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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 institute 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.
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.
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.
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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