One of the perennial challenges of older generations is providing guidance to younger generations without becoming bitter old scolds. One of the perennial challenges of younger generations is retaining their agency while being open to the wisdom of their elders.
And perhaps no conversations are more sensitive in these intragenerational dialogues than those concerning marriage and childbearing. Whether elders are warning against the losses of ease and freedom that come with settling down or asking when they can expect grandchildren, the pressure to get it right can be intense.
For Christians, added pressures come from Scripture and tradition. The Bible clearly teaches that “he who finds a wife finds a good thing” (Prov. 18:22, ESV throughout) and that “children are a heritage from the Lord” (Ps. 127:3). And in many evangelical churches, young people feel a certain expectation to marry young and have children promptly. But at the same time, the world—and often fellow Christians too—pressures young people to be autonomous individuals. Maximize your liberties, they’re told. Trim your responsibilities and pursue pleasures and success.
Facing these competing demands, it’s no wonder that many young people feel anxious, confused, and conflicted about their futures, particularly where family is concerned.
Older generations shouldn’t stop offering guidance in the form of deliberate discipleship and mentorship. But at least as vital is offering a vision for the good life in the contemporary world. Young people need to see healthy families. They need a tangible, accessible model to copy in their own lives. They need to learn firsthand that faithfulness and commitment are a joy, not a loss.
This need is urgent, because there’s reason to think younger generations are abandoning the basic institution of society: the family. Birth and marriage rates in America are both in decline, and a recent Pew study showed that American teenagers value career, friendship, and wealth over marriage and children. In fact, they deemed having a lot of money nearly twice as important as having kids.
It’s possible these teenagers’ goals were deformed by the economic and social anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s also possible that they’ve simply been inspired by an expressive individualist culture that prizes personal pleasure over anything else. But whatever their motivations, this intense focus on material success over family should be troubling to the church.
Scripture’s many warnings about the dangers of wealth make chasing it a deeply fraught goal for our lives. And while it’s possible to turn marriage and children into an idol as well, love for spouse and children is not described, like love of money, as “a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim. 6:10).
Cultivating close friendships and finding an enjoyable career are better pursuits. But for so many young people to rank these above marriage and children also suggests a certain preoccupation with self-actualization. Friends (in our culture) do not make the same lifelong demands that a spouse or child makes, and making career the top priority turns it into a vehicle for personal fulfillment rather than a calling in service to God and others, including family.
Put together, the message reflected in this attention to money, friends, and career over family is the message of our modern world: It’s your job to find meaning, purpose, justification, and pleasure in this life. No one else can do it for you, so do whatever it takes!
If, like me, you find this philosophy deeply unsettling and unchristian, you may be tempted to respond by pointing out its incompatibility with Scripture or even its internal inconsistency. You might want to highlight how this view of life offers hope of existential justification and satisfaction only to forever keep it just out of reach.
Those arguments are correct and might persuade some. But I don’t think they’re what most Christian young people primarily need.
I suspect they already understand at an intellectual level that belonging to God precludes certain lifestyles, such as prioritizing money. What they struggle to grasp is what it looks like to live a temperate life in a consumerist culture or a humble life in a careerist culture or a committed life in an inconstant culture. It is our responsibility as older Christians to build that vision with our lives.
You may not recognize this, but you have tremendous influence upon those around you just by virtue of existing in this world. People are watching you to see how you react to adversity, how you resist temptation, how you repent and apologize, how you humble yourself, and how you love others—in short, how you “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:37, 39).
And people are almost always confined to what they can imagine is possible. If a generation’s imagination is populated by examples of terrible marriages, they will struggle to believe that marriage can be a gift from God. If they’re never invited into a family’s home—perhaps your home—to see what a healthy, normal family looks like, they may doubt such families exist. It is within community with other believers that we are exposed to the possibility of the joys of marriage and children.
These joys do not exclude the hardships, of course. I’m not advocating a program of propaganda wherein we trick young people into thinking that marriage and parenthood are simple, painless fun. Our modeling must be realistic about the struggles of communicating in marriage; the difficulties of parenting in hyper-individualist, isolating communities; and the daily, mundane sacrifices that this life requires. Asking a young person into your home to see what life is like with your family does not mean hiding all the messes your children make or, even worse, hiding your children. It means opening the door to show what family life is really like so that it becomes an imaginable good.
Modeling the close friendships that young people want must be part of this as well. Young people are right to want these relationships but often have been wrongly told that marriage and children will make friendships impossible to maintain. A widely read 2023 story at New York magazine, for instance, dubbed children “adorable little detonators” of adult friendships.
That does happen—but it’s not inevitable. What young people need to see are examples of people with families who have good, healthy, close friendships. As parents, we do not have to become insular and neglect our friends. If everything is sacrificed for our children, it communicates to onlookers and to children themselves that choosing family means giving up on friends.
This is a false dichotomy. Yes, it can be hard to cultivate friendship in our time. Everyone is busy and distracted, and our work creeps into ever more of our lives. But young people are right to desire to keep close friendships, because friendship is one of the sweetest gifts God has given us. Those of us who are further along in adulthood can demonstrate—for ourselves and for those watching us—that the intentionality required to create and sustain those friendships while married with children is achievable.
With all this in mind, I think we need to do two things. First, we must look at our marriages and families and recognize that our actions in those relationships affect more than our immediate loved ones. They affect our entire communities. This is a good thing, but it is an awesome responsibility. Take it seriously.
Second, we need to invite people in our communities into our lives to see the good of marriage and family. This must be a deliberate choice as isolation becomes the norm, and it makes a pointed counternarrative to the world.
It may be tempting to look at the priorities of the young and hector them for failing to recognize the value of marriage and family that God has so honored in creation and Scripture. This would be a mistake. What young people need is not a lecture but an example. They need to see godly, healthy families living out our faith in community, over time, and with authenticity, not hiding our struggles but honestly striving to honor God in all that we do.
They need to see families where the parents are faithful to each other, respect each other, serve each other, and enjoy each other. Families where the children are nurtured, loved, and educated into the fear and admonition of the Lord. And, even as the world promotes the empty freedom of radical individualism, families animated by the joys of friendship, community, and committed service to each other.
O. Alan Noble is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University and author of three books: On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, and Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age.
发表回复