Confessing Evangelical

The Internet Monk has an excellent essay on the question of whether evangelicals are guilty of overvaluing marriage. The essay is largely aimed at a recent address by the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, Dr Al Mohler, in which he not only affirmed marriage, but also specifically criticised Christians who delay or avoid marriage:

Singleness is not a sin, but deliberate singleness on the part of those who know they have not been given the gift of celibacy is, at best, a neglect of a Christian responsibility.

The iMonk rightly lays into Dr Mohler over this, and sets out a number of ways in which contemporary evangelicals are guilty of an unbiblical denigration of singleness - leading (among other things) to single people being marginalised and neglected in church life, and teenagers being railroaded prematurely into marriage.

Here are just a few, largely unconnected, thoughts in response to the iMonk's essay:

1. As at least one person has pointed out in the comments to the essay, only a man - and a married man at that - could have come out with what Dr Mohler was saying. The gender imbalance in most churches means that many women who would love to get married simply cannot find a suitable Christian husband (and I'm guessing that Dr Mohler would most certainly not advocate that they look for a non-Christian husband instead).
   
   That's certainly the experience of a number of Christian women that my wife and I know. For people in that position of involuntary celibacy, Dr Mohler's comments are at best insensitive, and at worst a kick in the teeth for people who have struggled for years of single life, often having to resist the temptation to get into an inappropriate relationship - or to pluck up the courage to end one they've got into - or to avoid marrying in despair the first remotely plausible Christian man who crosses their path, regardless of suitability.
   


2. That said, the latter danger - of young people feeling compelled to marry before they are ready for it - is not such an issue here in the UK. Here, the danger is far more of the church unconsciously absorbing the surrounding culture's preference for late marriage and overly long pre-marital relationships.
   
   My wife and I got engaged at the age of 22, before I started my post-graduate studies to become a lawyer. I started at the College of Law a couple of months after our engagement, and joined the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship group at our college. I can still remember how shocked the other members of the group were when they discovered that I was engaged at such a "young" age - and how shocked I was in turn by their reaction.
   
   What struck me was how ludicrous it is for Christians to follow the world's approach to this. Question: why don't non-Christian couples feel compelled to get married until they're the other side of 30 and have been together for ten years? Answer: because they don't feel they need to wait till they're married before they start having sex.
   
   Sorry to be so blunt here, but that's the main reason why people don't rush off and get married before they're 25 these days. For Christians to adopt one half of this pattern - marrying late - while trying to reject the other half - sleeping together anyway in the meantime - would be laughable if it were not so downright foolhardy.
   


3. It's always interesting to contrast St Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 7 with the unconscious attitudes which dominate today's church. When my wife and I got married and joined our first church as a couple, we were both struck by the contrast between how this church welcomed us as a married couple, and how our previous churches had treated us as single people.
   
   As a married couple, you are (perceived as) gold dust for a church: and, fair enough, stable married couples and families are indeed the backbone of most congregations. But single people are perceived as a pastoral problem, with married couples seen as more likely to be "net contributors" to church life. (I've blogged before on how this also impinges on evangelistic strategy and approaches to worship).
   
   In comparison to this sort of attitude, how alien St Paul's words sound today:
   
   

   The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband.

   Now isn't the time to go into all the questions about St Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 7, and particularly how we should distinguish in that chapter between general principles and points that relate specifically to the crisis ("this present distress", v.25) that seems to have been afflicting Corinth at that time.
   
   But it is clear that St Paul regarded singleness as providing opportunities for serving the Lord - for being a "net contributor" - that were not available to married people, who face the distraction of having a spouse and family to worry about. Any Christian married couple will have some idea of what the Apostle was driving at here.
   


4. It also has to be said that Dr Mohler has a point when he talks about Christian men who refuse to "grow up" and who display "simple sloth, personal immaturity [or] a fear of commitment". For single Christian men - particularly in larger churches with a youthful congregation - the church can be something of a "buyer's market", and this can lead to serious problems.
   
   Some men in this position - by no means all, before anyone reading this takes offence - do not seem to understand the pressures that single Christian women are under, and in some cases this leads to some pretty shoddy treatment. The couple start dating; they seem to be growing closer; maybe they even start kissing; and then, just as the woman is thinking this might finally be "it", all of a sudden Blokey decides that "the Lord is not leading me into marriage at present", and drops her. And then does the same thing again, and again, and again, leaving a trail of emotional and spiritual wreckage in his wake.
   
   I know of one evangelical/charismatic Anglican church with a large number of young, single professionals in its congregation, where the vicar felt compelled to preach a sermon on the issue, basically reading the riot act to the single men, telling them to get their act together and stop treating their sisters in Christ so shabbily. And, back at university - where I was an atheist until my final term, he added hurriedly - the pattern of "serial monogamy" among certain members of my college's Christian Union was something of an open scandal, as my friends and I laughed about how the main benefit in becoming a Christian was clearly the opportunities it provided to "pull".
   

So, in conclusion, at what point should we say that marriage has been over-valued? Well, Dr Mohler certainly seems to have passed that point when he says that marriage is the "ultimate priority God has called us to". But we don't need to go as far as that to fall into the error the iMonk is describing. The real problem is when affirming marriage (a good and necessary task for the church) shades over into denigrating singleness, in a manner that St Paul - and Christians throughout the ages - would find incomprehensible.