Mark Regnerus in Christianity Today makes the point that the Biblical solution for sexual immorality is not so much abstinence as marriage. He thinks many Christians have bought into the world’s views of marriage and have forgotten God’s design. While Americans are getting married later and later, with Christians mostly following along and doing the same, Regnerus encourages Christians to get married earlier. See The Case for Early Marriage.
Postponing marriage, Regnerus says, thwarts God’s biological and spiritual design and causes people to fall into sexual immorality. Waiting until you attain financial stability and get established in a career should not be the priorities. Al Mohler offers a useful summary and commentary on the article.
The problem with this is that it is not that easy to find someone to marry these days. We have few mechanisms any more to help men and women find each other. Perhaps the revival of courtship rituals and the internet will help. Meanwhile, a lot of highly eligible Christian men and women are single and not by choice. They need a way to get together.
But still. . . .Doesn’t Regnerus make a good point in principle? (I notoriously made a similar argument in a World column a few years ago.)
FURTHER THOUGHTS, ANTICIPATING OBJECTIONS: But don’t couples who get married young have a higher rate of divorce? I am not advocating getting married in the heat of adolescent passion and without sober deliberation and the objective considerations of character and compatibility that used to be supplied by the couple’s family. I am calling for the recovery of Christian marriage, in which divorce is taken off the table and in which husband and wife love and serve each other sacrificially–the wife submitting to her husband as to Christ at the same time as the husband gives himself up for his wife as Christ did for the Church.
Recovering such Christian marriage is imperative. But do churches teach this? Do churches, Christian schools, and parents give their young people any help at all in understanding what Christian marriage is and in helping them enter into this estate, the one that will impact their lives more than any other? Don’t they get ALL of their understanding of marriage from romantic entertainment and the surrounding culture?
Our cultural model of getting established, having all the fun you are going to have, and sowing your wild oats before “settling down” into marriage–to the point that pop culture portrays singleness as the apex of sexuality!–certainly doesn’t work, encouraging the mindset of looking outside marriage for sex and satisfaction in a way that often leads to broken marriages.
But don’t people grow and change? If you marry young, might you and the person you marry mature into different persons who might not be as compatible? Well, if two people grow older together in the one-flesh union of marriage, that changes both of them along the same lines. Isn’t it harder to change for another person when you are both old and set in your ways?
But what about financial independence, as the first commenter here pointed out? Well, families used to help young couples “get started.” Dowries that remained with the woman, “marriage settlements,” and other practical economic provisions made by both families used to be part of the marriage “negotiations” that each family would enter into when their children were thinking of getting married. Today, if parents are supporting their young adults already, why should they cut them off completely if they marry?
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