Not so with many religious conservatives. The past is much like the present, they must think, with the exception that people in olden times had different hairdos, talked funny, and wore strange clothes. Besides minor changes in wardrobe, hair, and speech, they imagine, the circle is unbroken. The inability to understand change over time is a basic blind spot for a range of evangelical conservatives and right-wingers of various stripes. Whether they’re talking about the inerrancy of Scripture or the original intent of the founders, what’s missing is a real appreciation for historical processes or an understanding of the uniqueness of the past.
I conclude with one example: Marriage. Historians would appreciate that marriage in nineteenth century America is really not the same as marriage in twenty-first century America. One hundred and fifty years ago a woman’s legal identity was an extension of her husband’s. She was a dependent. Before 1848 in New York a married woman lost the right to control any property owned before the union. A woman could not acquire land in her own name. Neither could she make contracts or bring a lawsuit into court. Late in the century women gained greater property rights, but full legal equality in marriage would take decades to achieve. Added to all that, state laws could dictate who could marry whom well into the twentieth century. As many know, the case Loving v. Virginia (1967) challenged Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924.
Marriage gets more complicated, foreign, bizarre in contemporary eyes the further one looks back. The Old Testament patriarch Jacob had four wives. King David’s eight wives are named in the Bible, though he had many more. The book of I Kings describes the amorous King Solomon, who “loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites.” He took seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Wives and women in general were subject to a range of Bronze Age laws. Codes and regulations for concubines, spelled out in Exodus 21:7-11, were a whole other matter.
In the West women are no longer property to be hoarded by kings or jealous leaders of tribes. That historical context is either ignored or lost on advocates of traditional, changeless marriage. Here’s conservative Christian psychologist and bestselling childcare expert James Dobson on the subject: Gay activists “do not have the right to define marriage….For five thousand years in every continent on Earth, marriage has been the standard between a man and a woman.”
Wednesday 30 June 2010
The Past is No Foreign Country ☀
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