R. Marie Griffith - Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics

W HEN THE US S UPREME C OURT released its 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges finding a constitutional right to marriage for same-sex couples, the national reaction was as polarized as the court itself. Most progressives and liberals celebrated the outcome as a long overdue affirmation of equality for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, while many conservatives condemned the decision. Some Christian traditionalists blamed the ruling on the emotional terrorism of the left and identified it as a dire blow to religious liberty and the nations welfare. Religious leaders on the right admonished their flocks that, as a Family Research Council official put it, the truths of Scripture regarding human sexuality are not malleable and that neither the rulings of a court nor the pressure of secular culture should sway their allegiance to clear and authoritative biblical instruction on men, women, family, and marriage. The influential Catholic lawyer Robert P. George, past chair of the National Organization for Marriage, a group opposing same-sex marriage, wrote that Obergefell should be regarded much as Abraham Lincoln viewed the Dred Scott decision in 1857: as an anti-constitutional and illegitimate ruling in which the judiciary has attempted to usurp the authority of the people.

The Obergefell decision, released on June 26, 2015, made same-sex marriage into settled law. But it hardly stemmed the attempts to shun, restrict, and even outlaw such marriages. Within weeks, Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky and a conservative Pentecostal Christian, became a media sensation and a heroine to the grassroots right for going to jail to avoid authorizing same-sex marriage in her jurisdiction. Others sought exemption by refusing such services as wedding cakes to same-sex couples, hoping the judicial system would support their religious freedom to do so; indeed, courts will be hearing cases related to the ruling for years.

Such fiery emotions and legal wrangling have not been restricted to the issue of same-sex marriage. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, a prominent fundamentalist Christian leader appeared on national television and blamed the terroristic violence on the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle all of them who have tried to secularize America.

Why do these sexual issues provoke such fervent and enduring debate in the United States? Why have our public debates over sex and sexuality been so numerous, so ferocious, so religiously inflected, and so immune to definitive resolution? The answer is not simple, and many of the common ideas about the origins and nature of our current impasse over sexualitythe virtual civil war that has come to seem such a disheartening and permanent part of our nations social and political fabricare simply incorrect. Some argue that this impasse results from fissures that opened after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, but conflicts like these have a far longer history. Many see the conflict as pitting religious people against sexual freedom, and some religious people similarly see a secular crusade against religious liberty. But neither explanation really illuminates the ferocious controversies over issues ranging from birth control to same-sex marriage.

To fully comprehend how we got to this divisive and seemingly intractable culture war over sexuality, we have to come to terms with a deeply historical religious preoccupation with sex and understand how it has shaped subsequent American political debates over womens rights, gender roles, and sexual mores. That preoccupation emerged out of the long history of Christianity and was made all the more powerful by entrenched notions, both overt and unspoken, that Christian morality should provide the basis for our nations law and politics. Certainly, religious leaders outside Christianity have also been involved, sometimes deeply, in these huge debates over morality, sexual behavior, and gender roles. But for most of US history, until quite recently, Christians played a dominant role in American life; so too Christians, across the Protestant-Catholic divide and the full range of traditionalist to progressive, have predominated as those most vigorously connecting sex and politics and waging the most passionate battles in this arena. Many citizens have believed that sexual morality consists of a system of values that must be guarded and preserved for the greater social good, but whether those values focus on obedience to traditional family norms or on freedom of sexual expression and relations has grown into a source of profound division, even within American Christianity itself. Indeed, by the time the Obergefell decision came down, the rupture between Christian antagonists in the sex wars felt irremediable: one could plausibly argue that American Christianity had flat out split into two virtually nonoverlapping religions.

Moral Combat tells a story of the steady breakdown, since the early twentieth century, of a onetime Christian consensus about sexual morality and gender roles and of the battles over sex among self-professed Christiansand between some groups of Christians and non-Christiansthat resulted. That consensus was both Christian and national, as Christians overwhelmingly dominated the nation numerically and in terms of influence for most of its history. Up through the end of the nineteenth century, whatever else Americans disagreed aboutslavery, states rights, urbanization, immigration, labor lawsmost accepted, and took for granted as natural, a sexual order in which men were heads of households, wives were to submit to husbands authority, and monogamous heterosexual marriage was the only sanctioned site for sexual relations. Those who broke the rules were punished or shunned, as when early New England courts prosecuted sodomy, adultery, and divorce; or when communities rejected groups that forswore monogamous wedlock in favor of communal celibacy (Shakers), polygamy (some Mormons), complex marriage (the Oneida community), or free love (various associations others deemed cults).