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Gay marriage has all the potent therapeutic rhetoric and images on its side. It is about love. It is about happiness. It is about allowing two people to commit to each other. It is about acceptance. It is about inclusivity. And to oppose it is to be against all those things. Given the premises of expressive individualism, to be an opponent of gay marriage is to be more than just a sour-faced killjoy; it is to act out of irrational bigotry akin to that which motivates racists.
In a world in which emotivism rules, those whose language tracks most closely with the emotional temper of the time inevitably present the most persuasive arguments, even if they are not really presenting arguments at all.
the LGBTQ+ alliance is not an inherently stable one.
When and if the unifying enemy—heteronormativity—has been defeated, the coalition is unlikely to continue to exist in its current form. What shape it will take only time will tell.
And it is here that the real Achilles’ heel of the movement is likely to be found. It is easy to imagine that, in thirty or forty years’ time, adults who were used as, in effect, experimental subjects for their parents’ trendy gender ideology and subsequently had their minds, bodies, and lives traumatized by medical treatment, will sue their parents, the doctors, and the insurance companies who financed the whole mess.
capital will determine the future shape of the morality of gender ideology, and transgenderism will become a minority interest once again.
Only with the Reformation does religious choice become a possibility and then a distinct marker of identity.
religious choice predicated on religious freedom is historically foundational to the American experience.
Religious freedom and expressive individualism would now appear to be increasingly antithetical to each other.
Why is this? First, there is a general decline in religious commitment in the West,
Second, the Sittlichkeit of the West has come to see sexual identity as the key to the expression of personal identity. Therefore, any religion that maintains a traditional view of sexual activity and refuses to recognize identities
In short, they are either stupid or immoral or both.
the idea that religious freedom is a social good is not simply increasingly implausible, it is also increasingly distasteful, disturbing, and undesirable.
Christianity is overwhelmingly white, has enjoyed huge cultural and political power, and is generally regarded (sometimes accurately, sometimes unfairly) as having misused that power, from the Crusades to more recent child abuse scandals.
There is no compromise that can really be reached here because there is no way that the one can be assimilated to the other.
It is precisely because matters of basic identity, and therefore of what constitutes dignity and appropriate recognition, are at stake that makes a negotiated settlement impossible.
To allow religious conservatives to be religious conservatives is to deny that people are defined by their sexual orientation, and to allow that people are defined by their sexual orientation is to assert that religious conservatism is irrational bigotry and dangerous to the unity of the commonwealth.
That would seem to make the free exercise of religion, in terms of the individual’s right to apply his beliefs to life outside the Sunday worship service...
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The possible future for religious freedom is one that looks far less robust than its past.
the church should reflect long and hard on the connection between aesthetics and her core beliefs and practices.
dependence on personal narratives.
Our Bodies, Ourselves, the feminist bible, is full of personal testimonies presented as incontrovertible precisely becaus...
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the highest form of authority in an age of expressi...
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the perennial power of sympathy and empathy in s...
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Today images have primacy over ideas. For that reason, cinema, television and now the Internet have left books to one side.
The church needs to respond to this aesthetic-based logic, but first of all she needs to be consciously aware of it. And that means that she herself must forgo indulging in, and thereby legitimating, the kind of aesthetic strategy of the wider culture.
If the church is to avoid the absolutizing of aesthetics by an appropriate commitment to Christianity as first and foremost doctrinal, then second, she must also be a community.
the church can learn from the LGBTQ+ community, for, whatever moral disapproval we must have toward it, it was—is—a real community where real people look after each other in terms of meeting very real needs.
communities shape consciousness.
Our moral consciousness is very much shaped b...
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Protestants need to recover both natural law and a high view of the physical body.
A recovery of a biblical understanding of embodiment is vital.
If there is a precedent, it is earlier: the second century. In the second century, the church was a marginal sect within a dominant, pluralist society.
And she did it by what means? By existing as a close-knit, doctrinally bounded community that required her members to act consistently with their faith and to be good citizens of the earthly city as far as good citizenship was compatible with faithfulness to Christ.
