I was very distressed by the recent National Review Article in which John J. Miller interviews Wendell Berry. This is not odd (I am often distressed), but it is odd that I am distressed by Berry. The rambling interview asks about how and why Berry is popular on the left and the right. As Miller digs down into Berry's views, he finds a lot of things that don't fit the tags and categories that don't fit:
1. He votes for Democrats and even Obama (but has little hope that politician can do anything to help life).
2. He is pro-life, but non-committal when you get into particulars.
3. He looks to Miller like an anti-capitalist.
These were not too distressing to me. I expect Berry to be sort of politically non-committal. I would like him to be clearer on pro-life issues, but I respect his hatred of movements. I do not believe that Berry is anti-capitalist, but I do believe that he is anti-giant corporations (because they are out of proportion with life or as has been recently said "too big to fail").
I am distressed about Berry's views on gay marriage. He is for it. The reason he is for it are not shocking--he wants all sorts of people to have inheritance rights, etc. He basically wants the government out of marriage recognition business. This is, of course, fitting with Berry's distrust of government and his libertarianism. At this point, however, he is overreaching. Government does need to be involved in recognizing who is married to whom. How could the law work otherwise!
Berry also points to the hypocrisy of the church on sexual ethics, noting:
He regards the entire debate as a distraction: “I really don’t understand how you can single out homosexuality for opprobrium and wink at fornication and adultery, which the Bible has a lot more to say about. The churches are not going to come out against fornication and adultery because there are too damn many fornicators and adulterers in their congregations.”
Both of these reasons, however, fall far short of biblical justification. The Bible claims that sin is destructive. That it actually harms the people engaged in. If the government says it does not, then (well) the government is wrong (it has been before and consistently). The government governs best when it tells the truth, but the government can not change the truth, however, loudly it proclaims against it.
It is disappointing that Berry who sees so many flaws in the ways that our world works produces such flimsy arguments to justify bad thinking. Someone who works on a farm should know better! Nature (and nature's God) guide us through His word and through His revelation in nature.
Here is a link to the whole article:
