Let me recount some of the ways in which we modern Christians are confused:
- We are still trying to apply categorical reasoning to creatures and relationships in a world of evolutionary and developmental processes.
- We have no way, even in principle, of saying which of our ancestors was the first creature to fall into the category of `human being’.
- We have males and females being formed by way of events in the womb and the early years of life in which males, for example, are masculinized in some ways and de-feminized in other ways and there’s good reason to believe that much can happen which doesn’t produce a categorical male or female or perhaps does produce a human being who can seemingly be categorized in that simple way but is attracted to members of his or her own sex.
- Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, sexual attraction to members of the same sex might be at least partly voluntary, but we just don’t know. Ignorance is a poor justification for continuing our old ways as a whole and a worse justification for throwing out all our ways. We don’t want to throw out the baby but we do want to throw out the dirty water.
- Americans who claim to be traditionalists have come out strongly against same-sex marriage but haven’t been protesting much against women in near-combat roles and aren’t now protesting against women being assigned directly to combat units. Apparently, traditional men in the United States don’t mind being protected against foreign soldiers by women carrying guns but feel their traditional manhood threatened if two women are allowed to form a legal relationship as spouses.
- We also have Western Christian traditions of sacramental marriage which don’t depend upon any `official’ recognition of the marriage because, as the teachings of the Catholic Church go, the sacrament of marriage involves only a man, a woman, and God; Christian ministers are witnesses and not participants in the Sacrament of marriage; the Church and State provide at most a recording service and a way of helping to handle disagreements about responsibilities to children and disagreements about matters of property or finances. The canon law of the Catholic Church is a strange read on this topic, descending through various ceremonies and relationships, starting with a marriage ceremony in a Mass and ending with a suggestion of sorts that, if no other witness can be found, not even an anthropologist from Mars, then the man and the woman should marry themselves, but only with a bishop’s permission. That, minus the bishop’s permission, was actually the tradition in much of Christian Europe prior to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation—move in together, form a union of man and woman in economic and social dependency upon each other, start a family, and get the marriage blessed when the first baby is baptized.
- The Church of Rome (as a diocese) has, from ancient times, followed Roman traditions in which the patriarch had to approve and `enact’ the marriage and, to protect women and children as men became more mobile in the late Medieval Age, Roman ways were extended to all Catholics by the Fathers of the Council of Trent and various Popes.
- Modern Deistic and atheistic thinkers tried to convert human relations from sacramental bases (yes, all human relations are sacramental, even when evil and exploitive and even when there is no corresponding Sacrament to be celebrated in a liturgy or at least recognized in catechisms) to a contractual foundation more consistent with the Enlightenment’s positivistic and radically individualistic theories of human nature; indeed the men of the Enlightenment thought of all forms of being, including any which might be divine, in terms consistent with their understanding of human nature. (See Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality for a very short discussion of Einstein’s version of this way of thinking about being in which entities are well-formed and independent; relationships are fully external to the entities and don’t cause fundamental changes to them.)
- Catholics and others who try to defend at least some part of their traditions in the 21st century have reached a point where they live according to rather incoherently diffuse understandings of modern empirical knowledge of concrete realms of being and then claim to hold moral and theological beliefs supported by pre-modern understandings of those same realms of being. Adam and Eve were special creations in the Garden of Eden except when we are being treated for cancer or waiting for a transplant of an organ from a pig.
- Having failed to develop new understandings of created being, including human being, even with the vast piles of modern empirical knowledge; that is, having failed to respond creatively and honestly and energetically to the Creator and the ideas He manifested in Creation, modern Christians are starting to respond instead to the initiatives of those who propose programs and understandings of human being which can’t possibly be seen as consistent with any possible Christian views.
- Those who are part of the intellectual establishment of Christianity, though having failed to respond to God’s Creation, seem blind to the need to nurture or find thinkers who can respond properly. “We’re the experts and we’re determined to remain in control even if we do nothing useful during this time of crisis.”
In recent months, I’ve noticed that conservative Christian thinkers are increasingly prone to negotiate away their traditional positions on marriage and other sexual issues. They have shown no such willingness to consider the possibility that the world is proving to be richer and more complex than those traditional positions would allow. In other words, believing their traditions hold God’s ordained truths, they are willing to negotiate away the manifestation of those truths in our laws and social customs but they aren’t willing to consider the possibility that their understanding of God’s world might need to be updated to consider a mountain of inconvenient empirical facts or perhaps they simply have not the personal characteristics to respond in a creative manner to our problems and opportunities.
We have no right to voluntarily adopt human customs at odds with the truths God manifested in Creation but we do have a right and a strong obligation to honestly and courageously explore that Creation and to try to come to an understanding true to it, an understanding which sees Creation as unified and coherent and complete.
I’ve found myself to be increasingly unable to defend understandings of human morality which depend upon inherited mistakes such as the use of categorical reasoning in a world of evolutionary and developmental processes. Like it or not, we live in Darwin’s world and not Plato’s world, though we should remember the great amount of wisdom contained in the thoughts of that courageous Athenian. I’ve also decided it to be unwise and even hubristic to think I can come to any firm conclusions at this time about issues such as sexual relationships involving men who feel like men but are attracted to other men or men who feel like women or women of similar sorts. There are confusions inside at least some of these human beings, confusions of a genetic or developmental nature. There is much work to be done in trying to make sense of our own human beings and our world and it will be hard to do this work since we are still being flooded by new empirical facts, some of it at least partly digested to the state of knowledge. It’s understandable but not justifiable that we Christians protect our selves rather than trying to properly understand and channel this flood of new knowledge or sometimes false knowledge.
We modern human beings can reasonably anticipate some medical miracles from—perhaps—infusions of `good’ genetic matter, such as perhaps in Huntington’s disease (which destroys regions of the brain) or other disorders caused by relatively well-defined genetic problems. Why are we not willing to wonder if the complex genetic factors and developmental processes of sexual identity and preference might not play an important role? We can learn at Huntington’s disease that “Expansion of a CAG triplet repeat stretch within the Huntingtin gene results in a different (mutant) form of the protein, which gradually damages cells in the brain, through mechanisms that are not fully understood.” Do we tell victims of this disease they should overcome their problems by way of freely willed efforts?
A recent study of brain development processes, Unique Epigenomic Code Identified During Human Brain Development, speaks of the complexity of these processes, in the context of mental disorders, but similar comments apply to a multitude of variations which occur during the development of a human being:
“The human brain has been called the most complex system that we know of in the universe,” says Ryan Lister, co-corresponding author on the new paper, previously a postdoctoral fellow in Ecker’s laboratory at Salk and now a group leader at The University of Western Australia. “So perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised that this complexity extends to the level of the brain epigenome. These unique features of DNA methylation that emerge during critical phases of brain development suggest the presence of previously unrecognized regulatory processes that may be critically involved in normal brain function and brain disorders.”
At present, there is consensus among neuroscientists that many mental disorders have a neurodevelopmental origin and arise from an interaction between genetic predisposition and environmental influences (for example, early-life stress or drug abuse), the outcome of which is altered activity of brain networks. The building and shaping of these brain networks requires a long maturation process in which central nervous system cell types (neurons and glia) need to fine-tune the way they express their genetic code.
[See Epigenomics for an explanation of the epigenome which is, for my current purposes, a further complication of the ways in which our genes work, but note that this page explains that the workings of genes can be altered by a variety of outside factors, such as the chemicals we’re exposed to in our daily lives or, as I’ve noted in past discussions of research in this area, the eating habits of our grandmothers—see Our Grandchildren Are What We Eat.]
The masculinization or feminization of the brain involve complex brain development processes as well as complex development processes in glands and other parts of the body.
The point of all of this, and also the point of the pre-modern Christian understandings of human sexuality, is that our bodily stuff, brain and muscles and glands, define our possibilities including the ones we realize in becoming `me’, but modern empirical knowledge tells us our pre-modern understandings were overly simplistic and sometimes just plain wrong. We are being forced, by knowledge of God’s Creation, toward a richer and more complex, though not yet coherently organized, understanding of our bodily stuff and also of our relationships to other human beings and to the rest of Creation and to our Creator.
I’m not willing to reconsider any serious issue on the basis of current misunderstandings of God’s Creation, misunderstandings of human being both individual and communal, misunderstandings of the relationship between abstract and concrete forms of created being. I’m willing to respond honestly and courageously to God’s Creation, in full faith that whatever might be true, for example, of apparent confusions in human sexual nature and sexual attractions, it will prove to be consistent with God’s story in which the Body of Christ is developing, a Body in which God’s friends will retain their individuality but will also be fully that complete (communal) man, the perfect Christ, in St. Paul’s terms.
In other words: I’m willing to consider the possibility that we Christians have gotten some important ideas about Creation wrong but I refuse to believe, or to act as if, our views about Creation are true to God’s thoughts but we have a right to compromise on issues of moral truths for political and other reasons which are apparently more important than presumed moral truths.