Fecund Civilization

Let me say something controversial.

Human civilization depends upon the existence of male and female, marriage, and procreation. 

I know. Jaw dropping. Where’s the panic button? Who let this hatred in here?

Wait. I’m not done yet. There’s more. 

The most valuable natural resource in all the world is people. And people come in only two varieties, male and female, and they are both necessary for the creation of new human beings. 

I think I just heard Al Gore’s pancreas pop. Pretty sure it’s not supposed to do that. Somebody help him.  

But this is all biological fact. It is pure science, straightforward logic, unyielding reality, confirmed and reaffirmed for six thousand years and counting. And we now find ourselves in the awkward position of wondering whether saying such things out loud is even allowed any more. We know where babies come from, and we know how they come, in one of two varieties, all binary-like. Yes, and all of this is also a theological fact, but it also has massive social, political, economic, and cultural results and ramifications.

Well, I might as well say something else controversial. 

In terms of historic, material cause and effect, heterosexual, life-long, monogamous marriage is the foundation for and driving force of free market economic prosperity.  

There are theological and spiritual foundations for free markets, but speaking of the immediate social foundation of free markets, we must begin with heterosexual, life-long, monogamous, and let’s use an F-word shall we? fecund marriage. Look it up. It’s a good word. Yes, of course people can result from one night stands and polygamous unions and everything in between, but do a simple survey and you’ll find dramatically different results. Everybody wants to pretend like it’s all random and inscrutable, but there are dramatic differences in the overall outcomes of children raised in stable heterosexual monogamous marriages and everything else. And yet, we are witnessing the attempted dismantling of this central institution before our very eyes. Of all the socio-economic insanities, this is near the top of the pile. Broken marriage vows give us rates of crime, substance abuse, violence, suicide off the charts. And yet the one thing we will not do as a society is protect that. We will throw money and education at anything but that. Anything but heterosexual, monogamous marriage.

The modern incarnation of what we call “the Left” or “secular liberalism” or so-called “progressivism” is simply and fundamentally a resolute hatred of the world as it actually is and the deep-seated demand that it be different, an obstinate quest to make it different, to remake the world into something else. This is partially reasonable and mostly insane. I say it’s partially reasonable as there is a fair bit about the world that is in fact wrong and has gone badly. Let us give them that. The leftists can see out their eyes, and they see disasters and disease and shootings and poverty and injustice just like you and me, but they have no coherent accounting for it. I’m not saying that they don’t actually see it, they simply can’t account for why it’s evil and wrong, and therefore they cannot have any reasonable or coherent answer to any of it.  Again, I’m not saying they don’t have any answer, or that every semblance of an answer is wicked or wrong, I’m simply saying they have no consistent, coherent answer to it.

If there is no transcendent, objective Good, Truth – what Aristotle called the Unmoved Mover, or what the great monotheistic religions have called “God,” then what, pray tell me, is our standard of judgment, our measure of progress? How can you measure better or worse, good or evil, just or unjust? The leftist progressive instinctively knows that rape is evil, but the leftist progressive cannot account for the category of evil, beyond human consensus or preference. But that amounts to morality by votes, which is neither dependable nor predictable and is therefore hardly a morality at all. In fact, morality by votes could just as easily be wicked injustice. Can’t you think of any cultural atrocities perpetrated by large majorities in the history of the world? Since when were mobs judicious?

The first two tenets of unbelief are (1) there is no god and (2) I hate him. And everything follows from there, and if you’re following me carefully here, the tenets are not exactly in agreement. The second tenet is an irrational response to the first. For if there is no god there is nothing and no one to hate. And if there is no god, you might as well love or sniff or ogle or blip or swashgluddle. If there is no god, there is no meaning, no reason, and these sensations, thoughts, ideas are all chaos and nothing burbling in the cosmos, and there is no good or evil, no justice or injustice, no such thing as love or hate, and certainly no such thing as progress or regress. Ok, sure, you can make-believe such things, but you have no accounting for them. You just have, like, your opinion, man.

This is why the LGBT-Equality Act agenda is not merely a small mistake, a little oops. The whole thing is trying to undo reality as God made it. Now first off, let’s be clear, they can’t actually unmake the world as God made it. They can put two boys together or two girls together as many times as they like and they will never succeed in creating a new human being. And putting a dress on a boy or mutilating the body of a girl doesn’t count. That’s just really lame. We all saw you do it. Nothing magical or amazing about it.

Since Darwinian chaos cannot create life, secular progressives are stuck with stealing, and this is why atheism, secularism, and progressivism will always tend toward socialism and communism and various forms of collectivism. It’s a worldview of theft, a politics of envy. They want the money that free enterprise makes. They want the children that heterosexual marriage creates. They want the joy that Christian forgiveness bestows. But they want it all without submitting to the God who created the world this way and sent His Son to save it. I’m not saying it’s impossible to be an atheist and believe in free markets, but I would say that an atheist who believes in free markets is doing so for more pragmatic reasons (it works) than transcendent belief, and that means that over time, it might also work to take a little off the top, cut a corner here or there, and pull the levers under the table. Why not? If it works, you might as well, right? 

But monogamous, life-long, heterosexual marriage is the foundation of supply-side free-market economics. And the central thing it “supplies” is people. And in a stable Christian marriage those people grow up to be productive producers, not only of more people, but also many other supplies of food and skills and artifacts and tools — multitudes of man hours of fruitful labor and what we call science, technology, education, and business ventures. And my entire point here is to simply say that Christians continue to embrace all of this unapologetically and we really must be busy reminding the world of these basic facts. Yes, it is the way God made the world. It is a theological fact, but it is also a scientific, sociological, political, and economic fact.

And so regardless of whether your local city council openly confesses Jesus as Lord (although they should), they do have a vested interest in the livelihood of their neighborhood, and part of the Church’s job is to disciple the nations in the facts. And the Lord Jesus has given us this moment, this opportunity to remind our neighbors, our mayors, our governors, our senators and judges, that heterosexual, monogamous marriage is the foundation of all free society. Whatever they make of the LGBT blitzkrieg, they must defend heterosexual, lifelong, monogamous marriage if they would defend civilization. They have a vested interest in boys growing up knowing that they are boys and girls growing up knowing that they are girls. Civil magistrates, CEOs, venture capitalists, college presidents, school superintendents, and anyone remotely concerned with the future have a vested interest in the stable and relatively reliable production of people that comes from Christian marriage.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash