MY AMCONMAG ARTICLE ABOUT THE CULTURE OF FEAR OF DIVORCE is online! Like I said, I'm basically happy with how this turned out.

If America has endured a “divorce revolution” since California passed no-fault divorce in 1969, we’ve now entered the counterrevolutionary phase. Divorce rates have fallen from their peak in the early ’80s, the deep pain often felt by children of divorce is openly acknowledged, and young Americans typically express both fear and a moral horror at divorce. They are determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations; avoiding divorce is a constant anxiety, even obsession.

But as with most purely reactionary cultural movements, the revolt against divorce has been much better at targeting what it rejects than figuring out what it’s for. In a strange, sad twist, the divorce counterrevolution has only weakened our marriage culture more.

Here are three things we’ve ignored as we make divorce (and divorced people) the scapegoat for broader problems of family breakdown.

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STRONGER AT THE BROKEN PLACES: I've been thinking a bit about the use of language of "brokenness" in discussions of Christianity and homosexuality, and why I rebel against both that language and other people's reaction against it. I'll try to just briefly make some tentative points; tomorrow I'll have an even more tentative post soliciting alternative ways of discussing or describing the Church's prohibition on gay sex (rather than the alternative vocations open to gay people, where I feel much more certain of what I want to say--I am much more confident in what I want to say about the "yes" than what I'd say about the "no," but the picture is incomplete without both, I think).

The good thing about the language of brokenness should be obvious: It's humbling.

There's a contemporary American tendency to insist that we're good people, or that through bourgeois productivity and respectability we purchase indulgences and can therefore create our own Christian doctrine. (I can't remember where I read the tart aphorism, "Europeans don't believe in God, so they do whatever they want. Americans do whatever they want and call that Christianity.") At the very least we demand to be recognized as just as good as you. To say that we're broken is considered morbid or even offensive; to say that we might actually be unusually or distinctively broken is considered repulsive.

I am basically in favor of almost anything which prompts an admission of weakness, vulnerability, or similarly un-American expressions of spiritual poverty. To the extent that actual existing gay Christians use language of brokenness to express our need for unconditional surrender to God, I find it beautiful and spiritually-fruitful; I didn't share some readers' negative reaction to this language in Wesley Hill's Washed and Waiting, for example. (And I thought he either avoided or explicitly countered most of the negative aspects of brokenness language which I'll discuss in a moment.)

That said, here are some reasons I don't use that language myself.

First, I still do suspect that straight Christians often use "We're all broken!"/"The ground is level at the foot of the Cross"-type language, when discussing homosexuality, as a kind of rhetorical toll to be paid before you can get to the thing you're actually interested in talking about, which is Other People's Problems. If there's a danger of pharisaism for gay Christians who insist they're not broken, not like those messed-up addicts or crazy people (We Are Respectable Homos!), there's also a danger of pharisaism for straight Christians who want to use the language of brokenness when discussing situations they've never been in.

Second, and relatedly, using language of brokenness in the context of an already-stigmatized group has the obvious potential to provoke shame rather than humility, despair rather than surrender to God. I don't know that I need to go into detail here really, do I? Gay pride is wrong, but it's the wrong response to gay shame.

Thirdly, what do you do with a broken thing? I mean, you either throw it out or fix it, right? The imagery does not conduce to viewing homosexuality as a potential source of insight for the Christian. It's not a metaphor which suggests vocation. It's a metaphor in which one's orientation is a problem to be solved or at best endured. Even imagery of woundedness is more complex, insofar as wounds, in Christian thought, are not solely healed but sometimes glorified.

And finally, the language has been handled so much in this context that it's a cliche, a coin with its face worn off. When you say "brokenness" and "gay" in the same sentence I think a lot of people can only hear the five thousand previous times someone has used the metaphor, no matter what you personally intend to say with it.

But there's enough good in it that I wonder if it can be rescued, revived. After all, there are ways of describing a broken place as a place of insight--that's where the light gets in.

So I'm posting this more as a provocation than anything else: Talk to me more about brokenness. It isn't a metaphor which comes naturally to me and it's easier for me to see the limitations than the insights or beauty it can provide. But I think there's some poetry to be found here if we're willing to look for it: Are you broken like a wave, coming home on sharp rocks? Are you broken like a voice deepening into manhood? Are you broken like the Eucharist?

WHAT SHE SAID: "I SMOKE BECAUSE I'M HOPING FOR AN EARLY DEATH/AND I NEED TO CLING TO SOMETHING...." Out of all the songs on Meat Is Murder this is probably the one with the soundest political philosophy. It is anti-rationalist and it acknowledges that if someone does things you wouldn't do, she probably doesn't do them for the reasons you think she does. A surprisingly rare insight.

In an extension of my previous post about evo-psych fear of praising gender, I'd like to add that in general the reasons professors come up with for the things we do don't match up very well to our real reasons for doing them. A political philosophy based on rationalism will a) always place experts over subjects, placing those who can articulate their desires in contemporary jargon over those who insist on speaking like poor people or weirdos; and b) always turn mere experts into Pharisees, who believe that because they lead the lives their culture supports they are morally-equipped to tell the rest of us who we are. Or, as the current "nudge" political-philosophy fad would have it, they're equipped to structure our incentives.

Don't expect them to thank or forgive you.

A TRIVIAL POSTSCRIPT. While sometimes it is accurate to attribute actions you approve to "Obama" and actions you despise to "America," or vice versa, most of the time if you use that formula you're being a self-righteous jackass. Similarly if you can recognize either good or bad qualities in American culture but can't recognize these exact same qualities when displayed by Obama. As I think we should all be well aware by now, he is as American as anybody.

...Is this one of my meta-pharisaical posts again? "I'm so glad I'm not self-righteous like those other people!" Still, it seemed worth saying.

OH RIGHT, I FORGOT ABOUT: "She’ll defend Catholic moralists one moment, but defend prostitutes and bad girls the next."

I knew I liked her for a reason. Now praise drunks!

WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS: JWB notes that I might want to inform readers that my Weekly Standard review of Red Families vs. Blue Families is now available to nonsubscribers. I did not know that!

So you can read it here. As I said before, I don't think I nailed the problems with the book, but the review might still be worth reading. Please politely ignore the way I completely fuddled the rich man/CAMEL/eye of needle metaphor at the end! Or laugh mercilessly at my incompetence... you know, whatever floats your cup of tea.

THROUGH BLUE-TINTED GLASSES: My review of Red Families vs. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture is in the 8/30 issue of the Weekly Standard. The online version is subscribers-only for now, but I'll let you know if that changes.

I'm not thrilled with this review. I don't think I quite nailed the problem(s) with the book. I don't like doing negative reviews as a rule, and especially not negative reviews of work by people who have done good work--I don't remember reading any non-"red vs. blue" writing from June Carbone, but I've read things by Naomi Cahn which I really liked--but this book is just not good. I'm right about the lack of qualitative data a.k.a. letting people from radically different worldviews speak, letting them explain themselves rather than being explained by those who are not complicit in their choices, but I don't think I really explained the problem too well. I hope the review includes my praise for Cahn and Carbone's criticism of the contemporary American economy; the whole book should have been just that stuff. But I guess then nobody would have read it.

HOW IS JONATHAN RAUCH SO AWESOME? I mean, yeah, this isn't the column I would write about Red Families vs. Blue Families, but it is still so much more focused on the most important issues than approximately 99% of the reviews/articles/responses I've read so far, and so completely free from pharisaism . When I went to see him talk about his gay-marriage book he was totally self-overhearing, too, which as you know is one of my absolute most admired traits in any person. It's just so refreshing to see someone actively avoid opportunities to "charge them for it."

CHEAP TRAGEDIES: Noli Irritare Leones has a brief reply to my red/blue families post; here are three quickish points.

1. Right, all of us live in a "contracepting culture," I wasn't clear about that. I made it sound like I thought the basic divide was between people who don't believe in contraception and people who do, which would be a ridiculous claim about contemporary America. I was more referring to the reasons people might be less consistent/diligent about contraception, which includes stuff like mental health and general risk-aversion but also--and this is the real point I was trying to get at, sorry!--how much you feel like your future is in your own hands. People with less of a sense of control or agency are IMO likely to have a more Roman-hands-and-Russian-roulette attitude toward contraception. I may be overly influenced by pregnancy center counseling, but this doesn't seem unlikely, and seems very obviously class-linked rather than e.g. about whether you voted for Obama.

2. A related and perh more interesting point: The more I think about this red/blue families thing the more it seems like the r/b narrative and the "marriage gap" narrative are like those pictures which are a vase, but also two faces; or a duck but also a rabbit. The r/b narrative is the liberal one (not Left, but liberal) and the marriage-gap one is conservative. The r/b narrative promotes one set of solutions and the marriage-gap narrative promotes a very different set. The r/b narrative seems to emphasize politics and religion in its framing, while the marriage-gap narrative emphasizes poverty and race. Both often pay lip service to class (the intersection of economic status and culture, or the culture created by economic status) but really downplay it... which leads me to suspect that class is one of the biggest drivers of this divide. (Here's Jonathan Rauch on the marriage gap as a class gap.)

Anyway I'll probably end up writing a longer thing about these two competing narratives--with any luck, playing them off of each other will illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of both--ideally for money....

3. I am not sure how to flesh out what's essentially an aesthetic argument, but my problem with many of the red/blue commentaries recently is not that they're polemical but that they're pharisaical. "I thank God that my sins are not as the sins of this Republican" and all that. Thus class gets elided, for example, in favor of charging evangelicals with hypocrisy. (I don't think NIL is doing that! Just that it's the attitude which spurred my earlier post.)

...Also, though, a reader sent me this essay (PDF), which is a very early use of the r/b phrase and which I remember thinking was quite good. Still obviously from a liberal perspective but I seem to recall it as a fruitful and provocative one, rather than a self-comforting one. Will re-read shortly.

IT'S THE CIRCLE OF LIFE!: 1. Conservative, moralizing politician gets caught [EDITED to remove unnecessarily crass description; "gets caught" pretty much covers it...].

2. Conservative Christian commentator wails about how could he? with much throwing of the fiftieth stone. I would never!

3. Liberal commentator (Christian or not--all look same!) inveighs against the obvious Schadenfreude and piling-on of aforementioned conservative Christian types. Drink if they cite "Judge not, lest ye be judged"; drain your drink if they bother looking up the chapter and verse. Drain somebody else's drink if they specify that they're atheist and they really, really think adultery is bad, and they'd totally shame the initial bad guy as much as you would, but they just can't help themselves in pointing out the hypocrisy!

4. Bitchy blogger notes that patting yourself on the back for your rejection of pride might actually be... prideful. Thus, she judges your judgeyness of others' judging of sexual sin! It would be so awesome if this action were virtuous!

5. Lather, rinse, repent.

I know so many good people, I mean, where do I start?

UPDATE: [edited: ehhh, changed my mind about this.]

FURTHER UPDATED: Doesn't change what I say in this post, but this does offer context and assorted whatnot.