The Significance of Singleness

A Theological Vision for the Future of the Church

Hitchcock, Christina S.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493415724
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The church needs to do a better job of speaking theologically to single Christians. Challenging prevailing evangelical assumptions about "the problem" of singleness, this book explains why the church needs single people and offers a contemporary theology of singleness relevant to all members of the church. Drawing on the examples of three important figures from the history of Christianity, the book helps today's church form a vision of life in the kingdom of God that is as theologically significant for single people as it is for those who are married.

Part One

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Why Singleness?

Just before my husband and I became engaged, we talked rather seriously about the biblical and theological significance of singleness, and we tried to honestly assess how our potential marriage might affect our witness as those who believed in and lived solely through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We both believed that our witness to that was made less powerful by our marriage but that, even so, we were free to marry. In perhaps a guilt-fueled attempt to recognize this, we originally designed our wedding invitation to quote Jesus’s saying from Matthew 19:12 on the cover:“For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can” (NRSV). The invitation would then be opened to the simple statement, “We can’t accept it,” followed by the details of the wedding. Mostly out of concern for confusing and worrying various sets of grandparents, we eventually decided to use a more traditional invitation, but clearly we entered marriage with a sense that we were taking the easier and, from a Christian point of view, perhaps less significant road.

Recent essays in distinguished secular publications have indicated that American culture at large is both desirous of and conflicted about the institution of marriage. We desire the goods offered by marriage, such as stability, partnership, and romance, but we feel conflicted by the limitations involved in committing to and depending on one specific person for a lifetime. This simultaneous sense of desire and conflict in relation to marriage, particularly for women, was manifested several years ago in the November 2011 issue of The Atlantic when author Kate Bolick gave an extended (and personal) analysis of the cultural attitudes toward marriage and the effects of this attitude on single women like herself. Bolick noted that the average age at the time of marriage has increased in the past five decades. And men have become increasingly less marriageable due to a decline among men in education and earning potential (especially in relation to women, who have been making great strides in these areas). Yet many single women still long for marriage and possess a real fear of lifelong singleness. Bolick says that she herself experienced “panicked exhaustion”1 around age thirty-six (she was thirty-nine at the time she wrote the article) and felt an intense need to marry immediately, even if it meant settling for a man who was less than what she had hoped for. She also quotes from an interview with several single women in their early twenties. All were sexually experienced and sexually liberated (meaning that each easily admitted to taking part in the hookup culture of their colleges), and yet when Bolick asked them if they wanted to get married and, if so, at what age, “to a one they answered ‘yes’ and ‘27 or 28.’”2 She reminded them of her own age and suggested that her present reality could be their future, after which she asked, “Does that freak you out?” She reports that “again they nodded” and one of the young women “with undisguised alarm” whispered, “I don’t think I can bear doing this for that long.”3

The media response to Bolick’s article was an avalanche—on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, television, and print. Many praised Bolick’s candor and her desire and hope that single women are now moving past this need for marriage. Others, however, criticized Bolick as living in a fantasy world of high-powered women making intentional decisions to move marriage way down on the list of priorities (as Bolick says she has done). Anna Fields of the Daily Beast writes, “Well, I’m here to tell you, this may very well be the case in New York and Los Angeles, the land of the alpha woman. But here’s a dispatch from America—the real world, the red states—where marriage is not so much an option as a goal that’s hammered into women’s heads since birth. It doesn’t matter how successful you are in your career—or how unsuccessful your man is. If you’re not married, you’re a loser.”4 Fields reports that the pressure to marry is still intense for most women in their twenties and thirties. This pressure, coupled with women’s own desire for marriage, means that the single life for women past a certain age (twenty-five to twenty-seven) is generally considered undesirable. In addition, the recent US Supreme Court decision to legalize homosexual marriage nationwide creates an even greater aura of desire and conflict around the institution of marriage.

Unlike the secular world of people like Bolick and Fields, the American evangelical community believes that both marriage itself and the desire to be married are rooted in God’s original, created intentions for the world. Therefore it is not surprising that in light of societal trends both for and against marriage, this same community has become the most ardent supporter and defender of traditional marriage. This evangelical defense of marriage ranges from quiet but steady attention to marriage as the foundational building block of society and the church (think of all the churches catering the majority of their programs to couples and children) to book after book about marriage: how to get married, how to stay married, how to have sex while you’re married, and so on. If the pressure to get married is intense for someone like Anna Fields of the Daily Beast, how much more so for the twenty-one-year-old woman at a small Christian college?

As a result, American evangelicalism focuses almost entirely on marriage and lacks an understanding of singleness5 that is theologically significant. By this I mean that the church does not understand singleness as signifying anything important about who God is or what God is doing. In contrast, marriage is understood to be theologically significant in various ways. For example, husband and wife present a picture of Christ and the church, and marriage and children present a unique opportunity for sanctification. In other words, marriage and family tell us something important about God and the Christian life. This state of affairs in American evangelicalism would have caused those who received our original wedding invitation to respond with confusion rather than the wry chuckle we hoped for. Contemporary American evangelicalism tends to view singleness (at best) as a waiting period during which a person has greater time for church work or (at worst) as a lifelong sentence to loneliness. In marriage Christians are expected to find both personal and communal spiritual fulfillment, and in marriage Christians are taught to see theological significance. Thus marriage presents both an appealing lifestyle and a powerful picture of who God is and what he is doing, while singleness does neither.

I have experienced the truth of this marriage-minded atmosphere in more than one church, having been single until age thirty, and I have also seen it over and over again in my students’ attitudes toward marriage, especially my female students’ attitudes. My female students who have been raised in evangelical Christian families and churches come to college expecting to find and marry a good Christian young man. This expectation is ingrained in them by their families, their churches, their friends, their youth groups, and the books they read. It is not simply an expectation that they will get married to that fine Christian man, but it is an assumption that this is God’s will for them. Because it is God’s will, God is then obligated to provide said man.6 While many of my students get married before or right after graduation, some don’t. For the latter group, this kind of thinking is not only a recipe for disappointment; it often leads to spiritual crisis.

Sex and the Search for Autonomy

Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas identifies two prevailing views of sexuality within contemporary American culture. The first he terms the realistic view of sex. Realists “stress that sex is simply one human activity among others—it can be a profound human expression or it can just be fun—but what is important, no matter how sex is understood, is that it be demystified.”7 The realist believes that human beings will engage in sexual activity and the best we can hope for is that such engagement be as safe and healthy as possible.

He identifies the second understanding as the romantic view. This view says that “love is the necessary condition for sex and marriage.”8 Definitions of love may vary, but “for all romantics the quality of the interpersonal relation between a couple is the primary issue for considering sexual involvement.”9 American evangelicalism has baptized these two views, which speak of sex and marriage primarily in terms of rights and romance, respectively.

While on the face of it these two views of human sexuality seem quite different, Hauerwas contends that each grows out of a foundational belief in individualism. The realist assumes that the way things are is essentially the way things should be and therefore accepts the precept that sexual activity should be determined by what each individual feels is good for him- or herself. In much the same way, the romantic assumes that the basis for sexual activity, love, is a feeling that can be authenticated only by the individual, and therefore sexual activity is determined by the feelings of each individual. Modern Western culture’s most basic assumptions of individuality and autonomy govern our understanding of sex and its proper function, whether that takes on the guise of realism or romanticism.

American evangelicalism’s understanding of sexuality stands firmly planted on the same foundation as the realist and romantic understandings but has built a different ethical structure on that foundation. This structure adds a spiritual veneer to these secular understandings of sexuality in order to hide the fact that both Christian and secular sexual ethics are built on the same secular foundation. In recent years, this kinship with the secular, autonomous view of sexuality has become increasingly evident in evangelical Christianity with the Marriage Mandate Movement. While the overall tone of this movement is shrill and bossy, it is a good example of the kind of theological thinking that characterizes many American evangelical congregations as they think about marriage. The movement’s basic beliefs are that marriage is the norm for all people (not just for Christians) and that only those given the “gift of singleness” can rightfully opt out of marriage. Everyone else is mandated by God’s Word to marry and to marry young enough to have children. In other words, the overwhelming majority of young adults (adults in their early twenties) should be preparing for and entering into marriage. Not surprisingly, the Marriage Mandate Movement seems to have originated with and found its natural home in Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs–based institution dedicated to building and nurturing strong Christian families. The primary means of distributing the ideology of the movement is the online magazine and website for Christian young adults called Boundless.10 However, the Marriage Mandate Movement has found endorsement far beyond the doors of Focus on the Family in widely read ecumenical publications like Christianity Today11 and First Things,12 demonstrating once again the breadth and depth of the impulse toward marriage.

While advocates or friends of the Marriage Mandate Movement would certainly deny that their most basic assumptions are the same as those of their secular counterparts, their dependence on and use of Genesis 1–2 and natural law tell a different story. Like the secular realist, who believes sex is simply something humans do, this Christian perspective insists that sex, and therefore marriage, is simply a part of the natural order for all humans. In other words, it simply is the way things are. Michael Lawrence and Scott Croft of Focus on the Family gave an interview for Boundless expressing this perspec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Index
• Back Cover