Symposium: The Twice-Wounded

This article is in response to “The Social Costs of Abandoning the Meaning of Marriage” by Ryan T. Anderson and is part of the symposium, “Sex and the Polis: Perspectives on Marriage, Family, and Sexual Ethics.”

Most Americans still believe that marriage is a great and good thing. It seems to mean something. But as a people and a culture we are having an increasingly hard time defining that meaning.

Ryan Anderson has taken a bold and public stand on the most vexed issues of our time. He’s writing a doctoral dissertation on free markets and social justice in between his constant trips to uphold the conjugal definition of marriage as the permanent, whole-person union of a man and a woman oriented towards the bearing and rearing of children. His witness, warmth and words have been inspiring to me and to many others who care deeply about marriage but previously didn’t have an accessible way of making our case in the public square.

But one of the most important obstacles to persuading our generation to care for the flourishing of future generations by upholding marriage goes beyond the intellectual. The appeal of the compassionate argument for “marriage equality” is very strong, of course. But, more broadly, moral realities have to be enacted, not just described. This is why Burke constantly argued for custom, tradition, and prescription—because those are the ways that cultures pass on moral memory and embody principles.

Our generation, the Millennials, is basically the first in the Western world to grow up with no-fault divorce completely normalized. The heartache of broken marriages is everywhere around us, but we no longer assume that marriage between a man and woman is remotely permanent. For decades, we have already implicitly seen marriage as “primarily about adult desire, with marriage understood primarily as an intense emotional relationship between (or among) consenting adults.” I don’t think I would have strong convictions about marriage if I had not seen the loving union of husband and wife lived out by my parents.

I like to say that we college students, who want to see the sexual fragmentation of our day healed, are twice-wounded—once by the horror and despair of the dignity-corroding sexual culture on our campuses, and once by the beauty of the goodness and grace of the truth. But many of our peers have only been wounded once—by the ubiquitous sense of betrayal and commodification. Let us live out and tell stories that pierce to the heart with the tenderness and joy of chastity and fidelity!