What I am saying – and what religious conservatives actually believe – is that without charity first being nurtured in home and hearth, it becomes more difficult for our nation to understand what it means to love the desperate stranger, the lonely neighbor, or the homeless immigrant.

There are many unfortunate consequences of the culture wars. But one in particular, rarely noticed, is how it has insulated secular progressive academics from the habits of mind, ways of life, and types of reasoning that are integral to the worldview of religious conservatives. Consider just these two examples.

On the matter of the sanctity of human life, secular progressives will sometimes accuse religious conservatives of only caring about the unborn child before he is born, but not afterwards. They often go on to argue that if you do not support abortion rights, then you lack compassion for women in crisis pregnancies. Consequently, if you are not willing have your tax dollars fund abortion, contraceptive services, and child welfare programs for those poor women who do not choose abortion, then you are selfish and greedy.

What secular progressives miss is how their position sounds to religious conservatives. For this is what they hear: a pregnant woman has a greater obligation to pay for her neighbor’s abortion, contraception, and children’s welfare than she has to care for the innocent, defenseless child in her own womb.  For the religious conservative, this sounds like the secular progressive is saying that those closest to us and to whom it seems we have a special responsibility – our own family members, those children we sire and beget – demand less of us morally than people we do not even know.

This sounds so strange to religious conservatives that they find it difficult to believe that otherwise intelligent people, who claim to be the champions of empathy, sympathy, compassion, and community, are actually suggesting that charity does not begin at home.

I am, of course, not suggesting that religious conservatives believe that we do not have obligations to those outside our family circle. For to suggest such a thing would be inconsistent with what virtually all religious conservatives believe their faith teaches about the wideness of the human community and the common good.

Unsurprisingly, the Catholic Church is the largest charitable organization on Earth, having had nearly two millennia of experience in creating and sustaining a wide array of institutions in areas as diverse as education, health care, and poverty relief.

What I am saying – and what religious conservatives actually believe – is that without charity first being nurtured in home and hearth, it becomes more difficult for our nation to understand what it means to love the desperate stranger, the lonely neighbor, or the homeless immigrant.

Similarly: On the issue of marriage, secular progressives often depict the view of religious conservatives as arising purely from animus against gay and lesbian citizens. In fact, this depiction has been so successfully advanced in the culture that even the deeply literate Justice Anthony Kennedy has made it the one dogma of his sexual orientation jurisprudence that cannot in principle be disproven.

But for religious conservatives, the distance between this depiction and how they really think of marriage is so great that they do not recognize themselves in it. Yet because the portrayal is so deeply ingrained in the wider culture, any rebuttal of the depiction sounds to the secular progressive as a desperate rewriting of reality in order to rescue a floundering political cause. Nevertheless, let’s give it a try.

For religious conservatives, marriage is a unique institution in which two members of the two halves of the human race – male and female – are united so that they may forge a permanent bond for the primary (though not exclusive) purpose of begetting and raising children.

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