Friendship: What It Is, What It Isn’t

I found Chris Damian’s recent “Sex and the Polis” symposium piece, “Defining Marriage Isn’t Defending Marriage,” very interesting.

The atomization of the American social fabric, coupled with the diffusion of the revisionist (or companionate) view of marriage—according to which marriage is “the name that society gives to the relationship that matters most between two adults,” as one federal judge put it in 2011 while striking down California’s Proposition 8 law—has left Americans who cannot or do not marry in in a cultural milieu of isolation and desperation.

While Chris’s diagnosis of this problematic milieu is sound, his account of how we’ve reached this point leaves a bit to be desired: He does not attribute enough culpability to the fallout of the gradual American acceptance of revisionist view.

Over at Ethika Politka today, I respond to Chris’s piece by way of amending his narrative of how the institution of friendship has crumbled, and what the most promising means of restoring it is.

My proffered solution: Everybody should read and internalize the arguments put forth in What Is Marriage?, the contents of which, it is apparent, still haven’t been processed (or even consumed) by most revisionists. Spiritual Friendship, a site created by Ron Belgau and Wesley Hill (and for which Chris is a contributor), also provides refreshing perspectives on how a culture of deep extra-marital friendships can be restored.