The first thing that non-Christians
who stumble upon this blog need to keep in mind while reading it is that I'm a
religious wacko. I believe that I am occasionally led by God, and that
through following this leading, I can partner with God in the good that God is
doing in the world (and I believe you can too, but that's another story).
This is the reason I get up in the morning. I am trying to devote my entire
life to it. The only thing that sets me
apart from the guys who blow themselves up in public areas is that I believe
God is a God of love who wants us to better love each other. If I sound
irrationally radical, please keep this in mind throughout what follows. I also need to apologize to any readers of
this blog for the length of this first post.
I will post much smaller posts in the future, but needed a little more
space to properly kick start the discussion on this topic. Also, you’ll need to read to the end to get
my version of a Biblical view of love and marriage.
Anyway, when I graduated from high
school, I felt that, for several reasons, God was calling me to celibacy.
I wasn't sure how long this calling would last, but I felt like I should treat
it as though it were lifelong until further notice. It has now been
twelve years since I last had a romantic relationship or even went on a serious
date. There have been moments where this has been really hard. I have had times where I felt very lonely,
and very afraid of future loneliness (which is even harder). I have felt awkward around families. I have had restless evenings born of the
worry that I will someday become unable to care for myself, and have no one who
loves me to take care of me. However, as
hard as it has been at times, it hasn't been as hard as many people assume.
Any emotional difficulty always passes. For
the most part, my community and my church have assuaged my fears. And there is no part of my decision to live a
celibate life that I regret for long.
Now, as a 30-year old heterosexual
virgin bachelor, much of what I could write on the subject of marriage and
romance in our culture can and should be ignored. However, I do feel
like, as much as is possible, I represent something of an outside perspective
on this issue, and there are a couple things I have noticed that I would like
to add to the broader discussion of the Evangelical community.
For me, the first fomenting of these
ideas came from late '07 to late '08 when I was interning with Friends
missionaries in Rwanda. I used to believe that romance was a part of
human nature. As long as men and women
existed in the same place, people would get to know each other and fall in
love. However, as I talked with a few young
people in Rwanda, I remember being struck with some realities. First, it
was common for young men to reach a point in their lives where they would simply
decide that they should be married, find a good candidate, get their parents to
arrange things, and settle the deal all in the span of a month or two.
Second, divorce is much less common there. Third, "love"
between partners was hard for them to define (I imagine it often would be for
us too). Some people who I talked to had a sense that it was a
friendship, but more often people made a direct correlation between the word “love”
and sex. All in all, Rwandans seem to see marriage as more of a social
and economic partnership, than a spiritual and emotional union. In a
society where gender and age prescribe economic role, adult singles pose a
significant (for poor families a single adult can be a dangerous) drain on the
family economy. So the western concept
of what it means to “fall in love” is not a given in every culture. It is certainly not in Rwandan culture.
My initial reaction to this
realization was one of distaste. I am embarrassed to admit my misconception that this was simply a way in which African culture was less
developed than our North American culture. I thought that as African
Christians read their Bibles more, and allowed the gospel to transform them,
their perspective on marriage would become more like ours. Africans would
begin to tell me about the passion of romance. They would be able to, as
we do, write intense emotional poems honoring physical beauty. They would
sing nostalgic songs about tiny romantic gestures. They would talk about their "soul
mates." I no longer believe that.
There actually are ways in which I
do believe that the gospel will transform marriages in Africa. For
example, there are high levels of domestic violence and inequality in African
relationships that are unbiblical and inappropriate for people who are
submitted to Jesus. As the gospel impacts people's lives, we should
expect these things to change. But I no longer expect their relationships
to look more American.
Here in America, our view of romance
is equally far from a Scriptural view.
It stems more from our pagan past than the Bible. It seems like for a few weeks or so every
year people are vaguely aware that our celebrations of Christmas and Easter
have elements of ancient pagan festivals mixed into them. However, we forget during the rest of the
year that our western Christianity carries a great deal of baggage that comes
more from our pagan forefathers than anything found in Scripture. The most prevalent themes that got mixed into
our gospel are the related themes of redemptive romance and redemptive
violence.
Paul Hiebert sums it up well by writing that “In the Indo-European worldview,
the battle is the center of the story.
When it is over, the story is done.
The final words are ‘and they won (or were married) and lived happily
ever after.’ But there is no story worth
telling about the ‘happily ever after.’”
Besides the fact that European cultures almost always assigned gods to the internal/relational
phenomena of romance and violence (which is rare for internal phenomena, since
most gods are meant to describe external natural phenomena like wind, or the
sun), the forces that move the story in many pagan myths recognize violence and
romance between the gods as significant powers.
As Christianity began to overcome western culture, we began to adapt the
gospel to fit the forms of our pagan worship that we were most hesitant to give
up. In some ways this is obvious. Medieval Christians were taught to stop
praying to the pagan gods like Cupid and Venus, and pray to St. Valentine
instead. But the most subtle ways are
masked in the fact that we still tend to see romance and violence as the great
powers that can be used to create change in the world. This led to the myths of redemptive violence
and romance.
It is pretty easy to see that these myths
are the two most powerful driving values behind most of our pop-culture media:
TV, movies, literature, music, video games, etc. For example, the website Box Office Mojo
records the movies that have the top grossing opening weekends. Every one of the top ten movies on the list
champions one or both of the myths. In
addition to all the super hero/action movies, and movies like those in the
Twilight series (whose value systems are obvious), there are more surprising
movies like Shrek 2. On the surface, this movie has little to do
with the myths of redemptive romance and violence. I am sure that the filmmakers saw themselves
as promoting values like racial and cultural tolerance. However, when you look at the forces that
cause change in the story, the forces that are shown to have real power, it is
romance (Fiona’s father learns to accept Shrek because he sees how “in love”
his daughter is), and violence (when Shrek is falsely accused and arrested, his
friends break him out of jail by creating a gingerbread monster that can
temporarily overpower the guards, though not without loss and sacrifice). In fact, the only movies that I noticed in
the top 50 opening weekends of all time that challenge either of these myths,
even briefly, are the Hunger Games
(which briefly challenges redemptive violence while completely accepting
redemptive romance), and the Passion of
the Christ (which records an act that completely challenges every other
power structure the world has ever known).
While I have a lot to say about the
destructive effect of the myth of redemptive violence in our culture, it is the
myth of redemptive romance that has been on my mind recently. Though they are certainly related, I will
save the discussion of redemptive violence for another post. What I am calling redemptive romance is the
essential belief that a romantic relationship could give life meaning. It is
the idea that our broken lives, out of synch with each other, with ourselves,
and with creation, would be made happy, meaningful, and productive through a
romantic (and usually, but not always, sexual) relationship. Redemptive
romance is one of the key objects of worship of our popular culture. We worship it in song and story. We appeal to it, and recommend others appeal
to it as a solution to their problems.
For all intents and purposes, it is still a god that we worship today.
If it were only the popular culture
that endorsed this value system, I don’t think we would have a problem. In fact, we Christians would have a really
powerful contrasting testimony in the post-Christian West. Instead, we western Christians seem to
function from within the same paradigm. The
only difference is that, for us, we cap the redemptive romance experience with
marriage. I don’t know how many times
growing up, and even within the last year, I heard that “God had someone out
there for me” (a promise not found in any Bible I’ve ever read). But this idea comes out in more subtle ways
as well. It is frequently present in our
youth programs, and especially when we teach sexual morality. For example, the idea that God wants us to
“save sex for marriage,” has an underlying implication that God wants us all to
get married and eventually have all of our saved-up sex. This is part of why so many Christian kids
believe they are entitled to, that God owes them, a healthy marriage and a
great sex life, and are devastated when it doesn’t come easy. Perhaps more significant, it is implied in
our programing. Most larger churches
have several discipleship groups geared towards couples or families of various
ages. But if someone is out of college and
still single, they just get lumped in the “singles” group where the church often
sees their singleness more like a problem to be solved than a valuable asset to
the church. And yet throughout church
history singleness has proven to be incredibly valuable. This may be part of the reason that for over
a thousand years (and continuing to this day in some denominations) church
leaders whether priests, monks, or nuns, were required to forgo family for the
sake of the mobility and freedom that a strong commitment to ministry
requires. It has certainly proved
effective. It is impossible to overstate
the impact of the monastic orders on global Christianity (ok, fine, maybe it’s
just very hard. I mean, it’s not as big
as, like, the impact that Jesus had or anything).
Of course, there are some real
problems that singles face which the church has a responsibility to
address. Humans need to exist in
community. They need older people to
help mentor them, and younger people to mentor.
They need people who are like them to support them and different than
them to challenge them. It is through
others that any person’s place in the community is defined. The church has a responsibility to find ways
to include them. I love the movie Children of Men. It paints a hypothetical picture of the world
including the idea that without having a direct impact on children, adults lose
hope for the future. We have a human
need to know that we are a part of a story that is bigger than ourselves: one
that existed before us, one to which we will contribute, and one that will
continue on after us. We need to know
our lives matter. Single people are
naturally the most disconnected from community. Monastic orders used to provide an ongoing
story for single people within the church.
The order existed before them, they created change both to and through
it, and it continued on after them. In
our modern context, the Church could address the problem that singles face by
existing as a community that functioned more like a family (In Matthew 12:29,
Jesus endorses this view of the church by saying that his disciples were his
“mother and brothers”). But most
churches do not really function like families.
What makes most singles groups so particularly dangerous is that they do
almost nothing to address these problems.
In fact, they pull singles away from the rest of the community and put
them in a group with very little stability or ongoing story. Furthermore, as people marginal to the
ongoing story of the congregation, with no story of their own, singles end up
being disconnected from the very organization that some remain single to help
equip. The Western church doesn’t know how to incorporate celibate singles who
are not called to get married, settle down, and focus on the family.
The North American Church has even
taken this myth of redemptive romance and begun to read it into the Bible. This is easy to do since the Bible really
does have a lot to say about love, and also a great deal to say about marriage,
family, and community. I have been to
probably a dozen Christian weddings where at some point someone will read a
portion of 1 Corinthians 13. I have
never heard anyone point out that, while “keeping no record of wrongs” is
undoubtedly a good practice for married couples, Paul was not talking about
married couples when he wrote the passage.
Instead, the famous love chapter is really giving us a “more excellent
way” for church communities to function in order that they accomplish their
purpose. Paul begins by sharing that churches
should be structured so that the each individual’s spiritual gifts are valued
and used to make them more effective (1 Corinthians 12). But the more excellent way, an even more
effective way, is for the church community to be established in love. Love, from a Biblical perspective, can be
summed up as desiring, and (as the closeness of the relationship allows) acting
for the good of another person. When God
loves us, God desires and acts to bring what is good for us. When we love Jesus, when we are his friends,
we do as he commands (John 15:14). His
main command was that we love each other, and try to do what is best for each
other, and the rest of creation. This harmonizes
with our general purpose as the Church in the world: to work with Jesus in doing
the things that he is doing. And the
work he is doing is reconciling or redeeming people into relationship with
God. Consequently, we Christians have
also “been given the ministry of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19) When the Bible speaks of love, the vast
majority of the time, this is what it means.
It is indeed a beautiful redemptive love, but it is entirely non-sexual and
unromantic in the Western sense.
Interestingly, greater participation
in God’s work also seems to be the basis for marriage. Most of us have heard the story of Adam and
Eve, the story where God orchestrates the first marriage. It is a story where Eve, who was taken from
Adam as a rib is given back to Adam as a friend and coworker. And “for this reason a man will leave his father
and mother and be united with his wife,” and in some mystical sense beyond the
merely sexual, “they will become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24; Ephesians 5:31-2) This is where we contrast what the Bible says
about romance to the popular view, because the Bible does seem to say that
romance exists and is a good thing. It
even has a fairly romantic view of marriage.
The difference is that romance is never the reason for marriage (and it
is even less a reason for living or a life goal to be attained for its own
merits). Earlier in the story God gives
his reasoning for the marriage. He says
that it is not good for Adam to be alone, and he will create a helper. We often overlook that word, but the fact
that a spouse is seen as a “helper” means that the individual (and later on in
the Bible we will see that the community) has a task to accomplish. The word “help” has no meaning without a goal
or task. The fact that in Adam and Eve’s
specific case they will accomplish this task better as married people than as
single people is given as the reason for the marriage. In fact, this seems to be the main reason
that God wants people to get married or approves of the marriage throughout the
Bible (other examples are Abraham and Sarah, Ruth and Boaz, or Priscilla and
Aquila). I believe that it is the reason
that the Church should want people to get married today. If two people find that they can work with
Jesus to bring God’s reconciliation to the world better as a family within the
church community, instead of individuals within the church community, they
should get married. In cases where they
cannot work with Jesus better as a couple, Jesus and Paul both show marriage to
be a weakness (Matthew 19:12 and 1 Corinthians 7:7-9). Both marriage and
singleness find their true meaning in people who are wholeheartedly devoted to
advancing the Kingdom of God in the world.
We in the western church absolutely
must learn to speak out against this myth of redemptive romance. We must stand against the gods of popular
American culture. Our choice to engage
romantically does not redeem our lives.
Our only redeemer is Jesus. Our
only God is the Trinity. We must learn
to use every asset available to us as people who seek to work with Jesus to
expand the Kingdom of God.
As I continue to discuss the themes
mentioned above, and continue to learn about effective ways that churches can
use the asset of singles in their midst, I would be very happy to have the
thoughts and insights of others. Is
anyone doing this well? Does anyone have
resources they would recommend on singleness, or on marriage for the sake of
partnership in advancing the Kingdom of God?
Let the conversation begin!
I’ll try to write more about how I became convinced of the
pagan origins of the myths of redemptive violence and romance in future blog
posts. However, even if the myth of
redemptive romance did not have pagan origins, it is both clearly unbiblical
and clearly a driving force in our popular American culture.