This is the third of three posts in a
series. (
Part I)
In Part II, I
focused on a mistake in the argument of Essay 1 in the report of the Task Force
on the Study of Marriage (esp. pp. 21-27). I also made brief comments about pp.
37-38 and pp. 40-42. The mistake is supposing that there is only one
alternative to a Kantian understanding of Christian marriage, namely, a
utilitarian understanding. Another and better alternative is the one on which
much catholic moral theology has been based for centuries: an Aristotelian understanding
of human flourishing. This perspective was ignored by the authors of Essay 1,
which presents the framework for understanding marriage offered in the Task
Force report as a whole.
In this Part
III, the format is something like a commentary, with a substantive introduction
and then a discussion of a few points in Essays 4, 7, and 5 of the Task Force
report. I also offer at the end a brief reflection on the real disagreement between
traditionalists and a progressive but not liberal individualist account of
marriage equality (ME but not ME2, from Part I).
* * *
The authors of Essay
3, “A History of Christian Marriage,” begin with the following observation:
The
history of Christian marriage is as complex and diverse as the history of
Christianity, with the meaning of the word “marriage” having changed and
morphed as the generations of faithful Christians have sought to define for
themselves the nature of a holy life lived out in the midst of daily life. In
the same way, in varied contexts, societal and cultural understandings of
marriage have interfaced and shaped our understandings of Christian marriage
over the course of the last two millennia. (p. 45)
The Task Force
does a good job in several parts of its report pointing out how past social and
cultural contexts have shaped then current understandings of and regulations
governing Christian marriage. The report is not, however, equally
self-conscious. In the framing of its theological and biblical perspective, and
in its recommendations for changes in the marriage canon, it does not notice how
some features of our current social and cultural context in the U.S. have
influenced the report.
I attempt in
this Part III to describe the extent to which the Task Force report is
committed to the liberal individualism of what has been referred as WEIRD
culture – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (see Henrich,
Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010, The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33:61-83).
In this Part III,
especially in the five-section introduction, the canvas is large and the
brushstrokes are broad. I am attempting something a bit more ambitious here,
and this is somewhat long for a blog post. I am grateful you would read even
part of this. I attempt here to set out a way of seeing things which is quite
different from that adopted by the Task Force. The principal focus is the same as
before: the proposal to eliminate the statement of purposes of marriage from
the marriage canon and the Declaration of Intent.
* * *
Introduction, in five sections:
Let’s look at
things from the perspective adopted by the Task Force. If we consider marriage
from the point of view of a couple only, and note that we are currently talking
specifically about amending our marriage canon to include same-sex marriage, it
makes sense to eliminate a statement of purposes of marriage. The vows cover
the important commitments that each of the two persons make to each other, and
there is no call to refer to procreation in marriages of same-sex couples,
which is not an issue, except in cases where the couple will choose to involve
a third person as a donor and/or surrogate.
Still, should we consider and understand marriage
from the point of view of the couple only? No, we shouldn’t.
Human social
groups like congregations and communities, dioceses and states or nations, fare
best when they attend to maintaining group cohesiveness and to replenishing
group membership. Making the nurture of children a high group priority is an
important part of this. Pulling back from that priority in favor of greater
individual independence would be unfortunate for vulnerable and needy children
and for Christian communities.
The thesis of
this introduction is that there are better and worse ways to sustain the
cohesiveness and thus effectiveness of groups of various sizes. The better ways
involve fostering group loyalty and responsibility and also respect for the
authority of officials that lead group cooperation.
Research has
shown (see Haidt, 2012, The Righteous Mind,
for a review) that, while political conservatives tend to value loyalty to the
larger group (like the nation) and respect for authority within the group,
political liberals and libertarians are suspicious of them as antithetical to
their liberty. They tend to find group loyalty and respect for group
authorities at odds with their strong impulse to resist oppression. But this
leads them to act as if they assume that the larger community – the Church or
nation – will always be there to support them, without their loyalty and
respect. So they spend a great deal of their energy looking for and resisting
oppression and relatively little fostering larger group cohesiveness and
sustaining membership.
Conservatives,
by contrast, tend to be concerned about free-riders, whom they see as cheaters,
people who are benefiting without contributing or contributing enough, and they
are angered by the disloyalty and disrespect they sense among liberals and/or
libertarians.
* * *
I share here
something I wrote in March, 2011. I sent it to the members of my small group
following the Consultation in Atlanta, which was part of the Blessings Project,
developing what became “I will bless you and you will be a blessing.” This is my attempt, in a voice other
than my own, to express a traditionalist perspective on the move within The
Episcopal Church (TEC) toward same-sex marriage:
We are each born a single new thread in a
woven fabric, inheriting our place in a tradition that has been refined over
hundreds of years, thousands even. The tradition has survived so long because
it affirms relationships of mutual support and love in a specific way.
I was born to parents who had become one
family, completing each other by their union, to which I was added by my birth.
My siblings were added later, and I became a brother as well as a child, as an
essential part of who I grew up to be. In a way, my parents had always known or
at least hoped I would be born, even before they met each other. I too grew up
knowing or hoping I would have children, as I have had, marrying (thanks be to
God) as I had always assumed I would. I of course chose whom to marry, but not
whether. My wife and I chose when to have children, but not
whether. I didn't of course know all the steps in the dance before
the next piece of music began, but I always assumed that to dance was my
destiny. It is who I am, who each of us is ideally. It is what keeps our
tradition, and the people of God, thriving.
This way of ordering things socially and
morally means we inherit roles, whether we would necessarily choose them or
not. We have less choice than we might like, but if we all perform the roles we
inherit, we are all much better off than if each of us does our own thing. In
fact, we *are* these roles: husband or wife, father or mother, daughter or son,
sister or brother. And we are born to be them.
For we are none of us our own, nor are we
complete in ourselves. We are who we are by being part of the fabric, first of
the nuclear and extended family of our childhood, then of the nuclear and
extended family of our children. When one loses a spouse, a sibling, or a child,
one loses a precious part of oneself. The loss can be devastating. It may take
months, years, to get your bearings again, to deal with the hole in your heart.
Even if you remarry after the death of a spouse, or have another child after
loosing one, you are never quite yourself again, the way you were. This shows
our incompleteness apart from each other.
To move away from the nuclear and
extended family as the fundamental unit -- replacing families with
"households" of individuals -- is to abandon the mutual support and
love families entail. Of course not every family is perfect or even healthy,
but that does not mean that the standard, the ideal, should be changed to
conform to our brokenness. If we understand the person as a chooser,
a free agent in society and morality, if we accept "no fault" divorce
and remarriage as normal, if we condone same-sex unions as on an equal footing
with the traditional norm for families...then we suppose that each of us is
fundamentally a consumer. Some of us desire this type of car, others that type.
Some of us want this sort of companion, others that sort. Some like chocolate,
some strawberry. Some of us would really rather not have children, or not be
formally married, but would rather cohabit. If it is all a world of consuming
what we desire and can afford, we are morally adrift, following our own desires
rather than God's purposes for us. With each new desire and act of
consumption, we move on as we please.
I am being asked by my Church not simply
to accept others' choices but to condone a startlingly different understanding
of myself. It is an understanding on which, as a consumer, I have freely chosen
one of a number of acceptable options. My "partner" happens to be my
wife. I happen to have chosen to have children. I have chosen to stay married
to the same person through better and worse, thick and thin. But I had other
options.
No. I learned as a child and have always
known the form of mutual support and love that would sustain me. It is not
perfect, but it is the inheritance of millennia of experience in our tradition.
It does not maximize my choices, but it assures me and everyone a place. It
does not give me everything I want, but it guides me to want what will complete
me as a child of God. It does not guarantee everything will go as planned, but
it makes clear the rules and the consequences.
The change I see occurring in my Church
feels worse in a way than losing a sibling or child or spouse. It feels like
losing the whole world. I'm forced to choose between the fabric, of which I am
one thread, and my Church, which has always been the fabric of my very being.
It feels like being unraveled or torn from the weaving of God. I feel a deep
and profound despair. I don't want to be angry, but the only other emotions I
feel are loss and violation.
No one has assured
me that this is how they see things. So I may have missed or misstated
important features of the lived perspectives of real people in The Episcopal
Church. But this at least was my attempt in March, 2011.
I offer this
description as a model of one perspective that motivates sustaining group
cohesiveness and replenishing group membership. The individual members of the
group feel deeply their relationship and commitments to the larger group. All
other things being equal, such a group has a better chance of surviving and
flourishing than if the orienting perspective of the group is that each is on
her or his own, free to form small-scale partnerships to be sure, but with no
overriding inherited commitments to the group as a whole. Get married if you
want, or not. Have children if you want, or not. It’s all up to you.
* * *
What follows in
this section is a very different sort of account, one based in an evolutionary
perspective on human nature. The voice of the previous section might find the
following account deeply problematic. Nonetheless, it provides a complement.
What is required
to sustain large human social groups? Think of cities and nations. Or think of
multi-congregation religions spanning much of a continent or even large parts
of the globe, which for instance might cooperate in disaster relief for people
in a distant part of the world, or organize a coordination of services in their
own neighborhoods for children growing up in poverty.
The answer about
what is required lies in the fact that we are not only selfish. We are also
groupish (see Haidt, 2012).
Our groupishness,
so-called, refers to inner promptings that lead us to make certain demands of
each other, without which even small cohesive human social groups would not be
possible. On a strictly evolutionary (and non-Christian) account of morality,
morality is the demands we make of each other and of ourselves that are required
for sustaining cohesive groups for the sake of cooperation for mutual survival.
Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t murder. Etc. It’s all about maintaining group
cohesiveness for the sake of cooperation for survival – according to an
evolutionary account.
In human
evolution, especially during the radical climate shifts of the Late Pleistocene,
there were periods when food was plentiful but then extremely scarce, then
plentiful, then scarce. During such times, the individuals in the groups that
didn’t cooperate well didn’t make it. So over centuries, millennia, groups
containing significant numbers of individuals that were prompted to make these
demands of each other and of themselves survived, and this type of individual
became more and more prominent in our species. Selfishness was maladaptive and
lost ground. We eventually became hyper-social, capable of enormous but still relatively
stable social groups.
Some
evolutionary theorists add to this account of morality the idea that we have a
hair-trigger tendency to see agency behind things that happen to us, rather than
to see coincidence and luck, good or bad. For instance, that storm is because
the gods are angry; the bushes are rustling because there is a predator there; the
drought is a punishment; the bountiful food supply is a reward. They see this tendency
giving rise to early human practices of honoring and serving unseen lawgivers
and/or enforcers. These practices received more and more elaborate cultural
expressions up into recorded history, when written scriptures began to tell the
stories. As a result, according to an evolutionary (and non-Christian) account,
you get the whole show – morality plus, and reinforced by, theology. Honor the
god of your particular family or village or tribe. Don’t make idols of other
gods. Observe holy days. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Etc.
Of course not
everyone believes in human evolution. Not everyone believes morality can be
accounted for as an evolved feature of humans. And/or not everyone accepts
evolutionary accounts of the functions of religion. Evolutionary accounts can
tell us only so much, and some of it is pretty one-sided.
But the irony is
that a scientific, evolutionary account of morality is in some important
respects more in sync with conservative and/or traditionalist understandings
than with liberal and/or progressive ones.
Why should
Christians pay attention to evolutionary accounts of morality and religion?
Because they offer insights about how to sustain the large-scale, multi-level
organizations that make respecting the dignity of every human being possible in
practice – not only with our lips but in our lives.
* * *
How does this
relate to sustaining our churches and our Church?
According to a widely
known though now somewhat dated sociology of congregations, there are four
basic types of congregation, categorized by size. These sizes are referred to
as family size (<50 people), pastoral size (50-150 people), program
size (150-350 people), and resource (or corporate) size (>350 people).
The social
dynamics of these four types of congregation are roughly parallel, in part, to
the four types of social organization observed by some anthropologists and
paleoanthropologists: the band (25-50 people), the tribe (100s), the chiefdom (1000s),
and the state (100,000s and up). The chiefdom is in one respect more like a
diocese, and the state more like The Episcopal Church (TEC).
The key thing is
that, for social groups of much larger than about 150 people (the Dunbar number),
in which most relationships cannot be or at least are not primarily
face-to-face, the larger group can maintain cooperation only by being a group
of groups. This is true of program and resource size congregations, and also of
chiefdoms and states. For instance, the congregations of some program and resource
size parishes consist of three different groups: Rite I, 8 o’clock folk,
“contemporary” service folk, and/or “traditional” Rite II service folk. Any one
of these sub-groups may itself actually consist of sub-groups, if the larger
sub-group is around or much over 150 people.
How do we hold
large congregations and even small dioceses together, let alone The Episcopal
Church and the Anglican Communion?
If you could
simply assume personal loyalty to one’s congregation and something like brand
loyalty to The Episcopal Church, it would be much easier. Perhaps people wear the
logo of their congregation on t-shirts or polos, cardigans or sweatshirts, and
they may have Episcopal shields on their cars. They may wear the seal of their
diocese at Diocesan Convention or General Convention. This is one way we display
group loyalty that is felt independently of the displays. (Think also of the
logos for college and professional sports teams, or bumper stickers for
political candidates or various causes, etc.)
By the same
token, it would be much easier to hold together large church organizations like
one’s diocese or The Episcopal Church if we could just assume respect for the
authority of your Bishop and/or the Presiding Bishop.
But imagine
trying to sustain group cohesiveness without either of these two things. Imagine
there is no group loyalty within, let alone beyond, face-to-face relationships,
whether real or virtual (electronically mediated), and neither is there respect
for the authority of congregational leaders, let alone respect beyond regular
face-to-face interaction with those organizing the activities or life of your
diocese.
It might be
possible on occasion to coordinate large-scale efforts, when interests and
commitments happen to coincide, say, for disaster relief in a poor country or in
a refugee crisis in a war zone. But this kind of large-scale cooperation would
be the exception, not the rule. You couldn’t count on it, because it depends on
a coincidence of independent commitments and interests, not on a shared sense
of responsibility or values.
Furthermore, how
can we count on replenishing the memberships for our congregations, dioceses,
and The Episcopal Church? We don’t need every family in our congregations
having babies – but if none do, and if we don’t make a priority of welcoming
and supporting families with young children, our congregations and dioceses
eventually age themselves out of existence, no matter how vibrant they are
before the blossoms drop and the leaves turn and begin to fall. Surely our
experience has taught us by now that when we don’t make children a priority,
their families usually find places that do.
What’s needed is
a common understanding among group members that they have duties to their
groups, and not only or primarily rights, and that they occupy inherited (not
only chosen) roles in their groups which must be performed if the group is to
succeed in providing cooperative mutual support.
* * *
What’s needed,
that is, is something like the perspective offered in italics in the second
section of this introduction. Not exactly that perspective, perhaps. But
something more like it than the one articulated in the Task Force report.
Almost twenty
years ago, Rick Shweder and his colleagues (1997) described three different
types of morality found in cultures across the world (see Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997, The "big
three" of morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the "big
three" explanations of suffering, in A. Brandt & P. Rozin (Eds.) Morality
and Health, New York: Routledge).
- The ethic
of Autonomy is focused on individuals and their rights. It presupposes that
humans are fundamentally independent, though they can enter into some kinds of agreements
that establish duties to perform their contracts.
- The ethic
of Community is focused on social groups and the duties individuals have to
them. It presupposes that humans are fundamentally interdependent, though
relationships have to be nurtured and tended and sometimes go bad.
- The ethic
of Divinity is focused on the relations maintained between humans and
divinities and on regulations governing human purity and pollution. It
presupposes that humans are fundamentally dependent on God or the gods and that
special steps are required to pursue elevation and avoid degradation.
Some societies
in some cultures focus predominantly on one or the other of these three ethics.
Some blend them in different proportions.
Note: I wrote a summary
of the three ethics a few years ago, presenting them as strands in the moral
discourse of the U.S. and the West more generally. I emphasized how early
childhood experiences could lend themselves to any of the ethics; if you would
like to explore this idea of the three ethics more fully, please see this link.
The public
discourse in the U.S. and the West more generally is WEIRD, focused almost
exclusively on the ethic of Autonomy. The private home lives and the religious
lives of many – and the public political discourse of many political conservatives
– are nonetheless often based in the ethics of Community and/or Divinity. The
Hindu temple town in India where Shweder’s early work was based is focused on
the ethic of Divinity, with heaping measures of Community.
In what follows
I will focus on the contrast between the ethics of Autonomy and Community. We Christians
integrate the ethic of Divinity with another or a blend of the other ethics,
and that is not necessarily a point of difference. I will focus on the contrast
between Autonomy and Community as the principal point of difference.
The focus on
group loyalty and respect for the authority of group officials discussed in the
previous section is at home most in the ethic of Community. But the perspective
on marriage articulated in some of the essays in the Task Force report is
primarily based in the ethic of Autonomy, including the theological framework
in Essay 1 that relies on Kant.
The basic
proposal in the essays is that individuals may choose to marry or not, to raise
children or not, with no preference for any option from the point of view of
the Church. Calling this choice a “vocation” and this social and/or legal
contract a “covenant” puts an attractive veneer over the liberal individualism
at the base of this perspective, but the fundamental idea is still that
individuals are independent and free to choose their own paths, engaging others
only so long as they give informed consent – with no pre-existing obligations
except those one has chosen to accept either implicitly or explicitly.
If this were not the case, we could expect to see the suggestion that a couple's "vocation" with respect to children would be tested somehow in Christian community. The pre-marital counseling might be an appropriate setting.
Normally,
vocations are not chosen but discerned, as coming from outside oneself, whether
one welcomes them or not. There is no sense in the Task Force report that individuals
might need to have their choices or vocations reviewed by the church or their
religious community. Individuals are free to enter whatever agreements they
think best, though the person doing the pre-marital counseling might try to help the couple clarify their values and hopes.
An alternative
and opposed perspective is that the family is fundamental, a constituent of the
body of Christ, which is a constituent of the larger humanity which Christ
calls us to join with him. Of course celibacy and/or singleness is a good and
fitting role for some and can allow a very great devotion to the good of
hurting and vulnerable people. It can also allow a greater devotion to study of
the scriptures and to prayer. I know some single people and some gay and
straight couples who are without children who fit this description, whose
freedom for devotion to goods other than the nurture of children is exercised
in their lives and is an example to others.
That devotion to
the good of others and/or to study and prayer cannot be offered as fully by
those who have to devote themselves to a great extent to caring for their own
children and families. But the assumption is that being called to celibacy or
singleness and/or childlessness is a special vocation. It is not the default. The
choice to marry and/or nurture children, on this perspective however, is the
default. It is the assumed vocation. It is assumed as part of our understanding
of God’s purposes for human community.
In the essays in
the Task Force report, and in the recommendations it presents, we see the
following:
- The statement
of purposes of marriage within the context of the Church is eliminated, and the
vows of each individual to the other are emphasized.
- Inter-religious
marriages and marriages with nonbelievers are countenanced to such an extent that the understanding of
Christian marriage is evacuated so that such marriages are in no way
distinct within an official church rite from marriages between Christian
couples.
In this way, the
argument of the Task Force report as a whole gives expression to the broader
social and political climate of WEIRD culture. Christian marriage is adapted to
the social and legal understandings articulated in public discourse in the U.S.,
focused almost exclusively on the ethic of Autonomy and, in Essay 1 of the Task
Force report, which establishes the theological framework for the whole report,
on Kant’s Enlightenment moral philosophy.
So just as
historically earlier ideas of marriage are observed in the report to conform to
cultural norms dominant at the time, so the idea of marriage presented in the
current report conforms to the broader secular culture today. The ideal of
Ubuntu – I am because we are – is nowhere in sight, except perhaps as an
attractive veneer.
Here ends the Introduction.
* * *
In light of the
argument of the preceding introduction, it is possible to see the liberal
individualism of the Task Force report standing out in higher relief. I will
focus on some parts of Essays 4, 7, & 5, having focused on Essays 1 & 2
in Part II.
The authors of
Essay 4 describe anthropological accounts of rites of passage, including
marriage, given by Arnold van Gennep (1960) and expanded and modified by Victor
Turner (1969/1995). They discuss this anthropological work in order to show
something important about marriage, namely, the three phases we see in the process
of separating from unmarried life, the transitional time, and the adjustments
that follow the marriage rite when new roles and a new life are begun.
The authors of
Essay 4 helpfully draw our attention to the importance of the transitional time
known as betrothal, when the two people have promised themselves to each other
but have not yet formally begun married life. But in their description, they
miss an important opportunity to observe the function of rites of passage in
traditional cultures.
The authors of
Essay 4 begin well (on p. 64) in the following, though the account veers off
course (on p. 65):
Van
Gennep asserted that…rites of passage served core sociological, cultural,
psychological, and political purposes within a society. They help keep society
intact. They serve the needs of not only the individual but, just as important,
they serve the greater good by making ways forward that mediate against chaos,
confusion, and anomie within particular communities during specific moments of
transition and change...
Victor
Turner built on the work of van Gennep…Turner paid particular attention to the
period of transition leading up to the rite that finalized the change of status
of the person or the community. What he witnessed in his anthropological
research was a kind of liminality that was particularly at work in this
transition time. Individuals during this period were “betwixt and between,”
neither fish nor fowl. This period of liminality often both allowed for and
required a kind of suspension of former rules and categories in relations to
the person in transition. Because of this, there was a sense of graced time
which created an experience which Turner described as “communitas.”
Note: The Latin
word “limen” (s.), “limina” (pl.), may be translated “threshold.”
A liminal space is between being in one place and being in another; it is
in-between places, and in an important way in Turner’s analysis it is a nowhere.
Communitas
is about more than just everyday communal relationships. It is a shared ethos
and experiential context that allows for greater freedom, greater intimacy, and
higher levels of care and bonding than might normally be part of the fabric of
everyday life in society. During periods of communitas, trust is built.
Relationships are forged, and bonds of affection are created. This period of
communitas, this liminal period in the life of an individual, created a kind of
elasticity of identity that encourages and allows for greater adaptivity,
creativity, and spontaneity...
Turner’s
studies of this period of liminality led him to believe that its significance
to the change of status process was so central that he renamed van Gennep’s
three stages of rites of passage as the pre-liminal, the liminal, and the
post-liminal stages. He also revised van Gennep’s work (and the work of others
who were exploring ritual) to assert that while at times rituals become the
vehicles for societal stabilization and support of the status quo, at other
times they become the means to overturn the status quo and create greater
systemic change in the society. (pp. 64-65)
The authors
state that in liminality “there was a sense of graced time.” It “allows for
greater freedom, greater intimacy, and higher levels of care and bonding than
might normally be part of the fabric of everyday life in society.”
But this seems
to betray a misunderstanding of liminality and communitas. At least the authors
put the emphasis in the wrong place. They focus on the freedom and
possibilities of affiliation created in the in-between. But in doing so they
fail to note how rites of passage in traditional societies move individuals
from a time of being someone, through a time of being no one, without role or
status, to a time of being a new someone, with a new role and status. That is,
the authors of Essay 4 fail to see that in traditional societies a liminal
phase is peculiar because of the way one is without identity, a no one, in such
a phase.
Identities and
duties in traditional societies are based on social roles; they are not aspects
of individuals independently of their roles. An unmarried child or young adult
has certain duties in their family and society, but a married person has a
different identity and different duties in their family and society. That’s why
you need a rite of passage, with a marked transitional phase, so that the
individuals and their families and community can adjust to the significant
changes being brought about.
Turner
(1969/1995) describes liminality as follows:
The
attributes of liminality or of liminal personae
(“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these
persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally
locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither
here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed
by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial…Thus, liminality is frequently
likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to
bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon…Their
behavior is normally passive or humble; they must obey their instructors
implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without complaint. It is as though
they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned
anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new
station in life. Among themselves, neophytes tend to develop an intense
comradeship and egalitarianism. Secular distinctions of rank and status
disappear or are homogenized. (Turner, 1969/1995, p. 96)
Yes, there is
opportunity for affiliation not normally available, between those similarly
being “ground down,” but this may not on reflection seem like much of a “graced
time.” Turner continues:
It
is as though there are here two major “models” for human interrelatedness,
juxtaposed and alternating. The first is of society as a structured,
differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic
positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of “more” or
“less.” The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of a
society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively
undifferentiated comitatus,
community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the
general authority of the ritual elders. (Turner, 1969/1995, p. 96)
Here Turner sets
out his general thesis that societies embody tensions between structure and
anti-structure, with the liminal, transitional phase of rites of passage, and
accompanying communitas, being a period of anti-structure. He continues:
From
all this I infer that, for individuals and groups, social life is a type of
dialectical process that involves successive experiences of high and low,
communitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality and
inequality. The passage from lower to higher status is through a limbo of
statuslessness…Furthermore, since any concrete tribal society is made up of
multiple personae, groups, and categories, each of which has its own
developmental style, at a given moment many incumbencies of fixed positions
coexist with many passages between positions. In other words, each individual’s
life experience contains alternating exposure to structure and communitas, and
to states and transitions. (Turner, 1969/1995, p. 97)
After noting
that some religions tend to regard this earthly life as itself a long
transition and that some religious orders adopt the attitudes and behavioral
characteristics of liminal entities (p. 107), Turner offers the following
observation:
In
modern Western society, the values of communitas are strikingly present in the
literature and behavior of what came to be known as the “beat generation,” who
were succeeded by the “hippies,” who, in turn, have a junior division known as
the “teeny-boppers.” These are the “cool” members of adolescent and young-adult
categories – which do not have the advantages of national rites de passage – who “opt out” of the status-bound social order
and acquire the stigmata of the lowly, dressing like “bums,” itinerant in their
habits, “folk” in their musical tastes, and menial in the casual employment
they undertake. They stress personal relationships rather than social
obligations, and regard sexuality as a polymorphic instrument of immediate
communitas rather than as the basis for an enduring structured social tie.
(Turner, 1969/1995, pp. 112-113)
The period of
liminality and communitas is a time or phase of anti-structure which in
traditional societies is transitional. It is not, according to Turner, as the
authors of Essay 4 suggest, primarily a period of personal freedom, including
freedom even to undermine the status quo – unless individuals are independent
and fundamental, as they are in WEIRD cultures but not in traditional societies.
This
misunderstanding of liminality and communitas is part of the larger assumption
of liberal individualism in the Task Force report. It reveals a blindness to or
ignoring of the collectivism of most traditional societies, articulated in the
ethic of Community. The ethic of Autonomy is what you get if you reject structure
and embrace anti-structure as normative – but then find yourself needing some
rules for how people are supposed to treat one another in the absence of the
structures provided by everyone having roles within established and inherited
social systems.
And that
misunderstanding and blindness, I suggest, are part of a failure to see the
statement of purposes of marriage in the Book of Common Prayer and our marriage
canon for what they are: teachings about how marriage serves a larger good than
the good of the couple.
The authors of
Essay 4 add a reflection from Ronald Grimes (2000):
The
ritual studies scholar Ronald Grimes has written about the ways in which
contemporary society has compromised the fabric of North American and other
westernized rites of passage to a degree that is potentially detrimental. The
movement out of singlehood into marriage requires comprehensive transformations
for the individuals involved and the families of which they are a part.
Virtually every aspect of one’s life is changed through the act of marrying;
economic, political, legal, emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual
changes are expected of those who marry. In a different period in history,
couples took months or even years to make these changes. (p. 66)
And that seems
to be clearly on the right track. But then the authors state the following:
In
the 20th century, in large part in response to changing patterns of
marriage and divorce in contemporary North American society, the Church added a
canonical requirement for premarital counseling prior to marriage in an
Episcopal rite administered by an ordained Episcopal minister. This premarital
counseling requirement set up and made use of a period of liminality in which
the couple could explore the depth of change that marriage would bring to their
individual and shared lives. Effective premarital counseling is meant to foster
the development of “communitas.” (p. 67)
Here again we
see the misunderstanding or misplaced emphasis. In modern societies, there is
no genuinely liminal period, because there is no period in which the members of
the couple are no ones, “ground down,” betwixt and between fundamental
identities and so having none – because in modern societies, individuals are
thought to have personal identities independently of their social roles and
statuses, independently of their societies. What the required pre-marital
counseling provides is good, and it may well be a conscious attempt to simulate
something like the liminal phase of traditional rites of passage, but it is
quite partial, taking so little of a couple’s daily lives during the month or
so of the counseling, so it is at best a glimpse of liminality, with only a
mere peek at communitas.
Near the
conclusion of Essay 4, the authors state the following:
When
marrying couples have prepared themselves for marriage; have worked with
families and friends to create new bonds of relationship; have already publicly
lived into vows of mutual support and fidelity; have expressed to those around
them the commitment they are making to a lifelong union that will not be undone
by prosperity or adversity, then these couples have made their rituals into
subversive acts – prophetic acts that challenge the values of the society
around them and call that society to a richer, fuller, more robust way of
living human life. (p. 68)
But is that sort
of marriage subversive? Is doing something right, in a context in which it’s
come too often to be done wrong, disruptive? We should say, rather, that it is
restorative, redeeming. It shows and calls the larger society to what God
intends.
* * *
Essay 7
discusses the current state of marriage in the culture or cultures of The
Episcopal Church. There is much here too that is valuable, but again it would
be nice to have seen some things pointed out that were not. Early in Essay 7,
the authors give the following statistics:
For
example, by age 25, 44 percent of women have given birth, while only 38 percent
have married. Overall, 48 percent of first births were to unmarried partners. (p.
90)
This emphasizes
the finding reported in Essay 7 that many more people today, across
socioeconomic categories, are delaying marriage without delaying living
together; however, the economically less well off and less educated are not
thereby delaying child-birth. The
authors of Essay 7 next, starting off well, frame their account of the current
state of marriage in the following way:
Why
should we care? [Because m]arriage is not merely a private matter; it is also a
complex social institution. Stable marriages better the chances for stable
families, generally ensuring greater prosperity for individuals and families as
a whole. Marriage contributes to the stability of neighborhoods and school
systems, and helps families and individuals weather difficult economic times…
The
1979 Book of Common Prayer emphasizes that marriage is both a private matter
for the couple and a public covenant. The underlying assumption in our prayer
book is that the very private love of the couple entering into marriage has public
and sacramental value to the community as a whole – they are to “make their
life together a sign of Christ’s love to this sinful and broken world, that
[their] unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy
conquer despair” (“The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage,” 429). (p. 90)
I would have been glad to see the authors go one step further in the second of these paragraphs, adding the one main point I have been emphasizing in
these three parts of “Suffer the little children”: marriage is not only a
private matter and a public covenant, but it is also crucial for the public good,
especially because it is an excellent and/or the best context for the nurture
of children. It is understandable that the authors do not take this extra step,
since the Task Force recommends removing the bearing and nurture of children
from the marriage canon and perhaps eventually altogether from the
conversation.
Still, in one of
the bullet points in their executive summary, followed by two sentences three
paragraphs later, the authors seem to agree:
Delayed
marriage, especially among less-educated adults, has significant economic
impact especially for children in households with unmarried partners or with
single parents...Data are clear that unmarried couples break up more frequently,
often leaving young mothers to be responsible for raising their children alone.
This contributes to, or begins a cycle of, poverty that can exist for
generations. (p. 88)
No one, of
course, wants children to have to grow up in economically distressed,
parent-absent households. What is needed to decrease the rate at which this
happens?
These matters
are very complex, and I cannot hope to do them justice without going on much
longer than I already have – so I will confine myself to a few observations and
hunches. I do not worry so much about the accuracy of the coverage of the data
in Essay 7, which is insightful and a must read for those of us in The
Episcopal Church who think about these issues. I do worry a bit about the
authors’ focus and placement of emphasis. I’d like to see them note explicitly some
things they pass over.
Here are four
thoughts:
(1.) Economic
pressures affect marriage and child-bearing patterns, for instance, from shifting
jobs availability as many blue collar jobs have been removed, and as
college-educated job seekers are expected to move to new locations early in
their careers, often more than once. Also, cultural pressures affect marriage
and child-bearing patterns, for instance, culturally supported, strong extended
family and/or clan networks, which are associated with lower divorce rates, among
Hispanic/Latino Americans, Asian-Americans, and American Indians as observed in
Essay 7 (pp. 94-96). Pressures and restrictions, of course, whether economic or
cultural, can limit individual freedoms and choices. Ideally, we’d like to ease
economic pressures that discourage marriage and the nurture of children within
stable marriages. But would we be willing to increase cultural pressures that
urge marriage instead of cohabitation and the nurture of children within stable marriages? I have tried
to articulate my concern in these three parts of “Suffer the little children”
that the recommendation of the Task Force to amend our marriage canon moves in
the wrong direction. It decreases cultural pressure where it should be
increased.
(2.) Political
liberals tend to want to ease economic pressures, even when this doesn’t
encourage good long-range decision-making. They want to reduce suffering first
and foremost. Political conservatives and libertarians tend not to mind keeping
these economic pressures high, if they promote good decision-making. Let people
suffer the economic consequences of their bad choices. They’ll correct
themselves that way. On the other hand, political conservatives tend to want to
keep cultural pressures high too, to promote good choices. Political liberals
and libertarians tend to want to reduce these pressures in order to maximize individual
liberty. If I am right that the move to eliminate the statement of purposes of
marriage amounts to an effort to ease up on the cultural pressure supporting
the nurture of children, the proposal fits fairly straightforwardly with the
usual tendencies of political liberals and libertarians but not of political
conservatives. It fits with liberal individualism and the ethic of Autonomy,
not with the ethic of Community and of traditional societies.
(3.) Marriage
is hard work sometimes, regardless of how well suited the couple are for each
other. Child-bearing and the nurture of children are also hard work, especially
for women, increasingly for men. In the relative absence, then, of cultural
pressures supporting marriage and the nurture of children, people need a well
developed ability to delay gratification for the sake of long-range goals. Staying
married through bad times as well as good, and devoting substantial personal
resources to the nurture of children, including material resources, time and
energy, and lost opportunities, require the ability to delay gratification for the
sake of long-range goals. The capacities to plan for the long-range and to
delay gratification have to be nurtured beginning early in childhood. Some
components of these abilities are innate as part of one’s temperament, but some
are the product of early experiences and habituation. Another crucial
ingredient of healthy development is good, positive adult role models in early
childhood. Furthermore, not long after children begin school, their peers begin
to have as much or more influence on children’s development as do their
families. The deck almost seems stacked against stable marriages and healthy
practices in the nurture of children. That is why it is important to have
supportive lessons from one’s religious community and other cultural pressures
that support marriage and the nurture of children. Why would we move to reduce
those pressures in the current culture of the U.S. where they are already so
weak, except out of a sense that individuals should be given maximum liberty to
pursue their own projects and desires?
(4.) There
is likely a connection between the facts, on the one hand, that over the past
50 years half of all marriages have come to end in divorce, from about one
quarter in the 1950s and 1960s (pp. 76-77, and see p. 59 & p. 92), and, on
the other hand, that rates of cohabitation before marriage have increased in
the same time period by nearly 900% (pp. 88 & 93). Young people seeing
their parents go through divorce might naturally hesitate to enter right away
into marriage. The changes have been felt unevenly, though, as the authors of
Essay 7 point out.
Marriage
remains the norm for adults with a college education and a good income but is
now markedly less prevalent among those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic
ladder. (p. 91).
They also note
the following:
While
earlier generations looked at marriage as their entry point into adulthood and
a crucial vehicle for defining themselves as mature individuals, today young
men and women expect to achieve individual and autonomous identities before
they become bound as a couple...Also helping to redefine marriage is what many
sociologists call the “soul mate ideal.” As women have become more economically
equal and empowered, marriage for them has been drained of its primary economic
incentive. Young adults are now more inclined to focus on marriage for its
potential for deep emotional and sexual connections. (p. 92)
Marriage used to
be a rite of passage for economically well off and well educated young people,
marking them as adults. It no longer performs that function for the well off,
so they delay marriage and cohabit, planning to marry some day. For the not
well off, marriage has lost some of its significance as one of the marks of
middle class status, and they may or may not ever hope to marry.
The authors of
Essay 7 offer a helpful overview of the current state of marriage in many of
the areas where The Episcopal Church has congregations. Perhaps it is asking
too much that they would have drawn out implications of their findings that run contrary to the Task Force recommendations.
* * *
I conclude with
two brief sections: one on the argument for the recommended amendment of the
marriage canon and one on the common ground that might exist between
traditionalists and progressives.
Essay 5 is about
the history of the marriage canon. The heart of the argument at the end of
Essay 5 is stated briefly in three paragraphs. Its conclusion is that we should
eliminate the purposes of marriage from the marriage canon, by deleting the
Declaration of Intent. The three paragraphs are these (emphasis added):
Subsections
(d)-(f) spell out the Declaration of Intent, which the member of the clergy must have the couple sign before
proceeding with the marriage. The prescribed
declaration is a series of statements to which the couple must assent: marriage is lifelong; a union of heart, body, and
mind, intended by God for mutual joy, for help and comfort in prosperity and
adversity, and for the procreation and nurture of children when God so wills;
and pledges the couple’s utmost efforts to establish the relationship with
God’s help. Traditionally, the prescribed
declaration is signed as part of the required
pre-marriage counseling.
The
proposed revision of Canon I.18 deletes the declaration from the canon. The
language of the declaration rings of a creedal statement, a statement of belief
that may not be accurate. The couple is required
to declare their belief in a set of statements about marriage; but the
intentions of marriage are properly about performance, not belief. Since
baptism is required for only one
partner to the marriage, the declaration may
force a false compliance on a
nonbeliever or a person who holds to a tradition with a different theology of
marriage or no theology at all.
An
unbaptized nonbeliever or an atheist may marry in the church for the sake of a
spouse, but that person ought not to be placed in the situation of affirming a
belief about whether marriage is “intended by God.” Again it is the performance
of the content of the vows that is the proper focus of the couple’s intention.
The marriage liturgy itself includes the Declaration of Consent, as well as the
vows, and the wording in the proposed canonical revision points to these as the
operative texts. (p. 82)
It is hard to
know what it means to say that “the intentions of marriage are properly about
performance, not belief.” Intentions for performance of course presuppose
beliefs. If I intend to pay you my debt, I must believe there are such things
as promises and indebtedness, and such things as money or other instruments of
payment. If I intend to form a life-long bond with you in which we will become
as one and you will become another myself, an extension and part of my own
identity, I must believe such fusings of persons in heart, mind, and spirit are
possible. And so on. So the claim that the intentions of marriage do not
involve beliefs is a nonstarter.
The other part
of the argument about nonbelievers and non-Christians is peculiar. The canons
require that one member of the couple be baptized. The Declaration of Intent
requires that both can truthfully affirm that they intend to perform God’s
intentions for marriage. There is no inconsistency here unless we assume that
Christian marriage should be available to non-Christians who reject the
Christian idea of marriage. That’s what’s peculiar. Why suppose that?
The assumption
of the authors of Essay 5 seems to be that Christian marriage should be fully
available to those who reject Christian understandings of marriage, who, as the
argument suggests, may simply be doing their partner a favor by getting married
in a Christian ceremony. Why not say the same thing about baptism? So-and-so
wants to be baptized for the sake of her grandmother, so we can drop the
baptismal covenant from the ritual for all persons because we don’t want to
force a false compliance in a few cases. No. Or how about ordination? No.
We don’t remove
the requirement of assent to Christian understandings because Christian
sacraments presuppose Christian understandings. We should make no apology about
that. If Christian understandings concerning a sacrament are not valid, the
sacrament doesn’t exist, except as an empty ceremony. We should not evacuate
our sacraments just to accommodate those who already believe Christian
sacraments are empty ceremonies. That’s how they become empty ceremonies.
* * *
My thesis in
this Part III has been that there are better and worse ways to sustain group
cohesiveness and replenish group membership. The better ways make possible
large-scale, multi-level cooperation for mutual flourishing. And such
cooperation is required for respecting the dignity of every human being in more
than words. I have argued that the Task Force recommendation, that we eliminate
the statement of purposes of marriage from the marriage canon, makes sense only
if we make WEIRD assumptions about marriage and about morality more generally.
The ethic of
Autonomy works well as a way of relating to strangers and/or people with whom
we do not share basic cultural assumptions and commitments. That is, it works
fine for inter-group or between-group dealings. It was invented during the
Enlightenment for increasingly multi-cultural interactions so that there would
be an alternative to cultural and ethno-racial imperialism. But the ethic of
Community is far more effective for sustaining in-group cohesiveness and
replenishing group membership. It works well for intra-group or within-group
dealings.
There is one primary
place where the real disagreement lies between a traditionalist understanding
of Christian marriage and the progressive position I support, what I identified
in Part I as marriage equality (ME) without liberal individualism (which I
called ME2). That one place is found in the following paragraph. I
have copied it here from the second section of the introduction above. I
highlight parts of three sentences for emphasis:
To move away from the nuclear and
extended family as the fundamental unit -- replacing
families with "households" of individuals -- is to abandon the
mutual support and love families entail. Of course not every family is perfect
or even healthy, but that does not mean that the standard, the ideal, should be
changed to conform to our brokenness. If we understand the person as
a chooser, a free agent in society and morality, if we accept "no
fault" divorce and remarriage as normal, if we
condone same-sex unions as on an equal footing with the traditional norm for
families...then we suppose that each of us is fundamentally a consumer.
Some of us desire this type of car, others that type. Some
of us want this sort of companion, others that sort. Some like
chocolate, some strawberry. Some of us would really rather not have children,
or not be formally married, but would rather cohabit. If it is all a world of
consuming what we desire and can afford, we are morally adrift, following our
own desires rather than God's purposes for us. With each new desire
and act of consumption, we move on as we please.
Put simply,
marriage equality (in the sense of ME) does not require a consumer or free
agent model of human nature, though liberal individualism (as in ME2)
offers such a model of the person. The decision we in The Episcopal Church have
been dealing with about same-sex unions is not a decision for or against embracing
liberal individualism and the ethic of Autonomy as the official Christian
worldview or ethic. That is because marriage equality (ME) is consistent with a
traditional understanding of God’s purposes, with one principal amendment to
our former understanding.
Support of
marriage equality (ME) requires that we suppose that sex difference is not
essential to the monogamous, indissoluble,
covenanted companionships that God blesses. The idea that God blesses
non-heterosexual relationships of this sort only requires the following: God’s
design requires sex difference as normative when procreation is mandatory for
group survival, when extinction is a real possibility. When that condition is
relaxed or does not obtain at all, then procreation is beneficial and a
priority but not mandatory or a necessity for every biologically capable couple.
There is of
course far more to be said here than I would want to add to this Part III. It
is possible to get into the thicket very quickly, and in other contexts that
would be important. But I end simply by noting that support for marriage equality (in the
sense of ME) involves noticing how same-sex couples can exhibit the fruits of
the Spirit (Galatians 5:22) in their relationships. They can be and have been
for me positively humbling signs of the kind of all-giving love that Christ
displayed for humanity.
Seeing that
requires not arguments and reasoning so much as witness and experience of the
wonderful gay and lesbian couples by whose presence among us we in The
Episcopal Church are so blessed. Opportunities for this witness and experience are not equally available to all of us, often through no fault of anyone concerned, but they are becoming more available.
Some of these same-sex
couples are doing difficult but remarkable work by nurturing children who,
without the devotion and self-giving of these couples, would be pushed from
foster home to foster home or would be living dangerously and precariously on
the street.
Whether
generally as examples of the fruits of the Spirit in their relationships, or in
particular as exemplars of self-giving love in their nurture of children, these
same-sex couples bless us.
* * *
15 People
were bringing even infants to [Jesus] that he might touch them; and when the disciples
saw it, they sternly ordered them not to do it. 16 But Jesus
called for them and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop
them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” (Luke
18:15-16, NRSV)
