The Benedict Option and the Death of the Republic (Updated)

Notwithstanding the Court's gay marriage ruling, many religions still oppose the practice. For instance, the LDS Church authorities stated:

"The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints acknowledges that following today's ruling by the Supreme Court, same-sex marriages are now legal in the United States. The Court's decision does not alter the Lord's doctrine that marriage is a union between a man and a woman ordained by God. While showing respect for those who think differently, the Church will continue to teach and promote marriage between a man and a woman as a central part of our doctrine and practice."

I have written a bit about the implications of the recent gay marriage ruling and the potential for persecution of Christians here and here. As I noted, we have only to look at Canada for a glimpse of the future, where gay activists will use the legalization of gay marriage as a stick with which to beat Christians and Christian organizations. The question is "now what do we do?"

One route is civil disobedience and continuing to fight to retain our religious rights. For instance, USA Today reported a couple days ago that "Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a statement Sunday saying state workers can refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses if doing so is contrary to his or her religious beliefs." Various pastors have called for civil disobedience, including many black pastors (an interesting development which could see many blacks lose their enthusiasm for the Democratic party) (See also here). Bishop Michael Jarrell, the bishop of the Catholic diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, has also advised Catholics to resist even if it means breaking the law. Others, including some senior Republican leaders, believe it is time to just move on.

Whether civil disobedience or "moving on," Rob Dreher, writing at Time magazine, warned that Christians must now learn to live as exiles in our own country. He writes:

It is now clear that for this Court, extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice. True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the fears of those worried about religious liberty. But when a Supreme Court majority is willing to invent rights out of nothing, it is impossible to have faith that the First Amendment will offer any but the barest protection to religious dissenters from gay rights orthodoxy.

Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito explicitly warned religious traditionalists that this decision leaves them vulnerable. Alito warns that Obergefell “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” and will be used to oppress the faithful “by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”

The warning to conservatives from the four dissenters could hardly be clearer or stronger. So where does that leave us?

For one, we have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist. To be frank, the court majority may impose on the rest of the nation a view widely shared by elites, but it is also a view shared by a majority of Americans. There will be no widespread popular resistance to Obergefell. This is the new normal.

For another, LGBT activists and their fellow travelers really will be coming after social conservatives. The Supreme Court has now, in constitutional doctrine, said that homosexuality is equivalent to race. The next goal of activists will be a long-term campaign to remove tax-exempt status from dissenting religious institutions. [Docent: activists are already calling for this--"Now’s the Time To End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions," an op-ed at Time). The more immediate goal will be the shunning and persecution of dissenters within civil society. After today, all religious conservatives are Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla who was chased out of that company for supporting California’s Proposition 8.

Third, the Court majority wrote that gays and lesbians do not want to change the institution of marriage, but rather want to benefit from it. This is hard to believe, given more recent writing from gay activists like Dan Savage expressing a desire to loosen the strictures of monogamy in all marriages. Besides, if marriage can be redefined according to what we desire — that is, if there is no essential nature to marriage, or to gender — then there are no boundaries on marriage. Marriage inevitably loses its power.

In that sense, social and religious conservatives must recognize that the Obergefell decision did not come from nowhere. It is the logical result of the Sexual Revolution, which valorized erotic liberty. It has been widely and correctly observed that heterosexuals began to devalue marriage long before same-sex marriage became an issue. The individualism at the heart of contemporary American culture is at the core of Obergefell — and at the core of modern American life.

This is profoundly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But this is the world we live in today.

One can certainly understand the joy that LGBT Americans and their supporters feel today. But orthodox Christians must understand that things are going to get much more difficult for us. We are going to have to learn how to live as exiles in our own country. We are going to have to learn how to live with at least a mild form of persecution. And we are going to have to change the way we practice our faith and teach it to our children, to build resilient communities.

It is time for what I call the Benedict Option. In his 1982 book After Virtue, the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the current age to the fall of ancient Rome. He pointed to Benedict of Nursia, a pious young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray, as an example for us. We who want to live by the traditional virtues, MacIntyre said, have to pioneer new ways of doing so in community. We await, he said “a new — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”

Throughout the early Middle Ages, Benedict’s communities formed monasteries, and kept the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness. Eventually, the Benedictine monks helped refound civilization.

I believe that orthodox Christians today are called to be those new and very different St. Benedicts. How do we take the Benedict Option, and build resilient communities within our condition of internal exile, and under increasingly hostile conditions? I don’t know. But we had better figure this out together, and soon, while there is time.

Hunter Baker similarly warns at The Federalist:

It is not hard to see where this is going. The gay marriage debate is not about gay marriage any more than the Confederate flag debate is about racism. It is about free speech. The court’s ruling on gay marriage announces that in due course the First Amendment is to be sacrificed on the altar of the Fourteenth Amendment. Prior to this ruling, bakers and wedding photographers had already suffered fines and the threat of imprisonment for refusing to serve gay customers. Brendan Eich was among the first high-profile CEOs fired for his views on gay marriage, but he will not be the last. Eventually, churches and religious nonprofits will have their tax status threatened if they do not accommodate the new consensus on gay marriage.

It is not enough for the Left to live and let live. You must change your mind. You must not hold disfavored views. You must be the right sort of person. If you’re not, you will be muzzled.

A few years back, the late Cardinal George of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, who died in April, said this: “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.”

The implications of the Court's decision on gay marriage go beyond merely its impact on Christians and the institution of marriage. That decision--as well as several others from this past week--go to the heart of whether our Constitution is the highest law of the land, or merely guide stars representing vague ideals that can be reconstructed and reinterpreted as desired. I read sometime yesterday or the day before an article where the author noted (lamented, in fact) that there has been so little activity to amend the U.S. Constitution. However, as I have noted in other times and places, there is no need to formally amend the Constitution when all it takes is 5 justices to agree to a new interpretation. Rand Simberg addresses this issue further in his article, "How Republics Die." He writes:

But too many people (including, apparently and sadly, many of the justices themselves, perhaps even including the chief justice) think that the purpose of the Supreme Court is to give them things they like, like subsidies for health care, or the right to marry someone of the same sex. They care only about the results, and are utterly indifferent to the process (as we saw with the way the PPACA was passed). They believe that the ends, if sufficiently desirable, always justify the means.

But the means matter.

If, as Chief Justice Roberts implied yesterday, ambiguous laws can be changed by judges per their divination of legislative intent, then there is no law except what the judges think it is. (I would note that in fact his reasoning was fundamentally flawed by his statement that it was Congress’s goal to simply “improve insurance markets.” I think their intent was to increase their control over our health providers, and ultimately lead us down a path to single payer. But neither of us knows.) This was not judicial activism — it was judicial nihilism.

Similarly, if the Fourteenth Amendment contains a hitherto unknown right to marry someone of the same sex, then it contains multitudes of rights that will be discovered in the future by more “enlightened” judges.

 * * *

It [single-sex marriage, or SSM] was becoming legal in more and more states (though often, as was the case here, not by a popular vote, but by judicial fiat). Such a trend was probably inevitable, and young people are much more favorable to the idea than older ones (though they may change their minds as they age, as people do on many other issues). It was creating a problem in terms of “full faith and credit” between states that recognized it and those that did not.

But the Founders foresaw this sort of thing. That is why they put a provision into the founding document to deal with it. The proper way to address the issue, in terms of making SSM universal, was not to manufacture a new right from the Constitution, but rather to amend it. But that is something that hasn’t happened in a long time, because it is (rightly) difficult to do, and the Congress, the courts and the public have become too impatient, and prefer to sidestep it (which in fact has happened in, among other things, the federal War on Drugs, which somehow didn’t seem to require an amendment even though the prohibition of alcohol did).

The Constitution was meant to be the bedrock of laws, and the laws were to be enacted by the Congress, and signed by the president, not ignored or superseded by the president, or rewritten by the chief justice, to satisfy their own preferences, or those of others, even a majority. We are neither a tyranny of men, or that of a majority. As has often been told, when Benjamin Franklin came out of the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked him, “Mr. Franklin, what have you given us?” His reply: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

When we ignore and side step the Constitutional and legal process to achieve a desired end, the bedrock starts to turn to sand. When the laws are ignored by those who have sworn to uphold or review them, the rule of law itself disintegrates. When the public doesn’t care, or understand the role of the branches of government, but votes anyway for people who tell them they’ll just give them stuff they like, that is how republics are lost.

 (See also "Justice Kennedy’s Matryoshka Doll" by Roger Kimball; and "Was Supreme Court Justice John Roberts Blackmailed?" by Wayne Root).

Update: The Silicon Graybeard: "On Today's SCOTUS Ruling." Also, Brad Torgerson notes that marriage, as an institution, has been on the rocks for a long time, and reminds us that strengthening the institution of marriage begins at home. And that we will be judged individually by God as to how much (or little) we work on our marriages. But there is the other side of the coin which is that God does judge nations, and even the innocent suffer in such times.

Another Update: Daniel Greenfield warns that there can be no truce or accommodation with the left:

To understand the left, you need to remember that it does not care about 99 percent of the things it claims to care about. ... The left fights all sorts of social and political battles not because it believes in them, but to radicalize, disrupt and take power.

The left does not care about social justice. It cares about power.

That is why no truce is possible with the left. Not on social issues. Not on any issues.

 He also dismisses "living with it" or "moving on" when it comes to the important social and political issues recently won (or taken) by the left. Instead, he encourages freedom loving individuals to be the best saboteurs they can be.

Also, read "Marching Happily Toward Our Cultural Decline" at Diogenes' Middle Finger.

Update (7/1/2015): More about the death of the Republic. From "Supreme Court Disasters" at Real Clear Politics:

Many people are looking at the recent Supreme Court decisions about ObamaCare and same-sex marriage in terms of whether they think these are good or bad policies. That is certainly a legitimate concern, for both those who favor those policies and those who oppose them.

But there is a deeper and more long-lasting impact of these decisions that raise the question whether we are still living in America, where "we the people" are supposed to decide what kind of society we want, not have our betters impose their notions on us.

The Constitution of the United States says that the federal government has only those powers specifically granted to it by the Constitution -- and that all other powers belong either to the states or to the people themselves.

That is the foundation of our freedom, and that is what is being dismantled by both this year's Obamacare decision and last year's ObamaCare decision, as well as by the Supreme Court's decision imposing a redefinition of marriage.

Last year's Supreme Court decision declaring ObamaCare constitutional says that the federal government can order individual citizens to buy the kind of insurance the government wants them to buy, regardless of what the citizens themselves prefer.

The Constitution gave the federal government no such power, but the Supreme Court did. It did so by citing the government's power to tax, even though the ObamaCare law did not claim to be taxing.

This year's ObamaCare decision likewise ignored the actual words of the law, and decided that the decisions of 34 states not to participate in ObamaCare Exchanges, even to get federal subsidies, would not prevent those federal subsidies to be paid anyway, to Exchanges [set] up by the federal government itself.

When any branch of government can exercise powers not authorized by either statutes or the Constitution, "we the people" are no longer free citizens but subjects, and our "public servants" are really our public masters. And America is no longer America. The freedom for which whole generations of Americans have fought and died is gradually but increasingly being taken away from us with smooth and slippery words.

 See also "Hard Questions on Same Sex Marriage" by Richard Epstein at The Hoover Institute. He writes, in part:

Can the IRS now deny tax exemption to the Roman Catholic Church on the ground that it rejects, on religious grounds, same-sex marriage? If so, that judicial notion of “fundamental interests” works effortlessly both to expand and contract state power. It can insulate the exercise of some liberties from state control, but allow other liberties to be burdened by differential treatment of other liberties, including those expressly embedded in the Constitution.

The point here is not idle speculation. Here are three data points. In Martinez v. Christian Legal Foundation (2010), a five-to-four majority with Justice Kennedy concurring, held that it was perfectly proper for Hastings Law School, a public institution, to deny the tiny Christian Legal Foundation the full benefit of school facilities largely because of its opposition to same-sex marriage. The government can offer its subsidies to some groups but not to others, and in so doing, force small isolated groups to subsidize powerful gay rights organizations. Religious intolerance best describes that outcome.

Since then, the situation has only gotten worse. Last year there was public outrage at the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which upheld claims under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that a closely held company did not have to supply contraceptives to its female employees in a fashion inconsistent with its owners’ religious beliefs. And more recently, claims for religious autonomy have been crushed in state court decisions that have fined individuals who have refused on religious grounds to make wedding cakes for same sex couples. No one seems to be concerned with the autonomy and dignity of those under the state’s thumb. They will have to abandon their chosen profession to honor their religious beliefs. I see no evidence that gay and lesbian rights advocates are prepared to back off of these statist claims.

 As for the dominoes or slippery slope arguments, I would note an article from U.S. News entitled "Polyamorous Rights Advocates See Marriage Equality Coming for Them."

Another Update: The AP reports that a handful of state probate judges in Alabama are still refusing to issue marriage licenses for gay marriage, leading to a threat from a federal judge to hold them in contempt of court. Although not mentioned in the article, a person can be jailed indefinitely in contempt of court so long as he/she refuses to comply with the court's order.