The Difference Christ Makes: Marriage
By David Gushee,
McAfee School of Theology Atlanta, GA
Note: This article is adapted from the second of three lectures delivered at Missouri Baptist University, October 21, 2009.
As I promised, each of these three talks will have three movements: I will begin with a really honest description of what I think is going on in American culture in relation to marriage. Then I will try to review with you the basics of what the Bible and the Christian tradition have said about that subject. Each time we will see an obvious gap between contemporary culture and historic faith. Finally I will offer some practical suggestions about “the Difference Christ Makes,” or ought to make, for you in this area of life. In every case I will try to be totally honest and realistic and not hide behind any safe Christian platitudes or religious talk.
Marriage and American Culture
It used to be that America was a culture in which pretty much everyone was expected to get married and to stay married. I am not talking about that long ago—even as recently as the 1950s and early 1960s, the culture constantly found ways to reinforce the message that the normal path of the man and the woman was to fall in love and get married, to have children and raise them together, and to stay married for life.
Of course there were exceptions. Most people had relatives who did not quite follow the script. Not everyone got married. A baby was born out of wedlock now and then. And in some rare circumstances couples separated or got divorced. It was rare, almost a scandal you weren’t supposed to talk about, as when we find out that the mother in the World War II era movie “Miracle on 34th Street” is divorced. If you trace the numbers back far enough you see that the divorce rate in America began rising during and after World War I, peaked again right after World War II, then stabilized in the 1950s.
But from 1965-75 the divorce rate doubled, and though it didn’t keep doubling, it never came back down again. By then, which was during my childhood, divorce had moved from being a rare thing to a very common occurrence. For every two marriages in a given year in this country, there is one divorce, and that number essentially hasn’t changed in 35 years.
The other entirely new development was that many people began opting out of marriage altogether. The idea that standing at an altar promising lifetime commitment was just what people are expected to do began to be radically questioned. Cohabitation rates shot up beginning in the 1970s and those continue to rise. There had always been a small number of couples who never bothered to get married. But these were outliers. Now, people who live together and even raise families together but never officially “tie the knot” have become a substantial part of the population. In 1970 there were 500,000 cohabitating households. Today, there are over 5 million. Not coincidentally, the marriage rate declined in this country by 20% from 1995 to 2005.
The fact that such a large number of people have abandoned the conviction that sex belongs only in marriage, of course played a huge role in this change. For many men, especially, sex was the great prize that awaited us after the long dating and courtship game ended in marriage. Once we committed, we got sex. Now, when sex is available on the first, second, or third date—and really, what is dating anymore, anyway? Why bother to get married? In a classically offensive expression that I think I first heard from my parents, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” By the way, I think this change has not been to the benefit of women, who are more at risk from sex outside of marriage and I think more likely to get their hearts broken when trying to play by these new rules.
But this does not mean that marriage is dead in our culture. We are not quite Europe, where it seems that marriage has become truly optional and may eventually be the experience of only a minority. No, we continue to get married here. But we also get divorced. A lot. A fairly typical path now for the average American is to marry two, three, or four times, and to have children in several marriages, thus creating a reality in which they are constantly trying to weave families together from the fragments of earlier unions, while also sharing custody with ex spouses or lovers. The level of complexity involved in trying to manage families like that is truly mind-boggling.
This has its effects, both on the frazzled adults and on the kids. I wrote a book about marriage that was motivated by my years of teaching college kids at Union University, down the road in Jackson, TN. I was astonished at the number of kids there who had gone through divorce one, two, or multiple times. College is often when kids have the first chance to really process what it was like going through their parents’ divorce and parental dating and cohabitating and remarriage and divorce again and so on. The data is quite clear that except in a minority of cases in which abuse or violence occurs, kids are better off being raised in stable environments by their married mother and father. Kids can be resilient and can learn to adjust to many things, but to call these constantly morphing family structures a perfectly normal reality is to go against all the data and thousands of years of human history.
All kinds of movies are about the effects of divorce. Some of them are played for laughs, like Mrs. Doubtfire, which is really about a brokenhearted and insanely jealous Dad/ex husband, played by Robin Williams. Some of them are extremely sad, like the Sandra Bullock movie, Hope Floats, which is devastatingly realistic about the impact of divorce on the character played by Sandra Bullock, and on her daughter. You could name many other movies that are really about divorce.
Trying to understand why things have changed so much has consumed the best efforts of a lot of really smart people. Some of these factors might surprise you; for example, divorce rates seem to be linked to women’s employment and empowerment in contemporary societies. Women are more free to choose whether to marry and more free to leave marriages that they find unsatisfying. This has saved many women from having to deal with abusive or horrible marriages, but it has also contributed to overall increases in the instability of marriage.
Another factor seems to be that people have grown accustomed in our capitalist society to trading in or abandoning products that they don’t like anymore. When you buy a car or a home in 2009 you feel no obligation to keep it forever. Some sociologists are suggesting that the fluidity and market mentality of capitalist societies makes it very easy for people to look for a better deal in every area of life, even their most intimate relationships.
Expectations for marriage have also risen. People expect marriage to bring great emotional and sexual satisfaction. And people increasingly feel entitled to try again with someone else if those needs are not being met to the level they expect. Meanwhile, the idea that the greatest duty we have is to ourselves, rather than others, has taken broad hold in our culture.
So your generation is now approaching what used to be called marriageable age. Many of your cohorts are delaying marriage; some are deciding not to marry. Others are still taking the plunge. But all of us—and especially all of you, at your age—are affected by the instability and uncertainty and pain of contemporary marriage.
That is where we are.
Historic Christian Faith on Marriage
And amidst that culture some may go to church and may hear something like this. It will strike them as very odd: “Some Pharisees came, and to test [Jesus] they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ He answered them, ‘What did Moses command you?’ They said, ‘Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.’ But Jesus said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate’” (Mk 10:2-9).
Actually, there are a lot of churches where you will never hear this passage read or preached. It is far too controversial, unpopular, and painful. I remember a time when I gave a series of lectures at a seminary, of all places, and nearly got thrown out of the place because I offered a series of talks on the actual teachings of Jesus about marriage and divorce. No, these are not popular words right now. But I promised to expose you to what the Bible and the Christian tradition have actually said about these issues, so that’s what I am going to do here.
This particular passage is the main place Jesus talks about marriage and has probably proven more influential than any other single Bible passage about marriage.
Scholars have shown that the Pharisees were apparently trying to get Jesus to weigh in on a legal dispute they were having about the proper grounds for divorce. Rabbinic liberals said the Bible permits a man to divorce his wife for any reason. Rabbinic conservatives said divorce is permitted only for sexual immorality. In Mark’s version of the story Jesus simply refuses to take sides in this dispute. Instead, he drives all of his listeners back to the creation story in which God made Eve and gave her to Adam as his bone of bone, flesh of flesh life-partner, the only suitable partner for him.
This story says that man and woman are made from each other, made for each other, and made to celebrate each other when they unite in a one flesh relationship. And that relationship is described as marriage. Jesus reaffirms that beautiful narrative as God’s original intention for marriage. He says that a husband and wife are really no longer two, but one—their lives are joined, by God himself. And no one is supposed to shatter that bond. No one. Jesus goes on in the very next passage to say that divorcing someone to marry another is really just the same as adultery.
So for the church, the passage in Genesis 2, plus Jesus’ interpretation of it, plus the scattered other references to marriage in the Bible, led to a very specific understanding of marriage. It has for 2000 years been viewed as a relationship between one man and one woman; to be sexually exclusive and faithful; the context for the birth and raising of children; and lasting until the death of one spouse.
There have been variations on the theme in different times and places. For example, the Catholic Church developed the idea that marriage is a sacrament that confers divine grace on the couple; they also developed the tradition that marriage is literally indissoluble. This means not just that divorce is wrong, but that it is impossible. This idea underlies official Catholic teaching to this day, which is why the Catholic Church almost never accepts the legitimacy of divorce.
John Calvin, the great Swiss reformer, emphasized that marriage is a sacred covenant, drawing from a few biblical passages that suggest this idea as well as from the comparison of the husband-wife relationship to that between God and his people or Christ and the church, as in Ephesians 5. Today most Christian churches and wedding services communicate the idea that marriage is a holy vow made between husband and wife and God. It’s not just a love affair or even a contract like buying a house—it’s a sacred covenant.
The idea that marriage is for love is a relatively late development in western culture and has had fateful consequences. The church has not always taught that marriage should be based on romantic love and was always worried that basing marriage on warm romantic feelings made it vulnerable to people thinking they were free to divorce when those warm feelings cooled. For about a hundred years, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the church tried to hold the line in this way—it said to people that it was O.K. to marry for love, but only once, for better or worse. Now people marry for love over and over and over again, often ending up in a sad progression of worse and worse relationships.
Under the impact of Christianity, both Europe and America once made divorce very difficult to obtain. While the interpretation of some of the biblical passages is complex, Christian leaders understood the Bible to say that divorce should either be never permitted or only permitted in rare cases like adultery or abandonment. The laws until relatively recently reflected these values, and so if you wanted a divorce, you had to prove in a court of law that your spouse had done something wrong according to the laws of that state. Now of course, you probably know that you can get a divorce for any reason whatsoever. No one has to have done anything wrong. You can divorce for “irreconcilable differences” even if you’re the only one who thinks there’s a problem. That change happened only 40 years ago in U.S. law.
So that is where the church has been for its 2000 year history. It has never said that everyone has to get married. But it has said that if you do get married, it is to last for a lifetime. It is to be the only place where sexual activity happens. It is where kids are to be raised and cared for. Divorce is to be a rare exception for terrible circumstances.
The Difference Christ Makes
So here we have the second of our three great clashes that we will consider in these three lectures: American culture has essentially abandoned the marriage ethic that once shaped our culture and laws. Now marriage is optional, and lasts as long as we both shall love, not as long as we both shall live. This is a fundamental rejection of the Christian message about marriage.
You will get to choose the path that you will follow. You can go with the classic Christian understanding of marriage. Or you can go with the prevailing cultural pattern. Which will it be for you?
I hope you will go with the Christian version. I hope that not only because I think that self-identified Christians are supposed to follow Christ’s teachings. But I hope it is also because (a) it tends to lead to happier lives for adults, and (b) it tends to lead to much happier lives for children, and (c) it tends to be much better for society.
But the difference Christ makes on this issue is not only that you might believe in a Christian approach to marriage rather than a cultural one. It is also in the development of both the internal and the external resources that are required to actually live out this ethic.
The reality is that our culture will never go back to a time when people have to get married to have sex or have to stay married if they do get married.
If you are going to choose classic, Christian, faithful, lifetime marriage, you will need to be the kind of person who has the capacity to pull that off. That means that you will need those resources of character and temperament that are required to navigate a relationship with another person over a whole lifetime.
You might recognize this list: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, humility, gentleness, and self-control. It’s the fruit of the Spirit from Galatians 5. Successful lifetime marriage requires two people who exhibit these wonderful characteristics on a daily basis—and who also have the seemingly endless capacity to forgive themselves and each other when they fall short.
You will have to be the kind of person who knows how to endure hard times with resilience, toughness, and courage. Most marriages go through one or more very difficult times. Many times today people give up during those times, often regretting that decision over time. You will need to be the kind of person, and to marry the kind of person, who hangs in there during hard seasons.
In my marriage with Jeanie over 25 years now, we have moved nine times, had three children, lost two babies to fetal death, adopted a young adult with great stress on our family, lived through one daughter’s serious car accident, had one cancer scare, sent two kids off to college, had one of them survive a tornado, faced various severe job stresses, and more than once had to wonder where the money was coming from to make ends meet. Such is life. You need not just the right beliefs during hard times. You need Jesus. You need the Holy Spirit.
You will also need a certain kind of Christian community around you. One of the things that our cultural changes has meant is that no one really expects marriages to last a lifetime and no one much gets on you if yours doesn’t. Churches go soft, the culture seems to laugh at or encourage divorce, and the law makes divorce relatively easy. Meanwhile friends often seem to think that friendship means blessing whatever our friend wants to do.
One difference Christ can make is when he helps us decide to make Christian friends and join a church that calls us to faithfulness instead of blessing whatever junky decision we feel like making. We don’t need church to be just another voice telling us to give in to cultural voices and look out for number one. We need a community of people who help us follow Christ and be our best selves. Is that who you have around you?
There are many reasons to dream of and work for cultural changes that can maybe help reverse these devastating changes in marriage in our society. But it begins with Christians remembering our own tradition and following Christ again. Culture will care little about our words until we embody, not just talk about, a different way of life. This will be the way our culture will come to believe in the difference Christ makes.
