Is Nothing Weird Anymore?
In 1991 The Addams Family movie was released and advertised with this slogan: “Weird is Relative.” I was leading a youth group at my church at the time, and I recall a teen telling me, “You know, when you think about it, that’s true: Weird IS relative.” I thought, “Well, yes, of course you can only have ‘weird’ if you first relate it to ‘normal’” (‘normal’ is an antonym for ‘weird’ – see here). But she said it as if it was an epiphany, which struck me as odd, and troubling. That’s because I sensed that underlying her ‘discovery’ was a current and harmful assumption that was well on its way to full societal acceptance namely, that there are no external norms by which to evaluate, only personal preferences. In that environment, if something is relative, then, it’s relative to … me. It was “You do You” before that was a thing.
Within of our lifetimes (at least for those of a certain age) we have moved from a society adhering to traditional Christian values, to a post-Christian culture. It’s a world that Christian thinkers have been warning about for a good while. The late Christian philosopher and theologian Francis Schaeffer wrote in his seminal work, How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture:
If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals … If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions. ((Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, p. 166.))
The vacuum left by this departure from the norms of creation opens us to, well, anything. It happens that the year after The Addams Family movie was released Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote his infamous ‘mystery of life’ passage in a Supreme Court decision saying: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” That set the stage for this same Justice Kennedy to write the majority opinion in the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity” (see here). This business of “defining one’s own concept of existence … meaning … the universe … and the mystery of human life” is heady stuff. And try though he did to constrain this expansive individualism, some saw through it and to where it will inevitably lead. Chief Justice John Roberts, dissenting, said:
It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage. If “[t]here is dignity in the bond between two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to make such profound choices,” why would there be any less dignity in the bond between three people who, in exercising their autonomy, seek to make the profound choice to marry? If a same-sex couple has the constitutional right to marry because their children would otherwise “suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser,”, why wouldn’t the same reasoning apply to a family of three or more persons raising children? If not having the opportunity to marry “serves to disrespect and subordinate” gay and lesbian couples, why wouldn’t the same “imposition of this disability,” serve to disrespect and subordinate people who find fulfillment in polyamorous relationships? (see here)
One can only imagine the kinds of “relationships” that will be sought in the future by those untethered to any absolute except their own fallen desire.
The Christian worldview begins with the way things were designed to be, against which we can then identify deviations, and apply correctives. But our culture’s abandonment of that worldview has left us adrift, unmoored by any consensus regarding societal mores, and leaving each to do “what is right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Those who fail to learn from history are destined to repeat it, and we are. Let’s pray for revival. Should the Lord grant it we will see people saved from every variety of sin, including the ‘respectable’ ones like pride, anger, and gossip (see here) and also, it will again become normal to identify what’s weird.
Ken Brown is the pastor of Community Bible Church in Trenton, MI. We republish his article by permission.
Photo by Brecht Bug. This work is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) License.