Capps argues that we should develop separate social institutions to handle two things which heretofore have both been handled by marriage: the social needs of the natural family, and the social needs of groups (whether in a sexual relationship or not) who cohabit and share assets. We seem to be entering a period of history where, in contrast to the previous period, significant numbers of people will cohabit and share assets without forming natural families. Mere justice, Capps argues, demands that we develop social institutions to serve the legitimate needs of these non-familial cohabiters (that’s my term, not Capps’; let’s call them NFCs for lack of something better).

I see three issues that will need to be tackled for this to become a viable way forward. One is that NFCs who are in a sexual relationship may have social needs different from those who are not. I’m not sure this problem is big enough to need to be addressed, but at the least we need to think about it. Sexuality has social consequences other than babies, and one traditional function of marriage has been to channel sexual behavior for legitimate social reasons other than childrearing. Capps argues that one reason redefining marriage to include gay couples fails to do justice to NFCs is that it doesn’t provide for the legitimate social needs of NFCs who are not in a sexual relationship; this is true, but developing a social institution that lumps all NFCs together may fail to provide for all of society’s necessary interests in channeling sexuality.

A bigger issue is what we call the proposed new social institution. The real value of Capps’ idea as a way forward is that it names reality in a new way to accommodate the changing needs of justice. But one of the key sticking points in the marriage debate is that advocates of gay marriage believe that gay people need marriage to participate in society on equal terms as first-class citizens. They don’t want a two-tier system where their unions are a “silver medal” for those who don’t choose the natural family. So this new name for the reality of NFCs cannot be something that suggests it’s a sort of secondary appendage to marriage.

This leads me to what is perhaps the most important issue: how natural families would be treated under the new system Capps is proposing. As I see it, his proposal is a lot more likely to be adopted if it handles all cohabiting and asset-sharing through one institution, which natural families and NFCs would all participate in on the same terms. Then marriage would be an additional institution which, legally, would exist solely to handle the unique needs of childrearing. Of course, outside the legal realm we would continue to view marriage more holistically, as a metaphysical union that expresses the love of Christ and his people; I’m only talking about changing what marriage involves legally. I would not see this as a “redefinition” of marriage, but as a constructive reform that brings our legal arrangements more fully into alignment with the reality of 1) which aspects of marriage must involve the law and which need not, and 2) which aspects of marriage involve the law in ways unique to marriage, as opposed to claims on the law that marriage shares in common with non-marital social needs.

Capps’ proposal may not be likely to resolve our marriage debate in the short term. But it may be the seed of an idea that could grow into a viable social compromise for our children’s time.

The most remarkable thing no one has remarked upon, as far as I can tell, is the disconnect between the Melissa Harris-Perry view about socializing children and what I think we can call the Melissa Harris-Perry view about privatization of snipping the spines of babies. If we all own everyone else’s children, then Kermit Gosnell killed—barbarically slaughtered, actually—Harris-Perry’s babies. Why isn’t she angry about that?

Elsewhere on NRO, Peter Kirsanow demolishes the idea that the media blackout in the Gosnell case might be partly excused as a symptom of excessive racial sensitivity:

To this, most may be prompted to repeat Hillary Clinton’s infamous response, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” Scores of babies were allegedly slaughtered and women horribly brutalized. The race of the victims is, or should be, irrelevant.

One point Kirsanow doesn’t make, but could have: Some white people support abortion rights precisely because it disproportionately affects minorities. Ruth Bader Ginsburg edged toward this view in an interview with the New York Times in 2009:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

“That we don’t want to have too many of.” Just a quick reminder, in case you’ve forgotten: Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a sitting justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Far from being an excuse, the race factor, if anything, makes the media all the more culpable.

The empty tomb—a new life of victory. If the text of the New Testament says anything at all, it says Christians are not only to repent from sin, but enter into a new and Spirit-transformed life. It seems to me that the resurrection provides the Christological basis for this imperative; it carries us beyond the atonement for sin into the new life of victory over sin. Another way of saying this is that the empty tomb proves sin is not only atoned for but also defeated. This is why Paul says our faith is worthless if we deny the resurrection. In the last century, too many of us Evangelicals have been content to offer a “fire insurance” faith; make your decision for Christ and receive your Get Out of Hell Free card. This problem is not only about achieving an ethical standard in our own lives (“personal holiness”) but also about our influence in society. When we don’t live out the resurrection victory, we don’t manifest the Spirit in the way we live our lives in human civilization. Today it has become commonplace for Evangelical leaders to bemoan this “cheap grace,” but the chorus of voices bemoaning it has not yet translated into an effective solution to the problem.

The appearances—Incarnation as permanent reality. Living out our redemption means overcoming the dualistic thinking that keeps the gospel in a box labeled “church activities, missions, social programs, etc.” The rest of life—our daily work in homes, workplaces and neighborhoods—gets cut off from the gospel. Evangelicals love to challenge “dualism.” We use that term like it’s a swear word. And rightly so! While the Old Testament challenges dualism by teaching the immanence and omnipotent providence of God, that challenge is radically sharpened in the New Testament by the Incarnation—the Christological joining of the material with the divine, the temporal with the eternal. One might have expected the Incarnation to be a temporary measure designed to accomplish redemption, with Christ simply returning to godhood after his death. But Christ’s appearances after the resurrection emphasize his bodily resurrection, forcing us to realize that the Incarnation is a permanent reality. The challenge to dualism implies a perpetual imperative to bring all our lives under Christ’s lordship. If our lives in human civilization do not manifest the Spirit, we’re back to dualism. The resurrected Christ is, no doubt, a transcendent king with radical power over creation (he walks through walls, for example) but he is also the benevolent king who cares for our needs within creation (he gives Peter and friends a huge catch of fish). We should follow suit by living as responsible stewards, fruitful agents of social flourishing, rather than dropping out or going with the flow.

The Great Commission—disciples, not converts. Before the resurrected Christ takes his earthly leave of the church, he commissions it. Today, most Evangelicals think of the Great Commission in terms of making converts. But the actual command is to “make disciples” (Matthew 28:19). What is the difference between a superficial “convert” and a fully formed “disciple”? The transformation of daily life—which is lived in human civilization. Making auto parts, scrubbing floors, doing spreadsheets and so forth is where the rubber hits the road for discipleship. The social order seems like a huge thing, but it’s really the water we swim in every day as we do our jobs. A growing number of Evangelicals are looking to the Babylonian exile as a model for how Christians should relate to the social order. Certainly the divine command to “seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7) should spark a great deal of profitable reflection for us in the post-Christendom context. But so should the Great Commission. The coming of Christ matters! The Old Testament church was sent to Babylon with orders to manifest love and peace within its social life, but it was not sent there for that purpose. By contrast, because Christ’s work has been accomplished, the New Testament church is sent out precisely for the purpose of transforming the way people live their lives in the social order of every society—“make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).

The Ascension—Jesus as king of the universe. This commissioning implies we cannot be passive in the face of human culture. Certainly, as champions of religious freedom, Evangelicals are right in their desire to avoid “Christianizing” society using state power. However, this should not become an excuse for describing the social world outside the walls of the church as a place where Satan reigns and King Jesus has no place. While God was always really in charge of the universe, the cosmic kingship of Jesus enters a new and more dramatic phase with the Ascension. Jesus prefaces the Great Commission by declaring that “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18). The Ascension proves it. The empty tomb shows that sin and death have been knocked off their throne; the Ascension shows Jesus has taken his rightful place there. It’s true that Jesus is king of the church in a special way, and we can never erase the boundary between the church and the world. But Jesus is also king of the universe, and that matters. We must be agents of Jesus’ cosmic kingship in addition to being citizens of his special kingdom in the church.

Pentecost—restored for city-building. How can we become agents of Jesus’ cosmic kingship without using state power to “Christianize” society? Pentecost points to an answer. The gift of tongues at Pentecost reverses the confusion of tongues at Babel, so the meaning of Pentecost is partly determined by how we understand Babel. The point of Babel is that sin has ruined human efforts at city-building; after the human race at large is alienated from God, people place their confidence and security not in God but in the development of civilization. God sees that this will end in disaster, so he places a limit on their ability to develop their civilizations by confusing their tongues. But after Christ’s victory over sin, Christians are reconciled to God and no longer require these restraints. The leash is off! We are empowered to build cities again—to manifest the glory of God by carrying out cultural tasks that build up human civilization.

Pentecost is a hopeful place to close. As far as we still have to go, we have the Lord’s promise that the Spirit is always with us and will guide and empower the church. As we live into our vocations—as workers, as family members, as citizens, as members of local communities, etc.—we have amazing opportunities to renew the social expression of Christianity for the coming generation. We are gifted with creative power as stewards in the imago Dei, equipped for work, and with redemptive power as redeemed agents of kingdom vocation. The ultimate victory is already won, but the day-by-day struggle remains. Let’s get to it.

Matthew, what I find most fascinating about those Randinalia is how they reveal her irrationality. Her responses are not even remotely tracking the actual content of Lewis’ argument; they’re more like conditioned reflexes than reasoning. It’s clear that she perceives how Lewis’ argument is a deadly threat to all she holds dear (Victor Reppert called it “C.S. Lewis’ Dangerous Idea”). This perception cannot possibly be irrelevant to the fact that she so willfully misconstrues what he says, distorting it out of all recognition in her own mind. It’s the argumentative equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting, “la la la, can’t hear you!”

Even on the points where Lewis’ argument is weakest (such as his association of modern science with demonology), in her eagerness to make Lewis out to be a fiend Rand throws away all the really useful argumentative weapons she might have deployed against him. If she had only had the self-discipline to track his argument accurately, she could have demolished it. It reminds me of a line from Pascal: The habitual liar cannot tell the truth even when doing so would be to his advantage.

The title of your post was well chosen. She didn’t hate the argument because she thought it was false; she thought it was false because she hated it. Alas, this was all too characteristic.

I have to question Alister McGrath’s insistence (linked in this morning’s First Links) that the date of C.S. Lewis’ conversion “clearly needs review.” Lewis recounted in his autobiography Surprised by Joy that he converted to theism—not Christianity, yet—during “Trinity Term 1929,” that is, between April 28 and June 22. McGrath’s four reasons for demanding Lewis’ recollection must be challenged are as follows:

1. There was “no sign of a significant change in tone or mood” of his works at the time.
2. His correspondence at the time of his father’s death in September “makes no reference at all to any impact of a belief in God.”
3. Lewis wrote to Owen Barfield in a state of spiritual crisis, sounding like he was coming up upon a conversion but not yet converted, on Feb. 3, 1930.
4. The changes in behavior Lewis attributes to his conversion (such as attending chapel) suddenly start showing up in his letters in October 1930.

There are several problems with this. A conversion does not always translate into speech and action immediately. Even when Lewis identifies changes that followed his conversion, he doesn’t say they happened right away. Such a gap may be particularly likely to be present in this particular conversion. Most important, this was an intellectual conversion. He changed from believing in the pantheistic god of English Hegelianism to the transcendent god of Berkeley (a figure he identifies in Surprised by Joy as representing the view he changed to and the reasons for it) but not yet to the revealed God of the Scriptures or the history-changing God of G.K. Chesterton or the heart-transforming God of George MacDonald.

Also, he writes in Surprised by Joy that he was relationally estranged from his father and ashamed to admit to his friends and academic colleagues the truth about his selfish life; this may have slowed the process of communication. Plus, we know that in general the pre-conversion C.S. Lewis was (how shall we put this delicately?) a man who knew how to compartmentalize his emotions. Moreover, I beileve (under correction from McGrath or any other scholars who know this better than I do) that we do not have reliable information about the dates of Lewis’ progress from theism to Christianity. Who is to say the conversion he was beginning to experience in 1930 wasn’t this latter conversion? That would make sense of the evidence.

Granted, Lewis wrote Surprised by Joy two decades after the fact and had confessed to difficulty with dates, so the presumption in favor of his recollection is not especially strong. Still, the very fact that he usually doesn’t give dates for these movements and does give a date in this case adds some strength to it.

McGrath has done a great deal of historical study that I haven’t done, so I’m perfectly ready to be convinced by him. But he’ll have to come up with better evidence than he has so far presented.

Based on what you write, I would identify two main points of disagreement. (I would also quibble with some of the factual assertions you quote from outside sources in your post, but that’s not really worth getting into.)

1) Your whole post is predicated on the assumption that to whatever extent you can show a failure of rationality on the part of the buyer (in this case, the company, which is purchasing the executive’s work), to that extent you have demonstrated that the price is not rationally related to the real value of the thing being purchased. This assumption comes through clearly in the hinge of your argument, which is your statement that “if that rise is not merely the result of executive talent or the natural move of the free market, then we could try to rein in CEOs’ compensation without suffering dire economic consequences.”

The assumption is false. It stems from a conflation of the subjective rationality of the buyer with the objective operation of the price system and (even more fundamentally) the fallacy of thinking that it is possible to evaluate prices quantitatively against some standard of value that is independent of the subjective valuations of buyers and sellers.

Let’s say I buy bananas at Safeway for $3 a bunch when I would have preferred to buy them for $2 a bunch at Target, for the sole reason that I was unaware Target was selling them for $2. Let’s further stipulate that my lack of awareness of the better price is attributable to a blameworthy defect in rationality on my part (rather than, say, a rational and legitimate judgment that I have more valuable things to do with my time than shop around for better banana prices). Even so, this contributes pricisely nothing to consideration of such questions as whether Safeway is acting unjustly in charging $3, or if the “real” value of a bunch of bananas (or the ”ideal” value or the “rational” value or any other term you choose) is $3 or $2 or some other number.

Thomas Aquinas devoted a good deal of attention to deconstructing these fallacies; see John Mueller’s Redeeming Economics for a thoughtful consideration of Thomistic price theory.

2) Your key statement (“If that rise is not merely the result of executive talent or the natural move of the free market, then we could try to rein in CEOs’ compensation without suffering dire economic consequences”) also assumes that if we grant some entity—unspecified in your post—an arbitrary power to engage in a large-scale price fixing scheme affecting the leadership of every major company in America, this scheme A) might succeed in actually reducing executive compensation, B) might do so without creating massive disruptions throughout the economy, and C) might do so without dehumanizing the persons affected.

A) will not happen because price controls never actually exercise much control over the price; what they mostly do is transfer a part of the price into non-monetary forms of payment; B) will not happen because, in sharp contrast to “safety net” programs that don’t directly interfere with the price system, price controls have a devastating effect on whatever sector of the economy is subjected to them—just try to rent an apartment in Manhattan; C) will not happen because price controls must always, by their very nature, grant the controlling class arbitrary (and therefore dehumanizing) power over the controlled class.

John Paul II’s critique of socialism in Centesimus Annus provides all the basic ideas at work here. His sharp distinction between protecting the dignity of the vulnerable on the one hand, and on the other hand arbitrarily limiting or tearing down the success of those who get ahead through what he calls ”know-how, technology and skill,” is in strong continuity with Aquinas’ contributions to price theory and remains an important touchstone of Christian ethical engagement with this whole set of issues.

The topic of income disparities is another example. If you want to understand this phenomenon, you have to start with the fact that the aggregate inequality numbers everyone’s freaked out about are really driven by an explosive growth in incomes for a tiny number of people. A combination of very long-term structural and cultural changes (most of them good, such as greater freedom to choose marriage partners and greater educational opportunities) is coming together to dramatically increase both the development and the economic deployment of certain highly specialized human abilities. Most of these gifts fall into one of two categories: various forms of the ability to create and use systems of symbols (such as images, words and mathematical formulae) and various forms of the ability to predict and influence human decisionmaking. A small portion of the population possesses these gifts in extreme measure, and our civilization is getting better and better at helping this population nurture their gifts and put them to good use in ways that (in most cases) bring incalculable benefit to all of us.

No force on earth is going to prevent those people from making very large sums of money. It’s quite simple: The number of people in the world who are capable of doing a good job running Apple or Exxon or Wal-Mart is extremely small; the consequences of those companies being poorly run would be catastrophic for millions of people; therefore the tiny group of people capable of running those companies well is going to command extreme salaries. This would be true regardless of our economic system, law, policy, or what set of moral values predominated in the culture.

While Lindsey is right that hatred of the social outsider did create some stigmatization of the rich during the postwar generation, Krugman’s suggestion that executive salaries were kept in check mostly by fear of stigma is laughable. That generation of executives was magnificently indifferent to public opinion; they bear no resemblance to today’s executives, who grovel before the cameras, cringe at any slightest word that might make them look bad in the press, and offer themselves up as diligent servants to any politician who threatens to make them a public scapegoat. The postwar titans of industry didn’t care what you thought of their salaries.

Executive salaries were kept in check during that time mostly because the executives were much less capable. They weren’t worth paying as much. If you doubt it, consider the fact that almost all the dominant industries of that era are now either extinct or lining up for endless government bailouts, primarily as a result of poor decisionmaking by their executives during the postwar generation.

To the extent that high salaries are being stigmatized now, that represents not the return of an old stigma (well, not primarily that) but the introduction of something new. It’s a response to a new situation in the underlying social structure—the emergence of an overclass of extreme achievers. The Occupy Wall Street response was unhelpful, but they were not wrong to percieve that society is now run by people who don’t seem to be part of the same culture they are, and who therefore may not share their values or have an interest in their well-being.

All this is expertly canvassed in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and anyone who’s worried about the problem of the new overclass should read that book.

The big question to my mind is whether the GOP follows the pattern of the Democrats in the last generation and becomes a party of economic interests, or manages to find a voice for an economic ideal that can at least partially subordinate those interests. That, in turn, will probably be settled by the outcome of the distinct-but-not-separate conversation going on in the conservative movement.

Right now, the position staked out by IAV is the one most likely to find a positive reception in the halls of cultural power. The future terms of discussion about marriage will probably depend on who engages with that caucus and how they do it. Could we build a cross-ideological movement to combat divorce that brought together people like the IAV caucus and people like ourselves? Such coalitions are not uncommon—just look at how an issue like immigration scrambles all the usual ideological alignments. Suppose divorce became a similar cross-cutting, ideology-scrambling issue? That would redraw the battle lines in our favor, I think – even on the gay marriage issue. The marriage movement needs some entrepreneurial thinking.

U.S. education law is so favorable to the state that I doubt the courts will be of much use in preventing overregulation of school choice programs regardless of design. Thankfully, to date they have not been much needed. We’ve had school choice for twenty-three years (actually, Maine and Vernont have had vouchers in small towns for almost 150 years) and regulatory encroachment has been at most a minor problem. We tend to win those battles in the legislature.