So I already posted a rundown on Berry’s comments on same-sex marriage to the Associated Baptist Press, as well as a few links to articles by Dreher and Dalrymple. Now, a few more thoughts.
a) I want to begin by stating my admiration for Berry and gratitude for his work. Next to C.S. Lewis there isn’t a thinker who has more deeply influenced my thought than Wendell Berry. Reading Jayber Crow was a seismic experience in my life and I don’t think I’d have had the desire or the courage to return to Lincoln and stay in Lincoln if it weren’t for Berry. As Berry is a man I admire and an older Christian man, that needs to be said up front because I do not remotely want this to be the arrogant young 25-year-old punk kid trying to scold his elder. I also want to note that the critique made by some critics, most notably Douglas Wilson and David Mills, who say that this interview shows a fatal flaw in Berry’s thought, are off the mark. I think a better reading of this whole thing is to say that Berry’s current comments don’t fit with his broader vision of the good life. More on that soon.
b) I think some of the shock registered by Dreher and Dalrymple is a bit odd. Berry is very precise with his language, but often much less so in his argumentation, as anyone on the wrong side of one of his polemics in the past is well aware. Berry is not the most precise person when it comes to structuring an argument. Rather, I tend to think of Berry as one of those dissenting voices who is so utterly outside the mainstream that he is useful, even if also prone to overstatement or missing important nuances on occasion. I think what’s changed with these comments isn’t so much Berry’s style as his target. Traditionalist conservatives like myself aren’t used to being on the receiving end of his indignation and so we feel rather affronted by the whole thing. But Berry’s indignant polemics have never been renowned for their surgical precision.
c) This is the most important point for me: In a forthcoming essay in Fare Forward, I’m going to be arguing that Wendell Berry and C.S. Lewis have a remarkably similar social vision and that we can learn a great deal about both of them by reading them in conversation with one another. For that reason, I’m going to try and not tip my hand too much in this space while still adequately addressing the subject at hand.
Their social vision, as I understand it, can be distilled down to this basic phrase: “Human beings ought to relate to God’s creation as worshiping stewards, gratefully fulfilling their role as cultivators of the goodness of God’s world.” Note that word “cultivation.” That’s a very intentionally chosen word because it evokes both the idea of fertility and the idea of mutual flourishing. If you look at the views of both writers on ecology, sex, land use, and human community, their approach is always marked by a fidelity to those characteristics.
If you read That Hideous Strength, you should see a clear “environmentalist” message. But if that’s all you see, you’re not seeing the breadth and unity of Lewis’s vision. The book begins with the word “matrimony.” It ends with Mark and Jane reunited with the expectation of them conceiving and having a child. In between, Lewis belabors the point that a marriage without the potential for children or in which children are explicitly ruled out or avoided is a misunderstanding of marriage. In other words, he’s wanting us to see that sex operates in the same way that our relationship to the land should: We commit ourselves to the stewarding of the land in hopes that it would produce fruit–and the dual realities of labor and pleasure are wrapped up in the entire process. In fact, you could probably say without overstatement that marriage is the fundamental image in Lewis’s fiction (and, I sometimes think, Berry’s as well), or at the very least, in That Hideous Strength. St. Anne’s represents the world of marriage, in which distinct agents find their well being in pursuing the good of the other and embracing the role of willing servant and steward. The NICE represents the world of divorce, in which every distinct agent is in competition with every other and people can only advance themselves by treading on the back of someone else.
If you read Standing by Words or Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, Berry seems to be saying an almost identical thing. I think you can note the same characteristics of thought in Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow. Consider these excerpts from Berry’s past work:
“The meaning of marriage begins in the giving of words. We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word. And this must be an unconditional giving, for in joining ourselves to another we join ourselves to the unknown. We can join one another only by joining the unknown. We must not be misled by the procedures of experimental thought: in life, in the world, we are never given two known results to choose between, but only one result that we choose without knowing what it is.
Marriage rests upon the immutable givens that compose it: words, bodies, characters, histories, places. Some wishes cannot succeed; some victories cannot be won; some loneliness is incorrigible. But there is relief and freedom in knowing what is real; these givens come to us out of the perennial reality of the world, like the terrain we live on. One does not care for this ground to make it a different place, or to make it perfect, but to make it inhabitable and to make it better. To flee from its realities is only to arrive at them unprepared.
Because the condition of marriage is worldly and its meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you – and marriage, time, life, history, and the world – will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.
In marriage as in poetry, the given word implies the acceptance of a form not entirely of its own making. When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and living within the limits of a creaturely life. We live only one life, and die only one death. A marriage cannot include everybody, because the reach of responsibility is short. A poem cannot be about everything, for the reach of attention and insight is short.”
“Marriage is the mutual promise of a man and a woman to live together, to love and help each other, in mutual fidelity, until death. It is understood that these definitions cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance, anymore than we can call a rabbit a squirrel because we preferred to see a squirrel. Poetry of the traditionally formed sort, for instance, does not propose that it’s difficulties should be solved by skipping or forcing a rhyme or by mutilating syntax or by writing prose. Marriage does not invite one to solve one’s quarrel with one’s wife by marrying a more compliant woman. Certain limits, in short, are prescribed- imposed before the beginning.”
Or this excerpt from the same essay:
Properly used, a verse form, like a marriage, creates impasses, which the will and present understanding can solve only arbitrarily and superficially. These halts and difficulties do not ask for immediate remedy; we fail them by making emergencies of them. They ask, rather, for patience, forbearance, inspiration–the gifts and graces of time, circumstance, and faith. They are, perhaps, the true occasions of the poem: occasions for surpassing what we know or have reason to expect. They are points of growth, like the axils of leaves. Writing in a set form, rightly undestood, is anything but force and predetermination. One puts down the first line of the pattern in trust that life and language are abundant enough to complete it. Rightly understood, a set form prescribes its restraint to the poet, not to the subject.
Marriage too is an attempt to rhyme, to bring two different lives–within the one life of their troth and household–periodically into agreement or consent. The two lives stray apart necessarily, and by consent come together again: to “feel together,” to “be of the same mind.” Difficult virtues are again necessary. And failure, permanent failure, is possible. But it is this possibility of failure, together with the formal bounds, that turns us back from fantasy, wishful thinking, and self-pity into the real terms and occasions of our lives.
It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Or this excerpt from “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community”:
We thus can see that there are two kinds of human economy. There is the kind of economy that exists to protect the “right” of profit, as does our present public economy; this sort of economy will inevitably gravitate toward protection of the “rights” of those who profit most. Our present public economy is really a political system that safeguards the private exploitation of the public wealth and health. The other kind of economy exists for the protection of gifts, beginning with the “giving in marriage,” and this is the economy of community, which now has been nearly destroyed by the public economy.
There are two kinds of sexuality that correspond to the two kinds of economy. The sexuality of community life, whatever its inevitable vagaries, is centered on marriage, which joins two living souls as closely as, in this world, they can be joined. This joining of two who know, love, and trust one another brings them in the same breath into the freedom of sexual consent and into the fullest earthly realization of the image of God. From their joining, other living souls come into being, and with them great responsibilities that are unending, fearful, and joyful. The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to heaven and earth. It is the fundamental connection without which nothing holds, and trust is its necessity.
Or this excerpt, from “The Body and the Earth”:
It is possible to imagine a more generous enclosure–a household welcoming to neighbors and friends; a garden open to the weather, between the woods and the road. It is possible to imagine a marriage bond that would bind a woman and a man not only to each other, but to the community of marriage, the amorous communion at which all couples sit: the sexual feast and celebration that joins them to all living things and to the fertility of the earth, and the sexual responsibility that joins them to the human past and the human future. It is possible to imagine marriage as a grievous, joyous human bond, endlessly renewable and renewing, again and again rejoining memory and passion and hope.
That bold part definitely sounds like Berry is taking a quasi-Catholic turn and linking the meaning of marriage to fertility and reproduction, a move which by necessity leads to a natural law case that same-sex sexual behavior is unethical. What’s more, if you’re defining marriage in terms of potential fertility, it categorically makes such a thing as same-sex marriage categorically impossible. Anyway, let’s continue. Here’s another excerpt from the same essay:
Perhaps the most dangerous, certainly the most immediately painful, consequence of the disintegration of the household is this isolation of sexuality. The division of sexual energy from the functions of household and community that it ought both to empower and to grace is analogous to that other modern division between hunger and the earth. When it is no longer allied by proximity and analogy to the nurturing disciplines that bound the household to the cycles of fertility and the seasons, life and death, then sexual love loses its symbolic or ritualistic force, its deepest solemnity and its highest joy. It loses its sense of consequence and responsibility. It becomes “autonomous,” to be valued only for its own sake, therefore frivolous, therefore destructive–even of itself. Those who speak of sex as “recreation,” thinking to claim for it “a new place,” only acknowledge its displacement from Creation.
“When [sexual energy] is no longer allied by proximity and analogy to the nurturing disciplines that bound the household to the cycles of fertility…” How on earth does one reconcile such a passage with anything but a quasi-Catholic view of marriage and sexuality that sees the potential of fertility as essential to marriage’s meaning and to the meaning of sex?
I’ll stop here for now since I’m coming up on 3000 words when you include all the Berry excerpts. But I really would love to hear Berry’s explanation for how he squares his affirmation of same-sex marriage with the larger traditionalist agrarianism he has espoused for nearly 50 years. Whether he’ll admit it or not, he has changed in how he thinks about marriage. The Berry I’m quoting above sees the meaning of marriage and sex inextricably tied to the idea of being fruitful, which must include the bearing of children. Children are not the only fruit of marriage, but the potential for children is a necessary reality. That’s the Berry of his earliest writings up until the early 90s, at the very least. You could even argue that he retains this view of marriage all the way up to Hannah Coulter, which is from the early 2000s. He certainly seems to affirm it in Jayber Crow, which was published in 2000, if memory serves.
The Berry of this recent interview seems to have a different understanding of marriage, one that is less concerned with fertility and the relationship between sexuality and agriculture and more concerned with lifelong loyalty and commitment. If that’s the change he’s made, that’s fine. He’s certainly free to change his mind. But I would love to hear how he’s come to a position of apparent acceptance of a sexual practice that cuts off the participants from “the cycles of fertility” that he wrote of so eloquently in older works. I kinda want to ask him the same thing Galupo wanted to ask George Will last week: “I’ve read what you wrote in 1982 and I’ve read what you’re writing today. And I really don’t know how to reconcile what I’m reading. Please help me.”
(For what it’s worth, I don’t buy his almost insultingly simplistic dismissal of this view by saying that any childless heterosexual marriage is equally condemned by it. What we’re really dealing with here is the natural law tradition, a noble western tradition embraced by some of the west’s finest minds. Such a simplistic dismissal is an insult to that tradition–and an insult of the same caliber as some of the worst ones enlightened urban liberals have hurled at Berry’s rural neighbors. In any event, the point has very little to do with particular couples and whether or not they individually can have children. It’s about the creational intent reflected in the design of our bodies, which is a philosophical point completely unaffected by infertility.)
This line of thinking seems to me to lead to the conclusion that anyone who doesn’t want to have heterosexual sex and have children doesn’t “deserve” to be married, which I think is pretty presumptuous on the part of anyone making it. Demanding that people do a certain thing with their bodies– demanding that people perform a certain sexual act– is, at best, arrogant, and also creepy. If you’re making that a condition of receiving the intimacy that most humans crave, the situation is compounded.
One potential objection– though not one with which I particularly agree, since I have strong feelings about personal liberty– is that the potential societal harm from allowing any other type of marriage than heterosexual-with-kids is SO GREAT that it justifies such a massive intrusion on personal liberty. But there’s no evidence for this at all. We’re not facing an underpopulation crunch– far from it, parts of the world are experiencing severe water stress. American society is not falling apart because people are using birth control or marrying same-sex partners or deciding not to have children. You can argue that American society *is* falling apart, but there are several more immediate causes that have to be considered before pointing to declining fertility– stagnation of real wages, the massive increase in income inequality, the cost of our built environment finally catching up to us, the nutrients now sold under the guise of “food,” etc. So this argument falls apart both theoretically and in light of any potential evidence.
Ironically, that same fertility of the land that Berry upholds would be quickly exhausted if the land had to keep producing enough food to keep up with unchecked human fertility. Right now, we’re keeping that at bay through the massive use of chemical fertilizers. That’s not going so well.
I would say there’s a pretty simple way to resolve what you perceive as contradiction – like most Trads, you’ve mistaken “homosexuality” to mean “sterility.” Gay men and women are every bit as fertile as their hetero peers.
That’s not really a solution in that it still implies people should be willing to have children, using a sperm donor/surrogate or not, if they want to marry.
In Berry’s earlier comments I thought it was clear that his reasons for supporting SSM were primarily that if two people wanted to love each other, commit to each other, and form a household together, they ought to have the same benefits as anyone else in the same situation, and that those benefits ought probably to be decoupled from religious and community definitions of “marriage” and approval of such. I think it’s reasonable to try to see what he’s said most recently as an extension of that initial reaction to the issue.
A couple of things about his latest remarks, then: First, he was addressing Southern Baptist ministers, wasn’t he? So of course he was critical of them. That’s what Berry does. It’s the “contrariness of the mad farmer” — deliberately saying what he isn’t expected to in a particular situation — and he’s done it since his thirties.
Second, he’s never had much good to say about institutional Christianity. I’ve assumed Jayber Crow was speaking for the author when he called himself the “ultimate Protestant” who saw Jesus bringing religion out of the temple and to the fields and the hills.
Third, however grand Berry’s notions and style and literary arguments, I think he has always been very good about referring his ideas back to the land and to real people. Theoretical arguments about the nature of marriage are nice, but he strikes me as the sort of man who when he sees genuine love and commitment — two things he’s spent his life arguing or pleading for — he’s going to feel bound to support them, even in forms he hadn’t been prepared to accept.
And fourth, given his contrary nature, he’s going to be especially apt to do that if the people around him are prone to making nasty remarks about gays — which would not at all surprise me. I would add that it is perfectly reasonable of him to then ask why this issue gets singled out by so many preachers and churches, and to tell fellow Christians that, like it or not, we are going to be judged by our often ugly institutional history.
It is possible that I’m projecting onto Berry my own views on this issue: I’m sympathetic to some thoughtful conservative arguments against SSM, they make a lot of sense on their own, and yet when referred to the day-to-day reality of my gay friends living their lives, raising their children, owning businesses, working in the community, etc., those pleasant theories just don’t hold up: they aren’t as important as love, family, and community, whatever forms they take. People are more important than ideas. But I think that’s a notion he and I share (and perhaps he helped to convince me of it).
Cheers to David expressing what I think Berry was trying to communicate (and how it’s consistent to the -fundamental- aspects of his beliefs, if not all the ephemeral ways those beliefs have manifested themselves in Berry’s work historically), and eloquently summing up my perspective on arguments about SSM in the last paragraph better than I would have been able to.