I correspond regularly with a young single gay man about the ongoing legal and cultural battles over gay marriage in Minnesota, in California, and most recently in New York. My correspondent was understandably elated by the New York assembly’s legalization of gay marriage, but was at once dumbfounded and exasperated by the seemingly limitless energy (and money) that opponents of the bill—who style themselves as “defending marriage”—pour into the fight to make marriage impossible for some of their neighbors. Gay marriage “has nothing to do with them,” this young man protests; and I think I detect in his complaint the implicit question, why can’t they leave the rest of us alone?
Because I share his consternation, my first response to that question (and the variations that I’ve heard from others) is to want to be facetious. —It’s the same reaction that Rapture enthusiasts bring out in me. Every time some self-styled prophet announces that they’ve calculated the precise date of Christ’s return and we’d all better be ready, for Christ’s sake, I want to ask them: What makes you so sure the Rapture hasn’t already happened, years ago, and that you’re not one of those “left behind”? In the same way, when a conservative Christian declares that acceptance of homosexuality is an “attack” on marriage, I want to ask, with as much respect as I can muster: Just how far gone is your own marriage, and is there any hope it can be saved?
But the issue is too serious to be handled with a wisecrack. What those of us who support gay marriages (some of us, because we also live them) need to understand is that conservative Christians do experience a genuine sort of pain. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think their marriages are actually imperiled: to listen to the loudest of them, one would think they had discovered the secret to marital bliss somewhere in the pages of their Bibles. No, the pain I am talking about is relative. It’s the loss of a feeling of superiority that is very close to the heart of their faith.
Historians of American religion describe the “Puritan legacy” that has deep and pervasive roots in American culture. The Puritans brought to the North American continent a powerful Calvinist spirituality that set the individual in a precarious spiritual posture. Believing that God’s predestination of the elect (and, necessarily, of the damned) was final and irresistible, the Puritans were compelled to ward off absolute despair by conjuring undisputable evidence that they were among the elect, in both the austerity of their piety and the comforts of their (God-given) prosperity.
But the peculiar logic of Puritanism requires more than my own happiness: it requires that I appear evidently to be happier, and thus holier, than thou. The legacy of Puritanism requires its adherents to seek out ways in which they are superior to others, proving (at least to themselves) that they enjoy God’s final blessing. Here is, I think, the cultural root of much that is poisonous and vicious in American conservatism, from the sort of fiscal extremism that seeks to reward the rich and punish the poor to the social policies that similarly seek to brand whole classes of people as unworthy of respect and care. Much of the language of “merit” is, at bottom, the desire—the need—to identify and punish others who are unworthy.
(Listen for example to U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann explain to a television interviewer that she and her husband deserved federal subsidies—something she’s made a political career out of decrying when it involves actual poor people—because “I can be successful without government help.” That epitomizes the Puritan creed: God helps those who don’t need it, and the needy be damned.)
Gay and lesbian people are not the only targets of this punitive self-righteousness. The platform and rhetoric of the Republican Party is often rather explicit: the rich deserve what they have; the poor are by definition undeserving: why not structure society in such a way as to institutionalize the disparity as a permanent, earthly sign of God’s providential care for the “haves”? (The Democratic Party has not made this logic a matter of principle, but rarely dares to challenge it publicly any more. Alas.) Gays and lesbians just happen to be particularly attractive targets because, to the extent they make their flagrant offense against supposed biblical standards public—for example by seeking to have their marriages recognized publicly and officially—they are so easily ostracized and penalized, with the stroke of a pen or the clap of a gavel.
The Episcopal Church in the United States is vexed by the question of gay marriage, not just (or even primarily) because of debates over “biblical authority.” (With every new “study document” or “report” that agonizes over the proper exegesis of Romans 1 or Acts 10, I suspect that “we,” the Church, signal to our gay and lesbian members that “we” just don’t know what to do with “them” until “we” get our Bible passages lined up right. How demeaning that must sound in their ears!)
I think “we Episcopalians” continue to wrangle over the question—instead of deciding, simply and with a clear conscience, as other denominations have, that of course we recognize gay marriage, and then moving on to actually difficult questions like, say, how to challenge the austerity policies of the International Monetary Fund, to name the other pressing concern raised more than two decades ago at Lambeth 1988—because, like other Americans, we want to be able to look down on someone. We Episcopalians are genteel in our smugness, of course, and so we imagine that what sets us apart from other Christians is our refusal to descend into the sort of factionalism that tears lesser denominations apart. Of course, those denominational rifts often produce vital and committed new denominations with the freedom and vigor to get on with the work of mission. But never mind; that’s not for us: our pretense of unity in a fractious, abusive house is, we imagine, the symbol of our superiority.
None of these reflections will help my young gay correspondent feel encouraged. But perhaps they will shed light, for him and all of us, on just what we are facing in the months and years ahead, across the country and within the Episcopal Church as well. So long as we remain driven by the Puritanical need to look down on our neighbors for some perceived inferiority, gays and lesbians—but not only them—remain at risk.
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