---

Rebecca McLaughlin, in her book, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion, made an observation that inspires my article today. I am indebted to Rebecca McLaughlin and to the many serious Christian thinkers who have plowed ground that make it easy for me to walk the paths after them.

In this book, about a third of the way into the ninth chapter (Isn’t Christianity Homophobic?), McLaughlin talks about loneliness and singleness in the church. She digs up some nuggets that seem to have gotten lost in our modern culture.

She observes that western traditions have developed over the years that have plowed under values that once informed the early church. A tradition of rugged individualism and self-determination that is, perhaps, unrivaled anywhere in the world, is inbred into our American culture. Our suburban lifestyle is uniquely American, with our manicured lawns separated from our neighbors by fences and hedges. These are, perhaps, the gentrified remnants of farmstead claims staked by American pioneers against predators, weather, enemies and neighbors alike.

We circle the wagons today around the family unit that has come under “attack” from secular constructs of village-raised children and re-imagined family structures designed to fit societal mores that clash with us. These changes have caused conservatives and Christians to double down on the traditional, American family construct.

Traditional, though, is normative, and norms change. Not more than 150 years ago families looked different than they do today. In fact, they looked a little more like the modern family than the average person might realize.

Not long after the first generations of immigrants reached the shore of the New World, families and communities of families began to migrate across the country, south, west and sometimes north, clearing areas for homesteads. The fluidity of family compositions can be traced from one decennial census to the next. Not may households remained static from one 10-year census to the next.

My father, who researches genealogies, shines some historical light on the norms of the frontier movement in writing books about those migrations. From census to census to census, stories are told of dynamic changes in family structures.

Family units were ever changing in the combination of husbands, wives, children (both minors and adults), extended family and sometimes even strangers. Family often included a grandparent, niece or nephew, neighbor or border.

Children were born; children died; children moved away and moved back. Spouses died. New spouses moved in, or neighbors moved in who helped with the children and then became spouses… or not. Extended family members, neighbors and strangers, too, moved in and out of family units.

Census records reveal the consistency of flux as frontiers were blazed across this country. One of the many challenges of doing genealogical research through the 19th Century is determining the relationships of the people in those households from one decennial census to another and tracing the changes from decade to decade. 

The end of trailblazing and the Industrial Revolution, however, began to affect the composition of family units. Trailblazing gave way to communities, and factories grew up in those communities.

Workers migrated to the fixed location of a factory, and they became grounded and less mobile in their vocations. Family structures became more static and defined in the process. These and other influences formed the mold of the “traditional” American family.

What we assume to be the traditional family unit today is of relatively recent vintage. The Little House on the Prairie is more of a sentimental, re-imagining of the way it was than raw history reveals.

Even then, we get a hint of an interdependence of community that was much more intimate in generations past than our anemic sense of community today. This is true even with more distance separating homesteads than a thin veil of fences and hedges separating suburban lots.

The distance that separates people in modern western life, however, might as well be miles. We live as if we don’t need our neighbors, and we largely don’t even know them. Those fences and hedges might as well be walls.

In that sense, McLaughlin digs up the back-filled soil of modern western culture to uncover an ancient value that has been plowed under by the progress of western development. When St. Paul spoke about the virtue of singleness, he did so in a culture and time when family and community were quite unlike our own – values that we have relatively recently lost.

My inspiration today comes from McLaughlin’s comment about a friend who lamented the unfairness that same-sex-attracted Christians should be “sentenced to loneliness”. McLaughlin was reading through the Book of Acts at the time. She realized that the first Christians faced every kind of suffering imaginable, even being stoned to death or crucified, but loneliness was not a struggle they faced.

McLaughlin says,

“If we reduce Christian community to sexual relationships and the nuclear family, we are failing to deliver on biblical ethics. This point is underlined by the Bible’s view of singleness. Jesus, himself, never married. While he commends marriage, he values singleness more. (1 Cor. 7:38) Single people are vital to the church family, which is the primary family unit in Christian terms, and should experience deep love and fellowship with other believers.

“Where church culture inhibits this by overemphasizing marriage and parenting, Christians need to fight for culture change and embody the biblical reality that the local church is truly their family. Enabling same-sex-attracted singles to thrive in church means becoming more biblical, not less.”

(McLaughlin, herself, is a same-sex attracted person who has chosen not to act on that natural inclination. She describes herself as happily married to a man with children now.)

We rue and resist changes to the notion of the “traditional family” in modern times, but we have lost the sense that the original church family was far more communal and far more communally-focused than the modern church family. Our modern church, with its emphasis on what we call the traditional nuclear family, can produce loneliness for singles, regardless of orientation.

Whereas the Apostles urged the early church communities to be mindful and inclusive of widows and orphans, singles have become, in some sense, the widows and orphans of the modern church community. They often feel separated from the most intimate of church life by an emphasis on the “nuclear family”.

To be honest, the value of singleness has long been a luxury in harsher times gone by when the three-cord strand of spouses and children were important elements of New World survival as progress made its long trek westward and staked its ground in less inhabited places. As time wore on, that life became easy but the ground became hard and rutty in ways inimical to Paul’s ideal of the single person more wholly devoted to God than his (or her) married counterparts.

Paul said, “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman” (1 Cor. 7:1). He conceded that sexual relations in marriage may be necessary to protect against a lack of self-control (1 Cor. 7:2-6), but Paul considered his singleness a “gift”. (1 Cor. 7:7) Thus, he encouraged the unmarried to remain unmarried, unless they can’t control themselves. (1 Cor. 7:8-9) Paul concludes that the person who marries “does right”, but the one who doesn’t marry “does better”. (1 Cor. 7:38)

Can we say that with any enthusiasm today?

---

McLaughlin notes that people are free to develop greater intimacy in relationships with purer and greater outcomes when not constrained by passions that cannot be controlled. Unmarried men and women are “concerned about the Lord’s affairs” without divided loyalties and the “many troubles in this life” and complications that come with marriage. (1 Cor. 7:28, 32)

“For this world in its present form is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31), Paul reminds us. People who choose to remain single to give greater attention to God and the things not of this world are essential influences needed in the church today. They have a unique contribution to give to a robustly intimate church community that is devoted to God and His kingdom.

We seem to have lost sight of that value in our modern traditions that exult marriage as the greatest prize. We do singles a disservice. We do the church community a disservice.

I believe we need to try to regain the personal intimacy that under-girds a healthy church community in the modern emphasis on the nuclear family to the exclusion of the gift of singleness. Perhaps, a person wouldn’t consider singleness a “sentence of loneliness” in the church today if we valued the gift of singleness and those who embrace it like the early church did.