Guardrails?

Several times in the last few weeks I’ve had conversations with people who are concerned about guard rails. They worry that if the United Methodist Church should allow same-sex marriage, then in the end it will essentially allow anything.

They worry that there will be no guardrails to guide human sexual behavior and limit different forms of human sexual relations.

The argument is based on a fundamental misconception that God's law, enforced by the Church, is the source of human morality. Without a Divine legislator, judge, and executioner humanity will collapse into a chaos of sinful behavior. 

This couldn't be further from the truth. 

The reality, as attested by scripture, is that God's law is nearly worthless in keeping people on the straight and narrow. On the other hand the witness of history is that human societies self-regulate rather well, and are able to create structures of mutual care, guardrails if you will, that have allowed these societies to steadily progress in terms of human flourishing. Religion plays a role in social self-regulation, but only a role and not as a necessary source.

If we ever thought that the belief in God or knowledge of God’s law somehow places effective guardrails on  human behavior then the Scriptures certainly set us straight. Adam and Eve believed in God and they walked with him daily and knew his will; and they still ate the fruit of the tree. 

Israel received God‘s law directly and experienced God‘s miraculous providential care for 40 years in the desert. And yet within a few years it made little or no difference in the way in which the Israelites behaved of in how they structured their societies. (See Judges 20). A divinely appointed king wasn't a great improvement, as virtually all the prophets attest, and that period ends with Israel in exile. God might be faithful, but neither the priests, nor the prophets, nor the kings placed any real constraint on the people and were often unconstrained themselves by whatever guardrails the law might have provided. 

Do things get better with the coming of Christ and Jesus' teaching? Well Judas was a disciple of Christ, who knew as well as anybody exactly what Jesus taught. But he was only the worst of what proved to be, at least in the short term, a bad lot. Neither the Sermon on the Mount, or the Sermon on the Plain, (or even the encounter on the Mount of Transfiguration) successfully constrained the misunderstanding and infidelity of the apostles. (Matthew 16:23, Luke 24:58) 

But if you are a believer in divinely sourced guardrails, then you just need to read Paul. He was a rabbi who knew well the history of his people, and who was capable of looking into his own soul. And what he found was that the law does not create righteousness or even reign in unruly behavior. Paul spends half his time writing his churches to behave themselves while knowing that they won't. 

If you are a Christian who believes that guardrails are going to solve the problem of human sin and exploitation then you have not read the Bible. 

But then the task of the Church isn't to put guardrails on human behavior by creating and enforcing laws, because it doesn't work. 

Rather, human societies create guardrails as part of their natural evolution toward order and thus survival. The task of the Church is fostering human relationships with God that internalize the essential values of God's Reign. These then become both a guide for personal behavior and part of the larger conversation in any society about many things, including what constitute healthy structures for the expression of human sexuality and the raising of children. Being transformed not by laws, but by the Spirit of Law, Christians can in turn seek to be part of social transformation. 

This is why recognition of same-sex marriage isn't a step on to the slippery slope toward a sexual free-for-all. It is, rather a recognition by the Church that monogamous same-sex relations have the potential to be as expressive of God's love as monogamous different sex relations. Allowing the possibility for fidelity springing from love, far from diminishing God's Reign, expands it to take in LGBTQ+ persons. Because this is not a downward step it isn't the beginning of a downward slide. 

But note, and this may be unsettling to some, the principle on which both same-sex and different sex marriage rests is not monogamy per se, but fidelity. Fidelity as the natural outgrowth of Divine love is the principle of God's relationship with humanity, with Israel, and with the Church. And human commitment to fidelity is itself the manifestation of God's love in all relationships, whether sexual or otherwise. 

So it is the insistence on and modeling of the value of fidelity as the greatest expression of love that makes for the Christian contribution to the greater social good. It is the only meaningful "guardrail" guiding human persons into relationships that upbuild all participants and protect against exploitation. 

Will a focus on fidelity rather than monogamy lead to some kind of slippery slope of polygamy, polyandry, so called open marriages, and even pedophilia? No. Both within the Church and in the wider society the insistence on fidelity and protection against exploitation will still be realized in actual laws that protect individuals from harm and allow persons to thrive and serve one another. A principled approach to Christian witness to God's Reign, exactly the kind of witness found in the ministry of Jesus, ultimately yields guardrails. But these guardrails, instead of being held in the shifting sands of social conventions and cultural bigotry, will be rooted in bedrock principle of God's reign, love manifest as fidelity in Jesus Christ.

And that will hold when all else fails.