More on the Newsweek Case for Gay Marriage

Thanks to Nathaniel Peters for calling our attention to Christianity Today ‘s response to the Newsweek gay-marriage debacle. CT’s response is brilliant and truly devastating. I do have one quibble, though.

They say,

All this would be infuriating and insulting if it weren’t finally laughable and sad. It suggests one of three things. It could mean that Meacham and Miller are simply ignorant of the nuanced and careful biblical arguments that religious conservatives have made. But this is doubtful, since as journalists of the topic, they have surely been immersed in the literature.

The folks at CT are, no doubt, erring on the side of Christian charity (or, hermeneutical charity, as they say). But I’m afraid they have radically underestimated the ignorance of journalists on the topic of religion generally, and on questions related to elementary Biblical hermeneutics in particular. The assumption that these journalists are “immersed in the literature” is far too generous. I’m tempted to say that their knowledge of these matters is about at the elementary Sunday School level, but that would be an insult to elementary Sunday School teachers everywhere.

The rank incoherence of Meacham’s and Miller’s argument is nicely exposed in a co-authored piece ” No Case for Homosexuality in the Bible ” by FT’s Joseph Bottum, Biola University philosophy professor John Mark Reynolds, and Mormon elder Bruce D. Porter.

In the latest issue of Newsweek , editor Jon Meacham explains: “To argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt—it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.” Indeed, he continues, “this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism.” Curiously, he intends this as a defense of Lisa Miller’s cover story, which announces that we should approve homosexual marriage because the Bible tells that Jesus would want us to.

If Meacham and Miller were philosophers they would immediately be embarrassed by the contradiction or as modern philosophers put it nowadays by the “self-referential incoherence.” But they aren’t, of course. In fact, as Bottum, Reynolds, and Porter observe, neither Meacham nor Miller are really engaged in argument at all.

They’re speaking, instead, in familiar tropes and fused-phrases and easy clichés. They’re trying to convey a feeling, really, rather than an argument: Jesus loves us, love is good, homosexuals love one another, marriage is love, love is loving—a sort of warm bath of words, their meanings dissolved into a gentle goo. In their eyes, all nice things must be nice together, and Jesus comes to seem (as J.D. Salinger once mocked) something like St. Francis of Assisi and “Heidi’s grandfather” all in one.

The only relevant question after these criticisms is to determine whether the philosophical and theological ignorance of Meacham and Miller is, as the old moral theologians used to say, vincible or invincible. Now that would make for a truly interesting argument in Newsweek or over at the website On Faith: A Conversation with Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn . But then, one suspects that they just may not be up to it.