As C. S. Lewis put it half a century ago, ours is a society that elevates erotic love to heights never previously bothered with by most earlier societies. This manifests itself in conservative Christians wanting to have things both ways. We want the fireworks and twitterpation of mutual sexual attraction but we embrace outward restrictions such as courtship and no touching and so on. Sexual desire is lust unless it is directed to one's spouse but we live in a culture where no one has an arranged marriage and marriage is volitional and mutual sexual desire is considered a necessary precondition to even a conservative Protestant marriage. If we have the same sexual ethics in conservative Protestantism (and notice I haven't really said I think we do) as the world or the liberal churches, that would be because we have the same idols (and this, I think, actually can be said with the caveat that we display our idolatries in sometimes different ways).
In the neo-Calvinist world marrying at the age of 26 is considered a basis for some bloggers and pundits to talk about how the median age of marriage has risen from 22 circa 1960 all the way up to 26. Yeah, well, median age for males marrying in the 1600s was 26, too. Neglected to mention that detail didn't you, you marriage-happy pundits and theo-bloggers. Oh my gosh! Things are so bad in society that marriage is being delayed until about the same age bracket for marriages centuries ago! During the Elizabethan period even though it was legal to marry at fourteen many deferred marriage until the middle twenties. How curiously similar to what's been happening today in the era of the "epidemic of singleness". Why, during 2004 when Christians were fretting about singleness it turned out the median age for males marrying was one whole year higher than it was in 1890!
Never mind that marriage rates dropped during the Great Depression and rebounded after the Second World War. The weird thing is that Christians who worry about how long people take to marry aren't likely to tell you that it's been this way before. That which has been will be again but it's no good mobilizing the Christian soldiers to worry about irresponsible single people if you point out that this has happened before. Instead of conceding that in an economic downturn the likes of which we haven't seen in a while it's just better to tell singles to be responsible. Thanks to decades of fiscal policy, industry changes, and a mixture of grade inflation and degree inflation we should just tell people they need to go real jobs after we as a culture have told them to follow their bliss and follow their dream because they can be anything that they want to be.
Thanks to being in church settings where, as my brother-in-law put it, the sexual desperation has been so thick you'd need two chainsaws to cut through it, just saying "hi" or saying you'd like to get to know a person better leads them to disappear. I've heard of guys who had bullet-pointed resumes for why they hoped a girl would date them. I've seen women use their fathers as ways to snub men they weren't interested in and then snubbed their dads once Mr. Right showed up. I've seen men befriend dads just to get closer to their daughters and even convince themselves they held to values they didn't hold to in the hopes that "there might be something there." Women have told me that it feels weird to walk into church and instantly feel as though you're being assessed like some kind of slab of meat on the market.
Some men who think they are good Christian guys instantly converse with women only in categories of "wife candidate" or "not wife candidate" and conduct themselves very differently according to how they assess women. Women lament that "no guys ask me out" but neglect to mention the men they shut down who they didn't find attractive or interesting enough to date. I've heard a Christian guy say "I don't care if they're real as long as they're of a certain size" and then somehow still manage to be upset at how "shallow" women were because after a decade he hadn't managed to find too many Christian women he thought were attractive who would consider him as a possible boyfriend. I've met women who want a guy who gives her emotional space but will never let her cry, scarcely realizing that these criteria are mutually exclusive.
These individuals are fractals of a larger pattern. These were the people who, so far as I can tell, desperately want to get married (and get laid) because that's what they are sure they are called to because, well, they want it. I myself have heard the platitude that God wouldn't make you want something you can't ever have. I don't subscribe to that because I take being born into a world and a race marred by sin seriously. The same little babies who we can say are born innately preferring helpers are also born with an innate preference for their own racial group. If empathy could be said to be inborn so can racism and ethnocentrism can be said to have a biological basis. The more research gets done the less "beauty" seems culturally conditioned and the more it seems to have some transcultural aspects. And cross times and spaces when people find each other hot they don't restrain themselves much in expressing to each other "you're hot" in ways conservative Christians want to happen ... but not quite.
I've already written about how I think a lot of the popularity of the neo-Reformed world is because people like the idea that there's a conservative Christian scene in which it's okay to want to drink, smoke, and get laid. What I haven't written about so directly is how I have come to believe that a lot of what we do is convince ourselves in conservative Protestant land that we are not as worldly as the world when we often seem MORE worldly. It's not because we are more worldly in conduct but we are more worldly by telling ourselves we stand for things we don't do.
The surveys are in. Abstinence only programs tend to delay fornication but don't ultimately prevent it. Our alternating solutions as conservative Protestants is to warn against lust while urging people to get married FASTER and hold forth mutual sexual attraction and butterflies as a precondition to (though not a constant necessity within) married life. We do this by claiming we stand for different praxis when, really, we don't. We still hold to values of social and economic viability but imagine that we do so in a way that is better than the world. But most of all we can still proclaim in so many cultural ways, subliminal ways, that salvation is through a regular, committed sexual relationship as though that wasn't what the rest of America has been saying for at least a century.
There are plenty of times where I find myself thinking, "It would be nice to be married." I wanted to be married for a few years but gave up on the idea of it being possible about halfway through college. A fellow once told me that if you don't manage to get married by the time you're out of college it basically just won't happen. I don't know if marriage is in my future. Sometimes I want to be married but most of the time I don't see any wisdom in pursuing marriage. On the other hand, nearly everywhere I've been in conservative Christian circles I've seen and heard it said louder than almost anything, if you love Jesus you'll do this. As Lutherans might put it, there's a big old slab of "Law" about this with just about no "Gospel".
A friend told me that he met a man who went to a church and heard about this idea that men are called to get jobs, get wives, make babies and do this out of love for Jesus. Guy was totally on board with that and said to himself, "I can do this." A few years later after the wife and baby came along the guy confided to my friend, "This is really, really tough." In the Orthodox tradition it is said that marriage is a form of living martyrdom. I don't see conservative Protestants selling marriage like that! In fact if anything romantic love is sold as a way to mirror the love of the Trinity! Marriage is presented as Christ loving the Church. Marriage is shown as the Father (husband) is lovingly in authority of the Son (wife?) I trust I don't have to explain it too much. Consider how many ways in which conservative Protestants, and most of all complementarians, can find ways to work their views of marriage back into the very nature of the Trinity itself. It can begin to look suspiciously like the Trinity is not informing our conservative Protestant views of marriage and gender roles so much as our committments to marriage and gender roles are read backwards on to biblical texts.
And we wonder why so many of our fellow conservative Protestants are busy fornicating. We wonder how we can challenge people to embrace the calling of celibacy after we've spent decades annihilating Paul's eschatological as well as situational arguments for the advantages of celibacy. We have also paid lip service to the idea that sexual desire is great and awesome and sex should be enjoyed while forgetting that Paul also said that it's something that is not necessary for a full Christian life or Christian ethics. We have claimed we have not made an idol of marriage and erotic love when we have actually made it the measure of functional adulthood and castigated the Christians who, for whatever reason, have not become real men and women yet. We propose that the merest tingle of sexual desire is prima facie evidence that one isn't called to celibacy in the straight person while telling gays that they need to have a complete reorientation because their sexual desires are wrong while thinking virtually nothing about whether or not our own sexual impulses don't need redeeming.
And why not? In a lot of ways when I hear a pastor talk about how there's nothing like the love and support of a wife who truly loves you I find myself thinking, "I'd like that." When marriage is presented as a way to fulfill both your emotional and physical need for affection as well as being God's ordained design for you (if you're straight) it's pretty easy to be won over by the romance of it all, especially when it's billed as the divine romance.
There's no idol quite so terrible as the one you have convinced yourself God wants for you when there's no clear scriptural evidence that you will ever get what it is you crave just because you think you've baptised it in the name of Jesus. Oh, I can find ways to make sure the Bible "tells" me that what I want is what God wants for me. I can find people to encourage me that God's timing is perfect and I just need to wait on His perfect will. I can even tell myself that if I give up what I want to God that God will give it to me in the end because of my faithfulness. All of those are merely levels of deceit, for the heart is deceitful above all things.
"Though He kill me, yet I will hope in him" is not how most Christians I have known in conservative Protestant churches have really fielded the subject of whether or not there is a husband in the future. It's not even how I handle it most of the time. I haven't had a steady job in 20 months and have been poor. No, not "wealthy compared to people in Sudan". Poor. When you barely make it past four figures for income in more than a year then by American standards that's pretty well within the poverty line!
I am more awkwardly and painfully aware now than at any point in my life I don't want to be unmarried until I die but I am at no point in my life financially less fit to be married in terms of income. I am also at a point where I am not in a position to consider anyone a potential spouse anyway. I do not subscribe to the goofy idea that God will not let you have a desire that He will not fulfill. If that were true I would have had 20/20 fully binocular vision with a left eye that could read decades ago. If I were to try to suppose that maybe this was just a thorn in the flesh I have to live with I might get told that I shouldn't compare myself to Paul. Paul was boasting in suffering and weakness. I have lived at this point in a home because of the great kindness and compassion of others. I have made it this far because of the generosity of friends whom I love and who love me. I had made it this far because of the love and support of family. I have made it this far because of support from my church.
When I consider how discouraging things are and how long I have hunted for work to little avail I can get depressed, particularly when I have been part of the neo-Calvinist scene that goes on and on about the "epidemic of singleness". I have not only been discouraged at times by joblessness but by moments where I felt I had a dead-end job. There have been moments where I realied that 98% of the work I did for nine years constituted people throwing away what I helped create as so much junk. I can assure you that realization was often demoralizing.
Christ however, took the things that are considered nothing in this world and to them gave the good news of Himself. Through Christ God the Father has revealed that he has used that which was nothing in this world to make as nothing the things that are. I am not here merely to express discontent at how my fellow conservative Protestants claim to stand firm for biblical ethics they don't really stand for. I am here to remind myself that following Christ is about taking up a cross. I have not been very good about doing that but when I consider that the ways in which I believe I have failed are not so different from the failings of others I can remember that I am not tempted in any way except in what is common to others. This is true of others, too, even those who, like me, may suppose that "my" temptation really is unlike that of any other and so succumbing to whatever that temptation is therefore, if not okay, at least tolerable compared to the easier yoke others have to bear.
So when a preacher tells single people they need to not make marriage an idol while telling them that avoiding marriage is what makes them irresponsible, selfish, and not even truly adult what's happening here? I have come to the conclusion that it is one of the ways in which we conservative Protestants tell ourselves we are not worshipping an idol that we may worship more ardently than even the world does. I don't say that as someone who isn't part of that but as someone who has begun to realize that in my own way I am part of that problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment