The ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges “came down” on Friday morning, June 26, 2015, like a bolt from Zeus. Many who refuse to bow to the dictates of our Olympians will write trenchant legal, theological, and cultural/political analyses of the court’s ruling. What I’m comfortable contributing to the historical record, however, is simply how this all feels to a forty-something, orthodox Christian in what are probably the waning years of the American empire.

This bolt was inevitable, a predictable convergence of American vices powered clumsily by American virtues. When the bolt landed, it wasn’t as painful to me as it could have been. About a half-year ago, I killed my Facebook account. It was hard to leave. I no longer know what my nieces and nephews are doing, and I’m left out of most of the celebrations and milestones of friends and family. But on Friday, I was blessedly isolated from the reactions of those for whom this decision was a cause for celebration. What is, for Christian eyes, a great enormity is a source of joy and celebration for many of my fellow Americans. My friends tell me that Facebook is very hard to take right now, with pressure to change one’s profile image to contain rainbow imagery. I awoke on Saturday to find images online of the White House, bathed in a rainbow of colored lights, marking the occasion.

I feel left out of the celebration. I feel like fastidious Mr. Darcy at the ball, finding it “insupportable” to dance. I hate feeling this way.

In the past few years leading up to the decision, a great many Christians put forth quite valid natural law arguments for traditional marriage, and these were skillfully woven around the status of children or around metaphysical teleology. Some of the arguments required the hearer to buy into an entire metaphysics to be persuaded; it was either abandon belief that homosexual marriage is licit or abandon reason. These arguments proved impotent.

My own boldly naive biblicism would prove impotent as well, because it requires the hearer to embrace the claim that God caused a book to be written that: contains no errors, expresses the divine will by the power of his Spirit when interpreted in the context of the church, and is the final and perpetual authority on moral and ethical issues. Don’t laugh; it’s hard work to maintain belief in something so apparently ludicrous.

But whether on the basis of natural law or biblical authority, the very fact that these arguments have to be made in such a comprehensive way shows that we stand against a totalizing cultural shift that brings its own rationality, informed by its own hierarchy of values. We have few resources to draw upon from American culture that would empower a critique of American culture. How are we going to handle the mandate to be salt and light when even the weight of the edifice of scholastic Christian philosophy cannot best something as flimsy as the implicit argument of ABC’s Modern Family?

I picture the worker at the White House who screwed in the multicolored light bulbs as a forty-something guy like me, completing a work order and then marking the yellow ticket “complete.” Maybe he didn’t want to know the purpose of the change; it was just one more task to complete between breakfast and beer thirty.

So much of our Christian lives in the new United States will resemble this, hopefully sans apathy. We’ll bank, shop, clothe ourselves, feed ourselves, text, and swipe by patronizing (and working for) the funders of this cultural revolution, but we’ll simply avert our eyes when they call evil “good” and celebrate things that set our teeth on edge. In so many settings, we’ll find ourselves struggling to suppress a dour and censorious feeling on the inside as we serve others.

My heart yearns to celebrate something good and beautiful with other humans. I want to shake a tambourine, sing, feast, drink, and cut flowers for centerpieces at banquets. Perhaps the new cultural normal will renew the church’s resolve to celebrate and feast en famille, among people who share a vision for the good and the praiseworthy. We’ll have to relearn how to rejoice with each other, in the Spirit of Christ, so that when the culture’s party winds down, we’ll have a rager already going strong—a party worth inviting the wounded to join.

Jonathan Barlow (Ph.D., Historical Theology from Saint Louis University) is a Software Architect in Starkville, Mississippi. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @barlowjon.