Remember Lot’s Wife.

t is not mar­riage, what five peo­ple forced upon us all on Fri­day, and can not be mar­riage any more than a square can be round or a hexa­gon rec­tan­gu­lar. What five people—a major­i­ty by one—forced upon us all on Fri­day was a game of make-believe, a lie. Words mean things, and mar­riage is not just a social arrange­ment entered into by any two peo­ple who may choose. Mar­riage is onto­log­i­cal, root­ed in God’s design of the human per­son for uni­ty and pro­cre­ation. Man was not designed to fit with man, nor woman with woman. What five peo­ple forced upon us all on Fri­day was not a mere rejec­tion of the moral law of good acts and wicked acts, but a rejec­tion of the design of the Cre­ator. We may now design our own real­i­ty. We may now be our own God. It starts by mak­ing words mean what­ev­er we want them to mean. If sodomy can be mar­riage, then any­thing can be mar­riage; and if any­thing can be mar­riage, then noth­ing is mar­riage, and there is no design and no God. Things are not what they are but what we will. A man can be a woman or a Cau­casian a Negro.

The Phar­isees came to Jesus, to test him. They asked, “Is it law­ful for a man to divorce his wife for any rea­son?”

And Jesus, root­ing mar­riage in first prin­ci­ples, said, “Have you not read that he who made them from the begin­ning made them male and female?” (Matt. 19:3–4).

Mar­riage is what it is because the design of the human per­son is what it is. Man was not made to fit with man. In the cre­ation, in Gen­e­sis, God made Adam, and then he made Eve—not a copy, but a complement—and said to them, “Be fruit­ful and mul­ti­ply” (Gen. 1:28). This, Christ tells us, is the ori­gin of mar­riage: in the cre­ation of man and woman and the com­mand to cre­ate chil­dren. Because by design a man can not make a child with anoth­er man, nor a woman with a woman, two peo­ple of the same sex can not be mar­ried.

There is a word for it, but it is not mar­riage. The word is “sodomy.”

But this is about more than words. This is about a rejec­tion of God and a rejec­tion of cre­ation. We want to be our own God. We want to be our own mak­er. And so with same-sex “mar­riage” we vio­late not just the sixth com­mand­ment but the first. We are our own graven image.

•••

The Con­gre­ga­tion for the Doc­trine of the Faith tells us that Catholics have a duty to oppose this:

In those sit­u­a­tions where homo­sex­u­al unions have been legal­ly rec­og­nized or have been giv­en the legal sta­tus and rights belong­ing to mar­riage, clear and emphat­ic oppo­si­tion is a duty. (II.5)

Oppos­ing this is not an option. It is what all of us must now do. None may sit apart and let oth­ers act. And for any­one who calls him­self a Catholic, or a Chris­t­ian of any kind, to smear his pro­file pic­ture with a rain­bow is to look at God and say, “I reject your design and I reject you.” We must be clear about this. We must be stark about this. We have no call to lie about this.

But as a legal arrange­ment now call­ing itself “mar­riage,” this kind of sodomy is destruc­tive of more than just those who engage in it.

(Of course, it is harm­ful to those who enage in it. What else is it when, to take just one exam­ple among many, men have to wear colosto­my bags because of the destruc­tive effect of anal sex? Who would will­ing­ly do that to him­self? Only some­one who is in love with his sin. Rea­son does not much help in these cas­es.)

But it is, as Pope Fran­cis has told us, also destruc­tive of chil­dren because it deprives them of a moth­er and a father. It is destruc­tive of the fam­i­ly, where chil­dren are raised and learn to be com­plete human beings. The rea­son the state has tra­di­tion­al­ly favored mar­riage by grant­i­ng it spe­cial ben­e­fits is pre­cise­ly because a fam­i­ly, with a moth­er and father, is best suit­ed to the rais­ing of chil­dren to be upright mem­bers of soci­ety. The health of the fam­i­ly is nec­es­sary to the health of the state. Chil­dren, study after study has shown, need their own moth­er, and their own father, for their moral health and psy­cho­log­i­cal health. To give sodomy the dig­ni­ty of being called “mar­riage,” to allow such cou­ples to adopt and raise chil­dren, harms chil­dren in that it deprives them of an envi­ron­ment in which they can learn respect for the body God gave them, right moral and sex­u­al con­duct and dif­fer­ences, and healthy rela­tions between the sex­es. With­out that, chil­dren are harmed, and in turn soci­ety is harmed in a way that is dif­fi­cult if not impos­si­ble to repair.

•••

But here is where we are; and now what? We are liv­ing in the cities of the plain. Gen­e­sis describes the evil of Sodom and Gomor­rah:

But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the peo­ple to the last man, sur­round­ed the house. And they called to Lot, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.’ Lot went out to the men at the entrance, shut the door after him, and said, ‘I beg you, my broth­ers, do not act so wicked­ly. Behold, I have two daugh­ters who have not known any man. Let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please. Only do noth­ing to these men, for they have come under the shel­ter of my roof.’ But they said, ‘Stand back!’ And they said, ‘This fel­low came to sojourn, and he has become the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.’ Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and drew near to break the door down. But the men reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door. And they struck with blind­ness the men who were at the entrance of the house, both small and great, so that they wore them­selves out grop­ing for the door. (Gen. 19:4–11, ESV)

The peo­ple of Sodom loved their sin so much, they were so mad for it, that even after they were struck blind “they wore them­selves out grop­ing for the door” so that they could get at their prey.

And that is what our own coun­try is doing when we insist so much on our own sin, and upon our own mad desire to deny God’s design for us and cre­ate our­selves, that we demand the law of the coun­try suit our own will and call any oppo­si­tion hate and silence it.

God is strik­ing us blind, but we are wear­ing our­selves out grop­ing for the door.

That is where we are, and what do we do?

We could take the approach of Abra­ham and bar­gain with God. When God told Abra­ham he would destroy the cities of the plain “because their sin is very grave,” Abra­ham asked him: “Will you destroy the right­eous with the wicked? What if you find fifty right­eous peo­ple there?”

God told him: I will not destroy it for fifty.

“But what if there lack only five of the fifty?”

“I will not destroy it for forty-five.”

“What if there be forty?”

“I will not destroy it for forty.”

Through this method of bar­gain­ing, Abra­ham man­aged to get the num­ber down to ten: God would not destroy Sodom and Gomor­rah if he found ten right­eous peo­ple there (Gen. 18:22–33).

There must not have been even ten.

Might God save this nation in par­tic­u­lar, or West­ern Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion in gen­er­al, if we sought after right­eous­ness for our­selves and remind­ed him of the ten most right­eous peo­ple we know?

Per­haps. Per­haps we should be like Abra­ham.

•••

It breaks my heart to write these words, but I believe they are true, and so I write them.

West­ern Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion is irre­triev­ably lost. The total destruc­tion is com­ing, and it is only a ques­tion of when, and how, and by whom. The only ques­tion is—to bor­row the phrase from T.S. Eliot—what frag­ments we can shore up against the ruins. Par­lia­men­tary maneu­vers like amend­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion are not going to work in a world that has reject­ed not only basic moral law but observ­able real­i­ty.

Car­di­nal Burke not­ed that pagan soci­eties may have tol­er­at­ed sodomy, but even they nev­er called it mar­riage. That has nev­er happened—until now. A world in which such a thing is even con­ceiv­able, let alone has hap­pened, is not one that I think can be saved. (Indi­vid­u­als can be.) God has giv­en us over to our sin (cf. Rom. 1:24–32). He has said: “If you love your sin so much, then sin your­selves to death.” It may not be he who destroys us by him­self, but he who per­mits us to be destroyed by our own act. And so we com­mit sui­cide, and God does not lift his hand to stay us.

We are under his wrath. Wicked lead­ers are God’s judg­ment on a sin­ful nation.

Jesus warned us: “Remem­ber Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32).

When God led Lot and his fam­i­ly out of Sodom, his wife looked back at the smol­der­ing ruin behind her, and she became a pile of salt.

Did she look back because she was in love with the sin of Sodom? Or did she look back because she was in love with what Sodom once was, before it became a byword?

I don’t think it mat­ters.

My advice is: Do not look back. Speak the truth where we can to save souls, yes. But do not look back and long for what we used to be. It is irre­triev­ably lost.

I think the Prophet Hag­gai answers the ques­tion for us: What now?

Is it a time for you to be liv­ing in your pan­eled hous­es, while this house remains a ruin? Now this is what the Lord God says: Give care­ful thought to your ways. You have plant­ed much but har­vest­ed lit­tle. You drink but nev­er have your fill. You put on clothes but are not warm. You earn wages only to put them in a purse with holes in it. This is what the Lord God says: Give care­ful thought to your ways. Go up to the moun­tain and bring down tim­ber and build my house, so that I may take plea­sure in it and be hon­ored. You expect­ed much, but see, it turns out to be lit­tle. What you brought home, I blew away. Why? says the Lord God. Because of my house, which remains a ruin, while each of you is busy with your own house. (Hag­gai 1:4–9)

Rod Dreher has called it “the Bene­dict option.” In a recent arti­cle in Time he says that Chris­tians must accept that they are exiles in their own coun­try. The only hope for Chris­tian­i­ty is for us to be like St. Bene­dict in the wake of the fall of Rome: retreat into com­mu­ni­ty with each oth­er, with­stand hos­til­i­ty and per­se­cu­tion, pre­serve as much of Chris­t­ian cul­ture as we can against the destruc­tion to come, and use it to rebuild lat­er on when the Dark Ages end. Bring as many peo­ple into the ark as you can who will hear you and come.

For Rome, the Dark Ages came because their moral dete­ri­o­ra­tion left them open to attack from the bar­bar­ians. For us, the bar­bar­ians are Rad­i­cal Islam. I have seen no evi­dence that this coun­try has the nec­es­sary will to do what it must do to stop it.

Some might say that all this amounts to throw­ing in the tow­el. But no. It is just anoth­er strat­e­gy for vic­to­ry that takes the very long his­tor­i­cal view. Unless Christ should come again, I do not see any oth­er option. The cul­ture, as it is, is not going to be saved. God has giv­en us over to our sin. We must rebuil

Do not look back. Instead, go up to the moun­tain and bring down tim­ber.

Remem­ber Lot’s wife.