Saving Nothing for Marriage

In the early life of the church, being a Christian was risky. Most Christians are at least somewhat familiar with the persecutions that the early church faced at the hands of the Roman Empire. Somewhat less familiar is the trouble that this caused in the church after it became the darling of the imperial government. Many, perhaps most, Christians got comfortable in their brand new basilicas, but a few Christians just didn't think they were holding up their end of the bargain unless they suffered like crazy for Christ.

So these brave souls, denied the "red martyrdom" of a violent death, left the swelling churches (without breaking communion with them) and took to the deserts. There, they sought a "white martyrdom" of absolute self-denial, spending their lives in solitary prayer and fasting. After a while, these folks banded together for shared worship and exhortation, and the first monasteries were born.

At the Protestant reformation, Protestants lost the institution of monasticism, but the ideal of voluntary self-denial for the glory of God cropped up again and again. Max Weber described in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism how Reformed Protestantism imposed a semi-monastic discipline on its adherents, a discipline that forbade Protestants from enjoying any of the wealth that they accumulated through their hard work. Hard work, Weber explained, was itself a result of the Protestant obsession with self-denial. Later, Methodist circuit riders on the early 19th century American frontier, almost all of whom were single men, worked so hard that almost none of them survived until their fortieth birthday. A similar impulse sent countless evangelical Protestants all over the world in order to preach the gospel, many of them never surviving to return.

The roots of Evangelicalism, then, reach deep into the ascetic tradition. Stated another way, Evangelicalism is a way of life rooted in an assumption that God is honored by self-denial. The strange thing is not that almost all of the Christians that went before us thought that God could be pleased through self-denial, but that we have decided that we should be spared no pleasure.

In no instance is this more plain than in Evangelical approaches to sex and marriage. In matters of marriage, for instance, evangelicals are not prepared to accept that some people might be led to forgo marriage for the sake of service to the church and to Christ. I hesitate to diagnose the roots of this problem. Is it because we need marriage as a marker of our support for "family values" or of our opposition to homosexuality? Maybe it is because we're just anxious whenever anyone indicates, however gently, that "doing without" honors God.

The way we speak about sex is even more telling. Someone told me once that he was waiting to have sex until after marriage because if he did, God would bless the sex in his marriage and make it even better than it would have been. It's only a slight variation on this theme to suggest that by saving yourself for marriage, you keep something special that ought to be reserved for your spouse

With this in mind, it's no wonder evangelicals have such trouble with singleness. All of our justifications for chastity have to do with its effects on marriage. Many evangelicals that never marry must wonder why they even bothered saving themselves for someone that never materialized, for a day that never came.

To all this, I make a simple constructive suggestion: as conservative Christians, we should be addressing issues of sexuality and singleness not in terms of a divine quid pro quo, in which we offer chastity now in order to get a sexual benefit later, but as a form of asceticism. When single people voluntarily give up the right to have sex, they honor God. When married people give up their right to have sex with anyone to whom they are not married, they honor God. Sex isn't given up for the sake of receiving a benefit, but for the sake of pleasing God. I for one am tired of saving myself for marriage. I am, however, trying to live my life, my whole life, in light of the glory of God.