Listening to this latest installment of Allan Carlson being interviewed on Issues Etc., I kept thinking about the elephant in the room – the one that was never addressed.
He's lamenting what he calls the demise of the Augustinian view of marriage and traces the fifty-plus year course of marriage secularisation in American culture. He highlights the development of divorce law as well as a cultural shift in attitudes about marriage – what it's for and to what end.
The elephant in the room is the question of civil marriage itself – as any good Catholic Integralist would point out to him. Integralists will argue this is the end result of a civil marriage paradigm. Once you de-sacramentalise the institution and get the Church out of it, it's inevitable that its meaning, utility, and ethos will change.
Carlson is arguing for what could be described as a sacral view of marriage – another expression of cultural or even Civic Christianity, but is unwilling to go as far as Roman Catholic Integralism. The most recent model or example of this would be under Franco in Spain. Non-Church weddings were functionally illegitimate. Protestants living in the country could legally wed, but such a rejection of the Catholic order was a political statement and subject to bureaucratic resistance and even potential danger. It could be described as a soft reiteration of the medieval practice. And it should be noted, a failure to understand the medieval paradigm leads to some of the confusion in the historical record when it comes to the marriage status of 'heretics' – which in some cases were Biblically guided Christians resisting apostate Rome. The more extreme or principled groups would refuse to wed in a Roman Church and exercised a private ceremony. They were wed in Biblical terms but when caught in the nets of the Inquisition or some other ecclesiastical body, they were treated as an unmarried couple – and their children reckoned as bastards – and often handed over to monasteries and convents to be raised as Catholics.
For these reasons, Protestants celebrated and helped usher in the era of civil marriage – which also became more pragmatic in the context of post-Enlightenment religious pluralism.
Hypocrisy also played a role in the value-shift as the masses watched the aristocracy make a mockery of the institution. Their great fears surrounding adultery were not the moral questions but the exposure and degradation of their order in the eyes of the public. And yet the scandals emerged and considering the way in which the Church (especially in England) was connected to the aristocracy – all the institutions in question became something of a joke.
Carlson is inconsistent. He incessantly promotes a sacralist view of society but seems to want to retain it in the context of Classical Liberalism. I say 'seems' because every time I hear him interviewed (and when one considers whom he associates with), one is left to wonder if he really advocates liberalism in any form.
For my part, the abandonment of liberalism is no crime or sin. The philosophical framework is (I would argue) incompatible with the New Testament. But to argue that sacralism is the only alternative is to fall into fallacy and false dilemma. As strangers and pilgrims we need not commit to the models the world would provide – nor those proffered by the False Church, no matter how old or venerable they may seem to be. I refer here to both the Liberal Synthesis that's been sold to the Church since the eighteenth century and of course the older Throne and Altar paradigms which arose in the time of the murderer Constantine with his insidious visions and ecclesiastical meddling. Both systems are anti-Biblical and fraudulent and yet the former is at least one that dissenting Christians can live under. The Throne and Altar paradigm persecutes dissent, the threat of Liberalism is the seduction of freedom and prosperity and the subsequent confusion of the system's values with that of Christian doctrine and ethics – the very thing that has happened in the modern West, and especially in places like Britain and America.
Carlson insists these modern understandings of marriage are detrimental to young people.
What young people?
Is he speaking of the young people in the Church?
These understandings can only affect the Church when ecclesiastical leaders blur the line of distinction between the Church and the World – the very kind of sacral confusion Carlson is promoting.
If the Church maintains its distinct identity, then there's little fear of influence.
As far as the world is concerned – how is this a concern of the Church? We certainly lament the course of sin in the world but nowhere does the New Testament suggest that it's our task to transform the world. Indeed Paul in 1 Corinthians 5 dismisses this as futile and seems wholly unconcerned with the world as such. In fact in this passage (among others) the New Testament rejects the pedagogical view of the law vis-à-vis society being put forth by Carlson.
We evangelize the lost and in that capacity wage spiritual warfare against the claims of the celestial thrones and dominions, but to think that legislating Christian views of marriage will somehow transform society is folly. It is not supported by the New Testament and for that matter history testifies against these efforts. One can create a kind of Potemkin Village version of the Kingdom, a cheap facade or veneer, but such forms cannot generate substance and there's no basis to believe the Spirit calls us to employ such means. The problem then isn't the laws of society but the Church and its abandonment of antithesis with its embrace of sacralism.
We can look back at what seems like 'better' times and yet was it really? It may have been a more comfortable setting for us to live in but that didn't help the lost. Even if they respected Christianity on some level, that did not save them. And most importantly, the obsolete social order that all of us (of a certain age) remember, caused us to be at peace with the world – to let our guard down. As bad as things seem to be in terms of the Church and society, I think in some respects the current arrangement is more healthy, more conducive to vigilance. The problem from my vantage point is not the world acting out in its lost-ness, but the response of the Church and its lamentations over what was in the end – a false kingdom known as Christendom.
In its fury to recapture the culture, the hireling-led Church is falling into evil alliances, abandoning Christian ethics, and constantly redefining itself in order to score 'victories' and find pragmatic working solutions.
I don't enjoy having to turn off the radio, or give up on websites because of the barrage of sodomy and other filth. I don't enjoy seeing freaks and degenerates strutting through the town square as it were. But to me – this is only the end result of the system to which the West has embraced. It was inevitable. The Scripture's hints about Sodom in places like Ezekiel 16 have not been heeded and so history repeats itself.
The problem (as I see it) is the Church has not reckoned with this. It's not an easy pill to swallow – to acknowledge that generations of respected leaders were wrong and led the Church astray on these vital points. Western Liberalism is not Christian and now that it has decayed into a decadent state (as all societies and empires do), its real ugliness and internal contradictions have come to the fore. The Church is in crisis and leaders like Carlson have little to offer other than the embrace of Right-wing extremism as we've seen him and plenty of others do.
See also:
https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2019/08/american-evangelicals-and-european.html
https://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2017/03/carlson-on-capitalism.html
https://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-christian-right-and-lega.html
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