My students hated it, as I suspected they would. They also seemed unable
to fully understand the argument. As I tried to explain the reasoning
behind the conjugal view of marriage and its attitude toward sex, I
received dubious stares in response. I realized, as I listened to the
discussion, that the idea of “redefining” marriage was nonsensical to
them, because they had never encountered the philosophy behind the
conjugal view of marriage. To them, the Christian argument against
same-sex marriage is an appeal to the authority of a few disparate Bible
verses, and therefore compelling only to those with a literalist
hermeneutic. What the article names as a “revisionist” idea of
marriage—marriage as an emotional, romantic, sexual bond between two
people—does not seem “new” to my students at all, because this is the
view of marriage they were raised with, albeit with a scriptural,
heterosexual gloss.
While I listened to my students lambast
the article, it struck me that, on one level, they were right: marriage
isn’t in danger of being redefined; the redefinition began decades ago,
in the wake of the sexual revolution. Once the link between sexuality
and procreation was severed in our cultural imagination, marriage
morphed into an exclusive romantic bond that has only an arbitrary
relationship to reproduction. It is this redefinition, arguably, that
has given rise to the same-sex marriage movement, rather than the other
way around, and as the broader culture has shifted on this issue, so
have many young evangelicals.
[,,,]
To my students, the authors of “What is Marriage?” are making a
troubling move, reducing the purpose of marital sex to its reproductive
function. What they seemed less able to recognize is that they have
inherited the inverse: a view of sex with little meaningful connection
to procreation. And once such a view of sexuality is embraced, there is
not much foothold, aside from appeals to biblical authority, to support
the conjugal understanding of marriage.
What is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials? | Abigail Rine | First Things
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