Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Marriage and the Constitution

Who among the Founding Fathers would have ever thought that some day we might draft an amendment to the Constitution defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman only? But with the recent ruling of Massachusetts' highest court, to the effect that same-sex couples must be accorded the right to marry, we may not be far from doing just this. For those who find the possibility of same-sex marriages repugnant, amending the Constitution may be the only way to preserve what most people in this country believe marriage is at its core.

If the chaotic state of Texas' own Constitution is any indication, however, solving major questions of social policy by amending constitutions should be a much more serious business than it all too often is. Last resort approaches are rarely helpful as opening gambits. Unless the highly reactive quality of much current thinking about same-sex unions improves, we are not likely to generate a very edifying discussion and debate about what marriage is and isn't, whatever may be the outcome of efforts to make it finally a constitutional issue.

Consider, for example, the nearly hysterical outcry of Supreme Court Justice Scalia when anti-sodomy laws were recently overturned by his court. He fulminated that the very fabric of society was being rent asunder by our failure to hold up committed heterosexual relationships as the norm. But both divorce and adultery statistics make plain that for decades now, a large segment of our society has failed to abide by this norm, almost to the extent that Judge Scalia's fellow Catholics are failing to abide by their church's bans on the use of contraceptives. Are the errant behaviors merely signs of sinfulness, or are they, perhaps, more of an indicator that many people nowadays actually believe something quite different from what they say they believe?

Consider also the principal pattern of reasoning that is shaping most of the current arguments against same-sex unions: God has created us male and female, and intends for us to create heterosexual and not homosexual unions. No biblically-informed Jew, Christian, or Muslim would disagree with this reading of the first two chapters of The Book of Genesis. But therein lies the rub: a religious justification for a social policy of a society pledged never to force religious ideas or practices upon its citizenry. Maybe revising the Constitution is, after all, the only way around this consideration. But before we get there, maybe we ought to try opposing same-sex unions on other than religious grounds. Are there any other grounds?

Jews and Muslims will have to weigh in on the question of same-sex unions from their own respective backgrounds. As a Christian, though, I find it a pretty weighty consideration how selective most of us are in applying our Bible to questions of human sexuality. For example, certain biblical texts are slam dunks against the approval of gay and lesbian sex. But even more biblical texts are slam dunks against divorce. If we appeal to the Bible to deny same-sex partners the legal rights we grant to their heterosexual counterparts, it would seem highly dubious not to apply the same standard to the divorced in our midst (who outnumber gays and lesbians exponentially, and probably always will.)

There may be fellow Christians out there who are still prepared to put divorced people in the dock, and keep them there. I just haven't met any, for a very long time. Just as I haven't met anyone lately who argues that the failure to "be fruitful and multiply" invalidates a marriage as marriage. Or who say that you can get divorced but that you can't get married again. Once upon a time a lot of people did say stuff like this. Why am I not running across them anymore? Most likely because we are all operating under the assumption that as a rule book for today, the Bible needs some work, and that as a whole, the Bible serves us better as a narrative of grace and mercy than as a rule book anyway. Where we are going wrong is in not applying this very fruitful premise to all of the issues of human sexuality with which we must deal today, homosexuality included.

Maybe those in our society who approach the gay rights questions from a secular, ethical point of view more than a religious one are already up and ready to move the rest of us forward to a responsible resolution of the newly emerging debate on same-sex marriage. But I doubt it. A constitutional solution? Perhaps. A lot more thinking and deliberating in an atmosphere of mutual respect? Now that's the ticket.

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Trusting Our Doubts

After turning in grades at the end of a term, most seminary faculty members subject themselves to the usually humbling task of reading their students' course evaluations. Once, while I was reading my own sets, a colleague walked into my office and silently laid on my desk a copy of a letter that was signed and attached to one evaluation form. It was from a student he had previously described as someone he had not gotten through to at all. Now, in a somewhat awed tone of voice he said, "Well, he sure got through to me."

I picked up the letter to read it, and found especially interesting its next to last paragraph:

Professor, you made a bigger difference than you could possibly know by showing me how to raise responsible questions about things we thought we were never supposed to doubt. When you first started doing that, I truly believed you were a man of no faith. Then, I began to see that it was your very faith that was pushing you, and us, to raise the questions in the first place. I guess the difference between you and me is this: My faith was so weak I couldn't allow myself to question anything; you believe in God so strongly that you can question everything.

I commented to my colleague that the last sentence would make quite an epitaph for him someday. He replied with a smile, "I'm putting it in my last will and testament today."

Because the student who wrote this moving letter was also one of my own advisees, I knew something of his spiritual pilgrimage, and the toll it took on relationships with fellow Christians less hospitable than he to questioning and doubting official church teaching. In his community of faith, to doubt is to sin, the only atonement for which is to deny, rather than to work through, the doubt. Forgiveness of this particular sin always includes the admonition to go and doubt no more.

Most people I know who experience full blown crises of doubt would very much like to doubt no more. The problem is that they cannot simply will their doubts away. They need to be able to counter them with reasoned arguments, precisely what believe-it-or-else types are either unwilling or unable to put forward (or both.) A former parishioner of mine, very doctrinaire about what being a Christian involves, once told me that we should not even think about trying to answer a doubter or an unbeliever. All we would accomplish, he said, would be to give credibility to his erroneous thinking.

Not everyone, of course, must wrestle as my advisee did with a church tradition inimical to raising questions and thinking hard about what we are to believe as Christians. Some people grow up in churches hostile to the very idea of tradition itself. Imagine what it is like for them to be trapped in classes presided over by old geezers like my colleague and me, forced to listen for hours on end to historical overviews of normative Christian doctrines. Having had it up to here with all that, another advisee of mine once laid his fury on me full blast: There is nothing, absolutely nothing, about the trinitarian controversies that could possibly have relevance for anybody today. I don't mind mucking around in mythology like this, but it surely is crucial to know that it's mythology and not truth.

Many Christians are every bit as certain of their theological liberalism as my former parishioner is of his proudly vaunted conservatism. One thing both they and he hold in common is an antipathy to taking seriously any questions raised from standpoints different from their own. Another is an unconquerable certitude that their beliefs are the right ones and that people who differ from them deserve only their contempt. A major lesson to be learned from these anecdotes is that conservative Christians hold no monopoly on closed-mindedness. (Read much feminist theology lately?)

In today's churches, questioning and doubting have fallen on bad times. Both conservatives and liberals act like they have taken doubt-shots to make sure they escape the infection. I know a better serum for them all. It is stored in the introduction to Paul Tillich's great book, The Protestant Era. Among the many helpful things that Tillich wrote in that introduction, the best was his suggestion that just as we are justified (pardoned) by a gracious God in our sins, we also justified (made acceptable) in God's sight in our doubts.