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| More Lasting Unions: Christianity, the Family, and Society By Stephen G. Post Christianity and the Public Square Most people are somewhat ambivalent about their familial experiences. Families can be oppressive or abusive at worst, and even at best they will surely be imperfect. Even in harmonious families, the adolescent may well have a heightened ambivalence about the family as he or she breaks free of the parent-child axis in order to assert an independent identity. Jesus of Nazareth himself broke free of his family in order to begin his ministry. Christianity is not naive about the imperfections of family life, including the problems of myopic insularity, consumerism, and overindulgence that ignore wider spheres of moral and spiritual commitment. Yet Christianity nevertheless powerfully endorses the overall value of the family as the human context for faithful marriage and procreation shaped by equality of the partners and covenant love for children. As I shall argue, this endorsement is a profoundly essential one to Christianity and must inform its endeavor to positively affect culture and society. There are certain moments when the Christian must speak as a Christian to address a high-stakes public issue about which the tradition is clear. The Christian must choose these moments carefully if his or her voice is to be taken seriously. Precisely the same caution should be exercised by feminists, deconstructionists, African-Americans, Marxists, and many others who have meaningful voices in a pluralistic and liberal polity. A liberal polity enables those different voices to create alliances when they happen to agree practically (though worldviews and epistemic priorities may vary). Any voice that lacks intellectual rigor or that displays imperialistic arrogance, incivility in discourse, or lack of attentive listening to other voices will ultimately have no impact. In the words of George M. Marsden, all religious perspectives should be welcome in the academy and in the public square "so long as their proponents are willing to support the rules necessary for constructive exchange of ideas in a pluralistic setting." Without this pluralistic mix of voices, public discourse becomes dreary and uniform rather than creative, challenging, and tolerant. The value of democratic pluralistic discourse is that it does not require participants to privatize their core convictions. Critics of the religious voice insist on the single language of secular monism in addressing matters of the commonweal. While the believer can address many issues in the purely secular, rational language necessary for public policy, there are times when he or she should use specifically religious language in public. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was deeply theological in many of his public utterances; Martin Luther King Jr. built his "I Have a Dream" speech around scriptural references to the prophet Amos. Surely both Protestants and Catholics should have spoken out against Nazism from their theological traditions much earlier than they did; Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an eloquent exception whose voice was silenced only by death in a Nazi prison. Often the religious voice plays a constructive role without which public dialogue would be impoverished. With regard to the current extraordinary circumstances of cultural, political, and legal trivialization of lasting marriage and responsible motherhood and fatherhood, the Christian must enter the public square armed with rigorous rational arguments, informed appeal to established empirical fact, and specific religious reasoning. A robust pluralism imposes no silence in modern nations and universities who have long been committed to pluralism and disestablishment, and for whom fears of religious establishment at this point in history are no longer grounded in reality.
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