True and Useful

“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Ba-dum-bum!

I don’t recall hearing that line of argument against same-sex marriage from evangelicals much prior to the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015. However, Google’s Ngram viewer shows the phrase “Adam and Steve” appeared in popular culture for the first time around 1978 and peaked in 2011, with a strong tail into 2020.

So then, the line has been around nearly fifty years. It’s an old argument. It’s definitely a true argument. But whenever I hear it I ask myself, “Is it a useful argument?”

Upsides and Downsides

“Not Adam and Steve” has its virtues. It’s short and it gets right to the point. Your audience won’t drift off to Dreamland mid-sentence. It’s also catchy and it rhymes. It sounds mildly clever. To devout Christians, it’s generally persuasive. When challenged about divorce, Jesus too drew the authority for his argument from the way human relationships were ordered in creation: “From the beginning it was not so.” Like divorce, gay marriage was never God’s ideal for man, and not merely because it would have limited human history to a single generation. A quick glance back at the creation order reminds us of that truth without getting into a long dialectical screed. There’s a fair bit to be said for pithy rhetoric in the right context.

On the other hand, “Adam and Steve” has become a cliché. Your audience has probably heard it somewhere else, maybe not from anyone they liked much. It’s a talking point, not a personal observation. It’s also dismissive. Snappy one-liners have a tendency to shut mouths and finish conversations. If that’s what you’re looking to do, have at it, but I think most Christians get into dialogues about morality with friends, neighbors and co-workers hoping eventually to win them to Christ, not just to win a technical point. Ideally, we want these folks to see us as people of goodwill who can reason for ourselves (which hopefully we are), not robots spouting propaganda.

Who’s Your Audience?

When the Lord Jesus recognized God’s purposes in creation as authoritative, he did it to a group of Pharisees, a literalist religious sect that accepted the Genesis account as the final word. If there were any among them who didn’t, they were not about to admit it in front of their pals. So Jesus had the right argument for the right audience. Moreover, their real objective was almost certainly to discredit the Lord by setting him against Moses, a trap that referencing God’s original order neatly circumvented.

Like the Pharisees, I too believe in a literal Adam and Eve, so any true argument about them is also persuasive to me. If your audience is me or anyone like me, then appealing to the creation order is useful. We agree that it’s where God set the bar. However, those who read the Genesis account as a myth or reject scripture entirely are less likely to find referencing Adam and Eve as the ideal for any cultural institution a compelling argument. Rarely these days are we discussing the constantly morphing morality of our culture with people who take their stand on a literal interpretation of scripture. In such a case, it may be more effective to shift into “Personally, I believe” or “The Bible teaches” mode rather than delivering a zinger that ends up being the last word on the subject.

“True” and “useful” often describe overlapping territory, but they are not synonyms. Before reeling off “Not Adam and Steve” or anything else clever we’ve picked up from our in-group, it’s prudent to ask ourselves, “Who’s my audience here, and what’s my long-term objective for them?”