Up until [recently] the Church, in hunting down [the sin of
lust], has had the active alliance of Caesar, who has been concerned to
maintain family solidarity and the orderly devolution of property in the
interest of the state. Now that contract and not status is held to be the basis
of society, Caesar need no longer rely on the family to maintain social
solidarity; and now that so much property is held anonymously by trusts and
joint stock companies, the laws of inheritance lose a great deal of their importance.
Consequently, Caesar is now much less interested than he was in the sleeping
arrangements of his citizens, and has in this manner cynically denounced his
alliance with the Church. This is a warning against putting one’s trust in any
child of man – particularly in Caesar. If the Church is to continue her
campaign against lust, she must do so on her own – that is, on sacramental –
grounds; and she will have to do it, if not in defiance of Caesar, at least
without his assistance.
– Dorothy
Sayers, from The Other Six
Deadly Sins
Now I
know that is not the full story. I'm aware that with any such seismic shift in
culture as we have seen with the widespread embrace of so called 'gay marriage'
there is more than one factor that has lead to this point. As someone has
said, a tall tower requires a deep foundation whose bricks were laid long
before the visible ones at the top. I've actually written elsewhere about
how the Church is largely responsible for the tragic car crash that is the decline of Christian morality in the West. However, I think Sayers is
onto something here in that the State has been encouraged to care less about
the traditional family with the depersonalization of property. As Matthew
Jepsen says:
The
rise of the legal contract (versus inheritance by blood), the stock market, and
public corporations, set the foundation for people to act as free agents apart
from their money and land and families in a way unprecedented in civilization
before. During the sexual revolution, Caesar (the government) woke up one day
and realized that IT no longer cared who slept with who and so the champions of
traditional morality lost a powerful (though incidental) ally. The irony is
that this new foundation was often laid by conservative capitalists – sometimes
very religious ones – who never dreamed of it’s far-reaching consequences.
Wow.
Yikes. Let me give you a moment to recover...and then having recovered we need to think quickly how as Christians who are
committed to Capitalism (is there another sort?) need to respond biblically and faithfully. Answers on a
postcard please.
