By David Gushee
Reading John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government this spring has had a huge and still developing impact on my approach to U.S. public policy.
I have always known that the normative posture of the church on an issue like, say, divorce, could not always be advocated as an agenda for public policy. But I have usually accepted this restriction for practical reasons, such as that a law that most Americans do not support will be unenforceable and thus ineffective. But that our dream is the complete in-breaking of the kingdom of God, and that it is appropriate to hope that the state can play some role, however small, in gaining victories for the kingdom, has been at least implicitly present in my thinking.
Locke rejected all such approaches to government and law. The basic structure of Locke’s theory is that individuals in the state contract together to give up absolute liberty in return for the security that comes from the establishment of an agreed structure of laws and a government with the coercive power to enforce those laws.
The idea that individuals give up as little of their liberty as is absolutely necessary, and that government has as small a role as is absolutely required to meet the needs of those who created it, imposes a rigid discipline on the purposes of government.
Citizens might have all kinds of convictions, perhaps religiously inspired ones, about what a good world and right relations among people should look like. They are free to pursue such dreams through prayer, persuasion and voluntary associations of all types, but they are not free to use government to coerce others to join them in even their most heartfelt beliefs.
As Locke famously repeated more than once, the purposes of government involve protecting “life, liberty and property,” not advancing a broad vision of the good life. This marked an abandonment of the entire political trajectory of Christendom for more than 1,300 years.
Such a sharply limited role for the state was motivated in part by a “long train of usurpations,” as both Locke and Thomas Jefferson put it. Governments had sent too many people to prison and the gallows because of religious and other convictions that in Locke’s theory were no business of the state at all. (Baptists used to be very much aware of this painful history.)
The state ought to use its fearsome power primarily to prevent others from killing me, enchaining me or taking my property. Other than such very basic matters, government must be constrained tightly so as to allow maximum liberty for the citizens who create it and own it.
So the news last week was that President Obama and his administration have decided not to defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act any longer. This act made it federal law that marriage is between a man and a woman. Cue the predictable howls of outrage at Obama’s decision.
As a matter of personal conviction I am not ready to embrace gay marriage. I cannot imagine performing such nuptials as a minister. I cannot imagine my congregation doing so.
But what should the state do? If we reason from classic Christian sexual ethics forward to the role of the state, most traditional Christians (not all Christians) will come to a position of advocating that government hold onto an exclusively heterosexual definition of marriage.
But if we reason from a Lockean posture of limited government and maximum individual liberty, it is quite hard to find any compelling reason why it is any business of the state to decide whether people of the same sex can marry. Efforts to do so recently, as in California, have collapsed under their own empirical implausibility.
So we have a clash here between a Christendom paradigm and a Lockean one. On the one hand we have part of America’s culturally established but fading Christian majority operating from a paradigm that what God wills (as they understand it) should be civil law. On the other we have a Lockean paradigm that the state should only limit individual liberty for the most compelling reasons having to do with protecting the life, liberty, and limb of others.
In 1791, it was Locke, not Christendom, that prevailed in the shaping of our own constitutional order. This means Lockean premises usually win out, as they eventually will and should on the issue of legal recognition of same-sex relationships.
This says nothing about what Christian ethics ought to be on gay and lesbian issues. It says everything about the limits of governmental power in the lives of Americans.