SHOW NOTES:
Did you know that the concept of marrying for love is only 200-300 years old? In this episode, we trace the love-based marriage back to its roots in the Enlightenment. Here, we’ll discover the emergence of complementarity as a way for society to promote social order and marriage cohesion in this brave new world, which rocked the five millennia -long foundation of the patriarchal structuring of marriage, family, and society. We’ll also explore the idea that while secular culture abandoned complementarity within gender hierarchy after the 1950s, certain parts of the evangelical church locked it in instead of envisioning a better way forward for Christian couples and families in the 20th-21st centuries.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast, a podcast for couples who want to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live mutually empowered, purposeful lives. You are listening to season 2, where we are beginning a conversation around marriage, mutuality, and gender roles.
Last week, we took a look at marriage in the 1950s, because to me, it sort of marks the decade where culture went one way and Christians went another when it comes to marriage, family, and sexuality. Many Evangelical Christians said, “the 1950s align more closely with our moral values and our holiness traditions so we’ll hold onto that good, thank you very much,” while secular culture said, “in a world where women and racial minorities have more rights than ever and are still working toward a more equitable world, the 1950s are regressive and oppressive, so we’ll keep working in the decades ahead to address the bad, thank you very much.” …I have to wonder, what kind of world could we create if we could tolerate the tension and work to hold onto the good and address the bad at the same time?
But to be honest with you, I don’t think either side has figured out the healthiest way to marriage, family, and sex in a postmodern society. It seems like secular culture is working toward new ideals, however healthy or misguided, while conservative Christianity is working to reverse the present by trying to hold onto the past.
But here’s the piece I think that both camps are missing, and why we haven’t quite figured out how to do marriage, family, and sexuality in a way that’s productive to society as it is today, and it’s this: We forget how new the construct of the love-based marriage is—the love-based marriage meaning, this romanticized way of viewing marriage like we do today and the complementary structuring of gender roles. And this model of marriage, is honestly, still in its infancy, or at least, its toddler years, and so I think it will take us more time to develop an understanding of marriage, in general, and of Christian marriage, in particular, that resonates with 21st century couples.
So on this episode, we’re looking back even further than the 1950s to see that the nuclear family, along with its breadwinning husband and homemaking wife actually marked the end of the Western social experiment in which couples across the board, secular and Christian alike, tried to maintain traditional, hierarchical, split-sphered gender roles once love became the basis for marriage.
As we discussed in episode 98, entitled: Your Spouse is Not Responsible for Your Happiness, marrying for love is a concept as new as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a period in history, about 200-300 years ago, where philosophers, culture-makers, and eventually, the everyday couple looked to reason, progress, and individualism as their guiding principles. And when progress and individualism became values over and above stability and the common good, people’s ideas about marriage began to transition, too. Prior to the Enlightenment, marriage was collectively thought of as a social responsibility. But during and then especially, after the Enlightenment, people began to see marriage as an individual right. Thus, one’s marriage partner became a personal choice, rather than an arrangement and commitment made for the greater social good.
And this new love-based marriage was really disorienting and destabilizing to the way society had previously been structured. If you can wrap your mind around this, never before in history had people married for love. They’d only married for social order, social standing, political gain, and economic stability—so if love occurred in a marriage, it was a happy accident, a byproduct of a good match all-around, or the result of genuinely committed Christians who adhered to Paul’s radical teachings at the time to mutually love and submit to one another. But romantic love had nothing to do with the purpose of the marriage itself during that time. That time being, the thousands and thousands of years before the Enlightenment, the Victorian Era, and the Industrial Revolution. In fact, when you look at marriage throughout history, many people found romantic love outside of their marriages, instead of within it, just to show you how new the blending of romantic love within a committed, faithful marriage is. So the idea of choosing a marriage partner yourself, and choosing that partner based on love and emotional fulfillment was still in its infancy during that time, a grand social experiment like the world had never seen before.
And as you can imagine, some lawyers, politicians and others who held up society at the time were freaking out. They were afraid of what these marital changes and individual values would do to society. Because if hierarchical marriage and marriage structures had previously been the bedrock of a stable society, and now, people were marrying for love, an extremely unstable emotion, then understandably, questions emerged like, what will keep a couple’s personal whims from pulling their marriage and subsequently, from pulling society apart, as the thinking went? If people start choosing their marriage partners based on really fickle ideas, like love and personal happiness, then what will keep them choosing each other when romantic love fades and real life hits? How is a society supposed to maintain social order if couples no longer personally value commitment and stability? And if couples marry for love, then what social constraints are there to keep couples, families, and societies together, as before? When individualism runs counter to the permanence of marriage, and equality runs counter to the long-held social order, how can we promote the stabilization of marriage relationships?
So it’s here, in this era, only 200-300 years ago, that we begin to see the idea of complementarity set within gender hierarchy emerge. Complementarity is the idea that men and women are two halves of a whole, without whom each gender would be incomplete.
Prior to the emergence of complementarian teaching within gender hierarchy, men and women lived in a world where gender roles were a given. Everyone lived in a male-centric society, and women were long thought of as the lesser, inferior sex. Thus, there was no need to promote gender-based complementarity; there was only the need to uphold it by law to keep individual households and the social order intact.
For example, for thousands of years, under the law, wives were to defer to husbands as lord and master. Husbands had final decision-making power, and rights to women, property, sex, and the like. And even though we’ve come a long way, we still see the lasting effects of this male-centric society in the law, in the church, and in cultural attitudes. For example, until 1979, the state of Louisiana still upheld head and master laws, which said that husbands had the final say on all household and property decisions, and could do whatever he wanted with their joint property, without his wife’s knowledge or consent. And as late as 1993, marital rape was still legal and unpunishable by law in Oklahoma and North Carolina, whereas other states took to repealing the allowance of marital rape from the 1970s on.
So before the Enlightenment, when laws like this were the norm, and not the exception, complementarity was not needed to pacify men and women because a patriarchal society was assumed, rather than challenged.
But starting around the 18th century, several philosophical ideals began to converge to challenge this male headship structure, like the value of personal choice, individualism, love-based marriage and with that, the desire to marry for love and intimacy, not just commitment and stability.
The fear then for traditionalists was that equality paired with individualism would lead men and women to make choices based on their own personal, private good, rather than the good of society as a whole, and that these things might even lead men and women to believe that they didn’t need each other, that they might find they were fine on their own instead of fulfillment in marriage and family, which couples in the Enlightenment now sought. Articulating some of this fear in 1767, Dutch journalist and preacher Cornelius van Engelen wrote: “Were a woman to have the same authority as a man, or a man the same kind-heartedness as a woman, the former possessing a man’s courage and resolve, the latter women’s tenderness and charm, then they would be independent of one another,” (Coontz, 2005).
So complementarity seemed to address at least growing concerns about individualism. And the gender hierarchy already embedded into culture allowed for complementarity to do its work concerning gender equality in marriage.
As Stephanie Coontz writes in her book, Marriage: A History:
“At the beginning of the 19th century, the doctrine that men and women had innately different natures and occupied separate spheres of life seemed to answer these questions without unleashing the radical demands [of love, individualism, and equality] that had rocked society in the 1790s.
The doctrine of separate spheres held back the inherently individualistic nature of the “pursuit of happiness” by making men and women dependent upon each other and insisting that each gender was incomplete without marriage. It justified women’s confinement to the home without having to rely on patriarchal assertions about men’s right to rule. Women would not aspire to public roles beyond the home because they could exercise their moral sway over their husbands and through them over society at large. Men were protecting women, not dominating them, by reserving political and economic roles for themselves.” (p. 176)
Okay, so this will be another episode for another time, but the idea of holding sway over one’s spouse is manipulation, not intimacy, and it’s also no different than the political marriages and power couples of the past. And then this idea that each gender is incomplete without the other reminds me of a few things: 1) Every 20th century Hollywood romance movie ever made. 2) Every Victorian era book ever written and then turned into a Hollywood movie. 3) This quote from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (1991):
“The woman is the man’s helper. The man was not created to help the woman, but the reverse. Doesn’t this striking fact suggest that manhood and womanhood are distinct and non-reversible? Doesn’t this make sense if we allow that, while the man and the woman are to love each other as equals, they are not to love each other in the same way? The man is to love his wife by accepting the primary responsibility for making their partnership a platform displaying God’s glory, and the woman is to love her husband by supporting him in that godly undertaking.
So, was Eve Adam’s equal? Yes and no. She was his spiritual equal and, unlike the animals, “suitable for him.” But she was not his equal in that she was his “helper.” (Piper, Grudem, et. al, ch. 3, p. 91).
And in upcoming episodes, we’re going to explore complementarian and egalitarian theology, and in a way where we get a sense of both perspectives, but at this point, I do want to distinguish between two things. There’s gender-based complementarity…and then there’s gender-based hierarchy. And like we said before, gender-based complementarity is not a problem. We are created male and female; we know this, we understand it. But want I want you to understand is that both gender-based complementarity and hierarchy are subtly baked into the cultural teachings of the 1800-1900s, and in many of the later Christian teachings in the late 1900s and early 2000s. And I want you to remember that complementarity within gender hierarchy is an idea that emerged in the Enlightenment as a way to address individualism and growing equality in a changing culture. It’s what led to husbands and wives occupying separate spheres in an Industrial society. And it’s what led to the model of the 1950s marriage and family—that as long as men stick to breadwinning and taking care of their wives and children, and as long as women stick to homemaking and taking care of their husbands and children, then together, but separately, and in love, we’ll each be doing our part to work for the collective good of marriage, family, and society.
Yes, this was able to be achieved because of a decade of growth, wealth, and stability after the war, like we talked about last episode, but it was also the climax of an effort to help couples and families thrive in this brave new world of the love-based marriage, which was only about 150 years old at the time.
And on the surface, this seems sweet and true, because parts of it are. It seems like an honorable sentiment for those who’ve only ever seen themselves in that picture. And it sounded good to me on the surface up until I started diving deeply into this subject to entangle what’s true from what’s not in order to effectively and ethically help couples today who marry for love and who also desire to follow Christ.
And listen, I get the fears of the time, I do. I, by nature, am someone who is slow to change and slow to action, so I can even appreciate the train of thought that goes, “we’re just trying to apply responsible solutions and stave off progress too quickly in this life-altering, trajectory-changing reality we find ourselves in.” It’s just that I’ve lived on the other side of history long enough to realize that promoting marital hierarchy isn’t the only, or best way for that matter, to promote love and intimacy in marriage in our modern Western world where men and women’s rights are more equitable than ever before.
As a systemically trained marriage and family therapist who’s worked with so many couples, I’ve watched this soul-mate, gender-based, hierarchical model for marriage breed enmeshment, dependence, resentment, manipulation, spiritual abuse, and the stalling of adult development, rather than life and health and wholeness.
But complementarity, in and of itself, is not an unbiblical idea. It’s when it’s paired with God-ordained hierarchy and extrabiblical gender roles that complementarity gets twisted into something that doesn’t work for so many people.
And so it seems to me that our society’s second attempt at making hierarchical marriage work in the modern world, reached the peak of its relevance in the ‘50s and has been exposing its underbelly ever since.
It also seems to me that just because complementarity was the first solution applied to the love-based marriage and then taken on by the church, doesn’t mean it has to be the last—at least, in its culturally remnant form!
The conversation I’m trying to start for anyone willing to have it, is not about whether or not husbands should structure their marriages to have more traditional or equalitarian roles within their own home. And this isn’t about whether or not wives should stay at home or enter the workforce, because the privilege of living in a wealthy society with equal rights is that we can choose to do either, or both. This is a conversation about learning from history and taking a look at the recent past to see if we can’t discover a better, healthier, more life-giving way forward for couples, for families, for society, and for the church at large, the true family of God.
Because as far as I can tell, when we look at and study the whole Bible as the inspired word of God as told through a primarily Jewish worldview in a middle Eastern context, what we see is God’s love for all of humanity, His rescue and restoration of the poor and the oppressed, and His desire for us as men and women, as husbands and wives, as children and adults, to all be one in Christ. And when we look at Jesus’ ministry and teachings on His coming kingdom, it seems to look far less like what we’re comfortable and familiar with, and far more like Jesus did—imagine that—when He came as King in the form of a baby, or when He revealed Himself first as the Son of God, not to the masses or spiritual elite, but to a marginalized woman at the well. When He served His disciples by washing their feet, or when He sacrificed himself all the way to the cross to demonstrate His Lordship over all the earth, His Headship over the church, and His Saving Power in our lives.
I’m hoping that us starting this conversation on marriage, mutuality, and gender roles, within an understanding of history—both recent history over the past 200-300 hundred years, as well as ancient history, in the context in which the Bible was written—that we’ll be able to get to Truth about marriage and mutuality and gender roles. That we’ll be able to take a look at the marriage education that emerged in the late 20th century and evaluate it based on Truth, and our understanding of its context, which we’ll do in upcoming episodes.
But before we get there, and before we get to an understanding of complementarian and egalitarian theology, I’ve had the privilege of sitting down with my first ever marriage and family professors, who have their own experience to share with us, their own understanding of how marriage education developed over their lifetime, and as professionals, and who just have a wealth of knowledge to share with us so I’m really excited for you to get to hear my conversation with them next time.
In the meantime, thank you for listening. I’m your host, Kensi Duszynski. Podcast editing is by Evan Duszynski. Music is by John Tibbs. We hope you have a great week, share this with someone, and we’ll talk to you again soon.
Citations from this Episode:
Coontz, S. (2005). Marriage, A History.
Piper, J., Grudem, W., et. al. (1991). Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.
