State of marriage in the modern world

[sinjin smithe]

It seems to me that today marriage is taken less seriously by many people. Here in the US, we have a high divorce rate and many people including those who call themselves Christians live together out of wedlock. And lately, there are campaigns to legalize gay marriage. This question may seem very broad by why has the idea of marriage, a holy sacrament, gone by the wayside in our times? Marriage is a commitment made between a man and a woman before God to love each other as Christ loves church. It seems nowadays that this idea is totally foreign to many.

[sinjin smithe]

LOVING AND LIKING


Try to understand exactly what loving your neighbour as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself? Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently 'Love your neighbour' does not mean 'feel fond of him' or 'find him attractive'. I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do ... but that is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. Go a step further. In my most clearsighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity, Bk. III, ch. 7

I think in our society today and in the church, people get this idea of loving your neighbor as yourself confused, especially when someone does something bad.

[Justin]

I think part of the problem is that there is much less of a cultural stigma today regarding divorce, "shacking up," etc. than there once was. This has to do with more than just an in-the-present context, for such cultural pressures can seriously effect the moral views of a person during their formative years. If something is stigmatized culture-wide, people are not only hindered from sinning in the present, but often are not even as tempted (and certainly are not tempted to the same extent) than if there had been no stigma. (I don't mean to be romanticizing the past, btw; there was lots of bad back then too)

Another problem is the humanisitic focus of modern society. Man is the center, man is the focal point by which all things are judged. If something seems "good" for the person, it seems like a correct path to take. If a marriage just doesn't seem to be working out, if there's fighting and bickering, then they decide to chuck the marriage. "After all," they reason, "we don't want our children growing up in a house where we are constantly fighting... and it's bad for us as well." Once the cultural stigma was gone, humanism was able to come to it's natural practical conclusions. Marriages will continue to fall apart so long as we continue this culture-wide humanistic individualistic mindset (ie. the idea that each of us alone are the criteria for what is to be done in our lives; this being totally at odds with Orthodox theology which says that what each of us do effects every one else; perhaps Dostoevsky should be required reading should reforms take place)

One other idea that became possible once humanism broke free was the idea of relativistic morality. (Of course, history tends to "repeat itself," this wasn't the first relativistic culture). So now, not only were people deciding what was best for them based solely on their own wants and desires, but now they felt justified in choosing whatever course they chose as "whatever they chose was right for them, even if it isn't right for someone else".