How we dug our way down the rabbit hole

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reveals that support for same-sex marriage in the United States has reached 59 percent, and that more people would be comfortable with a homosexual president than with an evangelical one. As I wrote recently, we are witnessing the collapse of what is left of the Christian moral consensus, with stunningly swift reversals on sexuality, personal identity, and marriage. How did we get here?

It’s complicated. But for 250 years, American Protestant Christians have dwelt all too comfortably with modern individualism, which has inclined them to a default position of Arminian, Baptistic, and more or less independent churches. My free will—my freedom to steer the course of my life—is understood to be a principle before which even God Himself bows in reverence. In other words, “don’t fence me in” applied to religion.

This attitude replaced a covenantal view that sees God, not man, as the center and primary mover of human affairs. Consider the once commonly used phrase, “There but for the grace of God go I,” Abraham Lincoln’s assurance in his second inaugural address that “The Almighty has His own purposes,” and the reference in the Declaration of Independence to “a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence.”

Accordingly, in the broader culture (the culture that was raised in the church and departed from it), to be most human is to be most unconstrained, whether by tradition, nature, or God. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the 1992 abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Most ninth graders would agree with this.

So American churches generally do not hold their members spiritually accountable. They do not “discipline” them. In non-denominational churches there is often no formal membership at all. The customer wants to be in control, and the religious service provider is happy to accommodate.

But that individualistic understanding, nurtured in part by a uniquely modern and characteristically American strain of Christianity, is bearing us along to the absurdity of its logical outworking. If we are essentially autonomous individuals, everyone’s fundamental obligation is to respect each other’s individual self-determination. This side of the sexual revolution, sex is no big deal but at the same time definitive of who you are, something that, of course, should be within your personal control. After the complete triumph of feminism, sexual differences mean something only when we want them to. So it is no surprise that people are not only tolerating but celebrating homosexual marriage and the very notion of definable or even distinguishable “he” and “she” is officially unacceptable. People and organizations that think otherwise disqualify themselves from civil protections.

Heresy is always an opportunity for the church to refine her beliefs in light of biblical teaching. American Christians need to acknowledge our complicity in this rebellion against God’s created order and resolve to re-examine biblical faithfulness in a hostile world.