A Rite for the Uncommitted
Samuel Pascoe on “Shacking Up”
It is a new millennium, and by some accounts, that is reason enough to loosen the church’s long-held and well-reasoned conviction that the covenant of marriage is the only safe, healthy, life-affirming, and godly context for sexual relations. But there is one issue on which even conservative Christians tend to loosen the church’s teaching: Many of them, not least many conservative clergy, advocate abandoning the traditional ban on marrying couples who have lived together before their marriage.
Why is this bad? some people will ask. At least the couple are finally getting married. At least now they’re making a public commitment, and one that’s harder to get out of than simply living together. The man, as used to be said, is “making an honest woman” of his live-in partner. (And vice versa, of course.)
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more on sex from the online archives
28.2—March/April 2015
Man, Woman & the Mystery of Christ
An Evangelical Protestant Perspective by Russell D. Moore
25.4—July/August 2012
The Corrosive & Far-Reaching Fallout of the Sexual Revolution by Anthony Esolen
23.5—September/October 2010
The Loss of a Christian Understanding of Virginity Is Pure Tragedy by Eleanor Bourg Donlon
more from the online archives
32.5—September/October 2019
Some Trivial Thoughts on the Study of Philosophy by Graeme Hunter
19.1—January/February 2006
on Death & Seven of the Last Words of Socrates by Graeme Hunter
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