COMMUNITY SENSE

WHERE DO WE LEARN MARRIAGE?

Mark R. Wenger

The day my wife and I were married about 20 years ago, we were naïve. It’s amazing, though, how smart we thought we were. Ours was going to be the best marriage ever. Better than our parents’, which were "so yesterday." We wrote our own marriage vows—you know, creative, unique and personal, not those tired old traditional words. We had a lot to learn.

Thankfully, in addition to our bright-eyed bravado that day, we carried something else buried in our heads—a few basic "rules" for marriage. We had absorbed them from somewhere; they were embedded. To name a few:

• Sexual intercourse is off-limits until marriage.

• Marriage will last until one of us dies.

• Marriage is one-to-one fidelity; there will be no other competitors or lovers.

• Marriage is partnership and mutuality—equal love, power, and respect for the other.

• Marriage is for fathering and mothering children—for building family.

• God has a profound interest in marriage: "From the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’" (Mark 10:6-8 NRSV).

Kathy and I are still together and happy. Not because we developed a new and improved model. Not at all. We’re together because these rules for marriage from culture, family, and church gave us a steady and good foundation. By grace, perseverance, work, and play—and a supportive community—our marriage is lasting.

Sociologist Tony Campolo writes that the Western middle class—and its religiosity—has produced "one of the most wholesome, egalitarian, and loving family systems in human history. . . . Its family lifestyle may be the best form alive in the world today. . . . There is less oppression of women in our familial lifestyles. There is less ‘machismo’ employed to prove masculinity among our young men. There is more planning for the welfare of children. I know that among my colleagues in the field of sociology, it is heresy to make such assertions, but I believe them to be true, nevertheless" (Partly Right, Jarrell/Word Books, 1985, 17).

In like fashion I believe the community rules that helped my wife and me to get on our feet and find our way in marriage offer practical wisdom hard to improve on. Many will disagree, but I am convinced.

I shudder to think, however, how this broadly shared consensus about what constitutes marriage and procreation has eroded, perhaps even corroded, in recent decades. The sanctity of American marriage is an endangered species; the traditional definition of marriage may be crumbling.

As I write, the Massachusetts legislature is meeting in special session. The judiciary has ordered that legal provision be made for gay marriage. By judicial fiat the courts are telling elected representatives to write laws authorizing social and moral policy that has not been achievable through democratic persuasion. The newspapers have carried stories about gay couples in San Francisco getting "married" though there is no legal provision for it. Is marriage grounded in anything beyond personal preference and individual rights?

A glance at the record of heterosexual couples, however, doesn’t provide much more reassurance. A December 2003 column by George Will (accessed at www.townhall.com) contained the following sobering statistics: Cohabitation of unmarried couples has increased almost 1,000 percent in the last 30 years (523,000 in 1970, almost 5 million today). Forty percent of first marriages end in divorce—with mothers and children usually suffering the most losses financially and emotionally. Birthing centers record that 33 percent of newborns have parents who aren’t married. For women under age 25, the percentage rises to 60 percent of births to unmarried parents.

Is marriage seen as a barrier to achieving personal fulfillment and self-realization and often too risky to undertake?

The pungent irony in these snapshots is hard to miss: Gay couples clamoring for the right to get married, while more and more heterosexual couples are avoiding marriage and having babies anyway.

I view these peculiar phenomena, however, as two disparate consequences of a larger slow-moving train wreck—the decline of marriage as a social institution in America. When a community’s sense of what marriage is gets lost and is replaced by the supremacy of individual rights, the ground itself shifts.

Can anyone say with a straight face that the current state of marriage in America is better than it was 40 years ago? Does anyone claim that children today are healthier, happier, and more socially well-adjusted than in 1970? Would that our culture applied the same attention and marshaled similar resources to combat broken marriages and families as is done to contain the SARS virus or build smart bombs!

But I have little faith that government, science, or culture will take the problem seriously until something cataclysmic takes places, jarring the land from its individualistic neurosis. Community consensus supporting marriages and families will need to be nurtured and modeled in smaller, alternative networks of meaningful relationships.

Years ago I remember anthropologist Donald Jacobs talking about the important role of the extended family in East African culture. (Hillary Clinton said something similar: "It takes a village to raise a child.") Jacobs described how livestock was exchanged among families at the sealing of a marriage. If the marriage fell apart, all the livestock—and the offspring of the livestock—had to be returned. Divorce after a year or two was painful and messy, but doable. But 10 years down the road, the extended families had a vested interest in helping the couple make the marriage work.

In North America, except within some subcultural groups, the role of the extended family has weakened dramatically. Where can young adults find the kind of wise community counsel that will help them grow to adulthood? And if they get married, where can they learn to do marriage well? What they pick up from Dr. Phil and Oprah will not cut it. It takes a network of relationships to build a good marriage.

I believe faith communities are the alternative extended family with the most potential for maintaining and nurturing marriage and family in North America today. I’m talking about mosques, synagogues, congregations in which relationships of trust and mutuality are fostered.

Congregations with face-to-face relationships over time—from babies being born to grandparents tottering about—is where children, youth, and adults have the best chance of learning what a marriage is and what it takes to make it work.

If young adults want to know the secret to building a good marriage, I tell them to get involved in a small or medium-sized congregation and to make friends. If young parents want to raise sane and stable children in a crazy culture, their chances are much better if they join a faith community that will support them in passing on the truths and behaviors they value.

As a pastor of a 200-member rural congregation, I know there is no such thing as a problem-free marriage or family. But over the years I have been impressed with how a strong network of loving and honest relationships helps people young and old cope with the inevitable adjustments, disappointments, and joys of life. Divorces are rare, as are delinquent children.

If American culture, with its fixation on individual rights, is in danger of forgetting what marriage is all about, there are still communities around who haven’t forgotten. They remain deeply committed to putting what they consider wise rules for marriage into practice. They are eager to share the benefits with their children and with anyone who will listen. My only regret is that these faith communities are often so ineffective in sharing this good news winsomely and persuasively with the broader culture.

—Mark R. Wenger, Waynesboro, Virginia, is copastor of Springdale Mennonite Church and Associate Director of the Preaching Institute, Eastern Mennonite Seminary.