So that’s a very lame title, referring to an old and really bad TV show.

I still need to say more about the Walker Percy Festival and the Bradley Symposium on Higher Education. And maybe love will serve to keep all my remarks together.

On the Bradley event, you can review the record here. I am, throughout, the old fat guy. Yet I’m the only one saying anything good about the erotic or deeply personal dimension of genuinely higher education.

On Rod Dreher (who was, once again, a great host at the Festival), I agree with Carl that his Benedict-option stuff is somewhat overwrought. And that’s the Rod who criticized Carl’s “late republican” stuff for the same reason.

From Walker Percy’s view, a lot of what’s branded as evil or “liberationist” these days is just pretty clueless. A beginning to self-help is seeing that what sophisticates and their experts say these days is pretty loony, pretty ridiculous. And so you shouldn’t let what “they say” apply to you and your own. But that doesn’t mean, I hope, that you can’t live well among people with whom you disagree, and that you can’t do what you can to make the places over which you have some influence better.

And again following Percy, we shouldn’t be so all caught up in “decline and fall” narratives that we forget the ways in which the world is getting better. That doesn’t mean becoming a technophile who’s thinks that progress in wealth and power — or productivity — is the definitive form of human progress, the progress that will make everything better. But there continues to be some real progress (as well as some real decline) on the justice front too, and it’s far from all bad that there’s a general tendency to remove arbitrary barriers to America’s becoming something closer to a meritocracy based on productivity. The impersonal process that devalues all standards above personal productivity is what’s bad, and so it’s our job to resist that process with genuinely personal concerns.

After all, technology contributes the various forms of what Percy calls the “glimmer of hope” we should not fail to see. Think about the screen technology that allows Rod to work from home — the technology that, for a while, made our rural areas stupider but might be allowing them to become smart again. Think about the fact that the families of our “cognitive elite” (roughly the top 15 percent) are getting more stable and parenting among them is getting more responsible. These parents are most free from the romantic illusion that love alone will keep us together, and they are increasingly judgmental when it comes to divorce. They’re for same-sex marriage, but the big fact might be that they’re just really for marriage.

For what it’s worth, the kids at my Berry College (most of whom don’t come from elite homes) seem well raised with a liberalized form of the Southern mixture of honor, shame, and Christianity.

Not only is there love in the ruins, but it’s far from clear that the institution of marriage has been ruined (not by same-sex marriage but by a gradual emptying out of its relational responsibilities over time).

The situation for the bottom 50 percent is bad and getting worse. And it’s on that big issue that Republicans are often pretty clueless. But Democrats are too. And it’s on that issue that our churches should be doing much better.

There’s no denying that the way the Court has been justifying the constitutional right to same-sex marriage threatens the relational autonomy of our churches as organized bodies of thought and action. I’ve talked about that a lot. For now, let me emphasize that our churches (and other organized religions) can defend themselves only by becoming clear on what they believe and why, and by being loud and proud (and smart and charitable) in proclaiming the truth. It’s true that the churches are getting less respect as an indispensable countercultural correction to the self-obsession of American individualism. But that fact is not caused by some abstract idea of “America” working itself out inexorably over time.

The most pointy-headed commentators on the Web (such as Damon Linker) are bringing in Nietzsche (and Nietzsche’s view of Christianity) to talk about same-sex marriage and the journey of Caitlyn Jenner.

Now, in Damon’s opinion, pure Christianity stands in opposition to all legalism, including the Roman legalism that still accounts for the patriarchal and heterosexist dimensions of our understanding of marriage. There’s no reason why Christianity can’t accommodate an understanding of marriage that detaches loving relational life from all biological and political distinctions.

But I think that what Nietzsche actually says is that our democratic understanding of relational life is Christianity without Christ, Christian “values” illegitimately floating away from their real foundation in the person of Christ. Nietzsche says that this undemanding version of who we are is hostile to the sustainability of all human institutions. The institution of marriage can’t last if grounded only in the whimsical and all too ephemeral experience of merely human love. So there’s something Christian in spirit about wanting to affirm the love that holds together two gay men or women, and it’s uncharitable and untruthful to slight the reality of that love. But a Christian marriage is about more than the love. The most deeply observant Christian, Mormon, and Jewish believers think of marriage in terms of being fruitful and multiplying, and so of marriage being held together by hard and enduring shared relational responsibilities. It goes without saying that our birth dearth would be much worse than it is without these faithful believers. So I hope it’s easy to see that, just from a political and sociological view, it would be a mistake not to want the institution of marriage to endure, which it certainly can do if we accept the reasonable good faith of all Americans who understand marriage in different ways.

Let me conclude by saying that Christian marriage, from the very beginning, was hostile to the unjust degradation of women at the foundation of the Roman institution. The virtues of chastity and fidelity were affirmed in the service of the dignity of women as free and equal creatures, as was the belief that loving family life, where the father (and/or mother) may appear to rule but in fact only serves, mirrors the love that the relational God has for each of us.