Livin’ in Babylon

On October 7, 1999, Adrianne Clarkson, a well known Canadian journalist, became Governor General of Canada. This is a largely symbolic position and, beyond legal and ceremonial duties as Head of State, the Governor General functions as a kind of model Canadian. So, it was interesting to note that, in the time period between being asked to consider the appointment, and the public announcement of the appointment, she married her partner of 15 years. When asked about her new marital status she mused that her marriage was “short enough to still be interesting and long enough to be respectable”.

An event like this is probably a pretty good indication of the Canadian public’s attitude toward marriage at the end of the last millennium; living together unmarried was not so bad as to disqualify you from consideration for the job of Head of State, but if you wanted to actually get the job you needed to tie the knot. Marriage still mattered, but living together unmarried didn’t matter very much.

Now, I mean no criticism of Madame Clarkson. She was merely a representative Canadian. But this is a reminder that we live, and have always lived, in an evolving society. No ethnic group, church, political party, class or community has a corner on “Canadian values”. Canadian values concerning marriage, family, and everything else, are what they are at any given moment, and every group and individual shares these values to a greater or lesser extent. It’s a bit like being average. Each of us is above average in some things and below average in others, and no one really is, and few really want to be, average.

So, if a given community, a church for example, has a particular view of marriage, it should expect to differ in that way from the surrounding community. It should not be surprised or dismayed to find resistance to its view in the surrounding community, and will certainly not expect its children to gather their marital values, or any other values, from the surrounding culture.

And here we have a biblical principle. When God’s people were living in Babylon they needed to focus on producing godly communities of faith. They were commanded to love Babylon, of course, because God loves Babylon. They were commanded to bless Babylon. But the best way to love and bless Babylon was to become the people God wanted them to be, and to produce communities that could bear a faithful and biblical witness ― not to become Babylonians.