Sacrificing Lives on the Altar of Marriage

It’s time to talk about conservative evangelical pastor Doug Wilson again. Wilson became rather well known a while back for asking a judge to be lenient with a child molester he believed had repented—a child molester he later married to a woman in his congregation, asking God to bless the couple with children. Wilson writes frequently about what he calls “homosexual marriage,” and when he does he spares no words. Rather, he goes out of his way to be petty and crude.

In a recent essay about marriage, this bit caught my eye:

Suppose a couple gets together and you believe that the proposed union is a spectacularly bad idea. It is such a bad idea that you cannot in good conscience go to the wedding ceremony in order to witness the vows, or to celebrate them afterward. Say that a sixteen-year-old girl is marrying a 40-year-old chieftain in the Hell’s Angels. Not a good idea.

But wait. Why does the 40-year-old have to be in the Hell’s Angels? Would Wilson otherwise be okay with a sixteen-year-old girl marrying a 40-year-old man? Let’s say the groom is an upstanding, hardworking man in his congregation, and the sixteen-year-old is a girl who attends to the Christian school run by Wilson’s church. Would Wilson be okay with this marriage? Given that he had to throw in Hell’s Angels to justify opposing the marriage in his example, I worry the answer may be yes—and that should make us uncomfortable.

But they persevere in disregarding all counsel and get married in a nice little ceremony at the Flying J. Six months later your dear little fathead has realized that the whole thing was not as romantic as it had initially seemed, and she has now come to you for counsel. Though you didn’t go to the wedding, all your counsel now is calculated to save the marriage if biblically possible.

Okay first of all, yes, Wilson did call the girl “fathead.” I have no idea why, except that this is Wilson’s MO—he goes out of his way to be cruel and unkind, and as a result seems to think himself quite the daring whit. But let’s look beyond the insult. Wilson states that if a sixteen-year-old girl he knew married a 40-year-old man in the Hell’s Angels and then came to him for counsel, wanting out, he would do everything he could to make sure she stayed married to the man. Think about that.

At risk of stating the obvious, the Justice Department classifies the Hell’s Angels as an organized crime syndicate. They’re well known to be involved in violent crime and prostitution, as I am certain Wilson knows. Why else would he have evoked the Hell’s Angels to make it clear—clearer than clear—that such a marriage was a bad idea? That sixteen-year-old girl is at risk of being prostituted, or, at the very least, being stuck in an abusive relationship. The odds are good that a 40-year-old man who marries a sixteen-year-old girl does so because he wants a wife he can shape and control—a wife who will be too young and inexperienced and vulnerable to talk back.

But no. Wilson would not give this hypothetical girl an out.

You were saying no, no, no, all the way up the altar, and yes, yes, yes when they get back from their honeymoon. You were the sole opponent of their love before the wedding, and the biggest advocate for it afterward.

In other words, Wilson argues that evangelical Christians should work to oppose marriages they consider unwise, but that once the wedding has taken place and everything has been signed, marriage is inviolable. This is perhaps not surprising; it’s a fairly common belief among evangelical Christians.

A decade ago, my parents tried to break off my relationship with my boyfriend over theological disagreements. They didn’t want me to marry him. They felt he was bad for me, spiritually. I married him anyway, and after the wedding they immediately accepted him into the family. Oh, there were still differences, and things could be frosty on a variety of topics, but my parents’ attempts to break us up ceased completely. In fact, at one point my mother told me directly that they may have wanted to break us up before, but now that we were married they would do everything they could to keep us together, because marriage is forever.

On its face, trying to prevent marriages you have concerns about makes sense. Think of the sixteen-year-old girl and the Hell’s Angel. Someone should intervene. The problem is that conservative evangelicals’ criteria for identifying bad marriages is frequently warped. Consider that Wilson had to make the 40-year-old man a Hell’s Angel to be sure that his audience would agree with him that a 40-year-old man marrying a sixteen-year-old girl was a very bad idea. That age difference alone should ring warning bells, but apparently it’s not enough.

When my father created a list of criteria for a beau to receive his blessing, the points were all theological, or political, or financial. None of the items on his list had anything to do with how a prospective beau treated me, whether he was kind, whether he listened to me, etc. Shortly after my wedding my new husband and I spent some time with extended family. One relative told us that when she’d gotten engaged, her father had asked her three questions: “Does he love you? Do you love him? Does he treat you well?” And that was it. I was shocked, because until then I hadn’t considered the complete lack of any such questions in the list my father created.

Are you spiritually matched? Can he support you financially? That is generally where the questions stop. Add to this that evangelicals frequently do a terrible job educating young people about relationship skills. Rather than equipping us with a list of warning signs so that we can recognize when a partner is abusive or manipulative, we’re simply told not to have sex until marriage. As though it is that simple—abstain from sex until marriage and your relationship will be healthy and happy. Not so. Absolutely not so.

Perhaps most troubling about Wilson’s article is the role marriage plays, in his story, in trapping a child in a marriage almost certain to be unhappy and abusive. From Wilson’s perspectives, it is the marriage that matters, not the girl’s happiness or wellbeing. And that is exactly what happens in too many evangelical circles—marriage becomes more important than people. And, as we see in this story, that includes children. For one mistake, quickly realized, Wilson would have this girl spend the rest of her life stuck in an unhappy, unhealthy, potentially abusive marriage.

The inviolable sanctity of marriage is not a victimless doctrine.

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