Chapter Two: Singleness in the Church
My upcoming book, The Meaning of Singleness, will be published by InterVarsity Press on May 9, 2023. In the lead up to its release I thought I might share a short weekly excerpt, chapter by chapter.
You can pre-order or see more information about the book (including its full contents page, endorsements & a free sample chapter) here.
Chapter Two: Singleness in the Church
“According to sociologist and religious studies professor James Davison Hunter, by 1987, the significance of the family had “achieved dimensions perhaps never before seen . . . its survival in the modern world has become perhaps the highest priority on the Evangelical social agenda.”1 The ongoing significance of this theological and ethical narrative means that within contemporary evangelicalism, “to be a good Christian is taken to be inseparable from being a good family man or a good wife and mother.”2
Unfortunately, protagonists who promote this agenda have consistently failed to recognize that in idealizing “the Christian family, the traditional family or traditional family values, they are really referring to the prototypical nineteenth-century bourgeois family,”3 and its remarkably brief reinvention in the middle of the twentieth century. That is, the contemporary concept of the Western nuclear family—as a self-sustaining, internally-focused, and relationally-secluded unit of “togetherness”—is patently different to the expressions of family to be discovered in the pages of both the Old and New Testaments. Of course, in observing this discrepancy we are not thereby compelled to conclude that the nuclear family (as it is understood and enacted in the West today) is necessarily wrong or “unbiblical,” nor that gendered distinctions between men and women or husbands and wives are not part of God’s good creation. And yet, even just a cursory familiarity with the historico-social development of the household over the past few centuries ought to lead us to reject any insistence that these particular cultural formulations are the authentic biblical form we are compelled to recapture and reemulate today. Regardless, twenty-first-century evangelical doggedness seems largely determined to ensure that the “traditional nuclear family” is apprehended as the chief goal of the individual Christian life.
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Given this historical analysis, it is unsurprising that the contemporary Christian discourse typically regards the unmarried form of life as intrinsically problematic, dysfunctional, and even disordered—that is, a form of otherness. The next two chapters shall undertake a detailed diagnosis of the extent to which this conclusion might be evidenced as accurate…”
Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.
James Davison Hunter and Helen V. L. Stehlin, “Family: Toward Androgyny,” in Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation, ed. James Davidson Hunter (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1987), 76.
Sondra Wheeler, “Christians and Family,” in The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics, ed. Gilbert Meilaender and William Werpehowski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 344.
Hunter and Stehlin, “Family,” 92.