Why The West is Pro Gay-Marriage Yet Increasingly Anti-Abortion
The Western world has shifted dramatically in its view of gay marriage.
Until early 2012, Barack Obama held to traditional marriage. This was also the position of the Australian Labor party until around that time.[1]
Of course, support for gay marriage has grown enormously since then across the West.
But the same can’t be said for abortion. While polls fluctuate, widespread support for abortion has not risen like support for SSM, and depending on which poll you use, there has even been a drop.[2]
Both issues have had massive support from lobby groups, media outlets, not to mention mainstream entertainment. But whereas SSM proponents won the day, pro-choice advocates are struggling in comparison.
Why the difference?
While there may be several reasons for this, one of the key reasons is how secular Westerners now approach moral issues:
1) Emotion And Aesthetics Now Drive Our Moral Debates
According to Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, our modern Western moral debates are primarily driven not by tight moral reasoning but by emotion and aesthetics (or ‘optics’, to use another word).
He describes this as ‘emotivism’:
Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgements and more specifically all moral judgements are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.’[3]
In other words, secular Westerners don’t really appeal to anything higher than their feelings when deciding between right and wrong. As author Carl Trueman points out:
[T]he language of morality as now used is really nothing more than the language of personal preference based on nothing more rational or objective than sentiment or feelings...it is a way of granting those attitudes or values that we happen to prefer a kind of transcendent, objective authority. Essentially, emotivism presents preferences as if they were truth claims.[4]
And so, the modern secular individual often mistakes his personal preferences as universal moral imperatives. [5]
Of course, few people would admit that their passionately held moral views are built on a flimsy foundation of emotion. But that’s how most people live their lives. “It just feels right,” “I know in my heart it is a good thing,” and other similar stock phrases are familiar to us all, and all point to the subjective, emotional foundation of so much ethical discussion today.[6]
2) Why Does Emotion Drive Secular Western Moral Thinking?
Because there is no longer a widely accepted moral framework (at least on hot button issues).
Christianity used to be the moral framework that guided Western ethical thinking (in principle, if not always in practice). Not too long ago, ‘Christianity’ was synonymous with morality.
But in 2021, those days are behind us.
Yes, there is a residual Christian memory that still informs our moral thinking. But it doesn’t dominate our moral thinking as a culture – especially on hot button issues such as sexuality and gender. We no longer have an agreed-upon transcendent ethical framework but have splintered into many different ways of thinking about morality. [7]
And as MacIntyre makes clear, once the basis for such discussion lacks any agreed-on metaphysical framework, it is doomed to degenerate into nothing more than ‘the assertion of opinions and preferences.’ [8]
3) People On the Other Side Are Seen To Be Driven By Emotion (But We’re Driven By Rationality)
But as mentioned above, few people would see their positions driven merely by emotion.
They would argue that they’re following the science, following reason – and that it’s the other side who are emotionally driven and irrational. Just look at how social conservatives and Christian panellists are treated on shows like ABC’s Q and A, especially when it comes to issues of sexuality and gender.
And this was also apparent during the SSM Postal vote here in Australia. The ‘Yes’ campaign painted everyone against SSM as driven by bigotry and irrational hatred toward Gay and Lesbian people.
4) How Emotivism Works Against Abortion
While having debates driven by emotion more than reason should concern Christians (and everyone else for that matter), it has some interesting consequences.
Take abortion, for example.
Trueman points out how emotivism has affected mainstream attitudes toward abortion:
Strange to tell, changing attitudes to abortion provide evidence of [why emotion and aesthetics determine morality today]. The general cultural tide has been turning against the most radical pro-abortion policies, and this is not the result of abstract philosophical pro-life reasoning winning the day but rather the effect of sonograms showing that the baby in the womb looks like a small person. Such images pull at the heartstrings and elicit an intuitive, emotional reaction.’ [9]
Seeing the image of a moving baby on a sonogram – complete with a heartbeat – is one of the best ‘arguments’ against abortion. It’s hard to deny the humanity of an unborn child when you’re seeing them on the screen. (This is why many states in the US that are keen to limit abortion require pregnant women to see a sonogram of their child first before they’re allowed to access abortion).
5) How Emotivism Works For Gay Marriage
While there are reason-based arguments for gay marriage (based on the very modern view of identity), aesthetics and emotion have done the heavy lifting in making gay marriage plausible to secular Westerners.
As Trueman points out:
If aesthetics and emotions work in favour of conservatives and Christians on the abortion issue, however, I would argue that the opposite is the case when it comes to gay marriage.
He continues:
Gay marriage has all the potent therapeutic rhetoric and images on its side. It is about love. It is about happiness. It is about allowing two people to commit to each other. It is about acceptance. It is about inclusivity. And to oppose it is to be against all those things...to be an opponent of gay marriage is to be more than just a sour-faced killjoy; it is to act out of irrational bigotry akin to that which motivates racists. No less august a body than the Supreme Court of the United States made that point when it overturned the Defence of Marriage Act...
He concludes:
In a world in which emotivism rules, those whose language tracks most closely with the emotional temper of the time inevitably present the most persuasive arguments, even if they are not really presenting arguments at all.’ [10]
Where does this leave Christians and the Church?
6) The Church’s First Task: Be Aware of Aesthetic Based Logic (and Don’t Indulge it).
If emotivism is the method of modern moral debate, we first need to be aware of it. We need to see many of today’s ethical debates for what they are: thinly veiled appeals to emotion.
Second, we need to keep from debating in this way because such debating is not faithful to Scripture. We don’t find the truth through feelings or aesthetics. Feelings can lead us astray – especially when such feelings align with the world’s way of thinking.
Instead, Scripture encourages us to use reason and evidence to make proper judgements. Thus, when it comes to hot topics like sexuality, Truman points out:
The debate on LGBTQ+ issues within the church must be decided on the basis of moral principles, not on the attractiveness and appeal of the narratives of the people involved.’ [11]
This is no easy task when Christians are swimming in a culture awash in emotivism.
Image: Canva.com
[1] It changed in 2011 at the national Labor party conference: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/03/gay-marriage-australia-labor-party-endorse
[2] See for example the gallop polls on this site: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/Abortion.aspx
[3] Quoted in Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self – Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020), 85.
[4] Trueman, 85.
[5] Trueman, 86.
[6] Trueman, 87.
[7] As Trueman argues, ‘The plausibility of this position rests on the failure of other attempts to find objective grounding for moral claims. Emotivism is therefore a function of the failed history of ethical theory.’ Trueman, 85-86.
[8] Trueman, 87.
[9] Trueman, 396.
[10] Trueman, 396-397.
[11] Trueman, 403.