While it is very useful in the civic sphere for those who share common cause on matters such as abortion and homosexuality to stand together, if we ignore the different reasons which lie behind this common front, we risk reducing Christianity to a mere social ethic. For myself, I am pro-life because I am a conservative Protestant. The latter is the foundation of the former, not vice versa. And for that same reason, I am compelled to disagree with my Catholic friends on a whole host of things that are also of great importance to both sides.

In an article for the New Oxford Review, David Mills recounts the offense caused to a few of his conservative Protestant friends when he drew attention to the fact that they were in agreement with liberal Catholics against conservative Catholics on the matters of priestly celibacy, divorce after remarriage, and contraception. Only on the matter of homosexuality were they in agreement with conservative Catholics.

In fact, Mills could have gone further. Protestants like myself may agree with conservative Catholics in our conclusions on the moral status of homosexual acts but we still assume the legitimate separability of the unitive and the procreative aspects of sexual intercourse. Conservative Catholics not only deny that but see it as a foundational element in their understanding of sexual ethics.

What is more interesting is the hostility which resulted from Mills’s statement of what seems to be an unexceptionable matter of fact. While Mills tactfully hides the identity of his friends by avoiding any reference to their ecclesiastical affiliations, I would hazard a guess that they are either high church people of a Lutheran or Anglican variety, or evangelicals of a more generic sort.

There are likely to be three things which have contributed to the phenomenon Mills describes. First, there is a subordination of doctrinal confession to aesthetics. Particularly in American evangelicalism, there is a tendency to treat doctrinal difference with chosen heroes as something to be ignored or wished away rather than addressed. Thus, C. S. Lewis and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have become American evangelicals as a result of posthumous virtual baptisms into the faith, the brash boldness of which would surely have made even Brigham Young blush.

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