"The Problem That Intelligent Traditionalists Face"

The so called "Marriage Equality" bandwagon has been rolling across America with the help of a number of Federal courts. Today's youth and a large percentage of adults are in favor of redefining marriage to mean more than just "traditional" male-female marriage. Such things do not happen without an underlying cultural shift.

What causes cultural shifts? Typically people think of the following,

1. Invention (the creation of something novel)
2. Discovery (new knowledge)
3. Diffusion (contact with other cultures)
4. Conflict (war and conquest)

While some might argue that #2 or "New Knowledge" concerning marriage is the primary reason behind the shift in society's opinion about marriage equality, I would argue that the new knowledge of which they speak is not grounded on reality but instead derives from both a loss of "old knowledge" and a flood of false knowledge coming from the primary sources of information from which today's people learn about the world. Carl R. Trueman ( Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary) in a piece over at First Things puts it this way (I have purposely reversed the order of these two paragraphs),

"Most people gain their understanding of selfhood not from reading Thomas Aquinas but from watching The Bold and the Beautiful and following the antics of the Kardashians. We who advocate for traditional marriage and sexuality are at a huge disadvantage in the public square because we simply do not have the access to the kinds of tools exemplified by Will and Grace and Transparent. As we try to argue for our position, our opponents have simply narrated theirs, identifying their revolutionary positions with the reasonable and the normal by using the most apparently harmless and familiar of cultural idioms."  

"Some months ago, I was asked by a student how I would argue in the public square against gay marriage. I answered that I regarded Robert George’s work in the area to be compelling but I also observed that the work had seemingly persuaded nobody to change their minds. The reason for this is simple: Gay marriage has not become normalized through the presentation of arguments (though that is not to deny that many of its proponents have made arguments). It has become normalized through the Will and Grace factor: The impact of comfortable, sentimentalized, middle-class sitcoms, soap operas and their like in which no-one is ever seriously hurt, no action ever has wider social ramifications, and niceness triumphs every time."  

While we traditionalists do not have "Will and Grace" gravitas, we have a narrative which will out live all of the world's sit-coms and celebrities. The Gospel narrative is the story which the world needs to hear, not the shenanigans of the Kardashians or the latest sexual experiments being promoted by the popular media outlets. The Church must remain the unpopular counter cultural voice that can re-tell the Gospel as it has been handed down to us. The Church must repeat the words of Jesus which were as unpopular then as they are today, words like,

“Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?  So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.” Matthew 19:4-6  NKJV