Marriage, "red in tooth and claw"

I started thinking about this when I ran across the article, “Housewives of God” in this morning’s New York Times Magazine. It’s worth reading if you are interested in marriage, evangelical conservatism, biblical interpretation, or what author Molly Worthen calls the “biblical-womanhood-industrial complex. That phrase is when I started really liking this article. I attached the whole article and if you want a fair account of it, you should click here. For me, it’s just a launching pad.

I react strongly to the positions taken by Priscilla Shirer, the person on whose life and views the article is focused. Strongly, but not in the same direction for each position. Shirer holds, for instance, that the Bible describes a kind of marriage that is God’s way and that is therefore incumbent on all Christians. The feeling I have for that argument comes very close to revulsion. If I gave all the reasons why, I’d never get to the point I want to make. Most of them are in my Page on biblical interpretation, which is here.

I do not feel at all uncomfortable with the marriage the Shirer’s have. It looks pretty good to me. By the evidence given in the article, they have a kind of marriage they both value, they love each other a good deal, and they are full partners in pursuing the goals of the marriage, which includes raising wonderful children. Take away the rationale for the marriage and just look at the marriage itself, and what’s not to like?

I’m pretty conservative about marriage—an odd thing for a man to say who in on his third wife—but the argument I would make to feminists who have nothing but scorn for marriages like this, is a liberal one.[1] Tolerance. I preach tolerance. The Shirers like it. It works for them. Priscilla Shirer’s ideology is not like yours and if they are successful in raising their children to value the family tradition, their children will not be the kind you like, but I say tolerance is a good thing. A certain social diversity is a good thing. And maybe just the smallest sliver of ideological self-doubt. is a good thing too.

The range of marriages I have seen that I would call “good marriages” is absolutely astounding. I have seen a husband and wife who dearly love each other divide the bill for a shared lunch into “his” and “hers” and negotiate about the tip. I have seen women who are substantially more powerful and more whole “submit” to their husbands out of a certain knowledge that “being who she is” would break him into tiny fragments. I have seen men substantially pad their lives with rewarding projects and relationships so they will have the resources to continue to love women who would otherwise exhaust them.

None of these marriages are the kind I would like to have myself, but they are marriages where the partners truly love each other and arrange their personal competences as they may (examples one and two) or who are making the best marriage that can be made under circumstances that would defeat lesser spouses (example three). I honor these marriages. I learn from them as I am able. But I don’t aspire to have a marriage like them and I don’t.
I am against “equality” as a goal in marriage mostly because it takes too much accounting to maintain it. I think equality in marriage should be a presupposition. If you get to comparing the fundamental worth of one partner to another, you will end in disaster no matter the conclusion you reach. And what is worse, it is silly.

On the other hand, equality isn’t similarity. It is true that the only way to police “equality” effectively, is to define the roles within a marriage as identical, but if you have a marriage where policing is the first priority, you don’t have much of a marriage. I like complementarity in my marriage. That is the kind of marriage I proposed to Bette and the kind to which she was attracted. If the equality is presupposed and the differences are developed over time as we choose within a gracious and thoughtful relationship, then Bette and I can afford to emphasize complementarity and we do.

But we have the kind of marriage we have because it is the kind we want. Neither of us thinks God has commanded us to have this kind of relationship. Neither of us thinks our marriage requires a “head of the house.” Neither of us thinks that marriages that are affirming and effective are “bad marriages,” no matter how much unlike ours they might be.

There seems to me no good reason why the contemporary turmoil over “what a marriage should be like” must be “red in tooth and claw.” Nature is “red in tooth and claw” and it must be. Marriage doesn’t have to be. In cultures like ours, predicated on individualism; in cultures like ours, in which romantic attraction is the green light for marriage; I simply can not see why marriages that work should not be celebrated by us all.

I hold that marriages should not be judged by what a collection of scripture fragments, each deprived of its context of meaning, defines as good. You can have any kind of marriage you like, so far as I am concerned, if you will just keep your notions of a divine marriage template to yourself.

[1] The bad guys in this accusation are not “feminists.” They are “feminists who have nothing but scorn…” Sometimes, with just a little attention paid to punctuation, you can say exactly what you mean. Not all the time.