Damon Linker is writing too many provocative things too fast for me to keep up with blogging about them. The other day, he posted a good piece about why its not right for same-sex marriage proponents — as he is — to say that Christians who oppose SSM are on the same footing as racists. He writes:

As for gay marriage and anti-discrimination, Chotiner appears not to recognize that his own flippant views — which are very widely held among secular liberals — pose a very real threat to the religious freedom of millions of his fellow citizens. As countless liberals have done before him, Chotiner breezily equates those believers who once appealed to Scripture in defense of racism and those who currently reject gay marriage. The first position has been socially, morally, and legally marginalized with no negative consequences for faith, Chotiner asserts, and the same will soon be true about the second. So what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that strictures against homosexuality are rooted far more deeply in the Judeo-Christian tradition than racism ever was. Yes, slavery is found throughout the Scriptures and comes in for criticism only, at best, by implication. But race-based slavery — and the racism that made it possible and continues to infect ideas and institutions throughout the West to this day — receives no explicit endorsement from the Bible.

Which isn’t to say that those seeking to justify race-based slavery or racism couldn’t, and didn’t, twist biblical passages to make them provide such justification. But the Hebrew Bible and New Testament clearly do not teach (either explicitly or implicitly) that buying, owning, and selling African slaves is next to godliness.

The same cannot be said about the normative teaching on human sexuality contained within the Judeo-Christian scriptures — and even more so, within the interpretative and theological traditions that grow out of them.

This can’t be said often enough, though nobody on either the secular or Christian left wants to hear it. You simply cannot reconcile normative Christianity with sanctioning gay relationships, without doing serious violence to Christian teaching. And don’t start with the, “But Leviticus says you shouldn’t wear different fibers together, and we don’t pay attention to that, do we?” nonsense. Gender complementarity and an explicit rejection of homosexual desire is profoundly woven throughout Jewish and Christian teaching, and in Scripture. We are obviously and quickly moving into a culture in which this understanding is rejected. I concede that. What it impossible to concede without doing an extreme amount of obfuscation is that this is reconcilable with Christianity. Note well that Linker is a proponent of same-sex marriage — but at least he understands the stakes involved for traditional Christians, and understands that it is not like race. In Jewish and Christian teaching, sexuality — not just homosexuality — has intrinsic moral meaning, in a way that race does not. [UPDATE: See this, for example.] Traditional Christians and Jews may be wrong about this, of course, but those who believe that smear their opponents by likening them to racists. As Linker points out, it’s simply not true, theologically speaking.

Denouncing traditionalists as racists means that SSM advocates don’t have to do any thinking about what it means to live in a pluralist democracy, only emoting. To be fair, we trads often prefer to emote rather than confront the difficult issues raised by same-sex couples and the challenges they face; I came around to supporting civil unions as a compromise that would alleviate some of the burdens borne by gay couples, because they pose good questions about how they should be accommodated if we trads had our way. This isn’t satisfying to many, I know, but I would prefer to live in an imperfect (and perhaps temporary) accommodation than to live in a winner-take-all world that imposes serious hardship on a large number of people.

More recently, Linker claims that Christianity’s radical and historically progressive egalitarianism brought us same-sex marriage. Excerpt:

By all means, let’s ensure that the religious rights of these opponents are protected. But let’s also hope that they will eventually follow Tocqueville’s example in recognizing that a major reason why equality always wins is that the new order is always more just than what preceded it. This is why Tocqueville counseled resignation and acceptance rather than a reactionary response — because, he concluded, trying to “stop democracy…[is] to struggle against God himself.”

None of this means anything as crude as “Christ wants gay marriage.” But it does mean that we live in a culture in which reformers who successfully claim the mantle of equality inevitably triumph — because those who oppose equality find it impossible to gain public traction for their own side of the argument.

Equality always wins. And equality became the lodestar of Western culture thanks to Christianity.

My colleague Noah Millman casts a skeptical eye on this claim. Islam is also a radically egalitarian monotheistic religion, he points out, and nobody thinks Islam has given us gay marriage, or that gay marriage is going to emerge in Islamic societies. And he points out that Christianity took root in a pagan Roman world that embraced pansexuality; he might have argued, as the Yale-trained classicist Sarah Ruden so brilliantly does, that one of the key things that distinguished Christianity from the pagan society around it was precisely its teaching on sexual morality. He writes:

Maybe the problem with all these kinds of arguments is that ideas don’t have consequences – at least, not in the way that Linker wants them to. The older I get, the less Hegelian and the more Darwinian I get about the way that culture changes over time. That is to say: I am less and less convinced that a conversation about ideas is the motor of history, and more and more convinced that cultures prove themselves more or less adapted to challenges – material or ideational – that their cultures could not possibly have foreseen.

This is an important point. I see the world more like Linker does, which is why I am so convinced that some form of legalized polygamy is inevitable in our society, just as gay marriage was inevitable after the divorce revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. That is, I think both gay marriage and polygamy come from the logical outworking of certain premises that have force in our post-Christian culture. I don’t think equality has all that much to do with it. Eastern Christian societies — Russia and Greece, for example — are strongly opposed to same-sex marriage and gay rights in general. Christianity is spiritually egalitarian, but to claim that Christianity naturally and logically results in gay marriage is to claim that Christianity naturally and logically results in the normalization of lying, or theft, or anything else it teaches is a sin. The liar and the thief is, in fact, spiritually equal in the eyes of God, but it would be absurd to say that this inevitably leads to the conclusion that sin is not sin.

It is more plausible to say that same-sex marriage emerges as Christianity wanes. Our culture has, over time, come to place heavy value on individual autonomy, on a therapeutic approach to life, and on sexuality as both constitutive of selfhood. The degeneration of Christianity into Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and the privatization of religion has also had consequences, one of which is the legitimization of same-sex marriage. Gay marriage is the natural and logical result of a long period of cultural development. The egalitarianism of Christianity is less responsible for this than the rise of nominalism, which served as a disintegrating force, and the decentralization of religious authority from a corporate body. It is more true to say that Protestantism gave us gay marriage than that Christianity did, and it’s true to say that nominalism gave us modernity, of which Protestantism is the Christian expression.

For all that, Millman’s point is an important one to keep in mind. History doesn’t move in a straight causal line. My son Matt and I were talking this morning on the drive to Baton Rouge about the Tsarevich’s hemophilia, and how the Romanov family’s personal tragedy contributed to the world-shaking Bolshevik Revolution. Had Alexei not been so sick, and Rasputin not gained such a death grip through that on the Tsar’s family, would Russia have transitioned from despotism to something more modern and democratic without the trauma of revolution? If Gavrilo Princip had been a worse shot that fateful day in Sarajevo, would there have been two world wars, which certainly demoralize and partially deconstructed Western civilization, of which Christianity was the spiritual foundation, have occurred? Did Gavrilo Princip give us gay marriage?

You see Millman’s point.

It’s also worth considering the famed philosopher John Gray’s views on history, namely that nothing is inevitable, and nothing is as illusory as the idea that history is progressing in a particular direction. Excerpt from a Daily Telegraph interview with Gray, who is an atheist and a philosophical pessimist:

Perhaps the biggest misconception about John Gray is that he thinks all progress is a myth. In fact, he happily concedes that in lots of ways life now is a lot better than it was, say, 200 years ago. “What I’m really saying is that a lot of people nowadays cling to the idea of a slow evolution of human history – something I believe is more fantastic than the belief that God will raise us from the dead.”

All the advances in human rights that we’ve seen – religious freedom, racial equality, equality for gays and so on – are reversible, he believes. “We like to think that we can’t go backwards, but we can. We do it all the time. And the best recent example of that is torture.”

Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Gray wrote an article jokingly suggesting that if we were going to wage wars of liberation to modernise people, we should also modernise torture. This prompted a predictable chorus of infuriated shrieks. “But what happened? In the blink of an eye the world’s pre-eminent liberal democracy rehabilitated torture, reclassifying it ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.”

This, by the way, is why I believe the Holocaust was the most important event in human history since the life of Jesus. It shows that progress is never permanent, and that it can simply mean that we become a lot more effective at being barbarians. But I digress. Gray has argued elsewhere — in his book Black Mass — that Christianity is in part responsible for Nazism and Communism because it introduced the idea of apocalypse resulting in a utopia in which humankind is perfected. It’s an interesting idea. Ideas have consequences, but not always the consequences we expect.