Can Christian Singles Thrive? How Singles Around the World Confront the Likelihood of Remaining Unmarried By Anna Broadway
This author, Anna Broadway, has a new book about adult singleness being released soon (March 2024), I think it’s called “Solo Planet.”
This essay she wrote I am featuring excerpts of here touches on several topics I’ve raised before, one of which is Bedroom Evangelization, where some Christians mistakenly think God teaches that the way to grow the kingdom of God is via biological reproduction – married couples having sex and making children. The Bible does not teach that.
The Bible repeatedly teaches, in the New Testament, that one’s spiritual siblings (other Christians) are of equal, or more, import than one’s biological family, and that God’s kingdom is grown by Christians sharing the Gospel with non-believers.
But many Christians prefer a worldly, secular solution and approach – they prefer the idea of getting more Christians married off to enlarge the church (which again the Bible does not teach) – but it’s the same situation as to how God warned the Israelites in the Old Testament that having a king, as they kept asking for, was not a good idea.
Just because you marry and have children does not mean that your children will accept your beliefs. They may later reject them as they age.
Excerpts:
by Anna Broadway
August 2021
…Researching singleness was not the academic project I’d have wished for myself. By the time of my May 2018 departure, the question of whether Christian singles could still thrive without a partner had become an urgently personal one. I was weeks from my fortieth birthday and starting to face the likelihood of dying barren and unmarried.
For most of my life, well-intended Christians had assured me that the fact I wanted marriage must mean God intended to give it to me. Yet the more I’ve learned about racial injustice, the less this view holds up. If so many long for a justice they don’t receive in their lifetimes, how dare I assume my longing for marriage is any likelier to resolve as I want?
The global church has at least eighty-five million more women than men among adults thirty or older; the US church has twenty-five million more women. Even if some of those women have or find spouses outside the faith, that leaves millions who can’t ever marry – a reality the church has yet to face. Instead, most Christians I met around the world treated heterosexual marriage as the primary narrative axis in life. Marrieds and singles alike seemed largely unaware of or unwilling to reckon with this significant demographic disconnect.
And the gap may be worse than it seems. For one thing, not all Christian men can or will marry. Those who do marry may not seek Christian wives. In her 2019 book Relatable, Vicky Walker reports that almost two-thirds of women in her survey, but only half the men, deemed a Christian spouse “non-negotiable.” The numbers get far worse as age and the sex gap increase. Factor in the more pronounced unevenness caused by genocide, war, mass incarceration, and other factors, and women’s prospects for marriage get worse yet.
Yet most Christians continue to act – and churches to teach – as if nearly all will marry, with the corollary implication that it’s singles’ fault when we don’t. With that comes a tendency to view singleness as a second-class status – as missing out and falling short.
Christian Pundit 