Evangelical Pantaloons

the uses of believing the incredible

Almost all the memorable stories are betrayals in Jean-Joseph Ferrier’s account of his travels in Afghanistan but there is one story of quite astonishing trust. I’ll give it to you straight:

The Indians I saw at Herat had been there for upwards of twenty years, without ever leaving it; but their wives, in almost every case, had never joined them. One of them had, however, a son of about fifteen years of age with him; and I was wondering how he came there, considering that his mother had lived at Shikarpoor for a score of years, and his father the same number at Herat, when I received a solution of the enigma from my acquaintance, Syud Elias, an Afghan merchant, who had made a good many journeys to India, and was familiar with the customs of the people of that country. According to his showing, an Indian, when he leaves his home, leaves also a pair of pantaloons with his wife, who puts them on when she is desirous of being in that condition so natural to, and, generally speaking, so much coveted by married women; no husband, it appears, would ever dream of repudiating a child obtained by this simple method: to do so would be a perfect scandal.

I remembered this when reading the solemn declaration of orthodoxy signed by eight evangelical bishops against blessing gay relationships. After some preliminary throat-clearing guff about the Trinity and the Nicene Creed, necessary to establish that their opinion about gay people is shared by the vast majority of Christians in the world today (and it is – no argument there), they get on to assert that marriage is “more than a contingent social arrangement” but something established and intended by God.

As the Articles say, what is not found in Scripture cannot be imposed on the Church, and the Church lacks authority to ordain anything contrary to God’s word written.

Ah: that would be marriage to the deceased wife’s sister; divorce on any grounds at all; divorce on any grounds but a woman’s adultery. All these are explicitly forbidden in God’s word written – the last two, confusingly, by Jesus Himself in different gospels. Well, which? one wants to ask.

All of these prohibitions have been defended with passion, scriptural authority, and complete sincerity by evangelicals in wranglings that lasted decades, using exactly the same arguments from scripture and tradition as the eight bishops use today. All have successively been lost. Most of the signatories have parents or grandparents who would have been scandalised by the remarriage of divorcees; great grandparents for whom the marriage of a man to his dead wife’s sister was a moment of national apostasy. Some at least will have children who can’t see what the fuss is about. The knowledge of these retreats no doubt lends fervour to their stand in the latest ditch.

This looks like yet another illustration of the fact that it is not science, but history, which makes Christianity incredible. My shrewd (third) wife, herself a former missionary, said no: what history shows is that Christians have always needed to find exceptions to the rule. John Milton, himself, as bible-believing a Christian as you could find, wrote a pamphlet in favour of divorce.

This is where the pantaloons come in. The story that they tell is literally incredible, like so much of the Bible itself. It defies biology as well as history. But to pretend to believe it, or to believe it in the special way that people believe in miracles, preserves something valuable about marriage. In the context of Indian society, where marriage is a compact between families as much as it is between individuals, it preserves the alliances between families and the web of trust that holds these alliances together. In the context of merchant families, that web of trust – of whom you credit – is financially essential. The pantaloons cover the gross reality of sexuality. They provide heirs to family businesses when less miraculous methods are unavailable. They moderate the rigours of patriarchy, since there appears to be no corresponding mechanism for the father’s bastards, who must have existed. In short, they subordinate sexual desire to the needs of a wider society, which is one of the most important social functions of a marriage.

Of course it’s also “a contingent social arrangement”, because all social arrangements are contingent and everyone involved in them is going to die, too. They only work because people agree to ignore this fact, and to enforce that ignorance on others. This applies just as much to Western marriage as to the pantaloons of 19th century Indian merchants. This is what the bishops mean, I take it, when they say that marriage is more than a contingent social arrangement.

The important thing is that there should be an element of compulsion in these arrangements. Against the general anarchy and universal treachery of Afghan society as depicted in Ferrier’s book the pantaloons provide a socially enforced norm of who you can trust and for what.

This kind of faith need not have theological implications. In Eastern societies the demands of morality are to some extent distinct from the demands of the Gods, as they are in Greek and Roman mythology, too. Christians, and post-Christian Westerners, understand the world quite differently. For us, morality comes bundled with ideas about the order of the whole universe. We believe that love (as well as other things) gives us a glimpse of transcendent reality, of the order behind everything. This is quite as true of the incoherent longings of humanists as of Christians.

So I think I understand where the bishops are coming from. I too believe that marriage ought to be a covenanted relationship, and not a purely contractual one; and that even when one of them turns out to be unendurable, we should still work to realise that ideal next time around.

But I really can’t see what that has to do with refusing to bless loving and socially recognised relationships. And in a church which routinely now marries divorced people, to kick up this particular fuss looks like straight prejudice against gay people