How marriage can still be saved – thoughts from Greg Forster
In another thoughtful piece at First Thoughts Greg Forster explains why the struggle for marriage is eminently winnable in America. No, he’s not primarily talking about the struggle against same-sex marriage. He’s thinking of the character of traditional marriage itself, an institution fearfully weakened long before anyone thought same-sex marriage was anything more than an inherent contradiction.
Forster writes for the First Things blog but he is Reformed, has written for Presbyterian magazines like Ordained Servant, and has published books like The Joy of Calvinism. In this post, responding to a piece by Dan Kelly, he writes,
Firstly, I agree with Dan that homosexuality is a distraction; the root cause of our problem is liberalized divorce laws. Liberalized divorce establishes fully and indisputably that marriage is a meaningless piece of paper… In my opinion, it is only because liberalized divorce has established that marriage is a meaningless piece of paper that gay marriage makes deep intuitive sense to people, while opposition to gay marriage seems like it could have no cause but irrational hatred.
Forster quotes Kevin Williamson to illustrate his point:
I might be more interested in the politics of [gay] marriage if the legal standing of the institution were not already degraded to the point of triviality. Here is an experiment: Imagine that you have a marriage that you wish to escape and $50,000 of credit-card debt that you do not wish to pay — which claim do you imagine will prove more enduring? Or try unilaterally canceling a contract with an employee, without showing any fault on his part, simply because he no longer suits your taste. Your contract with your cell-phone provider is legally enforceable, and your marriage vows — “forsaking all others until death do us part” and all that — are not.
So why does Forster think the struggle for traditional marriage can be won? Because he recognizes that even the cultural elites of this country are becoming deeply disillusioned with the current state of the family. They recognize how important stable marriages are for the health of civil society and for the nurture of productive citizens. They are increasingly open to new suggestions for how marriage might be bolstered for the good of the country. As Forster puts it,
The forces at the top of the culture are already waking up on these issues. They have recognized that the breakdown of marriage threatens all their most cherished values: equality of opportunity for all and especially for the poor, equality of dignity across social strata (what some call “social equality”), and protection of the interests of women and children. This has been growing for some time and to my view (these things are subjective) it looks ready to reach a tipping point.
I’m confident that Forster is right on this point in part because his comments ring true to my own experiences at Emory University. Two of the professors on my dissertation committee edited this book, only one example of numerous contributions they have made on the subject.
But how do we lead the cultural elites to take the final step towards reaffirming traditional marriage (or something like it)?
It’s to rub their noses in the failure of their preferred solutions. They’ve admitted this is a big problem – indeed, a dire one. But their solutions don’t work. The next step is to offer a solution that manifestly does work and then demand to know: “if not this, what?” There are challenges to doing this effectively – you have to do it in such a way that they don’t feel like they have to sacrifice their position at the top of the culture, their credibility as cultural leaders, by adopting your solutions. We don’t want to displace them from the top of the culture, we want to force them to co-opt our preferred solution and pretend it was their idea all along. That can be done. Numerous social movements have done it on other issues in the past. This is where my concern to “deinstitutionalizing enmity” comes in – we want to defeat liberalized divorce, not conquer our unbelieving neighbors and subjugate them to Christianity.
Forster’s is an eminently pragmatic approach, one that recognizes the distinction between the demands of loving your neighbor in a vocational sense (i.e., in the vocation of political citizenship) and winning them over to the gospel of Jesus. It reflects the wisdom of focusing on concrete, practical issues, rather than reducing every conflict into a war of civilizations or clash of cultures (as some, for instance, insist on doing with any matter pertaining to Islam).
I encourage you to read Forster’s whole post, and to follow his writing on First Thoughts (For starters see some examples here, here, and here).
Posted on September 28, 2012, in Marriage and tagged Dan Kelly, divorce, First Things, First Thoughts, Greg Forster, John Witte, Kevin Williamson, no fault divorce, same-sex marriage, Steve Tipton. Bookmark the permalink. 14 Comments.
You keep referencing the “cultural elites…” Who are you speaking about?
Of course, most folk recognize the value of healthy marriages and intact families as a general rule. I don’t know of any serious group (“swingers” and hedonists, aside) who have ever suggested otherwise.
Re: marriage and gay folk, I like what Bush-era ultra-conservative Ted Olson has had to say on the topic…
. “If you are a conservative, how could you be against a relationship in which people who love one another want to publicly state their vows … and engage in a household in which they are committed to one another and become part of the community and accepted like other people?”
And I can’t find the other quote from him, but he also said something like, “On this part of the culture war, we’ve won. They want to marry, be monogamous and faithful… these are GOOD things…”
It just seems hard for an increasing majority of us to see how actually ENCOURAGING marriage – faithful, respectful, loving, committed adult relationships – in any way harms marriage…
Dan, I’d encourage you to do a search of and read some of my earlier posts on same-sex marriage, and then feel free to get back to me on it. I think you’ll find your questions answered there.
Reblogged this on Water Is Thicker Than Blood and commented:
Great insight and thoughts concerning Marriage and the need to bolster the Institution.
MT, I’ve read your comments and gone back to the FIrst Things post, but I can’t see any reason for optimism about improving the state of marriage. Is it because some “cultural elites” see problems with the current scene? If they do, so what? Then, we simply make them believe they wanted our solution all along? Okaaaay….
If part of the solution is to make divorces tougher to get, “fault” divorce went out as a legal requirement for a reason. The whole premise is making out the case that the other party has been a wrongdoer. Shall we have several-day trials on whether one of the spouses is a wrongdoer? Family court is bad enough without going back to trials like that. Then, is a judge supposed to deny a divorce and tell couples he will not sever their legal relationship when one of them loathes being in the relationship?
I tend to think there are deeper forces at work that aren’t mentioned here.
Mikelmann, I understand your point, but but not necessarily your pessimism. There are times when a society can improve in a certain area of justice even while that society moves further and further away from Christianity, and the reason for that is that “even the pagans” figure out that something is important, even if they are working on “borrowed capital.”
Two examples. First, American society moved away from institutionalized racism even as it became increasingly liberal in other areas. Second, Europe has become increasingly anti-war and anti-tyranny in the same period that it has become less and less Christian. In both of these cases broader society and cultural elites embraced ideals that were more consistent with Christianity even as that society and its elites moved away from Christianity. Why can’t this happen with marriage as well?
Matt, I’m not going to disagree with you that Europe is moving to an “anti-war” position.
What I would dispute is whether that is a good thing or not. Justice sometimes requires force, and when debating liberals from a European background I typically ask 1) whether the pacifist and anti-war movements of the 1920s and 1930s aided or hindered the rise of fascism, 2) whether anything short of war could have stopped the rise of fascism to world dominance rather than merely dominance of Europe, and 3) whether they think they would have liked living in a world where an isolationist “Fortress America” chose to ignore England during the Battle of Britain, refused to be involved in the lend-lease program, and allowed the Nazis and Japanese to jointly conquer the Soviet Union.
Virtually everyone who claims any sort of historic liberal position agrees that World War II had to be fought, and anyone who knows history knows that the pre-1940 position of the United States was essentially one of distaste (at best) for involvement in European conflicts. World War II was all but lost in Europe at the time of the Battle of Britain, and that would almost certainly have been lost if it were not for the decision of President Roosevelt to get involved in Britain despite strong conservative opposition in Congress to “European entanglements.”
I think what is going on in Europe is not so much the rise of an anti-war position but rather the development of a culture of surrender in which Europeans no longer believe there is much of anything worth fighting for.
The result, unfortunately, is that not believing much of anything, the continent is being conquered from within by an influx of Muslim immigrants whose beliefs are far more “intolerant” than the worst types of traditional Christianity ever sought to be.
Darrell, you’re right, I wasn’t clear on that point. I agree that Europe’s demilitarization has proceeded to a disastrous degree, and that this does not bode well for its future (not to mention that it demonstrates how much Europe is leaning on America). What I meant to contrast, however, was the rampant militarism, imperialism, and jingoism that dominated Europe in the first half of the 20th Century. I don’t think many people would disagree that in escaping that absolute disaster Europe made genuine progress.
Greetings, Matt. Your clarification is appreciated.
To clarify my own position as well — while I believe the military is a positive good and performs the primary biblical purpose for which government exists, I certainly do believe that “militarism,” as an ideology, is evil. Armies, police, and court systems exist to enforce justice, not to use force for its own ends apart from their proper biblical purposes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the game of baseball, but using a baseball bat not to hit balls but rather to beat people up and steal their money is evil. Likewise, while the military (unlike a baseball bat) has a biblical mandate, using the military for evil purposes is evil for the same reasons that hitting the wrong things with baseball bats is evil.
Have there been improvements in Europe since the rise of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s? In some ways yes; in other ways, no.
Yes, I’d rather have a pacifist Japan and a liberal Germany than to have a repeat of what happened after World War I which allowed the basic social institutions of both countries to remain unbowed and largely intact. The German junker ethos and the Japanese bushido ethos were both evil forms of militarism and both could be stopped only by armed combat. The effect has been that both nations have been rendered militarily irrelevant, and given their history, that’s a good thing.
So yes, I guess it could be said that I think liberalism and pacifism are useful in disarming our enemies. Why fight a war when training foreign students to become liberal college professors back in their home country is cheaper than tanks and planes, and causes less damage to American interests?
See, I can say something good about academia after all…
Not saying it can’t, MT, it’s just that I was, you know, hoping for hope in the Forster piece but didn’t find much cause for it.
In Iowa there’s a strange juxtaposition of gays enthused about their court-granted right to marry and heteros being pretty blase about the institution. So there’s one woman in my workplace having her second child by the man she lives with but no marriage. Another couple – both in the office – have lived together for over a decade but no marriage. Another young woman has two kids by two dads…etc. etc. It’s become rude to say “are you going to marry?” as if marriage itself is some kind of Victorian prudery.
All of which gives a different meaning to “Is this heaven? No, it’s Iowa.”
Mike,
It’s not only Iowa, it’s the military, too, which used to pride itself on its moral code. An officer in our JAG office, a Calvin grad (UM law school), living with a girl, and you want to say “Are you going to marry?” without sounding like a prude. Color me “pessimist” when it comes to changes in divorce laws. The trend in our laws is NOT toward restrictions, as you as a fellow attorney know.
Ugh.
It would be nice to blame the University of Michigan law school for this, but from what I saw as a Calvin student decades ago and from living most of my life in West Michigan, it’s pretty obvious Calvin is no longer a Christian school in much more than name.
Even back in the 1990s, one of my theology professors said, correctly so, that the Christian Reformed Church can be explained by sociology, not theology.
My wife and I are both Calvin graduates. We would never recommend Calvin to our daughter or to anyone interested in a serious Christian education.
Typo alert — that comment from a Calvin College theology professor was in the 1980s, not 1990s.
Darrell,
I hear you about Calvin–my son graduated recently and turned out OK, through much prayer and regular attendance at a church (LCMS) which rejected much of the college’s teaching. My fellow JAG officer, Calvin grad, is now an atheist.
Interesting… a Calvin student attending a Missouri Synod Lutheran congregation? I could certainly think of a lot of solid Reformed congregations in Grand Rapids. However, I’d much rather someone turn out to be a Lutheran than an atheist, or worse yet, a liberal who stays in the church and keeps causing damage.
Having said that, our local Missouri Synod pastor is a great guy, quite politically active, and was one of the half-dozen or so pastors responsible for a lot of success in fighting our local adult entertainment industry around Fort Leonard Wood. So far, the ministerial alliance has succeeded in shutting down three of the five strip clubs that were here a decade ago, and all but one of the whorehouses are gone. The last one is a Korean sex trafficking operation that has been around for decades and has been a hard nut to crack.
I’m certainly not a Lutheran by any definition of the word, but the local Missouri Synod pastor has done a lot of good work and earned the respect of the local Christian community, and he certainly has mine as well.