Revisiting “Traditional” Marriages

The call for a return to “traditional” family values comes at us from all sides these days. The problem is that it is not easy to figure out just what the call means. Apparently, it does not include standing up for parental arrangement and dowries as essential conditions for a valid marriage, even though these have been regarded as such for a very long time, and still are so regarded in many quarters of the world. Nor does it include the insistence upon the marital bond as indissoluble and forever.

This latter reticence is especially surprising. For if there is anything still left of the church’s traditional expectations for marriage, one thing is the idea that you shouldn’t be able to get out of one very easily. And yet, traditionalist Christians seem to be doing as smooth a job of leaving marriages behind as everybody else in society is these days. One telling statistic is that the divorce rate for self-styled conservative evangelicals has become just about the same as for the population as a whole.

And a good percentage of these evangelicals are getting divorced after becoming, in their words, “born again.” Once, I had in my office a middle-aged man just back from a Promise Keepers’ Rally who regaled me with a story of his recent conversion experience, following the break-up of his fourth marriage. He wanted to know whether I would be disposed to conducting the service for his fifth. “Can you believe,” he asked me, “that I used to be committed to a three-strikes-and-you’re-out philosophy of marriage?” He became agitated when I told him that, no, I couldn’t believe it and that, no, I wouldn’t  preside over another wedding for him. 

Other once widely accepted ideas about marriage also are dropping out of traditionalists’ credos. One is that marriage should endow the partners with new wealth and status, either from parental bestowal at the beginning, or from lots of children put to work tilling and managing acquired lands and businesses. Another is that real men should keep their women at home, in order to shield them from the grime and grimness of the workaday world. And still another is that they should protect their innocent partners from the sordidness of sex by “doing it” with them strictly for the sake of producing offspring, while going outside for the physical satisfactions that all hard-driving men require and deserve.  

So what does it mean, then, to call for a return to traditional values, as far as marriage is concerned? Well, in the first place, it seems to mean something like re-affirming marriage as a heterosexual and not homosexual union. Second, it seems to mean --- uh, er, any other ideas? Okay, try this on for size: it means that the man must be the head of the household and that the woman must defer to her husband in all things. About the only people I know who think this is still viable are guys whose wives won’t let them in the house after the rallies that infected them with the notion in the first place.

The fact of the matter is that, with the possible exception of the heterosexual norm, there just aren’t many traditional ideas left that most thoughtful people come back to anymore when they talk about strengthening the marriage relationship. Conservatives are as easily convinced as liberals and everyone else is that in marriage, staying excited beats getting bored, feeling good trumps doing good, and ensuring freedom pays out better than encouraging responsibility. Because these convictions have become so rock solid to so many, to just that many divorce is now as handy an option as hanging in there used to be.

As for the repudiation of gay and lesbian marriage, the issue has become prominent and important enough to deserve more attention than I can give it here. For now, I will call attention only to the intensity of feeling that the issue generates, and note that it is an intensity clearly out of proportion to what is actually at stake. If every state were to remove the bans this very night, the number of ensuing marriages would be insufficient to prop up even the flimsiest slippery slope to perdition. On the other hand, if the states continue to move in the opposite direction, civil unions for gays and lesbians almost certainly will be approved more explicitly than they now are.

And yet, the shouting matches continue. Why? Because they afford at least some of the repudiators their last real hope that they are not in fact abandoning traditional values as they demand that their own marriages feel good or else. Taking a few whacks at gays and lesbians takes the onus off of dealing death-blows to marriages that with some work and a lot of prayer might be made better, more lasting, and even holy in God’s sight.