Redefining Marriage

When I speak of redefining marriage, you, my faithful readers, will automatically leap to "He's talking about same-sex marriage." Sometimes. Not this time. You see, the process of redefining marriage did not start with the LGBT alphabet soup. We've been at it a long time. My wife received a piece of official mail yesterday and I noticed the address. It gave her the title of "Ms." And I caught it, right there. Redefining marriage has been in the works for decades -- most intensely from the 1960's. That's when they yanked "love" from its moorings of seeking the best for others and dragged it into "sex," as in "making love." That phrase originally meant doing things that inspired a connection, close feelings, likely aiming at a permanent relationship that we called (back then) "marriage." Today's version, oddly enough, doesn't even need to include warm feelings. Two people in today's world can "make love" without feeling warmly toward each other -- friends with benefits or maybe a one-night stand.

Enter the '70's. Having hacked down the root of marriage -- genuine love -- and replaced it primarily with sex, we went to work on the permanence of marriage. "No fault divorce" took the country by storm. Not only should we be allowed to divorce for cause; we should be allowed to dismember this "two become one" for no cause except "irreconcilable difference" (read "whatever I want it to mean"). Feminists kicked in with vigor, demanding to no longer be called "Mrs" but now be just "Ms" because marital status was irrelevant. "We will not be defined by our marital status." So "two become one" shifted into oblivion. I had someone ask me (15 years ago, now) "My fiance wants to keep our money separate. Is that okay?" How do you practice "two become one" by keeping your lives separate? But that wasn't an outlandish question; it was normal. And, of course, that other pesky problem had to be addressed -- reproduction. In 1958 we hit a peak 3.6 births per woman. In 1979 we bottomed out at 1.8 births per woman. Marriage and procreation had been untied. In 1970 roughly 8 million children lived in single-parent families. In 2022 that number was 19 million.

The biblical definition of marriage is the union for life of a man and a woman for the purposes of procreation and mutual support. God thought so (Gen 2:24). So did Jesus (Matt 19:4-5). So did Paul (Eph 5:31). So when, in 2008, the Supreme Court of California knowingly rejected the "longstanding, traditional definition of marriage" and instituted something we term "same-sex marriage," it was clearly a redefinition. But it wasn't the first. More to the point, it was more like the last. The last vestiges of God's version of marriage were brought down. We took it down, piece by piece, over decades. It was so subtle and so gradual that Christians often miss it. Christians operate under this new un-definition of marriage. Is it any wonder then that divorce rates have jumped dramatically since the 1950's while "marriage" rates (in quotes since "marriage" is no longer clearly defined) are way down and single-parent children are way up? Is it really a surprise that, given the fact that the foundational concept of family as "married with children" is now a punchline from a TV show, our society is devolving? Why would we expect better values, better morality, better kids, better lives? But I want to point out that, in fact, the redefinition of marriage was not the actual target here. The actual target was God and His values and His plans. Marriage was designed to represent the relationship of Christ and His bride (Eph 5:31-32). This is a larger coup attempt than merely taking down marriage. As such, expect it to have a larger effect than is readily apparent.