Conjugal Union isn’t a book about the Bible’s view on marriage; it’s a philosophical account that works out the ethical and legal ramifications of a controversial view. But it’s the kind of book that will help us read the Bible and other books better, as it will reward patient and attentive readers with new thoughts on human sexuality. Conjugal Union is philosophical meat, and even if readers don’t leave satisfied with the meal, they won’t go hungry for reading it.

Patrick Lee and Robert P. George. Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why It Matters. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 150 pp. $20.69.

Our society has struggled the past few years to come to a meaningful consensus on the nature and limits of marriage. While the Supreme Court’s decisions this coming June on four new cases will clarify the legal status of the institution, the only thing everyone agrees on is that the public dispute will carry on.

Traditional Christians aren’t going away anytime soon, and even if the question of how the state should regulate marriage (if at all) ceases to be a live one for our political debates, it will remain a test case for Christians aiming to understand how the church and world should intersect.

Building on What Is Marriage?

Few academics have attained Robert George’s prominence for his work defending a broadly traditional account of marriage and its goods. What Is Marriage? [review], which the Princeton philosopher and commentator co-authored with Sherif Girgis and Ryan Anderson, has been perhaps the single most widely read conservative critique of same-sex marriage. In Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why It Matters, George returns to the subject with another collaborator, Patrick Lee, a partner he’s worked with before. Even though the central arguments of the two books are nearly identical, What Is Marriage? was written (in part) for non-specialist audiences and limited in its scope, whereas Conjugal Union addresses more technical specifics and adds dimensions missing in the earlier work. Readers looking to better understand What Is Marriage? and to see the view’s ramifications on other questions would do well to patiently work through the arguments presented in Conjugal Union.

What Is Marriage? can be credited for reviving natural law arguments about the nature of marriage within the public square as well as the evangelical world. Yet not all natural law theories are identical, and many unique specifics and presuppositions were understandably omitted from the book. In Conjugal Union, Lee and George fill that gap, situating their account of marriage and sexual ethics within the broader question of the “natural law” and how we come to know its norms.

Basic Good for All

Their work in this section isn’t entirely new, nor is it uncontroversial. Lee (professor of bioethics at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio) and George (professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University) are members of the “new natural law” school that Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and others have been advocating for the past 30 years. On their view, conclusions about many moral questions can be had “independently of one’s acceptance of God’s existence or of divine revelation,” a claim that many evangelicals may find uncomfortable but that deserves careful consideration (15). Such conclusions aren’t derived from the structure of human nature per se: we cannot simply read off how we should act in our sexual lives, for instance, from the structure of human bodies. The moral nature of marriage, in other words, demands a much more sophisticated account than simply saying “the parts don’t fit.” Instead, moral goodness or badness is a matter of choices related to various “basic goods” we come to know by reflecting on the opportunities inherent in human action and the distinctive benefits such actions aim at. That flying sketch leaves out crucial details; the gist, though, is that basic goods provide reasons for action, and such goods—“life and health, understanding, skillful performance, harmony with other people”—are “aspects of true flourishing” and are therefore “worth pursuing and promoting both in ourselves and in others” (26).

Within this context Lee and George argue marriage is one of these “basic goods,” a community with an objective structure that determines human practical rationality. On their view, marriage is a “union of a man and a woman formed by their commitment to share their lives—physically (including sexually), emotionally, and spiritually—in the kind of community that would be fulfilled by conceiving and rearing children together” (41). In the sexual union such a commitment is made real, for “sexual intercourse is a unitary action in which the male and the female complete one another and become biologically one, a single organism with respect to [procreation] (though, of course, not with respect to others)” (45). Interestingly, their account of marriage entails that permanence and exclusivity are properties of it, rather than what defines its essence. They recognize that how those properties are practiced in any society will vary, but the variability doesn’t itself necessarily alter the essential structure of marriage.

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