Thoroughly Modern Marriage
Conservative Evangelicals, myself included, were shocked and scandalized when so-called gay marriage was legitimized by the Supreme Court in the 2015 Obergefellv. Hodges case. We should not have been. The unstoppable process leading to that case was set in motion 45 years earlier when we in the church allowed no-fault divorce to redefine the nature and purpose of marriage.
Worse yet, that terrible, sacrament-shattering act was signed into law by the California governor who would, a decade later, be elected as our favorite conservative president: Ronald Reagan. Where was the outcry when the California Family Law Act of 1969 ruled that divorce could be granted on the grounds of “irreconcilable differences”?
While some Catholics, Orthodox, and high Episcopalians resisted no-fault divorce, most Evangelicals quickly acquiesced to the new normal. No longer did a husband or wife who was feeling “unfulfilled” in his or her marriage have to prove adultery or abuse to purchase a get-out-of-jail-free card. One needed only to claim an inability to live with his spouse any longer, and the court would let him go. The abandoned spouse could complain, but in the end, he or she could do nothing to prevent the divorce.
Divorce Texas Style
It would have been nice if the spark ignited in California had stayed in California. Instead, it spread like a wildfire across the country, reaching the Bible-belt, red state of Texas in 1997. According to Section 6.001 of the Texas Family Code, “On the petition of either party to a marriage, the court may grant a divorce without regard to fault if the marriage has become insupportable because of discord or conflict of personalities that destroys the legitimate ends of the marital relationship and prevents any reasonable expectation of reconciliation.”
The important word here, the word that should have been resisted tooth and nail by every Christ-centered, Bible-believing, doctrine-affirming Christian, is the one that is easiest to overlook: “legitimate.” Crouching serpent-like in that unassuming word is a secular-humanist presupposition inimical to the nature of holy marriage: an institution that not only was directly created by God but that also, in contrast to all other such institutions, predates the Fall.
What exactly is it that can be destroyed by discord or conflict of personalities? Certainly not that mystical union established at creation (Gen. 1:27; 2:24) and reaffirmed by Jesus (Matt. 19:4-6), by which a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife so that the two become one flesh. Certainly not the bearing and rearing of children, which is inseparable from the true end of marriage. Certainly not the preservation of chastity or the companionship that marriage brings to those who would otherwise be alone.
No, the only things rendered “insupportable” by discord and conflict are those that the modern secular world has offered up as substitutes for the chief ends of marriage, listed in the previous paragraph, and the commandments to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves: happiness, autonomy, self-actualization, self-esteem, and freedom from guilt and accountability. A marriage that ceases to provide these things or that jeopardizes them in any way is immediately rendered null, void, and illegitimate.
How did this happen? How did the church come to accept a definition of marriage that is so fragile and flimsy, so grounded in self-centered emotions and frivolous, capricious feelings? C. S. Lewis warned us long ago (in Mere Christianity III.6) that a marriage founded on the experience of “being in love” will quickly collapse when the strong emotions that birthed it, and that provide its sole justification, fade. These warnings have been echoed and explored further in two recent works that Christians who care about biblical marriage would do well to heed: Carl Trueman’s magisterial The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020), and Douglas Wilson’s hard-hitting but biblically grounded series of interviews, Man Rampant (2019).
Marriage & Selfhood Desacralized
As Trueman demonstrates through incisive analysis and well-chosen quotations from Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Marcuse, and others, the breakdown of biblical marriage has deep roots in the slow move from a moral-ethical culture grounded in man as a rational being to a therapeutic culture grounded in man as a psychological being. Working within the sociological parameters and terminology laid down by Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre, Trueman helps us see how we have all come to live in an emotivist world where the final touchstone for right or wrong, good or bad, holy or sinful is internal and affective.
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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