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.[1]
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.[2] 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.’”[3] 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.[4]
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!
[1] Many people I talk to about this assume that the modern accessibility of pornography has made celibacy easier, and is a contributing factor to the reality that 30 year-old bachelors are not as unusual as they used to be. There certainly seems to be some truth to this. Pornography seems to be widely used pretty much anywhere that an internet connection can reach these days. I get why people find it so alluring, and I have, um, “experienced” my fair share of it, mostly in my high school years. I am in no position to look down on anyone for their love of porn. However, for the past several years I have taken steps to ensure that pornography consumption does not interfere with my commitment to the Kingdom of God and to celibacy. My laptop has a program that sends regular updates to a couple of friends so that if I visit websites I shouldn’t, I have to have an awkward conversation afterwards. All other internet capable devices I own have the internet features disabled. So no, at least in my case, porn does not make celibacy easier.
[2] 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.
[3]Paul Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books. 1994) 207.
[4] This is true for all adult singles. I recognize that most Christian singles today have not made an active decision to be celibate. However, in most cases they have actively chosen to pursue ministry or life goals other than marriage. Though they have not actively chosen singleness, their Kingdom values have indirectly led them there, and they have willingly accepted singleness as a consequence. In my experience, adults who make marriage a goal will find a way to get married, even when they clearly should not.
