Expanding Christian Covenant

There are two possible narratives Christians can embrace related to the contemporary demand of gays and lesbians for social and legal recognition of their committed relationships: a narrative of moral decline, or a narrative of moral commitment. Most traditionalist Christians believe a narrative of moral decline; I believe a narrative of moral commitment. Or at least, I want to believe it. Perhaps the readers of this post can make decisions that can help more straight Christians like me believe it.

Christians once taught and sometimes still do teach that marriage is for two people, who make an exclusive covenant commitment to each other, undertaken before God, church, and world, in which they make promises to treat each other with Christian love for life, to be sexually and emotionally available and faithful only to each other, and to raise children together in the Christian faith if God should bless them with offspring. Marriage, then, was understood to be permanent, monogamous, procreative, faithful, and loving, a covenant commitment to God and each other. It was, of course, also understood to be heterosexual.

In the last fifty years, though one can trace the trends back much further, just about every aspect of this traditional Christian understanding of marriage has eroded.

Marriage is not permanent, often not monogamous, if procreative that often does not stop couples from divorcing, and marriages are often not loving or covenantal. Today fewer and fewer people bother with marriage, and the idea that sex belongs only in marriage is treated as anachronistic or even laughable.

So now gays and lesbians want to marry. If Christians interpret this desire as yet one more erosion in the traditional Christian understanding of marriage, then there is further grounds for despair—a despair that often turns to anger, an anger many gays and lesbians have all too often experienced coming down on their heads.

But what if gays and lesbians are asking in to an older, pre-1960s decadence understanding of marriage? What if you all are asking for an opportunity to make an exclusive covenant commitment to a partner, undertaken before God, church, and world, in which you make promises to treat each other with Christian love for life, to be sexually and emotionally available and faithful only to each other, and to raise children together in the Christian faith if God should bless you with offspring (or has already blessed you with them)?

What if you want to be married, that is, engaged in permanent, monogamous, procreative, faithful, and loving, covenant commitments to God and each other?

What if you start marrying and your divorce rates turn out to be much lower than has been the case for heterosexuals? What if you abuse each other less, are more faithful, are better to your children, are more steadfast in sticking together through hard times, and faithfully take your kids to church and teach them the faith on days you feel like it and days you don’t?

Can we be honest here? If what you are asking for is simply legal recognition as an aspect of social equality, without any particular interest in contributing to the recovery of marriage as a social institution, why bother? You will gain both the scorn of the irreconcilable part of the Christian community and the misery of those attempting the half-marriages so typical of our age.

We don’t need any more half-married people, any more folks playing at “marriages” that are essentially glorified dating relationships with technically legitimated sex. There is plenty of that going around. And God knows—literally, through the tears and cries that He hears—that we don’t need any more helpless children dragged through the mud of divorce fights and custody battles and every other weekend visits to the other parent.

Marriage in Christian terms is about human beings learning to live in faithful love with each other, with God’s help, and then learning to share that love with new life that love creates and/or nurtures.

That is why Ephesians 5 compares marriage to the relationship between Christ and the Church. Somehow in Christian marriage we learn to love another person through every hardship because we have made a binding lifetime covenant with them—and then we make a family and make a binding lifetime covenant with that family as well. No more abandoned partners, no more abandoned children, no more divorce fights, no more using children as weapons between warring adults—instead, loving lifetime covenants. I personally am convinced that this is the most important need of the hour when it comes to family life in America and in the church.

If gays and lesbians can contribute to a narrative of renewed moral commitment by modeling steadfast, lifetime covenant love in Christ, they can make a lovely contribution to the church and to society in an area where such a contribution is desperately needed.

Photo via flickr user Jeffrey Avellanosa