Dan J. Brennan

Evangelical Utopia and Unmarried Women

Marlena Graves’ recent post on Desperate for Their MRS Degrees highlighted the desperation of young evangelical women in college to find a husband before they graduate. She pointed out how women will go to great lengths to find romantic "salvation." She wonders how this obsession impacts women and their callings.

As a white evangelical male, I write this with great fear and trepidation.  I don’t know what it's like to walk in the shoes of an unmarried woman in the evangelical sub-culture. But I’ve made it a point to listen to the stories of women. I also know something of the crisis in the evangelical church and unmarried women.

The Romantic Myth and Singleness

"People do truly wish to find good people to marry, even though they are not always provided the resources with which to do so.  The church is highly to blame for this situation, since many of the assumptions at the local parish level are that people will  be married, because that is the default state of the good Christian.  Many people pine after the ideal marriage and the overromantic assumption of lifelong togetherness, especially in the face of Focus on the Family and some other groups I mentioned in the first chapter.  Life does not often involve ideals, however.  What is needed, in part, is for Christians to be able to tell each other that romantic desire is not the be-all for Christian life and that there are ways of living as a single person that need not end in what is many people's worst nightmare: to be alone, completely alone, for an entire lifetime, with no one to share the household duties."

Water Is Thicker Than Blood