Rod Dreher has authored a thoughtful piece for Time on Friday’s horrible SCOTUS decision: Orthodox Christians Must Now Learn To Live as Exiles in Our Own Country. I recommend reading it. He plugs his “Benedict Option,” which is, for all practical purposes, what our little community in the hills of New Hampshire is doing. He also paints a stark picture of the significance of this wicked ruling, chiefly by citing the various dissenting opinions.
His major point is that “orthodox Christians” (more on that term in a moment) in the U.S.A. need to learn how to live as internal exiles in our own country.
Along the way, he makes a very good point concerning the inevitability of this thing:
In that sense, social and religious conservatives must recognize that the Obergefell decision did not come from nowhere. It is the logical result of the Sexual Revolution, which valorized erotic liberty. It has been widely and correctly observed that heterosexuals began to devalue marriage long before same-sex marriage became an issue. The individualism at the heart of contemporary American culture is at the core of Obergefell — and at the core of modern American life.
It could be argued that the inevitability of this ruling could have much deeper roots — reaching as far back as the foundation of a society whose declared political norm is the will of man rather than the will of God.
There is much to say about this ruling and its ramifications, “but I forbear” (2 Cor. 12:6)… at least for now.
Mr. Dreher, by the way, is a Catholic who defected to Eastern Orthodoxy, and for whose reversion to Catholic unity under Peter we pray, appropriately enough on this day. As a capital-O “Orthodox” Christian, his analogical use of the word “orthodox” in this piece — with a lowercase O — strikes me as a bit curious. It signals, I believe, that he applies the term across a broad spectrum of those who profess the Christian name, but who are generally “conservative” or “traditional.”
A thought I hope to develop in the coming weeks is that this is a moment of grace for us. I’ll just leave that there as a teaser.
