More than anything, A Faith of Our Own is indispensable for understanding how millennial evangelicals understand their own heritage and their place in the world in light of it. Merritt is honest that millennials have sought a different tone in public predominantly because of their experiences of poverty in third world countries, gay friends, or what have you. As he puts it, “These experiences—these faith crises—are often the power train behind the shifts taking place in our culture. Experiences like these thrust people of faith back into the Scriptures to ask new and different questions.”

Merritt is careful to suggest that this generation is shaped more by its “reflection” than by “reaction or response.” That may be true enough on an individual plane, but Merritt also points out that the broader, younger evangelical world is still reacting: “No one will deny,” he writes, “that there is a reaction against the past several decades of Christian political engagement.” In every story Merritt tells on this theme, people move in a liberal direction after a perceived failure of their conservative outlook to explain their experiences. The reaction may be a matter of deliberate reflection, but it is a reaction nonetheless.

So, “post-partisan” Christians, please ponder this: First, as the price for your new path, are you willing to forego any effective voice at all for unborn children?  Are you willing to keep silent when the secular world demands your silence?  After all, that is the true price of non-partisanship — silence.  Second, if you believe that a more perfect imitation of Christ (more perfect than the elders you scorn) will lead to more love and regard for the Church, consider this: No one was more like Christ than Christ, and he wound up on a cross with only the tiniest handful of followers by his side.

Follow Jesus, yes, but don’t think for a moment that will improve your image, and don’t be surprised if He takes you down much the same path He took the generation before you.

I tend to agree with my friend Jonathan Fitzgerald that framing discussion around waiting for the “kids to grow up,” so to speak, is the wrong way to go.  Like Fitzgerald, I have no interest in moving on from the idealism of my youth.  It’s idealism, as Chesterton pointed out, that gets things done.  The real difference between my idealism and Fitzgerald’s is that my ideas happen to be true and his, well, you can fill in that blank (wink and nod, Jonathan!).

In fact, I’m not really joking about that.  And that is the plane on which this whole discussion should go forward and why I enjoy talking with those folks like Jonathan and having respectful and invigorating disagreements.  It’s not that I’ve no interest in listening to the voice of wisdom:  I have and I do.  And I’m wary of the sort of media-centric caricatures of the “religious right,” as though the whole thing could be summed up in the person of Jerry Falwell.  And I actually agree with most of the substance of French’s piece, like how if you talk about abortion too much you’re going to get labeled as a “culture warrior.”   But the more important question is what the appropriate shape of Christianity’s public witness should be in a political arena where things are amiss.

What’s missing in all this is clarity.  So let me try to bring some.

Jonathan Merritt advocates for leaving behind the culture wars and the political parties that make them go in law and government.  French rejects that by wholesale affirming the “religious right,” suggesting that the only path forward is going to be the path we’ve already trod.  And therein lies the binary that everyone depends upon for their angst and frustration at the other generation.  Either your a culture warring conservative or you’re (ostensibly) above the fray.

There is at least one more option, though.  Ross Douthat recently wrote a book that critiques the culture wars.  But his solution isn’t political independence:  it’s repudiating what he has called “the partisan mind” while holding on to party affiliation because, well, parties happen to be how things get done in government.

Can someone be a partisan without being infected by “the partisan mind?”  I think so.  We’re trying around here.  And Douthat is himself a good model:  he’s willing to critique his own side (as in the aforementioned essay) but no one thinks he’s going to come out for Obama anytime soon.  No one, anyway, who hasn’t already given their brains over to the debased sort of partisanship that currently drives our political process.  And therein lies the trouble:  the danger with the “partisan mind” is that people have to continually demonstrate their credentials in order for everyone else to feel sufficiently confident that they’re on the “team,” and if they criticize too much they lose their voice.  Which is to say, trying to be partisan without the “partisan mind” may not win someone awards at conservative dinners even if they’ll happily take our donations.

The new path forward for evangelical engagement in politics will often share the political conclusions that the religious right came to.  And it won’t be timid about saying things that the culture not only disagrees with but is downright hostile to.  But it shouldn’t go, I don’t think, the path of “independence” that Merritt prescribes.  I am not convinced that Republicans are quite as committed to, say, overturning Roe as French is.  In fact, I’m more of the opinion that social conservatives are viewed as the idiosyncratic, slightly embarrassing uncles in the Republican world.

Which is why the better path of partisanship is not a wholesale defense of partisanship but rather the understanding that we have a strategic alliance that will break the moment the Republican party ceases to be friendly to our concerns.  We can take that approach, I think, while recognizing that there are substantive differences between the party platforms and their their environments (blessings on you few pro-life Democrats, but the failure of Stupak effectively killed their prospects for the season), differences that justify partisanship without captivity to the “partisan mind.”

Now America is suffused with generational consciousness, even though “generation” as usually defined is a hopelessly blunt instrument. Whole generations (defined as people sharing a common range of birthdates) have very little in common in a country as diverse as the U.S., even in the age of pop culture. If you doubt this, put a ten-year-old from Palo Alto in the same room with the daughter of a migrant farmworker from the Central Valley, and see what they have to say to one another. There ought to be a warning label on most every work of generational analysis published for popular consumption (as opposed to professional marketers and sociologists, who know better): “Applies to Affluent Suburbanites Only.” Massive fissures in American culture are obscured by generationalism’s relentlessly broad brush.

True, the eagerness of the Baby Boomers to tap into, and if necessary create, powerful “generational” identities in order to market more effectively has something of the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it’s remarkable how inaccurate many predictions about generations have been, beginning with the Baby Boomers, who were going to be anti-authoritarian and pro-environment, until they read the latest research on smoking’s links with cancer and got behind the wheel of a Ford Expedition, respectively. Gen Xers were doomed to a life of slackerdom, until nine-figure IPOs and Palm Vs were dangled in front of them. Today the Millennials are civic-minded, teamwork-oriented, industrious do-gooders (when they’re not pale-skinned Quake addicts shooting up their high school); tomorrow, who knows?

The piece is over a decade old now, but couldn’t be more timely.  The generational analysis game has been played in recent years largely to sell books and host conferences, as people’s anxieties have grown about all the young folks who are leaving behind the church.

I have participated in it plenty around Mere-O, though my only tepid defense would be that I’ve done so self-consciously and somewhat subversively:  my point here, after all, is that the “new evangelical scandal” ain’t so different from the old.  (And in the introduction to my book, I actually published that precise warning.)

At the same time, “generational analysis” doesn’t quite capture what’s driving the conversation about young evangelicals.  As folks are fond of pointing out, Joel Hunter fits the bill for what marks many (so called) young evangelicals and he’s a, um, wiser fellow.  The real question of whether there are shifts in evangelicalism has never been so easily solved by the sociologists, at least not those who are primarily empirically driven.  The move is an attempt to change tones, a tinkering with the ethos of evangelicalism.

But still, Andy’s essay is a wise and important caution for all of the armchair observers and interpreters of the evangelical world.  The question we must face is whether our constant prattling about “young evangelicals” and the like (which, thankfully, has gone down with less frequency over the past twelve months) is actually contributing to the cultural captivity of evangelicalism even as we seek to overcome it, by reinforcing a problematic way of segmenting ourselves even while we seek to understand ourselves.

The expanding economy has opened up new paths to employment, many of which our grandparents never could have conceived of. The scripts for marriage and dating have been rewritten, leaving many young folks uncertain about how to navigate their relationships. The only given for many upper-middle class white students is that they will go off to college upon graduation. And that path has led many of them to assume massive amounts of debt.

Previous generations might have met all of these challenges with an inner confidence, a stability that came from being raised in stable (though hardly perfect!) social structures like the family that imbued them with a sense that they could overcome the obstacles before them. But many of us younger folks have a sense of anxiety about the whole thing, a feeling that the lofty expectations which we have for our lives will not come to pass and that we will be diminished for it.

It’s tempting to push down these anxieties, to ignore them or confess them on grounds that they reveal our lack of faith. And maybe sometimes they do.

But Rhett Smith, a friend and someone who has been writing faithfully online for years, won’t have it. The provocative subtitle of his new book The Anxious Christian perfectly expresses his project: “Can God use your anxiety for good?”  It’s a question that turns anxiety on its head, forcing us to consider that all the anxieties that we feel are hindering and debilitating us might be God’s subtle call to us to pursue a deeper, more meaningful life. Rather than running from our anxiety, Rhett wants us to embrace it and recognize that God can use it to “lead us into freedom and possibility.”

That’s a counterintuitive and, honestly, countercultural message. Especially within the church, where we love trotting out Paul’s admonition to “not be anxious for anything” as a cure-all for a troubled heart. Rhett’s sensitive to the fact that not all anxieties are productive. But he wants us to open ourselves to them all anyway, rather than compounding our problems by burying and ignoring it

While a trained theologian, Rhett is also a professional therapist. And he writes like one, with a sensitive to the internal dynamics of the heart. It’s an honest book without being overly revelatory. It would be tempting, I imagine, for a therapist to write a book like this and simply deploy the latest insights from the field. Rhett occasionally slips into therapeutic language, which doesn’t do much for me, but does so gracefully, never letting it overwhelm other ways of speaking.

Personally, this has been an important book for me the past few months. As you might know, the wife and I have faced a significant decision that was more than a little taxing for me. I’ve wrestled with anxiety for a long time, and have internalized a healthy amount of the stigma about it. I’m not entirely convinced by Rhett’s approach, but it’s been helpful to momentarily overturn my expectations and consider my anxieties in new ways.

This is an important book on an underdiscussed topic for Christians. Rhett is an extraordinary fellow, someone who I have admired for a long time. And The Anxious Christian is an excellent representation of his concern and care for the people around him.

Disclosure:  Rhett sent me a copy of this book.  Though he didn’t need to.  If they do anything, friends buy each other’s books. 

The general sentiment was something along the lines of “Who cares?,” a response I would rebuke if I didn’t understand it so well.  Indeed, in the book I anticipated the point, noting that among the pantheon of concerns tattoos probably ranked somewhere near the bottom.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care.  Younger Christians often want to shout “every square inch” along with the Kuyperians until, apparently, we start considering the inches of their skin.  Then the exercise is apparently reduced to legalistic jockeying, an attempt to see who can become the most restrictive while ignoring all those verses about God caring about the heart.

But tattoos still matter. The comments at Relevant are about as good a representation of how evangelicals think about ethics—for good and ill—as ever I’ve seen.  Tattoos are helpful to think about because, well, we can think about them without people throwing us over for being heretics.  It’s a somewhat safer question to ask than those questions about, say, bioethics even though the way in which the Bible intersects with both topics is roughly the same.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, got married this weekend.  A notable event in these parts only because it prompted this bit by James Poulos, one of the smartest folks I know and one of the few writers whose every word I try to consume:

The real fear about advertising — and so much else — is that its superficially innocuous practices will lead us to live in ways we don’t want to because we’re already in a state of vulnerability and confusion that reaches too deep into our psyches to be corrected or protected against.

Any critique of tattoos in contemporary evangelical culture has to include the fact of advertising.  The phenomenon is an indication of how deeply wedded to consumer culture we are as Christians, of how much we have borrowed the script for our lives from the world around us.  Not necessarily problematic in every instance, but worth noting nonetheless.   The thing can’t be understood without knowing its history and emergence, and I assure you that Christians didn’t get the tattooing habit from sitting around reading Revelation.

Tattoos may be innocuous as a social practice.  Or they may only be superficially innocuous, a practice that has the appearance of harmlessness while revealing and reinforcing a diseased understanding of who we are meant to be in the world.   To me, the question is still an open one.  But given the popularity of the form of self-expression, it’s a question worth asking. 

Let me add this in defense of thinking long and hard about tattoos.  Some issues, like homosexuality, are so contentious and have so much wrapped up in them that any genuine inquiry is all but closed off before the conversation begins.  Folks know the right answers and there’s a lot at stake if someone deviates.  The social pressures to conform are high because of how much is at stake.

There’s not much that hangs on tattoos, which is why they are so helpful as a test case for our intuitions.  We can have genuine inquiry about them, we can work to see whether our method of reading Scripture actually suffices, and discern how Scripture intersects with the world.  All the skills, I’d point out, we need on issues of greater importance.

In order to understand the world in which we live and thereby more clearly grasp our place within it, sometimes it is more effective to put questions to it that seem irrelevant than those which are incredibly contentious at the front.  The forces and dynamics that have made tattoos a plausible option aren’t simply limited to aesthetics and self-expression.  And even if they were, what happens in one sphere of life shapes the whole.

We also wanted to take some of those posts and excerpt the choice parts here at Mere-O on the weekends.  Links and excerpts don’t constitute endorsements of anything than that the piece merits your attention.

Why Young Voters Won’t Tip the Gay Marriage Debate Anytime Soon

If 18- to 30-year-old voters did in fact split almost evenly on Amendment One, this casts some doubt on the theory that gay marriage will ride to acceptance due to overwhelmingly supportive young voters. While young voters do seem more supportive of gay marriage, and support increases the younger the demographic in question, the operative word is supportive. Only moderately in favor of gay marriage themselves, young North Carolinians were in no position to outvote their older neighbors.

In fact, even if nobody over age 45 had voted Tuesday, the amendment still would have passed by around 8 percentage points, according to the adjusted data above.

Therefore, any strategy of waiting for demographics to realize the maximalist position of gay marriage advocates across the country looks to be, at the very least, a lengthy endeavor. States on the margins, like California and Washington, where initial bans commanded marginal majorities, might support gay marriage in the near future. But on a wider scale, movement on the issue, though real, is likely to be far too slow to bring about dramatic change nationally anytime soon.

Gay Marriage Makes a Lot of Sense

On this common ground, same-sex marriage is a no-brainer. Some people are happier and more fulfilled in committed same-sex relationships. There’s no use trying to refute other people’s emotional expressions of their own subjective states of consciousness. Do same-sex couples wrestle with tension, anxiety over a partner losing interest and being attracted to someone else, infidelity, and so forth? Looking at the state of traditional marriage, how exactly are these couples uniquely dysfunctional? A 2006 Amicus Brief presented to the California Supreme Court by the nation’s leading psychological and psychiatric bodies argued, “Gay men and lesbians form stable, committed relationships that are equivalent to heterosexual relationships in essential respects. The institution of marriage offers social, psychological, and health benefits that are denied to same-sex couples…There is no scientific basis for distinguishing between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples with respect to the legal rights, obligations, benefits, and burdens conferred by civil marriage.” Well, there you have it. The new high priests of the national soul have spoken.

How would someone who believes that sin is unhappiness and salvation is having “your best life now” make a good argument against same-sex marriage? There is simply no way of defending traditional marriage within the narrative logic that apparently most Christians—much less non-Christians—presuppose regardless of their position on this issue.

Why American Evangelicals Love the British

THE AFFINITY FOR BRITAIN among American evangelicals has a long history. This attachment is difficult to disentangle from the colonial roots of many evangelical denominations in English and Scottish churches, as well as the transatlantic careers of the greatest American and British revivalists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But in the decades after the Civil War, American evangelicals began to diverge from their brethren across the pond. Thanks to social and theological dynamics peculiar to the United States, evangelicals here rebelled more sharply against modern intellectual trends, particularly the theory of evolution and the audacious decision of scholars to study the Bible as they would any other historical document. By the time of World War I, conservative American Protestantism was riven by fundamentalism—a movement of Christians who militantly opposed liberal trends in culture and thought, whom H.L. Mencken mocked as uncultured bumpkins who spent their time “denouncing the reading of books.”

Ever since then, evangelicals have been struggling to overcome an intellectual inferiority complex, to convince the wider world that confidence in the Bible’s authority is compatible with scholarly achievement. For decades evangelical colleges and seminaries have sent many of their most promising students to the United Kingdom to pursue advanced degrees—to work with particular scholars known for evangelical sympathies, or simply to receive that imprimatur of intellectual gravitas, the PhD from Cambridge or DPhil from Oxford. (New St. Andrews College, an upstart evangelical school in Idaho, has attempted to import that Oxbridge aura to America by requiring Latin and Greek and dressing students in black academic gowns for each week’s disputatio.) A degree from a British university impresses Americans—and evangelicals long ago figured out that escaping to foreign universities allowed them to avoid many of the prejudices and difficult questions they sometimes encounter at American schools, where faculty tend to associate evangelicalism with wacky Young Earth science and a right-wing political agenda.

Two Steps from Reasonable about Marriage

Under these conditions, it would make sense for the whole community, and its individual members, to recognize this momentous event for what it is. From these bodies, male and female, through this act, a child is brought forth into the world—a child who needs to be protected, nourished, and taught. The community now has a reason to say several things: First, this act that we men and women have been doing together is an act that has extraordinary consequences for the whole community—consequences that our acts alone or in the previously isolated communities did not have. Second, it has extraordinary implications for the couple who have received both a gift for which they yearn to care, and a grave responsibility. Third, it has serious implications for the child, who finds herself born into the world, in need of care, education, and the security of knowing who she is, where she comes from, and where she is going. Fourth, now that they see what their bodies and urges are for, the members of the community understand that their earlier acts were in fact an improper use of their bodies and a misplacement of their longings (though none of this was their fault, given the incompleteness of their information).

Thus, it is in the interest of the community, the couple, and most especially the child that human sexuality be protected and nurtured such that it will be used aright. For this reason, entering into a sexual relationship with a member of the opposite sex is a matter of great importance for the community and the couple, worthy of a rite of recognition and acceptance, of being made secure in and by the community, and of rules governing their sexual practice. It is only here that the notion of marriage can be brought forth—not from the desires of the couple for recognition, not from feelings of affection and closeness, but in the face of the reality of human sexuality.

Of course, this story is a thought experiment, not history. It illustrates that it is within the realm of human experience for human beings to form bonds of friendship that are centered in, and enhanced by, mutually pleasant acts. But it also illustrates the unreasonableness of the notion of marriage in a world where a pleasurable act cannot, by its nature, lead to children; in other words, it shows the unreasonableness of marriage being merely about the desires, pleasures, and affirmation of adults—the contemporary conception of marriage.

Now to you:  What else should we be reading that we missed this week? 

I think most of us loosely think of culture warring as a special class of ressentiment, combat driven by a mentality of besiegement, symbolic struggle, and supposed existential threat to a cultural identity. But I’m not so sure we can make a clean separation between that and good old democratic disagreement. Democracy as we generally conceive it is a structure for managing and containing conflict, a framework for legitimate political struggle. There will always be factions, sides, particular interests, etc, and those imply we will have political friends and enemies. Deep down, I think describing serious political conflict as a “culture war” is part of the liberal allergy to vigorous debate; it tries to shove deep disagreements into a corner with some kind of label indicating that this is not welcome in “reasonable” discourse. “Culture warrior” is an epithet, used by the “sides” against each other and by bipartisan elites against all that shrill partisanship. But the reality is that certain issues like abortion, gay marriage, etc, are deeply divisive, and they symbolize and encapsulate dearly-held views about what is good and right in our country and the identities of people who hold those views. Despite what Washington pundits might tell you, people should have strong feelings about these issues, and they should fight about them. It’s called politics.

This presents a dilemma for Christians on opposite sides of political issues, who need to both remain faithful to their theological/moral/political beliefs and to love other Christians who disagree about those very charged issues. It’s hard to do, but it’s not impossible. And the worst thing that can be done, I think, is to keep using the term “culture wars” against people who disagree with your politics while, in the same breath, claiming you are tired of fighting. I don’t mean to pick on Rachel here, because she is a lovely person who is doing much worth admiring. I get what she’s trying to say, and I have even made these same arguments in the past. But in a post like this, she is taking a fairly clear political position: that evangelical political opposition to gay marriage is wrong.  She opposes Amendment One. I agree with that position, but I can’t deny that it is a position, and that it puts me on a “side” of the “culture war.” (Similarly, Matt cannot convincingly claim he’s “not much of a culture warrior” when a significant amount of his work is devoted to energizing a conservative Christian worldview that has political dimensions he cares about passionately.)

I’d planned on saying something very similar to this to try to clear up how someone can be a conservative and say that folks should vote for conservative positions without being a “culture warrior,” but David has already done it for me.  So make sure you read the whole thing.

The question that I am kicking around these days whether the hostile strands of democratic discourse are exacerbated during peacetime, as there’s no external foe that the factions can align themselves with.  If (God forbid) the ludicrously implausible happened and Russia dropped a nuke on American soil, well, I suspect the “culture war” rhetoric would mostly recede to the background and we’d find a relative level of consensus.  This is all hypothetical, of course, and I don’t have the time right now to read up on the relationship between the emergence of the Religious Right and the ending of Cold War.  Perhaps some smarter folks will weigh in here.

I am more optimistic than David, though, about differentiating culture war ressentiment from the simple advocacy for positions on divisive issues.  It’s fascinating to me that those who decry the culture war seem to have such an anxiety about doing so.  Rachel’s solution, after all, is broadly to listen to stories.  And she’s not alone in commending that sort of approach.  I have suspicions that the wariness of “vigorous debate” has less to do with liberalism than it does with a particularly late-modern suspicion about assertion at all.  Call it a “postmodernist” hangover, if you will, though the term is so contested as to probably not be useful.  But ressentiment is a symptom of a deeper disease, and while David seems to point at liberalism I’m not yet convinced.

But those differences shouldn’t overwhelm what is the main point:  David is almost exactly right about all of this.  And as he uses “culture warrior,” he’s right to suggest that I belong in the class as well.   My stance has largely been one of agreeing with many of the positions (though not all) of the Religious Right on matters of policy, while getting there by a different path.  Non-culture war conservatism, if you will, if you’ll allow me to use “culture war” there to denote the “special class of ressentiment” that David describes it as.  Whether I’ve been successful at this, well, God and the reader will be my judge.  But even if I’ve failed, I’m optimistic that it can be done.  And maybe next week I’ll say a few things about how.

I suppose we could, if we must.  Though it’s hard to find people who are actually within the millennial demographic who might be willing to do it.  At least among the writerly class, anyway, the size of which seems to be doubling nearly every day.

The distinction is an important one.  Many of the younger evangelical leaders have published articles and books that claim to speak for the millennial generation.  Gabe Lyons assumes the mantle in The Next Christians.  You Lost Me takes the same vantage point, which isn’t that surprising given Kinnaman’s role at Barna.  Rachel Held Evans kicked off this discussion that way, and Jonathan Merritt’s new book takes that approach.*

Together for the Gospel. There may have been a millenial or two there.

The danger, of course, is that in claiming to speak for a group it is easy to only reflect back what that group already wants to hear.  This is especially true when selling books is involved.  There’s something more at stake then, and generally folks respond better when the message is roses and sunshine and you’re being told that it’s your generation that will finally change the world.  What’s more, in my experience millennial Christians don’t seem particularly disposed to listen to critiques of ourselves, from folks our own age or anyone else.  Brett McCracken gave it his best go and, well, we know well how that went.  In one of my favorite moments of writing ever, a fellow millennial Christian suggested that I didn’t like my own generation for trying to read Hipster Christianity charitably.  Those were good times, brother.

What’s more, the paradox of speaking for a generation of evangelicals is that it exacerbates one of evangelicalism’s ongoing problems:  a monolithic understanding of itself that allows for caricatures to take root within the media, and the marginalization of those who don’t fit the generalizations.  After all, those who are claiming to speak for millenial Christians have all but ignored any millennial who hangs around The Gospel Coalition or attended Together for the Gospel.  I don’t know how many of those there are, but I’m going to guess there are a few.

All that is why I have never really tried much to “speak for” millennial Christians, but to limit myself to speaking about them and–if they’d listen–to them.  I was first posed with the dilemma when invited to write what became my longest and best analysis of the millennial ethos.  I decided then that I wouldn’t strive to become a spokesman, on grounds that my innate desire and drive to “call ‘em as I see ‘em” would slowly be corroded.  Even now I can feel that pressure, as the path to influence seems to involve praise that borders on flattery.

Allow me, though, just a momentary break from that to speak for a very narrow corner of evangelicalism that is, I think, worth taking seriously.  There are a few conservative millennial evangelicals who take political cues from Russell Kirk rather than Rush Limbaugh and who would cross into Rome or Constantinople were they ever to leave “the church.”  (Webber’s Canterbury Trail has become a lot more rocky now that the accommodationist cracks of his day have turned into full blown ruptures, and I hear of fewer and fewer people who have been seriously tempted by it.)   Having rejected simplistic caricatures of the Religious Right, they’re no less thrilled about the same sort of caricatures of millennial Christians.

Like Rachel Held Evans and her readers, sexual ethics is one of their main points of contention.  But they are comprehensive in their conservatism, and ideas like handing out contraception in churches seem to them about as sensible as sin.  As one friend put it to me, the ‘”baptized” sexual mores” within the evangelical churches may be the issue that drives him to Rome.  They are done with facile sexual ethics, and that includes facile approaches to questions of homosexuality in the church and in public–but have looked at the liberal Protestant approach to Scripture and authority and found it wanting.  To close off the “speaking for” genre, I have received more emails and notes from younger evangelicals over the recent contraception dustup than I have in eight years of writing.

Those are the bulk of Mere-O’s readers, more or less.  We may not be many, but we’re around and we’re not going away.  At least not any time soon.  So while other folks go about speaking for millennial Christians, I would simply like to underscore that they do not speak for me.

*All these folks have good claim to speak for millennial evangelicals, of course.  My question is not whether they do or do not.  Rather, it is that they have self-consciously assumed that role and all the trappings that it entails.  Also, obligatory link to academic counter to the Barna narrative about the failure of the church.

There’s a lot to agree with in her post and it’s hard to not wonder how pyrrhic the marriage “victories” ultimately will prove.  The best way to ensure that the principles beneath the marriage amendment in North Carolina grows in more fertile soil is to hold it with something of an open hand.  Even if it is never overturned, no one likes a boastful winner.

What’s more, the categories of “winning” and “losing” seem alien to the work of discerning and crafting legislation, and even in another world getting it passed.  Yes, the hostilities exist and the sides are deeply divided.   But the only way through the culture wars is not to shout about our need to go beyond them, but to set about ignoring them altogether and get on with the work that is given to each generation:  providing the positive vision for society that has been informed by our Christian commitments.

It may be, in fact, prudent to simply avoid celebrating much altogether.  We ought to recognize, after all, that the overwhelming passage of traditional marriage amendments are not signs of our society’s health, but its disease–and we are all implicated in it.  Legislation ought to be the fruit of a long and careful discernment, what some have called “judgment” if we can get beyond the stereotypes for a moment.  That process costs us all something, for it demands reflection upon both the moral norms we ought to strive for and the society in which we live.   The attempt to close the gap, with legislation or some other effort, must be founded upon the recognition of failure.  It will not do to foist the burden of responsibility on others before moving on.  Not as Christians, anyway.  ”Weep with those who weep” is an exhortation given to the church, but it is for the world.  For as George MacDonald wrote somewhere, were it not for our tears the world would not be worth saving anyway.

It is clear in light of last week’s events, though, that those who have spoken of the culture wars’ completion were considerably too hasty with their judgment.  The younger evangelicals of the moderate variety may be gaining in strength and number, but they are still rowing upstream.  And we are mostly living off the culture war’s legacy, too.  Those who shout the loudest that the culture war needs to end stand to gain the most by it continuing.  Ressentiment is not a phenomenon bound by age and it seems like there is plenty of it among Rachel’s commenters.  

The real question that everyone wants to know is what comes after the culture wars.  And here, beyond the few platitudes that I’ve now heard enough of, no one seems to have much of an idea.  I’m on board with Rachel’s suggestion that we ought to share stories.  But my experience makes me think that sharing stories is helpful for establishing friendship but not exactly sufficient for unwinding what shape our society should actually take.  I can’t imagine any of my gay and lesbian friends resting content with sharing their story with me without them agitating to get me to vote differently.   Most of them are looking for social and legal changes based on the perceived (and sometimes real) injustices they have experienced.  And so they should.  But that simply means our political and legal differences take shape within the context of a friendship that is almost inevitably strained because of those differences.   Stories have changed much for me, but I remain a gay marriage skeptic.  And while I work to keep the question open for the sake of inquiry (doing better with this at some times than at others), I have confidence in my position and can’t forsee ever changing it.

Of course, I have never been much of a culture warrior.  I have been to the Values Voter Summit and while I remain friends with folks at the Family Research Council, I found the whole thing off-putting.  But the possibility of evangelicals being conservative without engaging in the culture wars tends to get lost among younger evangelicals.  Many people in North Carolina doubtlessly were of the culture warrior variety.  But if I know anything about the Acts 29 movement, I find it laughable to believe that folks in J.D. Greear’s church would be among them.

“There are many times,” Oliver O’Donovan once said, “when the most pointed political criticism imaginable is to talk about something else.”  When Jesus says to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, he does not make Ceasar irrelevant.  But he does ground his political theology in a sense of indifference, undermining the passions that would have incited both devotion and rebellion.  Jesus first concern is government, but the point has implications for all those creaturely realities that we might be tempted to exalt above the Kingdom of Christ.   Like Caesar, “culture war Christianity” has become an object of either devotion or rebellion, a matter for defense or denial by evangelicals both young and old. We  have not yet escaped its grasp.  And we only will when we can begin our political theologies by speaking of something else.

Remember the media prattle about a conservative “war on women?” It would seem that meme has come to an abrupt end thanks largely to DNC strategist and frequent White House visitor, Hilary Rosen, and her less than charitable view of homemakers.

Rosen infamously opined that Ann Romney (a homemaker) “has never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of women in this country are facing.” While Rosen was undoubtedly making a dig at the Romney family’s relative wealth, she was also diminishing the real value that a homemaker brings to the family.

Political operatives on both sides of the aisle quickly distanced themselves from her remarks, and Rosen offered an apology to Romney and the many women (homemakers and not) she offended.  But as Cathy Ruse points out, “Wasn’t [Rosen] just being honest, saying what everyone around her really thinks?”

Not Esteemed

Rosen’s comments aren’t an aberration, and Cathy correctly lays much of the blame at the feet of the modern feminist movement. The narrative, as Cathy notes, has been “careers optimum, husbands optional, conception avoided and the unplanned products thereof aborted.”

The reality is that our culture has little esteem for homemakers. Consider for a moment the conspicuous lack of homemakers in our sitcoms and entertainment today. Our protagonists don’t do diapers. (With the exception, perhaps, of Will Arnett.

It’s not surprising then that our tax policy rewards families where both parents work outside the home by providing credits for childcare, while offering no similar benefit for families who choose to forgo one income by having a parent remain at home.  Our law reinforces the ideal of a two income home by facilitating childcare, and exposes our belief that homemaking has little value. I’ll return to tax policy a little later, but allow me to suggest two simple reasons why homemaking isn’t esteemed by our culture. First, there is a general ignorance of what homemaking entails. And second, more importantly, we don’t value children.

Homemaking is Work

According the New York Times, 70 percent of married women over the age of 25 with children work outside the home. If this wasn’t the model they received, it was certainly the model reinforced in school and pop-culture. With so few families choosing the homemaking route, it should come as no surprise that homemaking is so poorly understood. Only someone with no experience in homemaking would dare suggest that it isn’t work, or that home economics are disconnected from the broader economy.

In a recent study by Investopedia researchers tallied the market value of the various services that a homemaker provides for the family. The list in itself is informative for those unfamiliar with a day in the life of a homemaker: cooking, cleaning, childcare, driver, laundry, home maintenance, etc. The market value of these combined tasks totals over $96,000.

It’s an impressive amount, but looking at the list of services the firm included, I can think of a handful they missed: personal shopper, interior designer, event planner, family counselor, first responder, private tutor, and accountant. Trying to list the intangible benefits would undoubtedly turn this blog post into a novela. So let’s leave it there for now.*

When presented with the Investopedia numbers, Rosen would likely agree that these tasks represent real work, or more likely, drudgery. After all, who’d want to be cooped up at home playing nursemaid and laundress for children? The “uneducated.” That’s who.

In profiling the modern homemaker, the Times couldn’t resist quoting the CensusBureau’s 40-year review, “Those with the least education are now the most likely to stay out of the labor force as stay-at-home mothers.” While this may in fact be true, it obfuscates several important realities.

The absence of a college degree does not imply an inability to obtain one. For many women, and some men, homemaking is a vocational choice. They’re not stuck due to a lack of education; these homemakers are doing precisely what they want to do—what they believe they’re called to do. According tosociologist Bradford Wilcox, an astounding 74 percent of married mothers who work full time would prefer to work fewer hours or not at all. For these women and the families they represent, homemaking represents anaspirational choice. And why shouldn’t it?

Because we don’t value children. Or, as my friend Josh Bishop observed, we eschew the self-sacrifice and “drudgery” that children entail more than we value children. Which is, I believe, all of a piece.

It is quite true that Rosen and many others would argue that they provide all the services Investopedia has tallied and work outside the home. I tip my hat to them. This was the case in my family growing up. But talk to any homemaker and you’ll find they place an emphasis on the relationships being nurtured in the home, not on the responsibilities of maintaining a home.

Valuing Children

Any discussion about the value of children must begin by acknowledging that our law persists in denying the humanity of the unborn child until the moment of birth. And the law is a teacher. We have enshrined the belief that the wellbeing, nay, the existence, of children is less important than the happiness of adults.

Mother, homemaker and author Rachel Jankovic captures this well:

The truth is that years ago, before this generation of mothers was even born, our society decided where children rank in the list of important things. When abortion was legalized, we wrote it into law.

Children rank way below college. Below world travel for sure. Below the ability to go out at night at your leisure. Below honing your body at the gym. Below any job you may have or hope to get. In fact, children rate below your desire to sit around and pick your toes, if that is what you want to do. Below everything. Children are the last thing you should ever spend your time doing.

Set aside the platitudes about children being our greatest resource. We don’t believe it. Author Anthony Esolen poignantly observes, “if we loved children, then we’d have a few.” But Americans aren’t having many children. In fact, if you were to take away population growth due to immigration, we’d be a shrinking nation. Our nation’s fertility rate is just hanging on around replacement level, considered to be 2.1 births per woman.

Undoubtedly, our policy of abortion on demand and the 50 million lives lost to abortion over the last four decades play a role in suppressing fertility and reshaping our view of children. But consider again how even our tax code plays its dubious part.

During a lecture at FRC, Ramesh Ponnurupointed out that the child tax credit, (whichFRC crafted a decade ago) would need to be increased to about $4,000 per child just to make our tax code “child neutral.” Ponnuru noted that those raising children are not only paying into safety net programs to fund current beneficiaries, they are also investing in the next generation of those who will pay into the system. It’s a form of “double taxation” that their childless peers do not face. So while Roe undercuts the humanity of our children, the tax code places a disproportionately heavy burden on families with children.

A Christian Response

So how ought Christians to respond to a culture which has little esteem for homemaking and places so little value on children? It seems to me that opportunities to live a curious, countercultural lifestyle abound.  But before we get there, I’d rather hear from you:

How have you seen the Church influence culture either through valuing children or validating homemaking? How do you see the Church being influenced by our culture in these areas?

Does the idea of promoting contraception to sexually active Christian singles, debated vigorously here at Mere-O, signal agreement with culture about the value of children?

* In full disclosure, my own wife is a homemaker and when I spell her for a day or two at home, I’m reminded all over again how much energy goes into the formation of  little people and into maintaining the forward momentum of our family. Needless to say, I’m somewhat relieved when she’s home and I can return to… ahem, “work.”