My wife and I got married early by today's standards. I proposed Thanksgiving break of my freshman year of college. We got married when I was twenty and moreover we had two kids while I was finishing up school. Getting married that young is unusual and getting more so by the year, even among people who should be the most married-minded: young evangelical Christians. We were not Christians, I had zero interest in religion at all so I have not experienced the evangelical singles or teen culture. Clearly though something is amiss in that very same culture.
Because of that sense that "something is wrong", I found a very interesting article in Christianity Today. That in and of itself is pretty unusual, because an awful lot of what is published in CT is inane and squishy. The article is The Case for Early Marriage by Mark Regnerus, and he makes a number of interesting observations.
Regnerus makes an interesting case that we have done a ton of work in discouraging premarital sex among Christian youth but haven't given them a corresponding lesson on getting married while in our younger years. As the adult years stretch on and marriage continues to be put off, the natural, God given desires of the flesh tend to win out over the chastity pledges. Humans by and large are not designed to be abstinent. Thus the gift of marriage is given to us to provide for a means by which sexual desire can be experienced in a God honoring way, more often than not leading to the gift of children. Our message is by and large "wait", "wait" to have sex and "wait" to get married until you are "ready'". Guess what, you will never be ready to be married! You can be as prepared as possible, and should be, but no training or perceived maturity can fully prepare you for being married. By telling our kids to wait to get married, we prolong adolescence...
As a result, many men postpone growing up. Even their workplace performance is suffering: earnings for 25- to 34-year-old men have fallen by 20 percent since 1971, even after accounting for inflation. No wonder young women marry men who are on average at least two years older than they. Unfortunately, a key developmental institution for men—marriage—is the very thing being postponed, thus perpetuating their adolescence.
I think by and large he is right. We want our kids to "experience" all sorts of things, and be financially secure, and be mature but in reality what helps to mature us the most, especially men, is marriage itself. Young men now are able to perpetuate adolescence for a decade or more after high school. Little wonder we are in the state we are in. More...
Most young Americans no longer think of marriage as a formative institution, but rather as the institution they enter once they think they are fully formed. Increasing numbers of young evangelicals think likewise, and, by integrating these ideas with the timeless imperative to abstain from sex before marriage, we've created a new optimal life formula for our children: Marriage is glorious, and a big deal. But it must wait. And with it, sex. Which is seldom as patient.
People used to get married much earlier, have kids much earlier and have more of them. I think you would be hard pressed to make the case that people are happier now than they were "back then". Without preparing our kids to be married, a realistic picture not some idealized fairy tale, and teach them the theology of marriage, of gender, of sex, of children, of headship we will continue to see people getting married later and later and the intervening years filled with immorality. Not to excuse immoral behavior, but a pledge to wait until you are ready for marriage is a lot easier to keep than a pledge to wait until marriage to become sexually active.
Not everything is accurate. At one point he says:
Indeed, age integration is one of the unique hallmarks of the institutional church, tacitly contesting the strict age-separation patterns that have long characterized American schools and universities.
Um, I don't know that I agree with that. Most churches, especially heavily institutionalized churches, tend to divide people up heavily. There are Sunday school classes for this age and that category of people, so you tend to go to Sunday school in bigger churches with people who look like you. The older people do their own field trips. The young adults have mixers. Sure we are blended together in the sanctuary, but that is anything but a setting for inter-generational fellowship.
I would say this. We need to spend our kids formative years preparing them for courtship and marriage, even more so that preparing them for college and career. Along with that, parents, and the church as a whole, need to spend a lot more time teaching our kids about gender, marriage, family life, the relationship between husbands and wives, parents and children. I have said before, we spend a ton of time worrying about schools for our kids, making the right college choices etc, and even send kids to Christian colleges because of the right atmosphere, but spend far too little time preparing them for courtship and marriage. We tell them what not to do (i.e. no premarital sex) and not nearly enough telling them what the Bible tells us they should do, that they should anticipate and cherish marriage. Not as something that is the end result of becoming adults but as something that is highly formative in becoming adults.
Give the article a read. I think it is right on in many places and generally challenging to our assumptions in America in 2009.
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