Photo credit: Andy Dingley

I don’t know why I imagine anyone wants to know what I think. And yet I send out these posts, like a man throwing small stones into the ocean. Perhaps it’s just for the sake of the mental discipline it takes to put my thoughts in organized form.

Anyway, in case you’ve been waiting for my opinion of the recent Supreme Court rulings on same sex marriage, here it is. I hear the sound of a “click.”

That click is the noise of a ratchet. The metaphor of the ratchet, not at all original to me, is a very good one, I think, for understanding social change.

A ratchet does not move smoothly. Sometimes it stops, and every now and then it goes backwards for just a moment. But the main movement of a ratchet is always in one direction.

The Supreme Court decisions on same sex marriage were a ratcheting up of the mechanism. We lost another half inch or so that we’re not likely to get back.

It was Justice Kennedy’s decision on the Defense of Marriage Act that revealed the most. As Justice Scalia noted in his dissent, “By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition.”

This is a development I’ve been expecting and, in all honesty, fearing. The moment when biblical Christians are declared enemies of humanity.

Because this, in my opinion, is the true goal of the Left’s long game — the erasure of biblical Christianity from American public life.

Now I don’t mean they’re out to get everybody who calls themselves a Christian. The UCC church down my street that proudly displays a rainbow sign on its front lawn is in no danger. They’re the kind of Christians who are welcome most anywhere, and will get along in most any age. It’s of such Christians that C. S. Lewis asked, “How should a jelly not conform?”

No, it’s biblical Christianity they want to get rid of. The Christianity of history, of the scriptures and of the creeds.

They are no bigots, our opponents. Their hatred is not, generally, for us as individuals. They hate what we believe. They hate the doctrine that there is some transcendent standard to which all people everywhere are obligated to submit. Any authority elevated above the fashions and laws of contemporary society is an offense and a horror to them. Such a standard challenges Progress, which is the god of evolutionists.

Remember what they taught you about Christianity in college? The Crusades (presented from one side only), pogroms, witch trials, inquisitions, religious wars. If all you know of Christianity was what was taught in the average college curriculum (and for increasing numbers of people it is) you’d consider Christianity a cult of pure evil, an enemy of all that is good.

Which is what more and more of our neighbors do believe. Justice Kennedy is in the mainstream when he implies that groups opposing homosexual marriage (strongly Christian in membership) are motivated by nothing but the same kind of hatred that underlies racism.

Christians as enemies of humanity. They used to say that in Rome, too, during the great persecutions.

I have no optimism to offer, except that which we share with the early Christians – Be sure you are at peace with God, and that you love your neighbor. Leave the rest in His hands, and trust Him to bear you up under whatever trials are to come.