I know it's hard to believe, given the length of the previous posts, that there are things that I left out or forgot to say. But here goes a few "P.S.'s," mostly to Friday’s post about the internal logic of Christianity not necessarily being legislation material.
1. A great example of this historically is Prohibition--the Constitutional amendment that went bad. Prohibition made sense in a certain subset of the Christian worldview but did not make sense when it was wrenched out of that context and the attempt was made to apply it to everyone across the board.
I think that a Constitutional amendment regarding marriage would have the same ring to it. My guess is that as Christians we'll speak out against gay marriage 50 years from now in the same way that we speak out against pornography and other expressions of sexual brokenness--not with legislation but with other forms of persuasion.
2. Contrary to what this may lead people to believe, I think that the saying "you can't legislate morality" is absolutely wrong. Every piece of legislation is founded in some sort of morality--whether that be abortion "rights" or laws against pedophiles.
3. So the question then becomes, whose morality? And in a representative government (which I think is the best of all the options) with a plurality of world views, the key is to find common ground across many world views in order to form a moral code that is amenable across world views. This means that Christians won't get their way in every situation. That's fine, this place is not our home anyway and it is God's mercy if we feel our alien-ness on a regular basis.
4. This is not to say that Christians don't have a place in government and shaping policies. It just means that we have to do so recognizing our context and limitations. Ten years ago there was a push from Christians for prayer in public schools. Please, good people, let's stop and think. These folks always assume Christians to be in power to implement things like this. If their kids had a Muslim teacher or principle, my guess is that they'd be less fired up about prayer in public schools. So Christians do need to be involved in government, but we've got to understand the broader context and play thoughtfully.
5. In legislation as well as other areas, lots of Christians have two positions: go hard or go home. What I’m pleading for here is a third option: thoughtful engagement. There are lots of ways to influence our culture and the changing the Constitution isn’t the only way nor is it in this case (in my not-so-humble-opinion) the best.
6. I actually do like NPR (the discussion that started this whole string of posts), even if it does stand for Nationally Partisan Radio.
2 comments:
I enjoyed the prior discussion as well. :-)
I think you're absolutely right on some of your points. All legislation is at some level, morality. Also, it might make our conscience feel good to penalize moral non-conformists (i.e., no gay marriage, prohibition, etc...), but it certainly is not practical to blindly legislate those things. Rather, emphasizing non-govt solutions would be more effective.
But I would not stop there. I think abortion is the same thing. It might feel good to outlaw it, but do to the nature of the problem, I strongly think the criminal justice approach would backfire (as it did with Prohibition and the "war on drugs")and not actually solve the real problem. Rather, non-govt solutions would be fare more effective and humane.
royale,
definitely agree that in the abortion case, non-govt solution must be more fully developed (nice to agree on something!). i'm just not quite ready to give up on the legislative side of that battle as well.
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