Southern Baptist Leaders Highlight Benefits Of Youthful Matrimony – Southern Baptists downplay adult singleness, uphold trope that virginity past 25 is impossible etc

Southern Baptist Leaders Highlight Benefits Of Youthful Matrimony – Southern Baptists downplay adult singleness, uphold trope that virginity past 25 is impossible etc

So, if you are single and a virgin at 35 or 40, where is your support from Southern Baptists? They only care to scream and yell at the 20 somethings of today to get married.

Notice also that one guy in here spits out several of the stereotypes I’ve mentioned on my blog before – he feels that being a virgin past a certain age is impossible or too difficult, and that God has only “wired” men to want sex.

I’m a woman. I experience sexual desire. I’m a virgin in my early 40s. So, quite obviously, it’s not impossible to stay a virgin past 25 or 30, and, God has also wired women to want sex.

By the way, this is a battle they are not going to win. They can beg, cajole, plead, and shame all they like, but at this point in American culture, Americans are simply not going to marry young.

All the shaming, scolding, and cajoling to get Christians from the 1980s to “wait for true love” did not entirely work, because there are many individuals who identify as Christian who have committed fornication.

Not all, mind you – there are some Christian adults who never married and are still virgins. But if the “True Love Waits” type or propaganda did not work for many Christians, where Christians were encouraged to wait until marriage to have sex, what makes these Baptists thinks that similar tactics will work to get people to marry by a certain age?

(Link) Southern Baptist Leaders Highlight Benefits Of Youthful Matrimony

• March 10, 2015
• by Blake Farmer
• Leaders of the country’s largest Protestant denomination have a message for millennials: get married already.The Nashville-based (Link): Southern Baptist Convention and its nearly 16 million members continue to resist societal trends like gay marriage and cohabitation. They also want to go against the grain on the rising marital age.

  But back in 1972, Pam Blume was pretty typical. She was just a few years out of high school when she walked down the aisle.

• … Andrew Walker is out front on this issue, working for the denomination’s public policy division. Married at 21, Walker sees a sinful side to waiting. For one, it makes the church’s expectation of virginity, in his words, “impractical.”
• “The reality is, starting at the age of 12, 13, boys and men, growing up into maturity, are hardwired for something that God gave us a desire for and an outlet for,” Walker says. “And so to suppress that becomes more difficult the older you get.”
•  Walker says he isn’t suggesting a cut-off age to get married. But he writes articles and leads panel discussions on the benefits of youthful matrimony.His work is a minefield of potential awkwardness. During one conference, he introduced his colleague, Lindsay Swartz, but inadvertently made her feel like an old maid.
• “As the single woman, which I’m not going to bring too much attention to…gentlemen?” Walker said.Swartz, who handles social media for the denomination, says she would love to get married and start a family. But the 30-something also sees drawbacks.

• “I don’t necessarily think it’s better to be single, but I do think we run the risk, including myself, of idolizing marriage and children,” she says.

  She points out that key figures in the New Testament never married. Swartz also says it would be a shame if the marriage push resulted in more divorces. While evangelical Christians oppose divorce in many cases, surveys find they break up at roughly the same rate as society.

• “I don’t think you can say people need to get married at a younger age today,” says Cindy Novinska of Wisconsin. “I think it’s much more complicated than that.”She and her husband Kenneth are Catholic. Both of them were married before but divorced.
• “The lady I married was way too young,” Kenneth says.
• One of his daughters also married right out of high school, only to split up. His son, on the other hand, waited until his late 30s.
• “They had jobs,” Kenneth says. “They knew exactly [that] they wanted to have children. You can just see their marriage is very strong.”
• Novinska believes it pays to wait. And even for Baptists, getting married needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis.
• ….The “marry young” mantra gets complicated as it hits closer to home, but generally Baptist leaders say marriage should be considered a foundation for adult life. And right now, it’s often seen as the high point.

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Related Posts:

(Link):  Southern Baptists Pushing Early Marriage, Baby Making – Iranians Pushing Mandatory Motherhood – When Christians Sound Like Muslims

(Link):   Typical Erroneous Teaching About Adult Celibacy Rears Its Head Again: To Paraphrase Speaker at Ethics and Public Policy Center: Lifelong Celibacy is “heroic ethical standard that is not expected of heteros, so it should not be expected of homosexuals”

(Link):  Douglas Wilson and Christian Response FAIL to Sex / Sexual Sin – No Body Can Resist Sex (Part 2)

(Link): Why So Much Fornication Among Christians and Secular Society – Because Christians and Secularists Have No Expectation of Sexual Purity

(Link):  When Women Wanted Sex Much More Than Men – and how the stereotype flipped

(Link): Groundbreaking News: Women Like Sex (part 1, 2) (articles)

(Link): Christian Stereotypes About Female Sexuality : All Unmarried Women Are Supposedly Hyper Sexed Harlots – But All Married Ones are Supposedly Frigid or Totally Uninterested in Sex

(Link): A Case Against Early Marriage by Ashley Moore (editorial)

(Link): Study: Got Married Sooner Than You Hoped? That’s Depressing

(Link): Divorce Rates in America Decreasing But Divorce Rates on Increase Among Southern Baptists

(Link): Family as “The” Backbone of Society? – It’s Not In The Bible

(Link): Misapplication of Biblical Verses About Fertility (also mentions early marriage) – a paper by J. McKeown

(Link): A Response by Colon to Regnerus Re: Misguided Early Marriage Propaganda

(Link): Christian Early Marriage Position Advocates A Low View of Celibacy and Virginity and Adult Singleness – another example: Justin Deeter Blog about Early Marriage

(Link): The Nauseating Push by Evangelicals for Early Marriage

(Link): Typical Incorrect Conservative Christian Assumption: If you want marriage bad enough, Mr. Right will magically appear

(Link): Conservatives and Christians Fretting About U.S. Population Decline – We Must “Out-breed” Opponents Christian Host Says

(Link): Over 10 Million Men of Prime Working Age Are Unemployed in the US and Experts Think It’s Causing Declining Marriage Rates

(Link): A Critique of – 10 Men Christian Women Should Never Marry by J. Lee Grady / And on Christians Marrying Non Christians -and- Unrealistic, Too Rigid Spouse Selection Lists by Christians

(Link): Do You Rate Your Family Too High? (Christians Who Idolize the Family) (article)

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(Link): Atlantic: “The case for abandoning the myth that ‘women aren’t visual.’”