LA Times ht. Dreher

In the end, like many mass terrorists we have gotten to know, Omar Mateen was a killer for God. Murder was his confession.

…

The desert religions of Abraham — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — were shaped by an encounter with a God who revealed himself within an ecology of almost lunar desolation. In such a place, the call to belief was tribal, not individualistic. Sexuality was an expression of faith to increase the tribe. Allegiance to God and to one’s ancestors was fulfilled by giving birth. And it is not only some radical Muslim teacher in a Florida mosque who professes such a theology. St. Augustine, one of the most sublime teachers of the Christian church, argued that the primary reason for marriage is having children.

Having multiple wives is often excusable in cultures where the woman as mother is more important than the woman as wife.

…

My sexual liberation is a Western liberation. I credit my freedom as a gay man to the women’s movement of the 19th century. When Oscar Wilde was in jail in England for loving another man, increasing numbers of women in England and Europe and America were marching for equal civic stature with men, regardless of whether they were mothers or wives. Women’s insistence on suffrage expanded in the 20th century to become the demand by women to exist in public as freely as men, and in private to govern their own bodies.

Dreher

What I do want us to talk about is hermeneutics, which is to say, the way texts are interpreted. To oversimplify, progressives believe religion primarily (but not exclusively) concerns what man says about God, while conservatives believe religion primarily (but not exclusively) concerns what God says about man.