The assumption of the article is that the Supreme Court decision in favor of same-sex marriage is a cultural landmark, placing gay rights within the moral authority of the civil rights movement—as it were, Martin Luther King blessing the rainbow banner. The decision, the authors say, is “like a boulder thrown into a pond which will have consequences for years.”
In the November 2015 issue of Christianity Today, the banner publication of Evangelical Protestantism, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner co-authored an article titled “The Power of our Weakness”. Gerson is a regular columnist in The Washington Post, and Wehner is on the staff of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think-tank in Washington. The authors basically agree that “we” lost: The “we” means conservative Christians, which could include both Evangelicals and Catholics, but the main concern here is the target audience of Evangelicals. This is not my faith community, but the question asked here must interest anyone concerned about culture, religion and politics in America.
The assumption of the article is that the Supreme Court decision in favor of same-sex marriage is a cultural landmark, placing gay rights within the moral authority of the civil rights movement—as it were, Martin Luther King blessing the rainbow banner. The decision, the authors say, is “like a boulder thrown into a pond which will have consequences for years”. A spokesman for the conservative Family Research Council calls it “the downfall of America”. Gerson and Wehner agree but they also insist that it is not simply a climax of the gay movement but has deeper roots in the (then predominantly heterosexual) cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. After all, there were all those feminists who, burning their bras while men refusing military service burned their draft cards, announced that “girls say yes to boys who say no”—even if they had to move to Canada to redeem their pledge. These now-aging women (they didn’t mind being called “girls” then) must resent that they don’t get a letter in the so-called “LGBT” community (unless perhaps they can pass as lesbians).
The authors suggest that Evangelicals now face two options. The “Benedict option” is named after Benedict of Nursia (480-547 CE), the founder of the Benedictine Order, who after the onset of an era of civilizational darkness created a monastic subculture in which the Christian virtues could be cultivated and the treasures of the vanishing civilization preserved to survive the rule of the barbarians. Gerson and Wehner don’t much like this option, not only because (as far as I know) they don’t propose to live by the Rule of St. Benedict, but because the option exaggerates the extent of the barbarian victory. After all, they correctly point out that some things have been getting better since the 1960s. For example, the mindless admiration on the American left for murderous Marxist regimes (the bloodier the better) has much diminished. Even Bernie Sanders, who proudly proclaims that he is a socialist, adds that he is a democratic socialist.
The authors of the Christianity Today article prefer what they call “the Wilberforce option”. William Wilberforce (1759-1883), was an Evangelical leader of the anti-slavery movement in Britain at a time when that barbaric institution was broadly accepted. Wilberforce died a few days after his movement achieved victory with the passage by Parliament of the Slavery Abolition Act. After that the Royal Navy actively suppressed the slave trade on the high seas. The movement became very active in the United States, served to legitimate the Union side in the Civil War, and about two decades later President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration. The option for American Evangelicals today means a focus for action on issues where they can still have an impact, as they have already had on development aid, the campaigns against HIV-AIDS and sex-trafficking, and with the notable work of Chuck Colson on prison reform. This also calls for a “rebalancing” of the disproportionate emphasis on sexual morality. (This is also something that Pope Francis has been urging. Could it be that Evangelicals might also take their cue from Rome on the issue of the death penalty?) Gerson and Wehner define this approach as not pursuing power, but rather “making an offer of grace”. They cite the remarkable event that followed the massacre at Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina by the white racist Dylan Roof—when relatives of the victims confronted the murderer in open court offering him their forgiveness. A few days later the Governor Nikki Haley (herself an Evangelical) ordered Confederate flags to be removed from state properties.
Despite the aforementioned setbacks, American Evangelicals are far from marginalized in America. They have gone through several significant transitions in their history. As far as I know, the term “Evangelical” originated in England. (I will resist the temptation to enlarge here on a pet peeve of mine—the inanity of spelling the term in lower case while Protestant and Christian are spelled in caps. I imagine that this decision was made by someone who never understood the difference between common and particular nouns in elementary school, and that his decision was subsequently immortalized by computer spellcheck programs). The term was applied originally as now both to certain Nonconformist free churches and to a wing within the Church of England (affectionately called “low and lazy”, against the other wings dubbed “broad and hazy” and “high and crazy”).