Is Gay Marriage a Candidate for Grafting onto the Tree of Conservatism?

What is Conservativism?

When we think about what it means to be conservative, we tend to focus on the desire to preserve tradition. The conservative is someone who sees all of human history and culture as something like a grand oak tree with sprawling branches. Just to lay eyes upon it is to understand that it has endured for a very long time and that its great size and age reflect powerful capacities for survival. The tree’s branches provide shade and shelter to all who gather beneath it. If the tree develops any rot or disease, the conservative response is to prune the branches, but essentially never to uproot the whole plant. Likewise, there may be innovation, but it will be by virtue of a kind of grafting. The original tree remains, but the new graft adds to the whole.  

Radicals and progressives tend to take a different view of the historico-social tree.  They look at the fruit of centuries, find it wanting on the basis of its flaws — real, imagined, or both — and conclude that it should be uprooted entirely and replaced with something new. It is this impulse that leads regimes such as the French Revolution or the Khmer Rouge to restart the calendar at the year 0 or 1 with the advent of their leadership. This is one way to think of the difference between conservatives and progressives. Conservatives deeply value tradition and the practices and beliefs that have survived for ages. Progressives view such matters skeptically and may assume things that have lasted for a long time simply reflect the influence of power, manipulation, and corruption unjustly honored by virtue of the passage of centuries.  

The difference between the two might be well understood as the difference between the American and the French revolutions. The American Revolution is often referred to as being conservative in nature. America’s founders sought to preserve what they saw as the best of the English political tradition, while jettisoning the monarchy and British governing apparatus they believed had become a threat to their legitimate claims to liberty and self-government. They emphatically did not seek to expel Christian churches or Christian influence in American society. The French Revolution, on the other hand, sought to overthrow both throne and altar and to establish a new total society. That revolution, certainly of the uproot-the-tree sort, engaged in radical political redesign and mass dechristianization (and the liberal use of the guillotine against its opponents).  

Gay marriage within the gates of conservativism

When we think of gay marriage and the embrace of homosexuality in the American mainstream, we may be tempted to view the change as largely a phenomenon of the progressive left. And certainly that has been a significant part of the story as President Barack Obama wove Seneca, Selma, and Stonewall (events pointing to women’s suffrage, black civil rights, and gay liberation) into a kind of American tapestry depicting the victory of progressive movements over a kind of hidebound conservativism.  

But it should not be lost upon us that perhaps the single most effective advocate for the legalization of gay marriage in the United States (and probably the West more generally) was the writer and commentator, Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan did his dissertation on the conservative thinker, Michael Oakeshott, whose view of conservatism tracks with that of our metaphorical tree. Conservatism, by his lights, was a kind of temperament or disposition. Sullivan approached gay marriage from that viewpoint by arguing that marriage is a social good that benefits the people who participate in it. While he conceded that marriage had not previously been a same-sex institution, he believed that making it available to gay couples would actually introduce new stability to their relationships and would provide a variety of social benefits. It would also help to dispel uncertainty in socially significant areas such as health care, adoption, and inheritance. His arguments gained adherents and surely helped move the needle toward a change in the law.  

In the wake of the change that was ultimately more a product of judicial decisions than by actual voting (even California voted against gay marriage in 2008), it is clearly the case that a substantial degree of acceptance has taken place. Mainstream advertisements, movies, and television shows regularly feature gay couples with no indication of revolutionary activity. The New York Times columnist David French, formerly of National Review and the Alliance Defending Freedom, has made the case that in the wake of Obergefell it would be too disruptive to rollback gay marriage as a social and legal institution.  

Revolution or Grafting?

So, the question is whether gay marriage represents something like a radical change that involves uprooting those things that are established or instead just a benign kind of grafting that alters an accepted institution to make room for a modest change.  I would argue the first of those two propositions. Gay marriage has represented a massive break from tradition rather than an incremental one.  Therefore, I would argue, gay marriage should not be viewed as a strong candidate for integration into a conservative view of the world.  

In a recent lecture, Carl Trueman made the point that while Sullivan may have been successful in his advocacy of gay marriage, he seems to feel distress that the innovation has led to the deep confusion many now feel regarding sexual identity. As the gay marriage debate went on, some conservatives argued the change would open the door to any number of unhappy changes. Polyamory was one, and indeed we have seen that practice growing in the popular imagination (and likely in practice).  But the more rapid follow-on change in the wake of gay marriage has been the transgender revolution that led to biological men fully invading the world of women from bathrooms to prisons to sports. Rather than bringing modest change and long term stability to marriage, the transformation of an opposite sex institution into one that can accommodate a variety of pairings have proved to be a gateway rather than a solidifying agent for the social foundation. Based on experience, and experience is a highly relevant indicator for conservatives, gay marriage upsets solid understanding rather than bolstering it.  

Christianity and Gay Marriage

With regard to the Christian faith, the question seems even more clear.  The first thing the Bible tells us about human beings is that they are made in the image of God. But the second thing is that they are made male and female. And the first presentation of their relationship to one another is the complementary, intimate partnership of marriage. That marriage then produces the fruit which will lead to the life of every human being on the planet. There is no question biologically (no matter how we manipulate nature) that children are the product of the union of the male and female.  Aristotle, by the way, identifies the male-female pairing as the fundamental unit of a society because it is only through them that there is a future. During the period when the debate raged the hottest over gay marriage, including at my university at the time, I often told students that they could think about gay marriage however they might wish to do so, but that biblically there was nowhere to go. They could not make out a Christian case for gay marriage. Likewise, I told faculty that while we had no political orthodoxy at our institution, we did have a biblical orthodoxy. The reason to make such a statement was to indicate the necessity of maintaining the biblical understanding of human sexuality.  

It is true that conservatism generally has room for course correction. I would argue that we have seen excellent examples in the form of diminished toleration for irrational prejudice based on skin color and the rejection of familial status or blood as determinants of one’s social value rather than merit. But I do not think same-sex marriage will be the kind of change that offers similar benefit. Instead, it opens the door to social confusion and upheaval of the kinds we have seen in the wake of Obergefell.  The change is not a modest one, but rather affects our fundamental understanding of the relationship between the sexes. And biblically, it is a dead end which can only be reopened via gymnastics of the most unconvincing type.