticed – you could reasonably expect to face creative applications of the laws on land use, housing, health care, education, employment, and so on, to impose progressive values.
There is a fourth approach bandied about, but it’s almost as unlikely as Catholic integralism. When “Christian nationalism” became a vague talking point among some Democrats, a few different evangelicals decided to claim the term. One wrote a book on it, which I haven’t read. What they seem to have in common is that they want an arrangement like that the one that existed in America before the progressive movement, with evangelical Christianity in the place of mainline Christianity as normative, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy tolerated but not normative, and non-Christian religions legal but marginalized to one degree or another. (This last in particular varies by thinker.) It would take some pretty radical social shifts to make that even vaguely plausible. And while radical social shifts have happened before, that’s not the kind of thing you can accomplish with a political program.
Those are a lot of words to say that I don’t know the best path forward. But hopefully they contribute to understanding the situation.
Or file an official form stating that they objected to doing so.
However, the Federal Government would then work with the insurance providers to fill the resulting gap, and some groups wanted to be able to opt out, not only of paying for their employees' contraception, but of anyone covering the cost!
...the 'socially progressive' view being that, the arguments against equal marriage all being rooted in their proponents' metaphysical assumptions, and the imposition of metaphysical beliefs by state power having spilt rivers of blood in 17th-century Europe (more recent to the Founding Fathers than the Civil War is to today), the official elevation of opposite-gender couples over same-gender couples cannot be justified as government policy. (I wonder if 'state government issues Civil Unions for all couples, leaves marriage to whatever church/other religious organisation/other private entity the participants see fit to involve' would have been accepted.)
The reasoning behind that being that they considered it the equivalent of the installers of these water fountains claiming, per some guff about the Curse of Ham or Hex of Corned Beef or Jinx of Turkey or whatever, a Conscientious Objection to letting [hexagrammaton]s use the same water fountain as white people, or a separate but actually equal one off the same production line.
There are many secular arguments for elevating opposite sex marriages. One of the better ones defines marriage as an institution primarily aimed to form families and raise children. It is because of this social good that marriage is elevated, and it gives the couple certain benefits. Marriage is not a certificate that two people love each other and its primary function is not tax benefits or shiny paper or anything like that. This intuitive family/children connection is also behind the fact, that it is not possible to marry your parent or your sibling.
To which the inevitable reply is that, okay, then where's the law banning infertile people from marrying? Because on the axis of "family formation," there's no difference between them and the gays, is there? To ban gays from marrying on the grounds they cannot produce children, but not similarly ban straight couples who cannot produce children, would clearly be anti-gay discrimination.
Now, I have my own secular, philosophical argument against this, complete with toy analogy, that I've posted here before, about teleology in an imperfect, entropic universe. (But I'll admit that sort of Aristotelian thinking is pretty far from most mainstream thought.)
There is a difference between infertile, opposite sex couples marrying and same sex couples doing so. Opposite sex marriage reinforces the norm that you should marry someone of the opposite sex and encourages conformity to traditional morals, same sex erodes those norms and morals. That's why atheistic communist regimes were ok with infertile marriages but not homosexual.
And the gay marriage proponents argue that the norm you posit is bad and discriminatory; that it is contrary to civil rights law, equality, and anti-discrimination; that it is nothing but anti-gay bigotry. They argue that the "traditional morals" you speak of outdated, and motivated purely by religious sentiment — which, again, makes it a violation of the 1st Amendment to enshrine into law. That, contra illiberal communist regimes, liberal Progressivism says we should erode these norms because what reason do you have that we should even want to "encourage conformity to traditional morals," if not some flavor of "because God says so"?
Conformity to traditional morals is supported by perfectly secular reasoning: our society is astonishingly good by historical standards, tinker with its fundamental institutions at your peril.
More specifically to marriage: even infertile hetero marriages encourage property ownership, reduce crime, and generally put couples on the normal, successful path. Homo relationships only achieve some of that same benefit but also erode the desirable pro-fertility, norm that everyone gets married to a member of the opposite sex. More controversially, the visible difference of homo marriages also weaken societal conformity in general.
The progressive is probably tempted to say that this is just a thin secular veneer over what is at core a Christian sentiment. This is flatly contradicted by the fact that Buddhist, Confucian, and Communist societies held essentially the same position (no legal/social recognition of same sex marriage, full recognition of infertile marriage). I think even ancient Rome and Athens, despite being open to same sex dalliances, also allowed infertile but not same sex couples to marry.
Edit: I bring this up mainly to counter the notion that the prohibition on homosexual marriage was not the result of a particular metaphysic, but the widespread consensus of major human societies regardless of their religious beliefs. This supports the upthread assertion that overturning that prohibition was the imposition of a new moral framework with it, not the neutral stripping away of an old one.
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As mentioned below, there are actually laws saying that some people couldn't marry unless they could show that they were infertile. Your entire frame of reference simply does not make sense, and you need a pretty significant perspective change.
Further, rather than there being "no difference", there is actually quite a huge difference, particularly in terms of intrusiveness to privacy. The government can very very simply look at the government documents which state that they're the same sex. What kind of standards, and what kind of intrusive nightmare would it be to require something like proof of fertility? @WandererintheWilderness would call it "Chinese-style authoritarian social engineering". These examples are worlds apart rather than being "no different".
It's not my perspective — as you'd note if you'd read the part I'd linked — it's just the most common counter-argument the pro-gay-marriage side presents.
What doesn't make sense about it? If you are saying the line between who can marry and who cannot, which puts gay couples on the "cannot" side, is drawn on the grounds of who can produce children and who cannot — that you're barring gay couples because they're non-reproducing rather than because they're gay — then the line has to be drawn between (straight) couples who can reproduce and couples, straight or gay, who cannot.
People made the "privacy" argument you made here, back when the debate was live. The first answer was that age is just as legible to the government "in terms of intrusiveness to privacy" as sex, and yet we let 70-year-old straight couples get married, despite being just as clearly not about producing children as in the case of gay couples.
(My reply to this is my linked argument about teleology, and "inherent" versus "accidental" characteristics in regard to such teleological orientations.)
The other is the argument (a much better one, IMO) that differences in the intrusiveness to enforce a rule between groups do not justify enforcing the rule unequally. Just because it's easier to enforce a ban against gay couples marrying than it is against infertile straight couples without massive state intrusion does not, under modern anti-discrimination law, make it acceptable or non-discriminatory to enforce it in a discriminatory matter, let alone set down such discriminatory enforcement in the law itself. If the rule is "too intrusive to enforce" against a particular group, then it can't be enforced, or a rule, at all.
This "if" is precisely what my example points out is not true. The entire premise of the argument is simply false. The entire frame of reference simply does not make sense. Basically the entire remainder of this comment is sort of pointless from the get-go because of this flaw.
Well then, if the line between who should be allowed to marry isn't about who can produce children, then what is it about? What is the difference that justifies, in purely secular, non-religious terms, treating gay couples differently than straight ones?
This is easy. You can be secular Cultural Christian. You do not believe in God, do not pray and you do not go to church. But you adhere to Christian Ethics purely due to your preference in the same way let's say some secular people prefer libertarianism, other people prefer progressivism and yet other prefer communism or whatnot. So it is purely my preference that stems from my materialist mind in this materialist world, and this preference has equal validity as your preference.
Or if you dislike that argument, I can borrow tankie secular argument against gay relations: it is a result of decadence of bourgeoise and fascist society, it goes against reproduction of worker class and thus it is inherently counterrevolutionary and reactionary.
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Again, the perspective change needs to be pretty deep. It is not about who is "allowed" to marry. It's about what the State is trying to encourage/discourage. Think about the example I gave; see if you can come up with an idea for what it is that they're trying to do.
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This seems rather trivial--create a "provisional marriage" that just signals intent and becomes a legal marriage upon birth of the couple's first child. We already track births, so there would be no new privacy intrusion.
This sounds like needless complexity, and it would invite a whole host of additional complex questions. Is there an expiration on a provisional marriage? Suppose you want to get married early, but delay having children a bit, is that allowed? Why or why not? The outrageous news stories will kill you, too. "This couple has had two miscarriages and is now about to hit the deadline on their provisional marriage!" This kinda thing will never fly with the public.
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Yes, but as pointed out elsewhere on the thread, that argument is seemingly defeated by any system which allows provably infertile people to marry one another. If you allow that, then you've allowed the expansion of the right to marry to inevitably-childless couples, and withholding it from homosexual couples is just haggling over price.
This is the classical example of exception proving the rule. Let's take another example of a state supported institution - incorporation into limited liability and other companies. The institution is there to support businesses, which are formed to pursue profit. The upside for the society is economic dynamism. Everybody understands, that there are unsuccessful businesses which fail to fulfil the imperative. Nevertheless it does not mean that the institution is without merit.
And it for sure does not mean, that just because there are some failed businesses, the whole institution should be hollowed out, because it is a "discrimination" that people cannot create companies for other things - such as group of bros creating a company in order to drink every Friday, which they can write off from their taxes.
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Marriage originated in a time when it was virtually impossible for medical science to tell ahead of time that someone was infertile. The only way to know was if a spouse proved unable to conceive after several years, and such was grounds for an annulment (a document saying the marriage was never valid in the first place).
That said, if you want to redefine modern marriage to exclude people who are provably infertile in advance, I'm all for it.
This is to large extent already happening, as the institution was hollowed out for decades, many people especially secularists are now questioning the meaning of marriage altogether, as they realize that all these Disney stories about love don't make sense. Nobody needs a paper from government certifying that two people love each other, especially if it is extremely easy to get a divorce and secularists are raving about and supporting "alternative families" anyways. The societal advantages are evaporating every year, less and less people care if somebody is married or not, with or without children. Every year there is less social stigma, but in turn marriage also has less support from communities.
Modern secular marriage is something akin to cargo cult, an idea running on vapors, mimicking the outside appearance of something that worked in the past. I think this was also the main drive behind gay marriages - they wanted to leech off of the legitimacy and high status of the institution in order to normalize their lifestyles. As with everything, each action has a reaction, and all these things changed the institution itself. I am not solely blaming gay marriages for this, the trend began long before that, but legalizing same sex marriages kind of hammered the idea home - do you really want to be in a marriage club with gays and weirdos running various marriage frauds?
As of now the marriage only make sense in religious communities, where it retains its inherent meaning, purpose and where it is seen as a sacrament with sacred vows and everything. The differences are stark enough compared to modern secular marriage, that it should probably get a new name. Maybe something how Catholics use it: secular union is a concubinage, while religious union is sacramental marriage. Then who cares what secularists and atheists declare themselves - they can create a secular union with their gay sex partner or with their polyamorous polycule out in Vegas in front of Elvis or just a two (or three or ten of them) exchanging ribbons under some old tree or whatever as a proof of whatever they want to declare and capture for their TikTok audience. It is still not a marriage from Christian standpoint.
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Yes, but that just means that definition is obsolete — as science and medicine evolve, the law must evolve with them, no?
I don’t see why that follows. The old law could be perfectly good for humans as it stands, and trying to make adaptations for improved science and medicine could wind up making the law worse.
It is a tough sell to assume that the old law, made with incomplete information, was accidentally so perfect that attempts to improve it with more complete information are going to make it worse.
Without getting into the specific issue here (marriage):
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If requested - but it did not, to my knowledge, equal an annulment in the sense of an infertile marriage being deemed to have no legal value. I've never heard of a third party suing to break up a couple's marriage against their will by seeking to prove that one or both of them were infertile. (I'd be genuinely curious to know if that did ever happen anywhere, but even if it did, I would remain skeptical that this was a broadly-understood principle as opposed to a weird legal loophole.)
This is at least coherent, and I would find it more respectable than the status quo ante. That being said, I doubt you'd get much of a constituency for it even among normie conservatives. It smacks of Chinese-style authoritarian social engineering, and at the human level it'd be fundamentally counterintuitive to say that infertile people can't get married even though people who become infertile can trivially stay married.
(And the same standard would, of course, raise further questions. With rapid advancement in medical science, how definitively can we assert that a currently infertile couple won't be able to use IVF in 10 years using some funky CRISPR stem-cell wizardry? But then by the same token, can we really rule out IVF for homosexual couples as a real possibility within the lifetimes of gay couples currently seeking marriage? For lesbians at least, to set aside the surrogacy problem for M/M couples.)
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I view this as an almost definitional/textbook deal with the devil. “What’s the harm,” evangelicals say, “if we grant power to an entity that we think we can control, who is evil, if it grants us short term wins?” I’ve seen this reasoning before. “We can control the Devil, and avoid his temptations, and look at all the power it will grant us!” Trump’s amoral and even explicitly anti-Christian character is well known and most evangelicals - the ones aside from a minority that fell into the personality cult (idol worship) - seemed to have concluded exactly this: who cares if he is personally odious if he gives them what they want (a potential champion VP, SC dominance, generalized right wing laws)?
If for some reason it wasn’t clear, this will backfire, like it always does. The shortcut to power and respect and moral victory is always a shortcut. It’s built on a foundation of sand.
If Christians want greater respect in society, they need to live more Christlike lives and support more Christlike behavior. It is truly baffling that so many have deluded themselves from the plain teachings of the New Testament. They need to be servants. They need to offer help to the poor, associate with the downtrodden, praise and seek humility and virtue, resist the temptations of domination, pride, vanity, wrath, cover-ups, revenge, and immorality. To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily imply unqualified meekness; you can be zealous to some extent if your own house is in order and if it comes from a place of love. You can make bold stands, as long as at least you’re occasionally demonstrating forgiveness. There’s a reason even Jewish law had periodic jubilees, granting debt relief and freedom, and that was the lesser law.
This is the only way an increasingly secular America will be tempted back towards a Christian path. The communities need to be strong and “so good they can’t ignore you”. Revenge is not a Christian concept. In fact the opposite. Yet some evangelicals have embraced the doctrine of revenge. And as you say, some Catholics have embraced a doctrine of domination, equally as antithetical.
Along those lines, your comment about winning respect in both fields. I think that said respect should be idealized as happening in spite of differing opinions. You know, “disagree better”, which maybe sounds short term foolish but long term is way better at persuadability. The cardinal sin of modern woke-style liberals has been burning bridges, carrying out moral purges, and claiming that differing values means exclusion and shaming is correct. In the short term they had their decade of power, but as we now see in the medium term it’s limited their coalition significantly. Conservatives and Christians alike should not make the same mistake. No-contact means no future persuadability due to decreased interaction surfaces. To be clear, exclusion can be an important Christian tool, and with good scriptural basis too; it’s just that said tool is one to be used with extreme caution.
"Do not call up that which you can not put down."
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Remember that the standard for right-wing support in the 2016 general election was “better than Hillary Clinton.” I don’t think that anyone really expected to control him. He was occasionally analogized to Cyrus, king of Persia, who freed the Jews from exile – a pagan whose actions benefit the people of God, whether from benevolence or from reasons of his own.
In the gospels, Christ is not nearly so understated as this implies. But, in any case, Christians in general and evangelicals in particular do quite a lot of charity. We mostly don’t do it for influence, which is good because we do not win much influence from it.
Many people are in social circles or media bubbles where they get told over and over again that socially conservative takes are acts of hatred. My personal experience is that high decouplers who know you well can sometimes overcome this to see that you are coming from a place of love. But low decouplers struggle with this; if they live in one of those bubbles, they will most often reject their past experience of your love in order to conform to the social norm that regards people like you as haters. This has been a source of frustration and sadness for me.
That applies to politics as well. We don’t support socially conservative policies because we want you to eat your Brussels sprouts or whatever; we support them because they are conducive to human flourishing. Gender transitioning children is a sin, yes; but it’s also profoundly bad for the children, and we should reject it for that reason. That is in fact a politics of love.
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This is probably the biggest barrier separating me from evangelicals at this point. I understand the temptation to burn down all the institutions, or to have our guy who hits back, or however you want to frame it, but I can't help but see that as strikingly inconsistent with the Christian behaviour, especially that of the early church, that we aspire to. Nowhere in scripture do I find anything that seems to support making pragmatic deals with villains for temporary benefit - on the contrary, the advice we are given is as follows.
Does this mean to give into every single progressive cultural issue? No, of course not. But I think it does rule out a certain kind of means-end pragmatism, where we do evil so that good may come. As you say, this does not demand total and unqualified meekness. We don't have to be doormats. But we should show moral integrity, forgiveness, and mercy, even in the face of persecution. "Never avenge yourselves" is pretty darn black and white.
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I think the key sticking point is that they will not tolerate such enclaves being trusted with children's education. A enclave of committed adults is free association; but an enclave which raises children on its doctrines is an anti-liberal cult which must be destroyed for the preservation of democracy. I think "should parents be free to educate their children as they see fit" might be one of the biggest under-discussed scissor statements in modern politics, where one side views the idea as self-evidently illiberal and abusive, and the other views opposition to the principle as self-evidently tyrannical and unnatural.
This is just obviously false. There are tons of Catholic schools. If that's not "enclave" enough for you, there are tons of Amish schools as well. You probably haven't heard of the Bruderhof communities (they're basically Amish without the name recognition), but they run this school which I've been to (not as a student): https://www.mountacademy.org/. I can attest that their lives are as enclave as you could possibly get and that they are doing just fine.
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I think this is a lasting fear that's characteristic of evangelicals. Sometimes it does verge on paranoia, but there's also plenty of evidence of it being a justified fear. Evangelicals are very distrustful of people who are successful in the secular world. If you can hold on to your evangelical faith in academia or politics, great, and there are some examples of people who've done that and retain credibility, but it's rare. There is a strong sense that these fields are solvents for faith, or examples of 'the world' in the biblical sense.
As a product of higher education myself I have to remind myself not to scoff at this fear. There are plenty of reasons to think it justified. It does also inhibit power-seeking in society. But that may be a feature, not a bug.
Oh, absolutely. Somebody - possibly me? - needs to one day delve further into that world and write an effortpost on the postliberal world. It's almost entirely illiberal Catholics now, and it seems like they all converged on this position very swiftly. I'm not sure what I think the common factor is yet.
I still remember the day my dad said he was worried about my job prospects and said he didn’t get the impression I had ambitions. I was flummoxed; as a good autistic Christian I had always equated ambitions with being worldly and prideful, so I’d never bothered to cultivate any.
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Overall, I think this statement is accurate. There was pretty substantive debate over a few cases that come to mind, though: embryonic stem cell research and right-to-die in the Schaivo case. The former was banned, and seems to have been mostly routed around in research since, and doesn't seem likely to have been majorly impactful long-term (do they still ask about cord blood during pregnancy?). The latter seems to have been sliding towards acceptance (more so for "removing a feeding tube" than for active euthanasia), but could still flare up, I think.
I think those are interesting cases partially because the culture war has moved on and show we aren't strictly doomed to be at each other's throats forever.
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