If Northern Ireland’s troubled past can teach us anything, it is that culture wars can lead to shooting wars. No-one in Ulster’s establishment or civil rights movement in the 1960s expected or desired a thirty year terrorist campaign. Each side was committed to democracy and the rule of law. Leaders from both communities laboured to control the demagoguery and civil disturbances which degenerated into terrorism and mass murder. However, unionists would not acknowledge nationalist grievances, nationalists would not appreciate unionist fears, and no-one really comprehended the power of the movements they had created. Social chaos so rapidly replaced the rule of law that for a generation no-one truly prospered and no-one was really free.
You will forgive my alarm, then, at the imprisonment of Kim Davis, a Kentucky County Clerk who has preventing anyone from obtaining marriage certificates in her office since the Supreme Court revised America’s definition of marriage. Quite frankly, the unwarranted panic of “social conservatives” and the sheer venom of “social liberals” smells like fuel for a dangerous culture war. The hatred evidenced against Mrs Davis on twitter feeds and other social media is arresting. Some have expressed thinly veiled hopes that she will be sexually abused in prison; others have crassly and cruelly blasphemed her faith; and the overt rejoicing over her imprisonment is nothing less than nauseating. As John Stonestreet has pointed out, one could disagree profoundly with Mrs Davis’ actions yet find her imprisonment disproportionate.
One could even disagree with #KimDavis and yet still think imprisonment is ridiculous.
— John Stonestreet (@JBStonestreet) September 3, 2015
The mainstream media has not generated significantly more light than heat either. Mrs Davis’s divorces have been taken as evidence of hypocrisy, even though these occurred before her conversion to the Apostolic Church. In general, the press has focused on a perceived “conservative” moral panic online rather than the abundant evidence of “liberal” religious hatred. The media loves to categorise, compartmentalise and simplify. Admittedly, I do not find it at all helpful to divide the world into “left and right” or “liberal and conservative”: I cannot fit all of my views into one camp. But a headline story must have two-dimensional characters and a simple plot.
So the media also glosses over the complexity of the issues surrounding same-sex marriage. It prefers a narrative reminiscent of Martin Luther King’s Birmingham and Selma campaigns. “Same-sex marriage” is reframed as “marriage equality”; Kim Davis is recast as a modern Bull Connor. Reporters casually assume that religious bigotry is the only force which could motivate anyone to resist same-sex marriages and then lump Mrs Davis with racial bigots. But as John Corvino has pointed out in the New York Times, the analogies between the battle for racial equality and marriage equality are not strong:
When civil rights laws were passed, discrimination against blacks was pervasive, state-sponsored and socially intractable. Pervasive, meaning that there weren’t scores of other photographers clamouring for their business. State-sponsored, meaning that segregation was not merely permitted but in fact legally enforced, even in basic public accommodations and services. Socially intractable, meaning that without higher-level legal intervention, the situation was unlikely to improve. To treat the lesbian couple’s situation as identical — and thus as obviously deserving of the same legal remedy — is to minimize our racist past and exaggerate LGBT-rights opponents’ current strength.
More to the point, there are LGBT intellectuals who are opponents of “marriage equality”. One of the most interesting and challenging critics of same-sex marriage is Claudia Card, formerly Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with a life-time’s teaching experience in Women’s Studies, Jewish Studies, Environmental Studies, and LGBT Studies. Card argues that marriage imposes a hetero-normative standard on society: it is the reproductive potential of a heterosexual couple which leads to demands for monogamy and fidelity.
In fact, Card goes on to argue that marriage is a social evil. It is the creation of a patriarchal ideology, gives men too much control over women, and both parents too much control over their children. It is a recipe for abuse. In her view, open relationships in close communities provide a better model for human flourishing. As a criticism of marriage per se, her case is wildly overstated. But, to my mind, Card’s criticisms should make us ponder the dangers of living in isolated nuclear families which are divorced from any wider community.
Throughout her long career, Card has experienced racism, sexual discrimination and homophobia. Yet in The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil she excoriates liberals for focusing their attention on inequalities instead of atrocities. In her view, far too much energy is expended on issues like “marriage equality” and not enough on ending genocide or the rape of children. I imagine that social conservatives will appreciate this point and nod in sage approval. It is, after all, utterly absurd to compare Kim Davis to sheriffs like Jim Clark or Laurie Pritchett.
However, it is equally true that Mrs Davis is not a Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttleworth or Fannie Lou Hamer. Her home has not been bombed; she has not been tortured or even beaten for her convictions. Evangelical Christians have not yet faced one fraction of the prejudice and discrimination experienced by black Christians during slavery and segregation. Mrs Davis has gone to jail by choice – a courageous choice, to be sure, but also quite a calculated one. She could have resigned her post or accepted one of the compromises offered in court. But like the proponents of same-sex marriage, she has taken a page from the civil rights movement. She has accepted a jail sentence to illustrate both the strength of her convictions and the her opponents political power and ideological passion.
It seems to me that Davis has exposed the potential for persecution and illustrated why there needs to be more room for philosophical and religious freedom. The state is asserting too much power against the religious conscience and the public hatred of Mrs Davis borders on the terrifying. But this is most emphatically not the beginning of persecution of Christianity in America. Our attention must not be drawn away from genuine evils. For example, we should be more concerned to pressure politicians to confront religious intolerance in China, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Russia.
Christians should not draw our wagons in a circle and summon the militia. We should be seeking deals and compromises whenever possible. Whenever it is possible, and insofar as it depends on us, Christians are ordered to live at peace with everyone. We are commanded to flee persecution if we can; I assume this advice allows Christians to negotiate an end to mistreatment. Christians would do well to follow the guidance of Robert Bolt’s extraordinary defence of the individual conscience, A Man for All Seasons
As the play builds to its conclusion the Catholic humanist Thomas More is informed by his daughter that Parliament has passed a bill demanding he take an oath assenting to Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn – a marriage More regards as both immoral and unlawful. Rather than seizing the opportunity for martyrdom, More immediately asks for the exact wording of the bill in the hope he can take it with a clean conscience.
Listen, Meg, God made the angels to show Him splendour, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind. If He suffers us to come to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can, and, yes, Meg, then we can clamour like champions, if we have the spittle for it. But it’s God’s part, not our own, to bring ourselves to such a pass. Our natural business lies in escaping. If I can take the oath, I will.
There is little social utility in jailing a woman who poses no immediate threat to anyone; those who celebrated Mrs Davis’s incarceration should be ashamed. But there is no great merit to be found in imprisonment when honourable alternatives are available. So Mrs Davis’s actions bring the Christian and the secular world to a crossroads. Each side can continue to use democracy as an instrument to impose its moral vision on others; or they can use this opportunity to seek compromises. It is not beyond the wit of legislators to defuse the conflicts between the secular and the religious conscience. We need only ask if both sides have the will to find solutions.