Understanding the Times

Perceiving the Conflict Over What It Means to Be Human

The Catholic can't think of birth control in relation to expediency but in relation to the nature of man under God. - Flannery O’Connor

There is a way to conceive of religious faith as something very akin to a vending machine. You put something in; you get something back. You behave yourself; you are rewarded. In exchange for some kind of allegiance, you receive blessing and protection. The problem, of course, with the vending machine model of religious faith, at least where Judeo-Christianity is concerned, is that we are not dealing with a machine but with a personal God. Nevertheless, a kind of transactional mindset about the Christian faith is widespread. “Systems thinking” is ingrained in all of us, here in our post-Enlightenment existence.

In this post I want to unpack something that has been rolling around inside my head, gathering lint, for a while now. I have been nagged by the suspicion that a predominately transactional view of faith diminishes the acuity of one’s cultural discernment, like trying to view a room through a keyhole. It fences in our perception, and makes it more difficult to understand our current moment. It does this, I think, by drawing our attention toward the skirmishes, but away from the actual war.

Notwithstanding the quote at the top of this post, I am not concerning myself here with the Catholic position on birth control. What interests me about Flannery O’Connor’s observation is less about the specific subject of birth control and more about how she frames the way we should understand it. Her framing of the question is intriguing and, I think, important just now. Her assertion, that birth control is an issue rooted in the “the nature of man under God”, keeps bubbling up in my thoughts when I’m neither seeking it, nor expecting it. It isn’t the birth control issue, per se, that has been needling me, but this business about “the nature of man under God”.

Now, whether you agree with Miss O’Connor’s way of framing that question or not, it does free the discussion from the constraints imposed when we understand it solely within the confines of a particular time, place, or technology. Questions regarding human nature in relation to God are questions about the Creator’s intention and design - the Creator being the one who establishes the parameters of reality. Such questions are thus removed from the realm of expedience, and are not subject to the fluidity of changing circumstance.

The framing of contentious issues as questions of human nature may at first seem like an esoteric kind of philosophical hobby horse. But I am harassed by the suspicion that the question of “the nature of man under God” is the essential thing being contested in most of the cultural and political flash points we are observing just now. Maybe it has always been the thing being contested, in every context, for all of time. That might be worth mulling over. Just thinking out loud. One could easily draw that conclusion from the events in the garden of Eden.

The “nature of man under God” is not always openly contested, however. It often smolders underground, unacknowledged at best and sometimes even unrecognized. But whether the issue is abortion, transgenderism, homosexuality, marriage, contraception, free speech or any number of other conflicts I could name, they all represent open skirmishes that are being fought in service to some more elemental conflict, simmering under the surface, over what it means to be human.

As an aside, this is a contributing factor to the growing grassroots resistance to technocracy as a cultural and political force. The historical conception of the Western political divide, as a dispute between left and right, is less explanatory than it used to be. Understanding the present political and cultural divide as a conflict between the human and the technocratic may offer a better explanation for how sides are being chosen. There is a growing alarm, prompted by a widespread intuition, that something fundamentally dehumanizing is going on.

What I increasingly find curious is the degree to which, outside of Catholic and perhaps Orthodox circles, many of these contentious issues tend to be contested by Christians almost entirely on transactional grounds. You may be thinking, “What does he mean by transactional?” I will try to explain.

When wrestling with any moral question, one way to think about it is to confine your interest to the issue of “how does this affect my standing” in some context or other. For Christians, reasoning transactionally regarding, say, homosexuality, involves reducing the question to something like “Can gay people go to heaven?” But the effect of framing moral questions transactionally often works, in practice, like a one-way moral ratchet. Social pressure incentivizes small accommodations. And we slowly forget how the original moral boundary was grounded upon something essential concerning human nature. We moderns are always eager to apply exceptions, justifications, and nuance to any moral proscription that hurts another person’s feelings. Being nice is the super virtue of our time. So traditional Judeo-Christian boundaries are inexorably eroded by a never-ending parade of small rationalizations, until those boundaries reach a point beyond which nothing recognizable as being distinctively Christian still remains.

Consider the following screenshot of a post on X about a so-called Christian organization known as “Sojourners”. Set aside, for the moment, the self-congratulatory moral exhibitionism blaring from the headlines. Entirely absent is any consideration of how sexual expression might be better understood as a question of “human nature under God”. The centrality of self-expression as our thoroughly modern raison d'être is simply presumed. The possibility that the Creator himself might have his own authorial intentions for the sexual expression of his creatures is blithely swept aside. There is no hint even of the possibility that, more than just the particulars of this or that behavioral proscription, “human nature under God” might be able to tell us something about ultimate meaning, and the purpose of human sexual expression. In Sojourner’s telling, alas, God resembles nothing so much as an enabling, toxic mother who pampers and flatters her disagreeable offspring, celebrating their every whim.

At just this moment, the historically more conservative Evangelical community is embroiled in an on-going debate over whether Christians can be gay, or maybe just call themselves “gay”, or neither one of those things, and yet still be considered “Christian”. Hopefully the reader can see that such a framing is entirely oriented around the question of standing. And to be clear, by “Evangelical community” I’m not referring to the mass of believing Christians who identify themselves in some sense as evangelical. I’m referring to various writers, speakers, publications, and institutions that are at odds over culturally contentious questions ranging from human sexuality to progressive politics. The way this ongoing debate has been framed illustrates what I mean when I use the word “transactional”. Transactional thinking is more or less the practice of confining one’s moral evaluation to the question of “what can we do?”. By contrast, the question Miss O’Connor is raising is the prior, more uncomfortable question, of “what are we for?” Or, to put it another way: What is our essential human nature as determined by our Creator?

One of the downsides of framing moral questions transactionally is that such thinking seems to open the door to hollowing out the very substance that the ancient Christian words embody. Sojourners still represents itself as being “Christian”, but it has jettisoned any identifiably Christian understanding of human nature. Sojourners continues to speak of “God” and “Jesus”, but those words are now empty reminders, worn more or less as a kind of skin suit, offering the appearance of something that is long gone. One might even say they wear these hollowed-out, ancient Christian words as a kind of disguise.

Parroting ancient Christian lingo, emptied of actual meaning, does serve a useful purpose for organizations like Sojourners: it helps them gaslight gullible Christians. Consider the video just below. This is from an organization called “The Trinity Forum”. Cherie Harder, president of Trinity Forum, interviews two guests on a sort of podcast. Her guests, she says, “are bound by a shared love for, and faith in, Christ.” One of those guests, as it happens, turns out to be, Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, the very organization I referred to just above. Taylor is the man at the helm of Sojourners who oversaw the publication of “The Trinity Delights in My Unique Trans, Nonbinary Identity”, along with many other celebrations of homosexuality that Sojourners published during Pride Month. Ms. Harder’s characterization of Taylor, as someone having a “shared love for, and faith in, Christ”, illustrates the problem with thinking about moral questions, and Christian faith especially, in purely transactional terms. Taylor promotes an understanding of human sexuality that is itself not even transactional, but really just a regurgitation of the trendy modern idea that sex is simply a vehicle for self-indulgence. By doing so, he has decoupled sexuality from any consideration that God may have his own overarching intention for human nature - one that is rather different than our own self-absorbed inclination to congratulate ourselves for our appetites. One can easily conclude, after perusing Taylor’s publication, that he believes Christianity is just another means of material and emotional satisfaction.

But what if the notion that we exist for our own satisfactions is entirely upside down?

"Supposing one were a thing after all - a thing designed and invented by Someone else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one's own true self?" - C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

What if there really is such a thing as an identifiable purpose toward which God intends for us to live? What if the Creator set this all in motion with his own project in mind? What if, as part of that project, the Creator intends for human sexuality to be something other than a vehicle for, say, narcissistic self-expression? In such a case, someone who says they love Jesus, while profaning his intended purpose for human sexuality, would be like saying they love the paintings of Michelangelo, while smearing them with their own feces. Such a person would be mouthing words of love, to be sure, but their words would signify precisely nothing. A person simply does not profane the work of someone he truly loves.

Is it possible to be a Christian, in any meaningful sense, while disbelieving the very purposes for which the world and human beings were originally created? Under such circumstances, in what sense would the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus serve any purpose at all?

When the American founders crafted the arguments we find within the Declaration of Independence, they positioned them in terms of human nature, as determined by the Creator. The individual rights that were subsequently delineated were derived from this understanding of “human nature under God”, to borrow Miss O’Connor’s expression one more time. By situating freedom and rights within the context of “the laws of nature” and of “nature’s God”, they were explicitly elevating the discussion above the transactional, placing the justification for such things beyond the reach of time and, importantly, above the authority of any government. (e.g. certain rights are “inalienable”)

Many Evangelical writers, in my experience, habitually gravitate toward reasoning about moral questions in a largely transactional way. I have wondered (speculation alert!) if transactional thinking is more prevalent among protestant writers because the entire Reformation project originated, and has always revolved around, the question of moral standing. How an action or issue affects one’s standing in regard to salvation is the first and central question asked by much of Evangelical punditry, when a moral conundrum presents itself. It is an important question, to be sure. “It’s YUGE!”, to quote a certain presidential candidate. But it is not the only question. One’s salvation is not the end, after all, but the beginning of something. Confining our assessment of moral questions only to the implications those questions hold for our ultimate moral standing is inadequate to the current moment. In any case, it is not an approach likely to yield sufficient insight into how to fulfill God’s purpose for us as human beings who are actually in the world.

Now, there are exceptions to every rule. It is absolutely the case that there is a growing number of Evangelical believers, notwithstanding having been ill-served by some of their institutions, who are nevertheless awake to the fact that the real battle we are facing against an adversarial culture, a battle subtly camouflaged as a dispute over what we can do, is really a battle over what we are for - over what it means to be human.

The Catholics and Orthodox, at least the ones who are especially thoughtful, have apparently been manning this particular rampart, waiting for others to join them, for quite a long time now.

Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point. - Author unknown, some say Martin Luther