{"id":6670,"date":"2017-06-13T15:36:25","date_gmt":"2017-06-13T21:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=6670"},"modified":"2017-06-15T12:53:43","modified_gmt":"2017-06-15T18:53:43","slug":"child-marriage-christians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/06\/child-marriage-christians.html","title":{"rendered":"Child Marriage and Christians"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"By<\/p>\n

Nicholas Kristoff has a column in the New York Times<\/a> on child marriage \u2014 not in some far-off country, but here, in the United States.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time there\u2019s been recent reporting on it. \u00a0And when I first came across it, my instinct was to rationalize: \u00a0surely those under-18 marriages are mostly 17 year olds, and live in communities where no one expects to go to college anyway, and where older teens are considered fully adult in ways that used to be the norm everywhere. \u00a0Surely the data on very young brides is out of date, and they\u2019re so few in number that no real conclusions can be drawn from any of it: \u00a0a few girls in FLDS-like cults whose lives wouldn\u2019t be any different if their parents had obliged them to \u201cmarry\u201d without legal recognition than with. \u00a0And is a married 16 year old mother any worse off than a unmarried one? \u00a0After all, the difference between \u201cour\u201d teen brides and \u201ctheir\u201d teen brides is that in the US, marriage is a way of managing teen pregnancies and ensuring the father does his duty, but elsewhere, teen marriage is outright encouraged by society.<\/p>\n

Which are all pretty lousy rationalizations.<\/p>\n

Child support laws and social pressure within the community should be sufficient to push\u00a0fathers to caring for their children. \u00a0Marriage laws in which children can marry with parental permission affirm the cult\u2019s belief and lead those girls to think that what\u2019s happened to them is OK. \u00a0And even if only a small number of children are affected, it\u2019s still a law that should be removed from the books.<\/p>\n

Why, then, not immediate horror? \u00a0I suspect, in part, because of this fear that awareness of the problem will lead non-Christians to say, \u201csee, this is what Christians do. \u00a0This is the inevitable consequence of believing that premarital sex is wrong. This proves that they\u2019re bad people.\u201d \u00a0I mean, look, how many more likes and shares does Patheos Atheist (now the Nonreligious channel) get than the rest of us, because those blogs delight in sharing stories about Bad Christians?<\/p>\n

In the same way, the story about the Christian high school<\/a> that wouldn\u2019t let a pregnant student walk across the state at graduation \u2014 well, part of my reaction isn\u2019t just \u201cthis is bad\u201d but \u201cthis makes Christians look bad!\u201d (Though note that many, many individual Christians, pro-life groups, and Christian groups of whatever kind are speaking up against this.)<\/p>\n

And I suspect that, though I labelled this as \u201cinstinct,\u201d this is in fact, at least in part, the underlying motivation when lawmakers reject changing the law so that minors, who are not able to make any other sort of contractual-type decision, would no longer be permitted to make this life decision either, and that parents may not make this decision on behalf of their minor children since, after all, this is something with far greater consequences than other decisions.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t right, of course. \u00a0But that discomfort with these statistics, the desire to rationalize them away, also provides a bit of a sense that this is how Muslims feel when they\u2019re called upon to condemn terrorists<\/em>. \u00a0It\u2019s the right thing to do. \u00a0It\u2019s the responsible thing to do. \u00a0And yet it feels unfair to be called upon to do so. \u00a0What, after all, do I have in common with a family attending a rural fundamentalist church, where the women wear dresses every day (or denim skirts) and maybe headscarves to boot? \u00a0Who am I to be telling them what to do, or condemning their culture, even if their notions of marriage at 16 or 17 is out of step with mainstream American culture? \u00a0They have nothing to do with me, right?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not simple, that\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image: \u00a0By Jeff Belmonte from Cuiab\u00e1, Brazil (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nicholas Kristoff has a column in the New York Times on child marriage \u2014 not in some far-off country, but here, in the United States. This is not the first time there\u2019s been recent reporting on it. \u00a0And when I first came across it, my instinct was to rationalize: \u00a0surely those under-18 marriages are mostly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":1550,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[643,6,16,151],"class_list":["post-6670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-child-marriage","tag-christianity","tag-islam","tag-marriage"],"yoast_head":"\nChild Marriage and Christians<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Nicholas Kristoff has a column in the New York Times on child marriage -- not in some far-off country, but here, in the United States. 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