It’s summer, and for a professor at a Christian college—an evangelical school within the South, no less—meaning it’s wedding season. On my campus, jokes about “ring by spring” still abound.
Talk a couple of counterculture. Few things are less in tune with the zeitgeist. Americans are marrying and having children later than ever. And even in evangelical contexts, many young people’s parents, pastors, and professors are advising delayed marriage: Focus first on a level, on establishing a profession, on saving some money. Worry a couple of mate closer to 30 than to twenty—and definitely don’t get pregnant! These things will care for themselves.
This advice is well-intended, perhaps autobiographical. Many Christians in older generations remember and reject the old stigma of singleness into one’s 30s. They could have married young themselves, then come to regret it—or they could worry that young people, especially young women, will follow the script of early marriage and childbearing to their very own regrets.
There’s also some real wisdom here: Don’t get married simply because it looks like the subsequent step on a checklist. Moreover, don’t make guarantees you’ll be able to’t keep. Take marriage seriously, even when meaning waiting for a couple of years.
The risk, though, is that a spouse might not be waiting for you. Marriage and youngsters aren’t just arriving later; increasingly, they aren’t arriving in any respect. From my vantage point, the issue just isn’t that too a lot of my students need to get married too young. It’s the other. They’ve gotten the memo from their families, churches, and secular culture alike. They know concerning the likelihood and pain of divorce. They know babies are demanding and expensive. They know popular culture rolls its eyes at lifelong monogamy. No one must remind them of these items.
But what a couple of of us might consider doing—I actually do—is telling them how great marriage is. How wonderful children are. How starting to forge a family in your 20s is a wonderfully reasonable thing to do. How money is all the time a stressor; so why not share the load? How praying and stepping out in trust isn’t crazy, though it’s actually dangerous.
As it happens, there may be one a part of the broader culture that doesn’t work at cross purposes with this message. And yet this phenomenon can be, in my experience, a whipping boy for Christian punditry and hand-wringing. I’m talking concerning the wedding industrial complex.
I doubt I want to enlighten you on this topic. The billions spent annually. The ballooning budgets. The influence of Pinterest and Instagram. The fairy-tale wedding that caps the romantic comedy plot line, from meet-cute to happily ever after.
There is far to criticize here, I don’t deny. Gone are the times of an easy ceremony together with your congregation, with cake and punch and decorations arranged by the identical church ladies who modified your diapers so a few years ago. Now the expectation is that the ceremony be picturesque, professionally photographed and recorded—the party of the 12 months. (Guests have expectations, you realize.) Parents go into debt. An already stressful time collapses under its own weight. And the purpose of all of it threatens to be forgotten: Namely, that two persons are being joined in holy matrimony.
Yet even when we will’t give three cheers for the marriage industrial complex, I can still muster one or two. So far as I can tell, it’s one in every of the few remaining cultural institutions that exert any form of positive pressure on young people to get married.
For all its faults, our ritual of elaborate weddings presents marriage, family, guarantees, and love itself as beautiful. Desirable, even. The industry provides permission to need to be married, and to kick it off in grand style.
The wedding industrial complex also holds a connection to faith that almost all of our public life has lost. Even nonreligious people need to be married by a minister; churches remain popular wedding venues; God often gets greater than nominal mention; Scripture or Communion or each are features of the ceremony. Tradition reigns. Like funerals, weddings are one in every of only a few remaining occasions to follow smart scripts written long before we were born. We find ourselves, sometimes to our surprise, disposed to follow where they lead.
One place they proceed to steer is the making of guarantees. Three many years ago, the theologian Robert Jenson remarked that in an age when our culture has lost faith in promise-keeping, the church might be an outpost of guarantees made and kept. Jenson was onto something. Year after 12 months, we lose reasons to trust publicly made guarantees, including marital ones.
Yet there also endures an ineradicable hunger each to witness them and to be certain by such pledges. I proceed to marvel on the earnest stubbornness of supposedly secular wedding ceremonies, through which grooms and brides simply refuse to stop making vows to one another. They do it in front of people that won’t allow them to forget it, they usually persist in invoking the name of the Lord.
I’m not so silly as to think this ceremonial persistence reflects abiding faith or that it mitigates the scandal of divorces, Christian and otherwise. But neither am I so cynical as to see in it nothing but empty formulas and rote traditions. And I believe we should always rejoice that, against all odds, people proceed to see weddings as holy feasts well worth the money, the time, and the headache.
This summer, I officiated my first wedding, and I even have one other one next month. My wife gave me a rule of thumb: If people I like or students I’ve taught honor me with the invitation, then I had higher have reason to say no. She’s right. I would like more weddings, not fewer. I’m the kook on campus telling these crazy kids to go for it, aren’t I?
If meaning calling a truce with Brides magazine and The Knot and even Instagram, so be it. The world may mean it for ailing, but God means it for good. Maybe “ring by spring” isn’t such a joke in spite of everything.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the writer of 4 books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry.
