Single women are having a hard time these days. Their increasing numbers are blamed for the rise of “woke” politics, millennial selfishness and even incel culture. In some Christian circles, single women are reminded (in case they have forgotten) to marry and have children, even with a gender imbalance among single Christians, and even if they are discouraged from dating people outside the faith.
This is a digital problem that is causing anxiety everywhere.
Meanwhile, the single Christian women I know are trying to make the best of a complex reality. They seek to serve God in their daily work, invest in their friendships and the Church, and pursue creative and educational opportunities that present themselves. Many of them are also trying to meet Christian men, getting into dating apps, and praying.
Their lives are both rich and imperfect. They experience cycles of hope and frustration. For most single people I know, their status is not due to lack of effort or lack of honor in marriage itself. Like the sociologist Lyman Stone Remarks In a recent CT article, when you ask today’s single Christians, most of them say they want to get married. Even Shakshuka’s daughter said as much.
One need not be a Calvinist to affirm that God is present to every person struggling with unfulfilled desires and silent sorrows, and that God carries out His plans in times of social stability as well as upheaval, decline and unprecedented changes. Even more, those who worry about the future of Christianity – or perhaps Western civilization and its declining birth rate – are called to remember the primary way in which the Church will be preserved in through the centuries.
Bottom line: it’s baptism, not just babies. After all, Jesus taught that it is not enough to be born. We are all called to be born Again.
The story continues to be instructive. At first, the Church grew in numbers because people verbally attested to the resurrected Christ and others believed and trusted in Him. It grew thanks to the proclamation of the Gospel ignited by the flames of Pentecost (Acts 1:8), not by a baby boom among the first disciples of Jesus.
Women in the early Church were raised for their testimony, not their wombs. Compared to Roman and Jewish cultures, Christianity called for single women, young and old, to play a crucial role. They house churches run, financed mission trips, and studied Greek and Hebrew. Their presence was not a problem to be solved but a treasure to be exploited for evangelical expansion.
Single women continued to play a key role, even after Protestant reformers rightly placed marriage and family on an equal footing with monastic celibacy.
If the medieval Church, with its virgin martyrs and mystical visions, is too strange for you, then look to the single women who led global missions – including Harriet Baker, Lottie Moon and Amy Carmichael – or those like Nannie Helen Burroughs and Mahalia Jackson, who led the black church and civil rights movement. Florence Nightingale, Sojourner Truth, Corrie ten Boom and Sophie Scholl all sacrificed greatly for the Gospel and arguably changed the world.
These women not only serve as role models for today’s single Christians, despite a history of materialistic, self-centered fulfillment. They also remind all of us, married and single, where we place our hopes.
Paul’s embrace of chosen celibacy should not be dismissed as the strange fixation of an intense man who thought the end was near. It rather reminds each generation of Christians that we always live at the end of time – and that marriage is a blessed but penultimate state. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas wrote more than 30 years ago:
Celibacy is that practice intrinsic to the Church, which reminds us that as a people, we live by hope and not by biology. Simply put, celibacy reminds the Church that we grow not by biological attribution, but by witness and hospitality to the stranger – who often turns out to be our biological child. As Christians, we believe that every Christian in a generation may be called to celibacy, but that God will create the Church anew. (emphasis mine)
In times of Church decline, Christians may be tempted to forget this truth and resort to natural means of spreading religion. If the talk of celibacy in the Church is any indication, we might ask: Does Evangelism Still Work??
The renewed anger against single women speaks to the anxiety of a secular age, where sociologists and pastors wonder how long the Church will survive, whether rates of church attendance and the formation of Christian families are indicators reasonable for the future.
In these anxious times, single Christian women will feel compelled to take one for the team by getting married and having children to carry on the faith. After all, babies seem like a better bet than evangelism (although parents will tell you that raising children in the faith is not a safe bet, since children are, rather embarrassingly, people endowed with will).
But the implicit message is that today’s single women should downplay or ignore modern concerns that won’t go away. These concerns include compatibility, commensurate levels of education and spiritual maturity, and the desire for physical and emotional security in marriage.
Women are pressured to associate with unsuitable and/or unchristian men, which only increases the risk of divorce. (Anecdotally, I hear many stories of Christians who, because of their purity culture and the Church’s fixation on family, married young and were unprepared for the storms to come. )
Worse still, these pressures reduce the value of women in relation to their bodies and their bodies to religious utility. Needless to say, this approach seems like a poor way to keep single women engaged in the Church.
Church leaders are right to continue to honor marriage and the family. Both are blessed by God. Both are paths of life that foster sanctification and care for the most vulnerable among us. But that doesn’t mean we should view marriage and family as strict means of producing Christian babies.
We are bold enough to believe that people gain faith by hearing and believing the good news. We know that Christianity develops through supernatural means. And we are convinced that the gospel we preach is “the power of God which brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jews, then to the Gentiles” (Rom. 1:16).
What is at stake in this conversation goes well beyond the inclusion of single people in local churches, as important as that is. Troubling data on church attendance and family formation gives all Christians, single and married, an opportunity to remember the source of our hope: the Word of God, which renews hearts and minds by the power of the Spirit.
Children represent much more than data points, and single women represent much more than their birth potential. Because of our hope in God’s lordship in all ages of history, including the strange times we find ourselves in, we can view unmarried women not as problems to be solved, but as actors crucial in God’s continuing work in the world, just as the Church has done. From the beginning.
Katelyn Beaty is editorial director of Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, and author of Celebrities for Jesus: How personalities, platforms and profits harm the Church.