Our nation recently passed two significant milestones. This last week, our population passed the 300 million mark. And also, just recently, the make-up of that population has been significantly changing. Five years ago, 52 percent of all households in America were married households. That number has now dropped below 50 percent. This means that those of you who are married here are now officially in the minority.
The war on marriage has many fronts. We are familiar with some of them—the press for homosexual “marriage,” the capitulation to easy divorce, and so on. But there are forces at work in our nation—undermining the institution of marriage—that go far beyond this. Part of this is the vanishing cultural expectation for men to find a woman and marry her.
Among the things that we want to do in this congregation to counterattack these pressures are: to create a culture in which marriage is honored and esteemed highly, to develop a mindset in which the married state is rightly seen as the norm for men and women, and to announce at least two engagements every week. All this is good and right, but it also creates significant problems for the unmarried among us.
When dealing with cultural sins and failings at the level of demographics, we cannot pretend to know every individual’s story. To take the most obvious example, in our nation there are 96 men to every 100 women. Given a scriptural rejection of polygamy, there will be individuals among us who remain unmarried despite all the esteem we can muster for the married state. Honoring marriage does not require us to be rude, thoughtless or patronizing toward those who are single. At the same time, we must not cater to the egalitarian notion that “it’s all good,” and that college and career groups are a decent alternative to what God designed for us in the Garden.
The key is conviction and manners together.