Dreher

When older church folks down South say that they cannot understand how Christians can approve of gay marriage, because the Bible clearly teaches against it, I get their point. But here’s the thing. Their generation of Southern Christians accepted racism, including apartheid in America, even though the Bible clearly teaches that treating people the way whites treated blacks back then is wrong. It was part of the Southern Way Of Life™, for which Christianity was the religious auxiliary providing a spiritual ideology of comfort, not challenge.

I’m not saying that gay marriage = segregation, so don’t even start with me on that. My point is simply that Christianity often serves not to shape the popular culture, but to baptize whatever the popular culture prefers to believe. This is not exactly news, I’ll grant you, but it’s fascinating to me to see it playing out among fellow Southerners on generations on either side of my own (I’m 48).