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What is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials?
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What is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials?
I am going to reprint two articles in this post. Because it is going to make the post very long, I am going to use the "spoiler" feature. This enables you to click to open the article, then click to close it again. Because the discussion will revolve around two articles, I think this will make things easier.
Warning: This post calls for a lengthy commitment to reading and pondering. I don't expect everyone to be so inclined. If you wish to make comments below, please take the time to read the material first.
Here's the main article:
And here is the article she referenced called, "What is Marriage". It is long. Read it if you get the chance, as it will help you understand what is going on in the minds of anyone and everyone who is allowing the prevailing culture to have a greater influence on their minds than the truths of the Bible.
It's a .pdf download that can be accessed by clicking here.
Because the article is lengthy, here is my edited version:
Here is one of the best paragraphs in the entire article:
And that right there is why I think this issue needs to be discussed. It is also why I think that Christians should continue to oppose legislation that undermines Christian religious freedom, as it is primarily Christian (or really Judeo-Christian) freedom that is under attack.
Finally, here are a few suggested discussion questions that arise from my reading of these articles:
Warning: This post calls for a lengthy commitment to reading and pondering. I don't expect everyone to be so inclined. If you wish to make comments below, please take the time to read the material first.
Here's the main article:
- Spoiler:
WHAT IS MARRIAGE TO EVANGELICAL MILLENNIALS?
A few weeks ago, I assigned the article “What is Marriage?” to the students in my gender theory class, which I teach at an evangelical university. This article presents an in-depth defense of the conjugal view of marriage, and I included it on the reading list as part of my efforts to expose students to a range of viewpoints—religious and secular, progressive and conservative. The goal is to create robust civil dialogue, and, ideally, to pave the way for thoughtful Christian contributions to cultural understandings of sex and gender. The one promise I make to my students at the beginning of the course is that they are guaranteed to read something they will find disagreeable, probably even offensive.
That promise used to be easier to keep.
When I first began teaching this course, my students were certainly curious about questions of gender, sexuality, feminism—the various “hot button” issues of our cultural moment—but they were nonetheless devout, and demonstrated, more or less, a Christian orientation to these topics. It wasn’t hard to find readings that challenged students’ shared values and assumptions, considering the secular bent of contemporary gender studies.
In just five years, however, this has changed. Students now arrive in my class thoroughly versed in the language and categories of identity politics; they are reticent to disagree with anything for fear of seeming intolerant—except, of course, what they perceive to be intolerant. Like, for example, “What is Marriage?”
My students hated it, as I suspected they would. They also seemed unable to fully understand the argument. As I tried to explain the reasoning behind the conjugal view of marriage and its attitude toward sex, I received dubious stares in response. I realized, as I listened to the discussion, that the idea of “redefining” marriage was nonsensical to them, because they had never encountered the philosophy behind the conjugal view of marriage. To them, the Christian argument against same-sex marriage is an appeal to the authority of a few disparate Bible verses, and therefore compelling only to those with a literalist hermeneutic. What the article names as a “revisionist” idea of marriage—marriage as an emotional, romantic, sexual bond between two people—does not seem “new” to my students at all, because this is the view of marriage they were raised with, albeit with a scriptural, heterosexual gloss.
While I listened to my students lambast the article, it struck me that, on one level, they were right: marriage isn’t in danger of being redefined; the redefinition began decades ago, in the wake of the sexual revolution. Once the link between sexuality and procreation was severed in our cultural imagination, marriage morphed into an exclusive romantic bond that has only an arbitrary relationship to reproduction. It is this redefinition, arguably, that has given rise to the same-sex marriage movement, rather than the other way around, and as the broader culture has shifted on this issue, so have many young evangelicals.
As I consider my own upbringing and the various “sex talks” I encountered in evangelical church settings over the past twenty years, I realize that the view of marital sex presented there was primarily revisionist. While the ideal of raising a family is ever-present in evangelical culture, discussions about sex itself focused almost exclusively on purity, as well as the intense spiritual bond that sexual intimacy brings to a married couple. Pregnancy was mentioned only in passing and often in negative terms, paraded alongside sexually transmitted diseases as a possible punishment for those who succumb to temptation. But for those who wait, ah! Pleasures abound!
There was little attempt to cultivate an attitude toward sexuality that celebrates its full telos: the bonding of the couple and the incarnation of new life. And there was certainly no discussion of a married couple learning to be responsive to their fertility, even as a guiding principle. To the contrary, the narrative implied that once the “waiting” was over, self-discipline would no longer be necessary. Marriage would be a lifelong pleasure romp. Sex was routinely praised as God’s gift to married couples—a “gift” largely due to its orgasmic, unitive properties, rather than its intrinsic capacity to create life.
The conjugal understanding of marriage, as articulated by Girgis et al, depends upon a view of sex that, in my experience, is not predominant in evangelicalism. Take Mark Driscoll’s book Real Marriage as a recent, if extreme, example. With its celebration of anal sex and breast augmentation as marital sex aids, Real Marriage is emblematic of how deeply the ideals of the sexual revolution have permeated our culture, even to its evangelical corners.
To my students, the authors of “What is Marriage?” are making a troubling move, reducing the purpose of marital sex to its reproductive function. What they seemed less able to recognize is that they have inherited the inverse: a view of sex with little meaningful connection to procreation. And once such a view of sexuality is embraced, there is not much foothold, aside from appeals to biblical authority, to support the conjugal understanding of marriage.
Abigail Rine, Ph.D., is assistant professor of english at George Fox University.
And here is the article she referenced called, "What is Marriage". It is long. Read it if you get the chance, as it will help you understand what is going on in the minds of anyone and everyone who is allowing the prevailing culture to have a greater influence on their minds than the truths of the Bible.
It's a .pdf download that can be accessed by clicking here.
Because the article is lengthy, here is my edited version:
- Spoiler:
- Conjugal View: Marriage is the union of a man and a woman
who make a permanent and exclusive commitment to each other
of the type that is naturally (inherently) fulfilled by bearing and
rearing children together. The spouses seal (consummate) and
renew their union by conjugal acts—acts that constitute the be‐
havioral part of the process of reproduction, thus uniting them
as a reproductive unit. Marriage is valuable in itself, but its in‐
herent orientation to the bearing and rearing of children con‐
tributes to its distinctive structure, including norms of
monogamy and fidelity. This link to the welfare of children also
helps explain why marriage is important to the common good
and why the state should recognize and regulate it. - Revisionist View: Marriage is the union of two people
(whether of the same sex or of opposite sexes) who commit to
romantically loving and caring for each other and to sharing
the burdens and benefits of domestic life. It is essentially a un‐
ion of hearts and minds, enhanced by whatever forms of sexual
intimacy both partners find agreeable. The state should recog‐
nize and regulate marriage because it has an interest in stable romantic partnerships and in the concrete needs of spouses and
any children they may choose to rear. - We argue in this
Article for legally enshrining the conjugal view of marriage, us‐
ing arguments that require no appeal to religious authority. - marriage is not a legal construct with totally malleable
contours—not “just a contract.” Otherwise, how could the law
get marriage wrong? Rather, some sexual relationships are in‐
stances of a distinctive kind of relationship—call it real mar‐
riage—that has its own value and structure, whether the state
recognizes it or not, and is not changed by laws based on a false
conception of it. Like the relationship between parents and their
children, or between the parties to an ordinary promise, real
marriages are moral realities that create moral privileges and ob‐
ligations between people, independently of legal enforcement.
Thus, when some states forbade interracial marriage, they ei‐
ther attempted to keep people from forming real marriages, or
denied legal status to those truly marital relationships. Con‐
versely, if the state conferred the same status on a man and his
two best friends or on a woman and an inanimate object, it
would not thereby make them really married. It would merely
give the title and (where possible) the benefits of legal mar‐
riages to what are not actually marriages at all. - the state is justified in recognizing only real marriages
as marriages. People who cannot enter marriages so understood
for, say, psychological reasons are not wronged by the state,
even when they did not choose and cannot control the factors
that keep them single—which is true, after all, of many people
who remain single despite their best efforts to find a mate.
Any legal system that distinguishes marriage from other, non‐
marital forms of association, romantic or not, will justly exclude
some kinds of union from recognition. So before we can conclude
that some marriage policy violates the Equal Protection Clause,12
or any other moral or constitutional principle, we have to deter‐
mine what marriage actually is and why it should be recognized
legally in the first place. That will establish which criteria (like
kinship status) are relevant, and which (like race) are irrelevant to
a policy that aims to recognize real marriages. So it will establish
when, if ever, it is a marriage that is being denied legal recogni‐
tion, and when it is something else that is being excluded. - there is no general right to marry the person you love,
if this means a right to have any type of relationship that you
desire recognized as marriage. There is only a presumptive right
not to be prevented from forming a real marriage wherever one
is possible. And, again, the state cannot choose or change the
essence of real marriage; so in radically reinventing legal mar‐
riage, the state would obscure a moral reality. - marriage involves: first, a
comprehensive union of spouses; second, a special link to
children; and third, norms of permanence, monogamy, and
exclusivity.14 All three elements point to the conjugal under‐
standing of marriage. - Marriage Defined: Marriage is distinguished from every other form of friend‐
ship inasmuch as it is comprehensive. It involves a sharing of
lives and resources, and a union of minds and wills... and an organic
bodily union. {because our bodies are truly aspects of us as per‐
sons, any union of two people that did not involve organic
bodily union would not be comprehensive}
So if two people agree, for instance, that they will have
"tennis monagamy" - to only play tennis with one another
until death parts them - they are NOT married. Physical
monogamy is the only kind of union that leads to the "one
flesh" that leads to a definition of "marriage".
individual adults are naturally incomplete
with respect to one biological function: sexual reproduction. In coi‐
tus, but not in other forms of sexual contact, a man and a woman’s
bodies coordinate by way of their sexual organs for the common
biological purpose of reproduction. They perform the first step of
the complex reproductive process. Thus, their bodies become, in a
strong sense, one—they are biologically united, and do not merely
rub together—in coitus (and only in coitus), similarly to the way
in which one’s heart, lungs, and other organs form a unity: by co‐
ordinating for the biological good of the whole. In this case, the
whole is made up of the man and woman as a couple, and the
biological good of that whole is their reproduction. if (and only
if) it is a free and loving expression of the spouses’ permanent
and exclusive commitment, then it is also a marital act. - Most people accept that marriage is also deeply—indeed, in
an important sense, uniquely—oriented to having and rearing
children. That is, it is the kind of relationship that by its nature
is oriented to, and enriched by, the bearing and rearing of chil‐
dren.
It is clear that merely committing to rear children together, or
even actually doing so, is not enough to make a relationship a
marriage... - It is also
clear that having children is not necessary to being married; new‐
lyweds do not become spouses only when their first child comes
along. Anglo‐American legal tradition has for centuries regarded
coitus, and not the conception or birth of a child, as the event that
consummates a marriage.17 Furthermore, this tradition has never
denied that childless marriages were true marriages. - people who can unite bodily can be spouses without
children, just as people who can practice baseball can be team‐
mates without victories on the field. Although marriage is a social
practice that has its basic structure by nature whereas baseball is
wholly conventional, the analogy highlights a crucial point: Infer‐
tile couples and winless baseball teams both meet the basic re‐
quirements for participating in the practice (conjugal union;
practicing and playing the game) and retain their basic orientation
to the fulfillment of that practice (bearing and rearing children;
winning games), even if that fulfillment is never reached.
On the other hand, same‐sex partnerships, whatever their
moral status, cannot be marriages because they lack any essen‐
tial orientation to children: They cannot be sealed by the gen‐
erative act. Indeed, in the common law tradition, only coitus
(not anal or oral sex even between legally wed spouses) has
been recognized as consummating a marriage. - etc.
- Conjugal View: Marriage is the union of a man and a woman
Here is one of the best paragraphs in the entire article:
Because the state’s value‐neutrality on this question (of the
proper contours and norms of marriage) is impossible if there is to
be any marriage law at all, abolishing the conjugal understanding
of marriage would imply that committed same‐sex and opposite‐
sex romantic unions are equivalently real marriages. The state
would thus be forced to view conjugal‐marriage supporters as
bigots who make groundless and invidious distinctions. In ways
that have been catalogued by Marc Stern of the American Jewish
Committee and by many other defenders of the rights of con‐
science, this would undermine religious freedom and the rights of
parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children.
And that right there is why I think this issue needs to be discussed. It is also why I think that Christians should continue to oppose legislation that undermines Christian religious freedom, as it is primarily Christian (or really Judeo-Christian) freedom that is under attack.
Finally, here are a few suggested discussion questions that arise from my reading of these articles:
- If the state expands its interest beyond marriage as conjugal, why should it not also begin creating civil causes of action pertaining to ordinary friendships as well?
- Should the state, then, create a "romance" stipulation or should the legal benefits of "marriage" be technically available to anyone who wants to create a "union" for the sake of enjoying them? In other words, why top at defining "marriage" by some type of notion of "romance"?
- What should monogamy have to do with marriage? If marriage is to be defined away from the conjugal view, why retain its number - "2"? And if it would be wrong for the state to redefine marriage as including any number of persons, why is it NOT wrong for the state to define marriage as anything other than a conjugal and monogamous relationship etc.?
- Why should marriage not simply be "whatever we say it is"? What could potentially be wrong with this view?
PastorDan- Admin
- Posts : 243
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Age : 56
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