The Perpetual Death of Christian Marriage (Book Notes: Ungodly Women)

Yonder comes ... a ship having all the evidence of tempestuous passage: salt water-mark reaching to the top of the smoke-stack; ... bulwarks knocked in; ... main shaft broken; all the pumps working to keep from sinking. That ship is the institution of Christian marriage.

In Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism, Betty A. Deberg quotes T. Dewitt Talmage, a Christian activist who wrote the above in 1886. It certainly does sound familiar, doesn’t it? The language is perhaps a bit more florid than what we are used to seeing today, but the essential ideas are much what contemporary Christian leaders go on about.

It seems, then, that “Christian marriage” (whatever that means) has been dying or sinking or breaking apart or whatever for more than 100 years now. Shouldn’t it just be shot and put out of its misery by now? Or, perhaps, maybe it isn’t so sick and decrepit after all. Perhaps all of the cries about how bad the shape of marriage is are really just people crying wolf — after all, complaints about the high rates of divorce typically ignore the correspondingly high rates of marriage. There are problems, to be sure, but not enough to turn people off of it. Even the fact that gays wish to marry is a sign of how strong the institution of marriage is.

The key, however, lies in the adjective “Christian.” Writers like Talmage aren’t satisfied with mere “marriage,” they demand a “Christian” marriage. In Talmage’s era, such a marriage meant that women were subservient, didn’t work outside the home, didn’t vote, and were left in charge with maintaining the religious values of the home. Deberg’s book is all about how American fundamentalism developed as a reaction to changes in matters such as these.

Today, that kind of “Christian” marriage hardly exists anymore, so it would be fair to say that were Talmage alive today, he’d declare the institution dead — probably replaced with some pagan copy of marriage. Contemporary Christians, though, would disagree. They see Christian marriage as continuing to stumble along but they have different ideas of what makes a marriage “Christian.” Somehow, I suspect that the same will be true in another hundred years. Marriage will be different from how we envision it today, but conservative religious leaders will still be there, complaining that everything is all wrong and that True Religion requires holding the line against even more changes.

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