Dear friends,
One of the great points of conflict between Christians and the world is the topic of marriage. Though it is part of God’s creation of the world, seen in Genesis 1 and 2, the effect of sin makes it strangely foreign to today’s society. There’s nothing new in this, as Christians were called to be different or holy in this area of life in the New Testament itself. However, today’s discussion is about how different Christians are to be in an area of life where even non-Christian commentators are beginning to see the failure of Western civilisation.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: It's Peter and Phillip Jensen once again to share with you. Genesis 2 is a creation ordinance for all people; this is how we are made. But 1 Thessalonians is much more explicitly Christian. 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8:
Peter Jensen:
Finally, then, brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more. For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.
Phillip: Holiness is one of the themes in that passage. ‘Holiness’ means to be separate, to be different, to be consecrated to God, not like the nations.
I thought we should spend some time talking about Australia and the world around us at the moment. You could parallel this by talking about England or America. It's the way the Western world is going as it moves away from God to a different view of marriage, sexual relationships, and the like. As Christians, we need to grasp the importance of being different from the world in this area of life.
Peter: As well as a different, the word 'holiness' has within it the idea of goodness. Because ‘holiness' sounds to our modern ears as though you are to be trapped in a monastery far away to be holy. But ‘holiness' is a very practical word, and it calls you to live a godly life, which is the good life, the life that God has planned for human beings. Ultimately, it is to find our fulfilment in living that life, and it will be different.
Phillip, there was a great book published in the early 21st century called The Death of Christian Britain.1 In the 1950s, we had the baby boomers and the baby boom. The famous baby boomers have passed on through their generations, but what happened in 1963? Is it tied to the death of Christianity in Britain and Australia?
Phillip: The first baby boomers were turning 18. The average kind of Australian family had four children. It was a time of massive expansion amongst educational programs for children. The society seemed to be governed by those children. They have been politically and numerically in control since the 1960s. Such was the return after the war of the soldiers re-establishing society based on family. But the baby boomers didn't like their parents. They revolted against their parents and against the culture that they felt was imposed upon them. They struck out for individualism by all wearing the same clothes and having the same haircuts and developing their own culture, but it was not their parents’ culture. Dads had short back and sides in the war, and so sons had to wear long hair when they became adults. The shift in our culture has been massive.
Peter: In 1963, the release of the contraceptive pill was to control fertility. I've always thought that was a good thing. What do you think?
Phillip: It was a good thing, but the culture was unable to cope with it. For 30 or 40 years before then, the cultural leadership of our society was pushing and promoting immorality in discipline after discipline: Margaret Mead in anthropology, Freud in psychiatry, Havelock Ellis in psychology, the Kinsey reports that came out, and Hollywood movies promoted sexual pleasure. In area after area of life, the leadership, the intellectual leadership, was fermenting immorality.
In the Sydney scene, there was Professor Anderson holding a very important position in the only university in Sydney. He held a dominant position in our society and was atheistically promoting a morality that comes out of atheism, a morality that didn't work anyway. There was the Sydney Push, which was made up of his students. The Sydney Push was a degenerate community around the pubs and the university. But they became the leaders of the next generation of the university for the baby boomers. When I went to university in 1963, the head of education, the head of psychology, and other heads of departments and key lecturers were people who had been in the Sydney Push or were still in the Sydney Push. I remember being in a psychology class and having lecturers reinterpret the nursery rhymes in terms of degenerate double meanings. As an 18-year-old, I was taking notes and thinking, ”It never occurred to me that's what it meant, but that's interesting, isn't it?” It wasn't until 20 years later that I discovered that the lecturer was a great promoter of degeneracy and was part of the Sydney Push, one of the leading people who were degenerating society.
James Franklin, an academic at New South Wales University, produced a book called The Corrupting of Youth2 in which he recounts the details of how this corruption took place at the intellectual levels around Sydney. Paul Johnson produced a book called The Intellectuals,3 in which he gives biographies of famous intellectuals like Rousseau. But he relates the dirt in terms of what their lives were like. Although they were arguing great thoughts, their personal lives were basically degenerate. Their arguments were rationalizing their rejection of Christianity and of God's standards. But when I read their books and was confronted with the arguments, I didn't know that. So, the baby boomers came at a time when the ferment of the intellectuals was reaching its fullness.
This is when censorship was broken down. There was a terrific censorship in that period. I'm never comfortable with censorship, but garbage is garbage, and garbage was put out as normality. The stink of it could not be recognized by people who themselves were arguing for garbage.
Peter: You're not saying, are you, that it was a wonderful period in Australian history where everything was marvellous until then? Were there problems in the 1950s, 40s, 30s?
Phillip: Of course there were, and some dreadful problems, immoralities and decadence. Sydney has a long history of prostitution wars and things like that that took place. But people didn't argue that doing the wrong thing was right. You could still call on people and say, '“What you have done is wrong.” Now they say, “No, what I've done is right. You are wrong.” A fundamental shift took place in our sense of public morality that opened up changes in behaviour. The two are interrelated.
Up until 1975, divorce was difficult to obtain in our community. But in 1975, we had the new Family Law Act, which was really ‘the divorce act’. There was a sudden outpouring of divorces because of this new act. It was framed and pushed through the government by people who were divorced themselves. They knew about divorce; they'd been through it. But this made divorce very easy. Immediately, the unhappy marriages of yesteryear took advantage of it. After five or ten years, it settled down, and since then, there's been a steady and stable level of divorce. But it changed the meaning of marriage. We say the words, “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, for sickness, until death us do part.” But no longer do those words mean that. They now mean not, “I will stay with you and no other.” What it means now is “I will stay with you until I stop staying with you. And I will not stay with another as a married person until 12 months after I've left you.” So we now have a contract which does not mean the words that we say. It's the only contract I know where the lawyers have allowed the words that we say to be almost the opposite of what we mean. But that's what's happened. In making divorce easy, we've undermined the value of marriage.
Peter: Okay - does it matter? There are many good things about the present day. Does this matter?
Phillip: The hypocrisy of the old divorce system, where people went off and engaged private detectives to photograph a spouse in adultery so that they could get married, was terrible.
Peter: There was a lot of hypocrisy caused by the strict laws.
Phillip: The consequence of it now, 50 years later, is a different arrangement for family life. You can look at the examples of marriage through the works of Gertrude Himmelfarb, a historian with a Jewish background from New York. She produced a graph that showed something of divorce and marriage in England. The graph showed the number of children born outside of marriage from, I think it is, 1800 through to 1960 varied between 5% and 8%. After 1960, the percentage rose to 35% in 1990, when the graph finishes. Something happened in the 1960s—it was that children were born out of wedlock. That has gone on, and the parallel can be seen in Australia. We now see that by 1975, 10% of children were born outside of marriage; by 2023, 40% were born outside of marriage.
Now, does it matter? Well, yes and no. A lot of the marriages aren't technically marriages. They are de facto marriages. But people living together in these marriages have a much shorter span of living together than those who are married legally. De facto marriages are considerably more tumultuous and considerably more unstable than legal marriages. But 40% of our children are born into those marriages or to single parents who do not even have a de facto relationship. The outcome for the children is dreadful. We need to be careful here that generalizations are not the same as individual cases. There are some single mothers in particular who are fantastic and have raised wonderful children with great care, love, and wisdom. But in general, the case for children raised outside of their biological family is much worse than for children who are raised by their biological families. And so creating a structure where de facto marriages have the same status as de jure marriages is a disaster for the children, apart from the parents and the grandparents.
Today in Australia, we have 8 million people who are in married relationships and another 2 million who are in de facto relationships, apart from the 7.5 million who are not married at all. That's a big change in the nature of our relationships. We know the damage that it has caused to children. The Australian government produced a report titled To have and to hold: Strategies to strengthen marriage and relationships4 in which it surveyed the stability and instability of de facto relationships around the world and the damage done to children. There's not the slightest shadow of a doubt that it was a bad thing. But our government is committed to utilitarianism, to enlightenment and individualism, and to the freedom of people to run their own lives their own way. So it continues to support marriages that are not legal or formalized and has continued, therefore, to create this problem.
Divorce is also problematic for adults. There has been a great rise in people living alone, not just in the elderly, but people in their forties to sixties, because it's in the forties that people now are going through separation and divorce. Hence, an increase in people living alone. Not everybody who lives alone is a lonely person; again, you have to be wary of generalizations. Loneliness in people living alone has become a major problem in Western society. Easy divorce has fed into it because it has changed the concept and expectations of married life.
Peter: A father and a mother do matter. But I'm glad you also mentioned the impact on parents and grandparents in all this.
Phillip: The clearest indicator of academic success is parental interest in education. People who are raised in families that are not under stress through divorce have a head start in life, educationally. It's a no-brainer that people do not seem to be able to work out.
We live in a time of an ageing population. Whereas the baby boomers were greater in number than were needed for society, they have not reproduced in the same way, and their grandchildren even less. We now have less than 1.5 children for each adult woman, which is both not replacing ourselves and not providing for our future. That is the consequence of moving sex into hedonistic pleasure, as the 1960s did, rather than having it in terms of family life.
Peter: You can see from God's word and its treatment of marriage and family life that this has always been said by God to be the consequence. Abandoning the biblical view of the family and sexual relations will result in considerable ill effects.
When you leave father and mother and cleave to one another, in one sense, you don't leave father and mother. You are now bringing together two families. Any child who is well looked after will not only have a good father and mother but also have excellent uncles and aunts, cousins, and others who make a significant contribution to their lives. So that it is the family together, using that term in a broader sense, which is so significant for raising children.
Phillip: Peter, you mentioned husbands and wives. What do you think of this word 'partner' in use now?
Peter: The first time I heard it, I laughed. It seems to me to turn marriage into a business contract or a tennis partnership. But it's harder to get out of a business contract than it is to get out of marriage these days. There are a number of words that have been deliberately changed in the last two or three decades. Language changes over time; that's part of the joy of language. But this is a deliberate change in order to achieve ethical or so-called ethical results. The greatest honour I've ever received, apart from being a child of God, is being called ‘husband’ and ‘father’.
Phillip: It's a deliberate shift, from ‘sex’ to ‘gender’.
Peter: Yes, that's another one. Why do you think that change was made?
Phillip: The attempt to move everything to unisex was an attempt to make egalitarianism an expression of sameness. But we're not the same. We're beautifully complementary. So, there's no great advantage in this.
One of the problems of collecting statistics is the data. The reason people collect data is often to uphold a particular viewpoint and promote a viewpoint. It is very difficult to get the right statistics for family structures. The consequence of one set of generations isn't felt until two or three generations later.
I noticed there was a list of kinds of marriages that were around and how they functioned. Everything was presented in percentages, except for single sex marriages. It was the only one presented as an absolute number. There were 24,000 people living in single sex marriages in Australia. What's that as a percentage compared to people who are in a heterosexual marriage? 0.2%. Well, if you put it as 0.2%, you'd say it is so marginal as to be almost not worth noting. But of course, as this is a big change that has happened in our society and one that people want to promote further, you have to put it in. It's a misrepresentation and a misuse of statistics. I'm sure there are 24,000 such couples. But that's next to nothing compared to the success of marriage. We looked at weddings last year, and weddings outnumbered divorces two to one. More people are getting married than are getting divorced. Marriage with children is still the norm that people want. They're getting older in their marriage; no longer marrying in their 20s when it is good and safe to have children, now marrying in their 30s when it is much more dangerous and difficult to have children because of the economics of housing and two incomes and career development and a whole range of other problems. But the end result has not been the happiness that the sexual revolution promised. And so there are lots of critiques today on the sexual revolution.
Peter: Louise Perry’s book5 and her YouTube presentations are persuasive in this regard.
Phillip: The Enlightenment has failed and has been questioned by the postmodernists and found to be wanting. Postmodernity is so stupid that they don't want to go there. What is the basis that made the Enlightenment work? Well, it came out of the Bible. It came out of the Protestant Reformation. I understand that Louise Perry is now going to church. I pray that she goes to a good church where she hears the gospel and that God would speak to her through it, but she's doing it for the sake of her children. She can see that she hasn't got the touch of God and Christ in her life, but that those who are religious are the people who make marriage work, and marriage is what's needed.
Peter: Yes, although there are bad Christian marriages and there are abusive Christian marriages.
Speaking broadly, there are two things I remember from Louise Perry’s book. Firstly, her advice to women seeking a husband was “marry a dad, not a cad.” Marry someone that you can imagine will be a good father to children if you have children. Secondly, the last chapter of the book is entitled something like Listen To Your Mother. That's very good advice and harking back to the podcast we did for Mother's Day, both sexes, father and mother, have an enormously important part to play in the raising of children. But you'd have to say mothers are extraordinarily important.
Phillip: Mary Harrington has written a book, Feminism Against Progress,6 which takes the same direction, again not coming from a Christian background, although she uses a lot of theological language. Kevin Andrews, of Roman Catholic background, who died recently, was a leading politician here in Australia during the period of the Howard government. He wrote a very interesting book called Maybe ‘I do’— Modern Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness,7 which gives you statistic after statistic of how marriage is good for humans, and good for humanity, and good for society. Wilcox Bradford wrote Why Marriage Matters,8 in which he edits information from academics across the United States about the statistical advantages found in married, family life. The information in that book is overwhelming, all from reputable academics in secular universities looking at the sociology of family life in North America. One of the problems with utilitarianism is that it says, “We're going to look, we're going to change things, and then we'll see whether it works or not.” Well, we changed in the 1960s, and it hasn’t worked. So, how do we now put the genie back in the bottle?
Peter: Two things: firstly, the recognition that what the Bible says about male and female is true and for the good of us all. Secondly, our true life, the good life, is found by turning to God, committing yourself to him, and trusting in him. When you do that, you will be strengthened to live in whatever relationships you have, whether you're married or not. You will be enabled to live in a way which pleases him, and which is actually for your good, not perfect, we're living in a sinful world, but nonetheless, for your good.
Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London and New York, Routledge, 2009)
James Franklin, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia (Macleay Press, 2003)
Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1988)
House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, To have and to hold: Strategies to strengthen marriage and relationships (Commonwealth of Australia, 1988) PDF available here
Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress are reviewed in an article by Phillip here
Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress (Swift Press, 2023)
Kevin Andrews, Maybe 'I do' – Modern Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness. (Ballarat, Connor Court, 2014)
W. Bradford Wilcox, Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition: Thirty Conclusions from the Social Sciences (Broadway Publications, 2011)
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this sermon by Phillip on Genesis 1&2
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