In remarks prepared for his acceptance of the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for literature in 1993, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn torpedoed the modern obsession with finding creative alternatives to truth. Beginning with the art world and expanding his comments to culture at large, he remarked, “Looking intently, we can see behind these ubiquitous . . . experiments of rejecting ‘antiquated’ tradition, there lies a deep seated hostility toward any spirituality. The relentless cult of novelty . . . conceals an unyielding and long-sustained attempt to undermine, ridicule and uproot all moral precepts. There is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative . . . How clamorous it all is, but also—how helpless.”1

In the twenty-first-century West, the “relentless cult of novelty” has fixated its “clamorous” and corrosive power upon civilization’s defining cultural marker—marriage. For the first time in human history, calls for the legalization of same-sex matrimony are being made as if the human race was born yesterday. Assuming naivety on a massive scale, advocates of homosexuality lecture the public that “fairness” and “progress” mandate that gays and lesbians be granted sweeping cultural concessions and privileges.2

Such glib assertions must be met with a firm and determined skepticism. “What evidence is there,” the unpersuaded might reply, “that such a systemic cultural experiment has been tried successfully—without devastating results?” Not only has same-sex marriage been unknown in the West where biblical tradition has held sway, but it has never existed in African, Asian, or Middle Eastern cultures either. At best, where homosexuality has flourished, it contributed, for example, to the decline of the Roman Empire and the backlash to the Weimar Republic in Germany.

Tradition, on the other hand, has long been on a march in defense of the one-man, one-woman union. As Erasmus of Rotterdam once reminded a young friend, “if you want to know the value placed on marriage by the ancients, consider the penalty for a violated marriage.”3 The Greeks, the scholar explained, once went to war over a marital bond violated. In addition, both the Hebrews and the Romans legislated various provisions for capital punishment in case of the crime of adultery.4

No such moral outrage has ever attended the dissolution of same-sex partners, however. Quite to the contrary, expectations simply cannot be and have not been lower for such relationships. Both figuratively and literally, they are simply not the stuff of permanence.

Homosexuality has never been privileged among peoples who treasure principled law.5 The story of Sodom and Gomorrah offers enough of a reminder of that. As such, a reasonable person need not swallow such pleas for depravity when prudence would tell us to preserve the tradition which has served humanity so well. And so the Christian gladly confesses—as one theologian has put it—“bravo the humdrum!”

Why should the collective wisdom of civilization so quickly collapse before the advance of an idea whose time heretofore has never come? With Solzhenitsyn, the Church must resist the avant-garde to ensure that deadly ideas never come of age.
 
Footnotes:
 
1  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The Relentless Cult of Novelty and How It Wrecked the Century,” The New York Times Review of Books, February 7, 1993, 3.
 
2  See Kairos Journal article, “Making a Mockery of Civil Rights.”
 
3  Desiderius Erasmus, “A Praise of Marriage,” in Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar, eds. Amy and Leon Kass (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2000), 96.
 
4  See Kairos Journal article, “Barbed Wire.”
 
5  See Kairos Journal article, “Homosexuality and the Wisdom of the Ages.”
 
article adopted from Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church is located in Perryville, MD