Later this week, a commentary of mine be published elsewhere about an upcoming decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue is the First Amendment’s prohibition on laws “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The context is Texas’s law requiring internet porn sites to verify that their users are not minors.
In such cases, lawyers usually focus on what falls within the scope of the speech and press clause according to the Court more modern precedents. Non-lawyers focus on the denigration of the individuals who make and use pornography.
Today, I want to consider something else. I think it has been grossly overlooked. Until a few years ago, I didn’t know anything about it.
Today’s Focus: What Kind of Harm is Pornography?
To frame today’s commentary, consider what Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote about the speech and press clause in his Commentaries on the United States Constitution (1833):
That this amendment was intended to secure to every citizen an absolute right to speak, or write, or print, whatever he might please, without any responsibility, public or private, therefor, is a supposition too wild to be indulged by any rational man. (emphasis supplied)
Notice that the kind of harm left unprotected by the clause is not limited to private ones, to individuals. Public harm is also constitutionally unprotected. But what kind of harm is that?
The Court’s Reductionist View of Human Beings
On that point, notice how the Court eliminated from its constitutional jurisprudence any objective (essential) meaning from art and literature:
Consistent with the fundamental First Amendment principle that “esthetic and moral judgments about art and literature … are for the individual to make, not for the Government to decree,” this Court has long treated non-obscene sexual content as constitutionally protected.
United States v. Playboy Ent. Grp., Inc., 529 U.S. 803, 818 (2000) (emphasis added).
In other words, mere pornography — “non-obscene sexual content”— is a constitutionally protected form of “art and literature” based on an individual’s “esthetic and moral judgments.”
Apart from this obscene debasement of art and literature, the Court has reduced the law that governs pornography to the lowest common denominator of a purely subjective individualism. Where does a public harm fit in that?
My Analysis
I believe that quote demonstrates that the autonomy of the individual has won the day, for now, in our nation’s culture and constitutional jurisprudence. In culture, tribes of different kinds arise out of the insecurity of individualism. In law, art and literature is in the eye of the beholder.
We can condemn this. We can enact more statutes trying to stop the metaphysical pull of a subjective individualism that can only go in one direction—the perversion of everything. But law cannot reverse the direction of this metaphysical merry-go-round any more than law can make a person righteous who is metaphysically deformed by sin.
What’s the Deal About Metaphysics?
Christians are supposed to have a metaphysical understanding of who human beings are. By metaphysical, I mean Christians believe in the individual, but also that individuals constitute a humanity, dare we say a “public body.”
In other words, our bodies point to something more than our bodies. The individual has meaning and the many have meaning, that is, there is a real though invisible public body; they reveal what is true of one essential and invisible God who exists in three persons.
Want a real life application of theology? Here it is: Our nation and its jurisprudence have embraced an anti-Trinitarian conception of human meaning.
This is more than just bad people doing bad things. It is a culture and understanding of law that is against God.
How did we reach this point?
For an answer, I offer just one of many question that evangelicals might want to consider (other Protestants and Catholics may want to think of their own):
Does evangelical teaching ever bring attention to metaphysical considerations regarding human meaning?
If you don’t understand the question, you are in the same sinking evangelical ark I was in a few years ago. Your answer would be “No.”
Why This One Question Was Important
Here is the reason for my question: Without a Christian metaphysic, men and women can be reduced to different kinds of bodies or bodies with different sets of chromosomes. That, by the way, is how most Christian lawyers, policy makers, legislators, and pastors I know present the matter.
But if that is all we are, then why can’t those bodies be used primarily for physical pleasure? And don’t say, “It is wrong” because of this or that. Wrong in a Christian sense is a metaphysical proposition. Sin is a metaphysical proposition.
Moreover, if our bodies have no metaphysical meaning, sexual conduct can have no metaphysical meaning either. Eat, drink, and have lots of sex for tomorrow we are gone as passing vapor.
But if that’s true for individuals, the “public” can have no real (metaphysical) meaning either. The public can’t be harmed.
“Public,” today, simply means an aggregation of individuals in particular places at particular times. That kind of non-metaphysical “public” can’t be harmed by what individuals do privately and in non-public spaces.
Conclusion
Without a Christian metaphysic, I don’t think evangelicals will ever be able to address pornography adequately.
Sadly, evangelicals don’t seem to think much about metaphysics anymore. That’s not surprising to me. I can’t remember a pastor ever using that word on a Sunday morning, much less relate it to anything. I’ve never seen or heard of a “Christian metaphysic” conference for the person in the pew.
Without a Christian metaphysic, the present metaphysical merry-go-round of subjective individualism will never move in the opposite direction. I think it’s time for evangelicals to learn again how to speak as Paul did with the Epicureans and Stoics on Mars Hill, with a Gospel metaphysic that challenges the non-metaphysical thinking that prevails in our day.
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