Orson Scott Card: Casualty of Culture Wars

A reflection on a personal hero

Initially published on Twitter.

I had an idea the other day: that I’d write an article about how Orson Scott Card, one of my greatest inspirations as a writer, was wronged. This came shortly after listening to an old “Secular Humanist Revival Meeting”¹ where he spoke.

The meeting is a fascinating listen, a reminder of a near-forgotten era: when Card, as a Latter-day Saint, felt inspired to speak passionately in defense of a secular state and against those who would use its arm to shut down dissent from their particular moral view. He speaks in praise of science and reason, reading and chuckling in horror at excerpts from a “creation science” textbook and noting that true science and true religion can always co-evolve. He condemns preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson calling for an explicitly Christian state, criticizes initiatives like prayer in school. He speaks against a ban on porn, presenting it as the camel’s nose of censorship, then condemned liberals seeking their own forms of censorship - of sexist language, of Huck Finn, of more. It’s an emphatic defense of classical liberalism set in the dimly remembered wars of the ‘90s.

And I listened to this all, and remembered just how much my own view, as I grew up, was shaped by the frame he spoke so passionately of: how as an LDS kid I was always proudly on the side of Science and worked to reconcile it with the doctrines of my faith, how I learned to value free expression and other classically liberal ideals. I remembered how profoundly his writing had impacted me, how many themes from his stories stick in my mind and motivate me even now. What a shame, I thought as I listened, that a man like this could be hounded out of a “secular humanist” coalition.

So I had this vague idea that I’d reread his essays on homosexuality—the ones that got him cast out from Polite Society, the ones that profoundly influenced my own view on homosexuality as a kid trying to work out what to think of the world—and re-frame them in light of that secular humanist vision as something where collaboration was clearly possible. He considered his views moderate ones, I recalled, and growing up I considered them moderate as well and was outraged by people’s harsh reactions to them.

That’s not quite what happened when I read them. Instead, I saw them, perhaps inevitably, in a new light: one of sympathy towards those who recoiled against him. In 1990, he spoke of the value of laws against homosexual behavior to discourage it and encourage people to keep it discreet. In the 2000s, he wrote of gay marriage as an attack on heterosexual marriage so severe that it would mark the end of Democracy, would place him in bitter and intractable enmity with any government that implemented it, that it would be the death of any value in the Constitution and cause to tear the government to the ground.

Where did the moderate frame he claimed and I remembered come in? He wrote about seeing gay people as individuals just like anyone else, with “as complex a combination of good and evil in them” as he finds in himself. Hating the sin, but loving the sinner, as he put it.

I understand these beliefs, because they were my own. Not just an influence on my own—the overriding influence on my own. Here, after all, was a writer whose books I loved, who shared my faith, and who wrote cogently and persuasively in defense of its doctrine and standards. What more could I need, as a teenager finding his way in the world? I remember reading his editorials and essays and nodding excitedly along, thinking about how finally, someone got it. I understand them, and sympathize with their almost-inevitability as words from an intelligent LDS individual determined to remain intellectually consistent and defend the doctrines of his faith, because I came from the same roots and made much the same calculation.

Years later, when Obergefell passed, my viewpoint had softened a bit, but that logic had not fundamentally changed. I had slowly shifted to a sentiment that if the church changed its view on gay marriage, I would first leave the church, then start supporting gay marriage, as the secular rationalizations began to fall flat for me. But Card still seemed basically right.

At the same time, another piece of his writing was working its way through my mind—the moment that inspired my username, the story of a girl who held fast to her faith even after it was demonstrated to be false, kneeling down and tracing woodgrains as a religious ritual as her whole world fell away from it. I had realized gradually that I could not reconcile my understanding with my faith, and found myself constantly re-examining the question of whether to trace the woodgrains or to stand up and walk away.

It’s only after I elected to leave that I re-examined my position on gay marriage, still later when I realized my own attraction to men and married one. I was on Card’s side of the dispute the whole time it was a live dispute, then found myself not just on the opposite, but profoundly so: happily married to a man and grateful for the legal protection my relationship has.

Here’s the quandary: what does the “secular humanism” Card spoke of do with the people it leaves behind? Card’s view at the time left no room for the sort of reconciliation that is my instinct, the polite but strongly felt disagreement between two people aligned on more fundamental matters. I want to be on the side of the Orson Scott Card pushing for secularism and cooperation in the ‘90s, against evangelicals pushing young-earth creationism in schools and censorious progressives alike, while at the same time feeling a sense of impossibility at understanding how to cooperate with the Card who spoke of gay marriage as a threat to the Republic so profound it would merit tearing the government to the ground.

Even with that impossibility, though, I retain the sense that Card was wronged, as are many good people who see the times move on from them. People fixate so much, so exclusively, on the area of dissonance between his frame and theirs that everything else fades into irrelevance, that one of the most earnest and humanizing authors of our day becomes known in pop culture only as the one who was against gay marriage. It’s not that it’s unfair to judge people on the fights they pick, precisely—but I cannot help but see it as profoundly tragic to reduce them to that and become incapable of seeing or talking about anything but that dissonance.

Anyway, in his public statement on the matter after gay marriage became legal, Card asked for “tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.” A decade later, I can’t pretend I disagreed with him while the issue was in dispute, and I certainly lack the sway in Polite Society to undo the reputational harm he suffered in the wake of the gay marriage fight. But what I can say is this:

When I read Card’s books, when I hear his secular sermon, when I see glimpses of his mind, I see a brilliant writer who impacted my life and my worldview profoundly, one who wrote so beautifully and so honestly that his writing stuck to my soul as I realized I could find no home in the faith that had been our mutual home. I see someone who was committed to much the same vision of culture that resonated with me, only to find that culture shift too far, too fast, to remain a home for him. And I want desperately, perhaps impossibly, to find a culture where both he and I can feel at home and in some meaningful sense on the same side.

I can’t compel everyone to show tolerance, nor can I pretend I find a true reconciliation between his frame and my own. But as a direct beneficiary of a policy he fought passionately against, I’m grateful for the role his words have played in my life and think people were wrong to reduce him to nothing but “a bigot” and culturally marginalize him. People retained “hate the sin” from the Christian framework, but never quite figured out “love the sinner.”

Ultimately, it is incumbent on the winners of cultural battles to show grace to the losers, and that never really happened after the legalization of gay marriage. Perhaps now that particular issue has cooled a bit and we’ve moved onto yet more exciting and bitter battlefields, those of us happy to have gay marriage can now do so: viewing him with understanding and sympathy, neither glossing over our moral dispute nor turning him into a caricature because of it.

1. Transcript here.