By Davis Carlton

The title is unfortunately not satire. Though even I am surprised at how quickly mainstream conservative evangelicalism has become conformed to the world. Joe Carter, or Joke Harder as he is affectionately known in our circles, begins by noting the recent endorsement of gay marriage by David French. Carter admits that French’s position has received “considerable backlash” and seeks to articulate a tenable alternative while addressing French’s concern, which is that he wants “gay couples to enjoy marriage-equivalent legal protections but without changing the legal definition of marriage.”

Carter acknowledges that while church-going evangelicals are the last holdout against so-called gay marriage, this resistance is rapidly waning with only 58% of those who claim to attend church weekly saying that they remain opposed to gay marriage with even that number continuing its steep decline. Carter’s solution is to support gay marriage in principle without having to call it gay marriage. Carter advocates for “desexualized civil unions” that are “open to any two adults who desire to enter into a type of contractual relationship known as a mutual beneficiary contract.” In addition to defending the “marriage-equivalent legal protections” of sodomites, the rights of adult “relationships more worthy of legal recognition” would also be protected. Problem solved!

Carter argues that “The essential problem, as many people have consistently pointed out, is that there is not and can never be such as thing as same-sex ‘marriage.” Carter believes that this is “a solution to the problem that is easily implementable and that should be acceptable to almost every Christian (and most secular Americans)—yet no one’s talking about it.” The fact that Carter believes that a mere ceasefire with secular America can be considered a “solution” speaks volumes!

Carter suggests that French’s desire to extend “marriage-equivalent legal protections” to homosexuals “was always a possibility—and still is.” According to Carter, this can be done “without changing the legal definition of marriage” by promoting “civil unions.” The reason why the mainstream “conservative” positions like those advocated by David French and Joe Carter consistently fail is that they consistently choose the approach of cowardice, retreat, and surrender.

Carter acknowledges that the reason that “civil unions” weren’t “more broadly endorsed by conservative Christians” is because “they were previously promoted as endorsing homosexual couplings but they excluded relationships more worthy of legal recognition.” Carter uses the example of Focus on the Family endorsing a form of civil unions in 2006, after which they were “criticized by many of their fellow conservative Christians because it was feared the legislation would help normalize homosexual partnerships.”

Gee whiz Joe, ya think? Civil unions were obviously a means of providing social legitimacy to “homosexual couplings.” This was the original intent of left-wing activists who viewed the legal recognition of civil unions as a merely transient step until “gay marriage” became universally recognized throughout the entire country. Unlike the conservative establishment, Leftists were not satisfied with anything less than total victory. Nothing less than the recognition that “homosexual couplings” were actually “marriages” would be acceptable, because the modern secularized West simply considers marriage to be the highest expression of romantic and sexual commitment that is recognized by society. If gays were to have their relationships legitimized in the eyes of the government, nothing short of marriage would suffice. Why does Carter think that the Left will relinquish the “progress” that they have made over the past two decades and retreat to what was obviously only intended as a transitional position? Why would purely secular appeals about the definition of marriage work now when they failed miserably two decades ago?

Carter pathetically tries to find a precedent for “non-sexual civil unions” in the relationship of Naomi and Ruth! Somehow Carter thinks that the solution to over-complicated regulations is government acknowledgment of “non-sexual civil unions” rather than society simply granting family members the privileges they need to carry out their responsibilities. Lost in all of Carter’s rambling about government regulation is the fact that Ruth and Naomi didn’t have or need a special government arrangement because ancient Israel understood the duties and responsibilities of family.

Joe Carter’s whole discussion about removing onerous government regulations under other unrelated circumstances is a cowardly tactic to try to change the subject. Carter argues that we ought to eliminate unnecessary red tape when a man needs to care for his elderly uncle because he knows that this is uncontroversial and this allows him to avoid the uncomfortable task of saying that homosexuals do not have a legitimate claim to social recognition. Carter’s underlying assumptions about law and morality don’t provide a good rejoinder to leftist rhetoric on gay marriage, and so he attempts to quibble about how other relationships deserve the same “rights” as gay couples.

This leads to the underlying reason as to why supposedly conservative Christians are consistently defeated by the advances of secularism. Those who call themselves conservative Christians like David French and Joe Carter consistently fail in their pitiful attempts to influence the culture because they accept the essential presuppositions of secularism and they aren’t epistemologically self-conscious enough to realize this. Carter begins with an anecdote from Abraham Lincoln about how a dog has only four legs even if the tail is counted as a leg, because in reality a dog’s tail is not a leg no matter what it is called.

Carter concludes using this example that “The attempt to change the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions is a prime example. Simply calling such relationships ‘same-sex marriages,’ many believe, will make them marriages. Such reasoning, however, is as flawed as thinking that changing tail to leg changes the function of the appendage.”

I find Carter’s usage of Lincoln’s illustration to be puzzling in light of how he applies it to his actual solution to the issue of so-called “same-sex marriage.” Carter supports generic “civil unions” for any two people without having to accept the legitimacy of any sexual activity that those individuals might be involved in, but that is precisely what society would be doing by granting marriage adjacent rights to homosexual couples. Granting this legal status to people openly living as homosexuals is gay marriage by another name. Joe Carter’s “solution” is exactly analogous to calling a dog’s tail a fifth leg!

Joe Carter and David French fail to grasp the deeper problems with their secularist presuppositions. Consider the following examples:

• Carter insists that, “Government doesn’t create the institution of marriage; it only recognizes its value. It has no legitimate authority to redefine the term to make it more inclusive of sexual and numerical variations. Marriage should be reserved for the intimate, exclusive, sexually complementary relationship of one husband and one wife.”
• Carter also says that, “Desexualized civil unions wouldn’t be a threat to religious liberty.”
• Carter rhetorically asks, “But doesn’t that fall back on a religious argument? Can’t governments determine the standard for civil marriages? No, they cannot, because marriage is both a prepolitical and prereligious institution that was instituted by God before any formal government or religious institutions were created.”
• Finally Carter concludes, “Neither the state nor the church has the authority to change the essential nature of marriage, since the institution was neither created by nor belongs to either the church or the state. Because the three institutions of church, state, and marriage have interdependent yet independent existence, they can decide whether to recognize each other’s legitimacy, but they cannot delineate each other’s boundaries.”

How does Carter know any of this? Carter talks about the “legitimate authority” of government and the definition of marriage being exclusively between a man and a woman. How does Carter justify his own beliefs about the role and authority of government? Even if marriage is “pre-political” as Carter states, why should governments or other institutions be bound by past consensus? Was marriage instituted by God, or a social convention that civil governments recognized? If the latter, why can’t governments today simply choose to broaden their recognition into different relationships? None of these questions can be answered without a “religious argument.”

If rights such as “religious liberty” are the product of consensus or social convention then they can be altered at any time by the will of the majority. To the Left “marriage equality” is absolute and sacrosanct, so nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of complete social recognition and acceptance of homosexual relationships. Joe Carter and David French provide another example of why the Left continues to win the culture war. Carter claims that his “solution” should be acceptable to “most secular Americans” but his arguments fall into the No Man’s Land between secularism and the remnants of a Christian worldview corrupted by classical liberalism.

I was a college student during the 2004 presidential election in which the recognition of gay civil unions was to become a key social issue. A few states had begun to recognize gay civil unions, with Massachusetts becoming the first state establish gay marriage. Carter’s position is essentially indistinguishable from the lunatic fringe leftist position from less than just two decades ago! The Left is winning because most Christians are like Tim Keller who states that he would “rather be in a democracy than a state in which the government is officially Christian.”

Mainstream Christians who take after Tim Keller, Joe Carter, and David French can’t complain about the loss of their “rights” when they’ve all stated at different times that they don’t want to live in a specifically Christian society. Democracy is premised upon equality and true equality cannot be achieved without the male and female genders becoming interchangeable. Consequently gay marriage is one of the consequences of living in a democracy. The line in the sand between God’s Law and the chaos and tyranny of secularism could not be clearer. There is no neutrality. There is no actual solution to these problems to which “most secular Americans” will agree.

The real solution to the culture war is the one proposed long ago by the great St. Augustine of Hippo, “If a people gradually become depraved, if it hands over the government to wicked and criminal men, then that power of conferring honors ought rightly to be taken away from such a people and restored to those few who are good.” (De libero arbitrio voluntatis, i, 6). Only those who work to build up Christ’s Kingdom will find themselves on the right side of history.