|
Newsweek’s brainless assault on biblical and Christian truth; and, does marriage have an essence?
(Note: see my extensive exchange below with Mack about whether there is a fundamental essence to marriage or just a bunch of different things called marriage, about the relationship of marriage to Christianity, about whether there should be a separation between marriage and the state, and related questions. Despite a momentary outbreak of annoyance on my part because I felt he was being difficult, he persisted, and I did my best to answer all his questions.)
Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, has made a name for himself as a supposedly thoughtful, moderate writer and commentator on religious matters—clearly liberal in his views, but intellectually serious and respectful to both sides. In addition to his books, such as his book on the American founders and religion, he participates in an ongoing, “moderate” sounding forum on the interface of religion and politics at the Washington Post along with Sally Quinn. In fact, as anyone can see from actually reading him, Meacham is a liberal sneak whose real aim is to destroy Christianity and biblically based morality, or, at the least, to remove them from any influential role in American life.
Meacham has now dispensed with any doubts on the matter. Following Newsweek’s in-your-face cover story supporting homosexual “marriage” and attacking the religious opponents of same, Meacham published his own column defending the article. Mark Hemingway at NRO attacked it, echoed by John of Powerline. Both Hemingway and Powerline somewhat overstated their scandalized feelings at the discovery that Newsweek is on the left. In reality it has been a leftist—and in cultural and moral matters, nihilist—publication for at least 20 years.
Below is Meacham’s column with a couple of interpolated comments by me:
The Editor’s Desk
By Jon Meacham | NEWSWEEK
Published Dec 6, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Dec 15, 2008
On the campus of Wheaton College in Illinois last Wednesday, in another of the seemingly endless announcements of splintering and schism in the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan and other leaders of the conservative forces of reaction to the ecclesiastical and cultural acceptance of homosexuality declared that their opposition to the ordination and the marriage of gays was irrevocably rooted in the Bible—which they regard as the “final authority and unchangeable standard for Christian faith and life.”
No matter what one thinks about gay rights—for, against or somewhere in between—this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism. Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt—it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition. [LA replies: So, according to Meacham, the Bible is not true at all, it’s not a source for any authoritative truth. But of course the Episcopal Church, the conservative dissidents of which Meacham smears, is (or, until 2003, was, but, since 2003, unambiguously no longer is) founded on the Bible. Everything that it holds as doctrine is based on the authority of the Bible. So apart from the monstrosity of, denying, in the name of the Judeo-Christian tradition, any truth in the Bible (meaning, it’s not true that “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” it’s not true that “God created man in own image and likeness,” it’s not true that “I am the resurrection and the life”), Meacham is denying the basis of Christianity itself.]
As Lisa Miller points out in her cover essay this week, the debate and its implications spread far beyond intramural Anglican conflicts. The impetus for the project came not from Wheaton but from California and the successful passage of Proposition 8, which seeks to ban gay marriage. The issue of marriage (as opposed to civil unions and other middle courses) is not going away: California was a battle in a larger, ongoing war, both in America and in Europe. (For the record, the Lisa Miller who is our religion editor and the author of the cover story is not the Lisa Miller who is featured in Lorraine Ali’s companion piece about a gay couple’s custody fight.)
Briefly put, the Judeo-Christian religious case for supporting gay marriage begins with the recognition that sexual orientation is not a choice—a matter of behavior—but is as intrinsic to a person’s makeup as skin color. [Italics added.] The analogy with race is apt, for Christians in particular long cited scriptural authority to justify and perpetuate slavery with the same certitude that some now use to point to certain passages in the Bible to condemn homosexuality and to deny the sacrament of marriage to homosexuals. This argument from Scripture is difficult to take seriously—though many, many people do—since the passages in question are part and parcel of texts that, with equal ferocity, forbid particular haircuts. The Devil, as Shakespeare once noted, can cite Scripture for his purpose, and the texts have been ready sources for those seeking to promote anti-Semitism and limit the human rights of women, among other things that few people in the first decade of the 21st century would think reasonable.
Beyond the Bible, some argue that marriage is between a man and woman by custom and tradition—which is true, but only to a point. As recently as the 1960s men and women of different races could not legally marry in certain states. In civil and religious terms we have redefined marriage before in order to reflect evolving understandings of justice and right; to act as though marriage has been one thing since Eden (and look how well that turned out) is ahistorical. [LA replies: he’s saying that to allow interracial marriages was to redefine marriage itself, and therefore marriage has no unchangeable essence and we can do with it what we want. Isn’t it amazing how the civil rights movement continues to function as the sacred fulcrum for every wicked cause of modern liberalism? ]
In this light it would seem to make sense for Americans to look anew at the underlying issues on the question of gay marriage. One can decide to oppose it in good faith, but such opposition should at least be forged by those in full possession of the relevant cultural and religious history and context. The reaction to this cover is not difficult to predict. Religious conservatives will say that the liberal media are once again seeking to impose their values (or their “agenda,” a favorite term to describe the views of those who disagree with you) on a God-fearing nation. Let the letters and e-mails come. History and demographics are on the side of those who favor inclusion over exclusion. (As it has been with reform in America from the Founding forward.) The NEWSWEEK Poll confirms what other surveys have also found: that there is a decided generational difference on the issue, with younger people supporting gay marriage at a higher rate than older Americans. One era’s accepted reality often becomes the next era’s clear wrong. So it was with segregation, and so it will be, I suspect, with the sacrament of marriage.[Italics added.]
[end of Meacham article]
- end of initial entry -
Alan Roebuck writes:
You said:
[Meacham is] saying that to allow interracial marriages was to redefine marriage itself, and therefore [he’s saying] marriage has no unchangeable essence and we can do with it what we want.
Quite so, and as Christian apologist Greg Koukl has pointed out, if marriage has no essence, and can be whatever we want it to be, then it can be only for man and woman if that’s what we want it to be. On the other hand, if marriage has an unchangeable essence, then what the elite want is not relevant; elites have been wrong before.
Ben W. writes:
If as Newsweek says, marriage can be redefined to be whatever a generation wants it to be and it has no eternal form and essence, then what is wrong with polygamy? Or indeed marriage between a man and his dog?
LA replies:
Meacham, a supposed Christian, uses the radical relativist argument that our paramount authority is social change and changing demographics. So, if enough people support homosexual “marriage,” then homosexual “marriage” it is. But what Meacham doesn’t realize is that if this is the case, then it’s also the case that if enough people support (I am resisting the temptation to resort to the reductio ad Hitlerum), uh … anti-miscegenation laws, then anti-miscegenation laws it is. He thinks anti-miscegenation laws are a terrible thing, but by his own logic, if a majority of people supported them again, he would be obligated to support them too. And this person, who can’t think his way out of a paper bag, is a prominent editor, author, and “intellectual” in our society.
Mack writes:
I think that the discussion of the nature and meaning of marriage is an interesting debate from many perspectives. Realistically there is no doubt that marriage has been redefined over and over across the ages—and is a culturally malleable institution. But I don’t think that this is what you, or most anyone is talking about when they refer to the fundamental essence of marriage.
What then is essentially fundamental to marriage? Is it simply the sex of the marriage partners, the number of marriage partners, the equity between the marriage partners, the roles of the partners, the permanency of the marriage contract, or some combination, etc?
I’m no biblical scholar but a cursory search results in many hits for claims that polygamy, for instance, is not specifically proscribed in the New Testament. Is that so? And is New Testament theology the source from which you are deriving the essential nature of marriage?
I have stated in the past my view that the easiest way to put this issue to rest is to do away with civil marriage—making marriage a purely personal/religious/cultural act. My guess is that you don’t agree with that idea—but I would like to hear a reasoned explanation of why.
LA replies:
The issue is made impossible when it’s treated as though everything in the Bible were exemplary. There is no basis for saying such a thing. (In Islam it’s different, everything Muhammad did is exemplary and must be followed.) There is this weird stupid idea we hear constantly (I’m not saying you’re saying this) that the fact that Abraham had concubines indicates that the Bible and thus Judaism and Christianity okay concubinage. There was never a time when this was so. Further, Judaism as we know it, as it came into existence between 2,500 and 2,000 years ago, is not based on the Bible alone, but on the Bible as interpreted by the rabbis, then in written form in the Talmud. Monogamy has been the only way in Judaism and Christianity since Judaism and Christianity have existed. That’s the Judeo-Christian morality, the morality of our civilization, the only sexual ethic we know. Concubinage is as irrelevant as the extermination of the Canaanites. Jews have not attacked Canaanites for 3,000 years. (See note.)
So when I speak of the fundamental essence of marriage, I speak of the fundamental essence of marriage as we know it in our civilization, the civilization that proceeded from the Bible, from Judaism, from the Catholic Church (which formed European civilization), and then from Protestantism. They all had in common the belief in monogamy. They all had in common the words of Genesis, “And for this reason a man will leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.” The marriage customs of South Sea islanders, of African tribesmen, or, indeed, of pastoral shepherds in the Levant 3000 years ago, are irrelevant.
Really, the way liberals beat down Christians and conservatives is by repeatedly making these ignorant, mindless, yet seductive sounding arguments, that “there have been many forms of marriage, and therefore you have no right to exclude other forms of marriage,” that “the Bible is as violent as Islam, and therefore we have no right to exclude Islam.” These are not real arguments. They are forms of words meant to trick people, they lack any real logic or true meaning or true connection to the real world. Yet such arguments control liberal society, and their constant repetition has the effect of exhausting all resistance.
_________
Note: In fact, strictly speaking, Jews never attacked Canaanites, because when the people of Israel began calling themselves Jews it was 700 years after the Hebrew tribes entered Canaan. The Jews came into existence as the “Jewish people” after the Canaanites had long vanished, and after the Hebrew themselves had lost their own kingdom and had become a diaspora people. That’s when Judaism began coming into being, as the religion of the “people of the book,” at the time of the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century B.C. Before then, there was what you might call the cult of Jehovah, of the Temple, but it was not yet Judaism as we know it, which was centered in the synogogue and the Sabbath observances, not the Temple, and in the study and interpretation of the Torah, not in the animal sacrifice.
Of course, at the time of Jesus, both forms of the Jewish religion co-existed. There were the Temple priests on one hand, and the rabbis (the Pharisees) on the other. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D, the way of the rabbis became the only way in Judaism.
Mack replies:
I appreciate your explanatory effort—these paragraphs go a long way towards explaining where you believe the fundamental basis for the institution of marriage does not come from.
I don’t personally have a horse in this race—as I stated before, I don’t think marriage is something that the state needs to have anything to do with.
I guess my question needs to be distilled further. I am curious about what you think the unchangeable essence of marriage is. It is difficult for me to understand exactly what you mean when you use abstractions like “as we know it in our civilization, the civilization that proceeded from the Bible, from Judaism, from the Catholic Church (which formed European civilization), and then from Protestantism”—I gather that you believe that there is some absolute meaning to marriage that transcends any relativistic attempt to define it. But just what is that?
Is it Western? Is it American? I’m curious what you think since there is, even within the contemporary Judeo-Christian tradition, a spectrum of beliefs about what properly constitutes marriage.
LA replies:
Monogamous marriage, within the terms and customs of Judaism and Christianity and Western society. Is that so hard for you to understand? Did you just land on earth yeaterday?
LA continues:
Mack wrote:
“I don’t personally have a horse in this race—as I stated before, I don’t think marriage is something that the state needs to have anything to do with.”
This is such a typical way that people today, or at least Americans, have of expressing themselves. Mack doesn’t have any stake in the institution of marriage, because he doesn’t believe in it. As though he were living in his own society somewhere, some society where there was no institution of marriage, where “marriage” was some ad hoc thing developed by libertarian individuals as they pleased. He doesn’t take responsibility for the fact that he lives where he actually lives, in our society in which marriage has been the central society-forming institution forever and does have something to do with the state. As a libertarian (which Mack, I think, is), he has psychologically detached himself from our actual society and tradition, it has nothing to do with him, even though the stateless-marriage-society he believes in doesn’t exist anywhere.
Mack replies:
Wow Larry—no need to get insulting.
It’s the attempt to understand people like you—whom I don’t, in many ways, have a shared background with that is what I’m trying to accomplish.
If you feel that you can talk about the customs of Judaism and Christianity without including the practices of the Haredi and other orthodox Jews—that’s fine, but you and I don’t share the same set of assumptions obviously.
And in terms of religion “as practiced”—maybe I did just land yesterday—with that in mind, I try not to be presumptive regarding people’s belief systems. I don’t think it would be better if I pretended to comprehend something when I really don’t.
LA replies:
“It’s the attempt to understand people like you—whom I don’t, in many ways, have a shared background with that is what I’m trying to accomplish.”
People like me? Like I’m something different from you? You don’t have a shared background with me? Do you not live in the United States? Are you not an American? Do you think I’m some weird person living in some exotic subculture? I live in the same world as you.
I gave you a sufficient answer, and you ignored it, and you kept asking me the same question about the essence of marriage. You didn’t take in that I had given it to you. Sure, I could have expanded on it, but that wasn’t what you were asking me. You had simply ignored my answers and kept asking me the same question over and over.
Mack replies:
I hate to say it but in my emails I did ask specific questions, none of which you addressed directly.
As far as us being different, even though we are both Americans we definitely have generational differences. I think you are about 20 years my senior and probably of a different socio-economic background. Additionally I have no religious background and don’t understand peoples personal religious experiences.
Yet for some reason I continue to be interested in what you have to say despite being frequently rebuffed.
LA replies:
Ok, I can see that I didn’t answer all your questions. I’ll go through your e-mails and address your questions one by one. And then you have to pay me $100 for my time and efforts. (Joke.) Which is actually pretty funny because you’re asking me all these question as though I were an authority, and I’m really just speaking from general knowledge.
[Here are Mack’s questions and my answers.]
1. What then is essentially fundamental to marriage? Is it simply the sex of the marriage partners, the number of marriage partners, the equity between the marriage partners, the roles of the partners, the permanency of the marriage contract, or some combination, etc?
A man and a woman, joined for life, sharing a household, till death do us part, producing offspring and responsible for their upbringing and transmitting their knowledge and culture to them. Obviously widespread divorce weakens the very purpose of marriage. But the existence of divorce by itself does not cancel out marriage and its good.
2. A cursory search results in many hits for claims that polygamy, for instance, is not specifically proscribed in the New Testament. Is that so?
I’m not aware of polygamy being mentioned in the New Testament. Jesus never dealt with it, as he taught among the Jews, who practiced only monogamy. As for Paul, I don’t think he mentioned it either, which is not surprising as I’m not aware of any society in the Greco Roman world, at least the parts where Paul evangelized, that practiced polygamy. I could be wrong about that. So if polygamy was not proscribed, it was because it was not relevant. Christianity inherited the Jewish customs and laws, which were all about monogamy and never considered anything else.
Remember, one of the strongest impulses driving the Bible and Judaism was the rejection of the sexual mores of the Near Eastern peoples surrounding the Hebrews/Jews. God constantly says: “You will not be like the people who live round about you. You will not have temple prostitution, you will not sacrifice your children to Moloch, you will not lie with a man as one lies with a woman, because this is an abomination to the Lord, you will not have sexual relations with your relatives, you will not worship many gods or idols, but you will worship me alone.” So, sexual purity through monogamy and fidelity and the life long companionship of husband and wife was central to the moral development of the Jewish people and set them off from other Near Eastern peoples of that time. And the Jewish ways of marriage were essentially inherited by Christianity. And this goes back again to Genesis. As God says in Genesis 2, before he’s created woman, “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him an help meet (suitable) for him,” which got translated into the beautiful English expression helpmate. Man and woman are designed by God for each other, to help each other. In the same way, in Genesis 1, man and woman, so different, are yet both made in the image and likeness of God, complementing and completing each other according to God’s plan. That’s the Jewish-Christian view of marriage.
3. I have stated in the past my view that the easiest way to put this issue to rest is to do away with civil marriage—making marriage a purely personal/religious/cultural act. My guess is that you don’t agree with that idea—but I would like to hear a reasoned explanation of why.
Marriage is fundamental to society. All kinds of things about it are public, not private. It’s not just a private agreement between two people. It consists of a man and woman declaring before society that they are pledged to each other, that they will be faithful, that they will raise and care for children together. The whole society has an interest in the marriage, because it represents the formation of families, of children with known parents, of the line of generations linked to each other through marriage. Everything in society branches off from marriage. Issues of parental responsibility, property, wills, custody, divorce, the obligations that husband and wife owe to each other—whenever there’s a problem or dispute, all these things and many more have to be dealt with by some authoritative body, meaning courts (and behind the courts, legislatures which set the basic ground rules). The libertarian idea that marriage should be purely private is absurd. It’s the kind of whacked out idea that modern people come up with who know nothing and care nothing about the institution they want to reform. By its very nature it’s a public institution. Without marriage, without uniform laws of marriage, there would be no society but chaos.
Now in past centuries it wasn’t the state that made the rules for marriage, but the Church. But the Church had real power in those days. As the Church weakened, the state stepped in.
4. And is New Testament theology the source from which you are deriving the essential nature of marriage?
The New Testament doesn’t say a great deal about marriage. Christianity really inherited the Jewish tradition of marriage, of monogamy, fidelity, mother and father caring for their children, and a relative degree of equality between husband and wife. There are specific statements about marriage (like Paul’s statement about women obeying husbands), and about divorce (only for fornication, i.e., for adultery) in the New Testament, but we don’t need to go into them. The important thing is not the Bible by itself, but an tradition, embodied in laws and customs, that grew out of the Bible. Christianity for its first 1500 years meant the Catholic Church, it was Church law and doctrine that defined things such as marriage, not the Bible. That’s why I get annoyed at people talking always about the Bible, like in that Newsweek article, instead of the actual tradition of Christianity and Christian society, which is a matter of laws, doctrines, and customs.
5. I guess my question needs to be distilled further—I am curious about what you think the unchangeable essence of marriage is—… I gather that you believe that there is some absolute meaning to marriage that transcends any relativistic attempt to define it. But just what is that? Is it Western? Is it American? I’m curious what you think since there is, even within the contemporary Judeo-Christian tradition, a spectrum of beliefs about what properly constitutes marriage.
I think I’ve described the unchangeable essence of marriage as well as I can. I also quoted the beautiful passage from Genesis 1 to you, but it made no impression.
I don’t know what you mean by a spectrum of beliefs about marriage. Catholics prohibit divorce, Protestants don’t. But such differences don’t change the nature of marriage itself, though easy and widespread divorce obviously harms the very goods that marriage is aimed at and starts to dissolve the bonds of society.
6. If you feel that you can talk about the customs of Judaism and Christianity without including the practices of the Haredi and other orthodox Jews—that’s fine, but you and I don’t share the same set of assumptions obviously.
Whatever difference may exist between, say, a Protestant American marriage and a Hasidic marriage, it doesn’t affect the essential nature of marriage itself as I’ve defined it. You are talking about differences within an overarching essence, not about different essences.
7. I try not to be presumptive regarding people’s belief systems. I don’t think it would be better if I pretended to comprehend something when I really don’t.
I understand that you’re sincere. I got momentarily annoyed because I felt you were being unnecessarily difficult. I hope the answers have been helpful.
December 12
Mack replies:
Thanks for breaking this down for me—I think I understand where you’re coming from much better now—I really did just land on Earth in some ways—I lack any personal connection to religion.
Having not been brought up in any faith tradition and also having only the most cursory understanding—even on a conceptual level—of what religion was as a child has eventually lead to me not really having any clear understanding of how religion intersects with people on a personal level. I think this accounts for a deficiency in how I can comprehend the significance religion has in peoples lives—this is something that I’m trying to remedy—often by asking seemingly obvious tedious questions.
Howard Sutherland writes:
I just read your exchange re the essence of marriage. Excellent, and though your interlocutor was exasperating, he seemed sincere in his questions. Like you, though, I don’t understand how people can blithely declare themselves separate from and unaffected by the society in which they live and (unless they are immigrants from utterly alien cultures—all too likely now, I suppose) which presumably formed them. I would be interested to know what Mack’s cultural background is—he denies having a religious one. That might help explain his feelings of detachment.
Out of curiousity, I googled Meacham, expecting to find the usual Harvard, Yale or Princeton followed by Columbia Journalism School CV typical of sanctimonious mainstream liberals. To my horror, I found instead that Meacham is from Chattanooga and was graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where—worse, still—he studied religion. What on earth did he learn? Sewanee is a great, Southern liberal arts college founded by the Episcopal Church—or was. It is where my very conservative late father went to school, graduating in 1942. My father was a devoted Sewanee alumnus all his life. I always found it telling that he gave as generously as he could to Sewanee, but never gave Harvard a penny despite having business and law degrees from Sodom on the Charles.
So in Meacham, I’m afraid we probably have another example of a type I really don’t care for: The Guilty White Southerner, always looking for some Negro, somewhere, to apologize to—although any minority or non-white immigrant will do in a pinch. Other notable examples are Bill Moyers and Howell Raines. In the political arena, John Edwards and Lindsey Graham also come to mind. Despite his lack of ivy credentials, Meacham has risen very fast at Newsweek, so he must be very sound ideologically. He also has a wife named Keith (?!) and is a vestryman of St. Thomas’s Church, Fifth Avenue.
Mack writes:
Howard Sutherland writes:
I just read your exchange re the essence of marriage. Excellent, and though your interlocutor was exasperating, he seemed sincere in his questions. Like you, though, I don’t understand how people can blithely declare themselves separate from and unaffected by the society in which they live and (unless they are immigrants from utterly alien cultures—all too likely now, I suppose) which presumably formed them. I would be interested to know what Mack’s cultural background is—he denies having a religious one. That might help explain his feelings of detachment.
I appreciate both your, and Mr. Sutherland’s concession that I am in earnest when I ask questions that must seem to you like easily deductible propositions drawn from “common knowledge”.
I don’t however, and certainly not blithely—or with any lack of consideration for that matter, declare myself separate and unaffected by my society. And while the society I live in is infused with religiously derived values (in a sense), these are forces I’m largely unaware of—just as earlier men felt gravity or saw light, yet knew nothing of their underlying principles. However, the society we are most directly affected by is that of the family, and the home. Just as most who grow up in Catholic homes grow up Catholic, it stands to reason that if one comes from a non-religious home (although not particularly atheist) they will likely grow up non-religious.
I find myself frequently making mistakes in analyzing how religion is integrated into peoples lives due to the fact that I only know religion from the ‘as written’ perspective.
My cultural background is post-hippie: I have one parent of Slavic Catholic background and another of Sephardic Jewish background. However the concept of religion was simply non-existent in our household. I had a dim childhood understanding that equated religion with churches and singing, that’s about all. I think it wasn’t until late in grade school, after belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny disappeared that I realized that these two holidays even had a religious nature.
I completely understand that it might be difficult for people to believe that there are people like me out there—but I’m here. And I have never felt an internal drive to internalize religion in any way. I know that puts me in a distinct minority and I feel that it is incumbent upon me to make an effort to understand how religion informs a wide range of world views, oftentimes ones that appear to me to be in conflict despite ostensible origins in the same religious traditions.
LA replies:
I should have softened Mr. Sutherland’s remark to “a bit exasperating.” You weren’t that bad. Please don’t feel you’re being attacked. In fact, I allowed myself to get more annoyed with you than I should have and I’m sorry about that. Your desire to understand things is admirable.
You embody the challenge of a person having come up in a radically secularized, de-cultured society, and now in adulthood having to figure out from scratch what its religion and its culture is. Which in turn suggests that the cause of your lack of knowledge of religious things is not your own family—it’s the whole society. Which further means that you are not in the minority, as you imagine, you are in the majority, you are typical. It’s the society as a whole that has junked its religion, moral traditions, and knowledge of its own history, and therefore the average member of that society is going to be lacking in familiarity with its cultural, moral, and religious tradition, as you are.
In this connection, there is no substitute for reading. For example, I knew very little of the history of Western civilization, and particularly of historic Christendom, from my high school and college learning; it was largely from my independent reading in adulthood that I picked up these things. Given the non-existence of real education today, that kind of reading is indispensable. I strongly believe that one cannot be a “citizen” of Western civilization without having a knowledge and a feel for its history. This doesn’t require being a scholar; but it does require having some sense of the West (and of the civilizations that preceded it) as a story, as a living continuum through time, of which we are a part. If you don’t have that, then all the “West” will mean to you is its “ideas.” It won’t be a living, particular entity, which indeed it is.
At the same time, books aren’t enough.
As I said, during my thirties, I read of lot of history, philosophy, religion, and was especially drawn to European history in the Middle Ages. But it wasn’t until I had the experience that made me a Christian believer, and began attending a variety of churches, especially the traditional Anglican church in which the liturgy goes back to the earliest days of the church, that I began to understand European history, and realized that all these people in the Middle Ages I had been reading about were Christians. They attended church, they listened to Eucharistic service, they partook of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. They lived their lives in a culture and a way of being centered around Christianity and the Church. One cannot learn this from any book. (As for the knowledge of Christianity that a non-Christian member of our society might get from movies, even in the Golden Age of Hollywood when there were many Christian-friendly, and specifically Anglican-friendly movies, their portrayal of church services was bland; for example you never heard the words of the Eucharistic service, which is the center of Christianity.)
Which doesn’t mean that one must be a Christian believer to have the desire and ability to help defend the West. But the fact remains that the West in its deepest core is not about democracy and capitalism; it’s about Christianity. The very individualism that is central to Western man could not exist without Christianity, with its focus on the individual soul. And as Stanton Evans and others have well shown, the very idea of liberty in the West is a product of the Christian Middle Ages.
Now I didn’t become a Christian in order to become a member and defender of the West. The conversion was something that came to me. But an important practical result of that conversion was that I began to have a feel for the historic West that I had not had before.
Laura W. writes: There are many, many Americans who have grown up like Mack, with very little religious training, strangers to the core ideas of their civilization. It seems, however, unfair for Mack to blame his ignorance on his parents. He is surrounded by Judaism and Christianity. Any community library, even an inferior one, offers the basics. Nevertheless, the definition of marriage as essentially between a man and a woman is not peculiar to Judeo-Christianity. There is no society in the history of the world - pagan, Hindu, Buddhist, or atheist - that has up until now defined marriage as anything but a relationship between the sexes. It’s very strange to be put in the position of having to defend this self-evident truth (that marriage is, by definition, between men and women.) It’s as if one were asked to define the idea that a garden is in essence earth and seeds and sun. If someone asked, “Well, how do you know that’s the essence of a garden?” what are you supposed to say other than that, “I have never known - and no one has ever known - a garden that was anything but this.”
LA replies:
Here’s Mack’s earlier question about polygamy and the New Testament: “A cursory search results in many hits for claims that polygamy, for instance, is not specifically proscribed in the New Testament. Is that so?” This was logically the same as asking: “Have the defenders of the traditional definition of gardens ever specifically refuted the belief that a garden is really a kitchen table?” Answer: No, they haven’t, because the assertion has never been made, and therefore it has never needed to be refuted.
In a world in which nothing can be taken to be known, a world in which there is no common culture and no common concepts, there is no end to such questions.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 11, 2008 12:41 PM | Send
|