Burnt By The Sol

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APRIL 2, 2015

10:31 PM

ROD DREHER

This comment from a religious studies scholar who comments under the
name Raskolnik is one reason why I have the best comments section
on the web. He’s responding to a comment from another reader, which I
have put in italics:
[The reader said:] With that said, why the heck are conservative
Christians so freaked out about homosexuality above and beyond
virtually every other “sin.” I’m no biblical scholar to be sure, but even if
homosexuality is verboten under the Bible, so is divorce, fornication,
and adultery. Are there florists and caterers that will not service
weddings unless the bridge and groom are virgins? Why do Christians
fight against gay marriage, yet don’t fight for laws to prohibit divorce or
criminalize adultery?

[Raskolnik replies:] Some variation of this question pops up so

frequently that I figured it would be worth writing a fairly involved
answer that I could then copy and paste as necessary. On the one
hand, the premises of this question don’t really make any sense from
an orthodox Christian perspective; on the other hand, you’d have to be
an orthodox Christian to understand why, so it’s probably worth spelling
out exactly what the issue is.

So: the thing to understand here is that the vast majority of Christians
are not “freaked out about homosexuality above and beyond” every
other sin, sexual or otherwise. I understand that from your perspective
it may appear to be so, but please understand that this is simply a false
impression driven by the media and various political interests. Most of
the Christians I know, for example (myself included), are far more
concerned about the extreme prevalence of pornography than they are
about homosexuality. However, pornographers and pornography
consumers are not a politically powerful lobby, and as yet there is no
one who identifies as “pornosexual,” thus there is no narrative of the
oppression of the poor pornosexuals to tap into Selma envy .
Back in the 60’s, the sociologist Mary Douglas came up with the idea of
a “condensed symbol.” The idea is that certain practices or ideas can
become a kind of shorthand for a whole worldview. She used the
example of fasting on Fridays, which the Bog Irish (generally lowerclass
Irish Catholics living in England) persisted in doing, despite the fact that
their better-educated, generally-upperclass clergy kept telling them to
give to the poor or do something else that better fit with secular
humanist mores instead. Her point was that the Bog Irish kept fasting,
not due to obdurate traditionalism, or some misplaced faith in the
“magical” effectiveness of the practice, but because it functioned as a
“condensed symbol”: fasting on Fridays was a shorthand way of
signifying connection to the past, to one’s identity as Irish, as well as to
a less secularized (or completely non-secular) vision of what religious
practice was all about. It acquired an outsized importance because it
connected systems of meaning.

I bring up the notion of “condensed symbol” because I think that’s the

best way to understand what’s going in (what you perceive to be) the
“freakout” about homosexuality. The freakout isn’t about
homosexuality per se, it’s about the secular world shoving its idea of
sexual morality down the throats of orthodox Christians. If you haven’t
read Rod’s piece Sex After Christianity , you really should, and if you
haven’t, I think you should be able to connect the dots between the
Christian cosmology of sex and the Christian opposition to same-sex
marriage as a “condensed symbol” of Christian resistance to secularism
writ large.

Because the fact of the matter is that, for a variety of reasons, some
easily understandable from a non-religious perspective, some of them
perhaps less so, participating in a same-sex marriage has become the
21st century equivalent of making offerings to Sol Invictus. A Roman
might just have easily asked, “What’s the big problem? Why not just
make the offerings? Don’t they want to be a part of Roman society?” A
more intelligent Roman might even have asked, “They don’t even
believe in the divinity of the Emperor anyway. Why can’t they just burn
the incense, which they literally believe has no effect on anything
whatsoever?” Hopefully you can see the connection here; Christian
opposition to the Roman cult of Sol Invictus, like Christian opposition to
same-sex marriage, is about a whole lot more than burning some
incense or baking a cake.

That’s really, really helpful. And here, from The Nation, back in 1993,
when the successful stage of the gay rights revolution was just getting
started, is why it is a “condensed symbol” for so many of us — because
it is, for Nation readers and many on the left, also a condensed symbol:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed

in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the
moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past,
but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis
throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most
conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to
invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will
come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual
minority will change America forever.

Absolutely correct. Could not agree more. I think it is also the case that
for many liberals in this country, especially among media, academic,
legal, and upper management types, orthodox Christianity, in its
Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox varieties, is a “condensed symbol”
of the things they stand against. The Lamb and the lambda cannot
harmonize.