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How do you decide what should be normal in a secularized, fragmented society?
The destruction of America’s political norms.” “Don’t normalize that.” “This is not normal!” “Why can’t you just be normal?”
The last two decades have seen a rising attention to normalcy in American public life. Google Trends shows a steady upward slope—a quadrupling, in fact—in online interest in “normal” between 2004 and 2024.
But anecdotally, I’d say this acceleration has felt more intense since around 2015. Not coincidentally, that was the year former president Donald Trump first came to dominate national politics, and it’s also the year the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, which shifted public discourse on sexuality and gender away from gay marriage and toward new frontiers, especially on gender identity.
Normalcy has long had some moral valence. Its etymology has to do with the rightness of angles in carpentry, and from there, it’s not a long verbal journey to other kinds of rightness: conformity with rules, not just the ruler, and especially with ethical rules.
Lately it seems like that moral shade is thickening. In a secularized, fragmented society, we are running perilously short on widely accepted norms. A panic is rising. No one wants anomie, a norm less culture, but how do you set effective norms if there’s no consensus on what’s normal? On what basis do you mourn or herald the death of old norms or the rise of new ones? By what rule can we judge and instruct if we’re losing agreed-upon rules?
A fascinating case study of this quandary popped up in a recent Atlantic essay from scholar Tyler Austin Harper. Titled “Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad,” its first three-quarters ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
Umn ministry
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