Going Nuclear-Late Modern Singleness-Part 2

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Note to the reader. If I wanted this post to go far, I would write about a crisis in the Western political order. I do have a phone. I know what’s going on. But if you’re like me you’ve read enough about the headline topics. Your soul and your adrenal system need a break. It may be important to ponder something else. In that spirit, I offer the next installment in my series on singleness in Late Modernity, the beauty of Jesus, and the opportunities for the Church.

By 373 AD Cappadocia had suffered a string of dry summers and bad harvests. The rivers were scummy, and the cities stank, and the skin of the poor, mourned Basil of Caesarea, “clung to their bones like cobwebs.”

All that was bad enough, but when famine struck the Roman World its citizens doubled down on an ancient practice, and so if you were to leave town by the backroads and stroll through the refuse heaps, you would hear infants crying—mostly from the lower classes, mostly girls.

Infant exposure is a well-known feature of the ancient world in all contexts, and it’s gruesome. In those trash heaps you would find babies devoured by wild dogs, and in the sewers beneath some Roman brothels archeologists have found veritable infant graveyards. You’d also find pimps browsing the wares for future prostitutes and families picking out a new slave from the other rubbish.

But not on a certain estate outside Caesarea. If you were to go there, to the properties of Saint Macrina the Younger (a single, celibate woman), you would find a social revolution. You would find a community of women from all backgrounds—slaves, immigrants, the wealthy, the poor—living a life of prayer and caring for those children. Macrina herself would wander the trash heaps rescuing kids, and so it was only a matter of time before she had to start a school to promote literacy among those under her care. The community valued manual labor as well, and so there was work into which those exiled from society could be included.

Truly, the proto-monastic community of Macrina was a marvel in the ancient world. But it was also an extension of Christian practice, which was to reconfigure the social order around the teachings of Jesus. As Tom Holland writes:

“The apostles, obedient to Jewish tradition as well as to the teachings of their master, had laid it as a solemn charge upon new churches always ‘to remember the poor’. Generation after generation, Christians had held true to this injunction. Every week, in churches across the Roman world, collections for orphans and widows, for the imprisoned, and the shipwrecked, and the sick had been raised. Over time, as congregations swelled, and ever more of the wealthy were brought to baptism, the funds available for poor relief had grown as well. Entire systems of social security had begun to emerge. Elaborate and well-organised, these had progressively embedded themselves within the great cities of the Mediterranean.”

Amazing, right?

Over and over again Christians have had to creatively confront a dysfunctional social order. Filled with the Holy Spirit, Christians have been able to do so. Followers of Jesus leveraged generosity and global supply chains to engage famines, something that happened as early as the first century (Acts 11:27-30); they created the first hospitals to respond to plagues and the first poor houses to respond to imperial domination. Most often, Christians created houses of prayer, study, and manual labor to heal the social order.

Indeed, in Her long history, the Church has responded to many a grave injustice and dire social threat.

Now, She needs to do it again.

This is Part 2 in my series on Late Modern Singleness; if you missed Part 1 and you’re in the mood to survey depressing data, you may want to start here.

In this installment I’m going to explore an issue that is almost Late Modern Singleness’s mirror image: the Late Modern Household. The Late Modern household is the smallest and most restricted household civilization has tried. It makes singleness harder. But it also makes marriage and family life harder, and that has contributed to community’s downward spiral in the West.

I’m also going to talk about a phenomenon I’ll call Nuclear Marriage, which is as much an experiment as the Western Nuclear Family.

Even so, this post will be more hopeful than Part 1. Because here we’ll at least forecast what the Church needs to do. There is a road map. There is not, in all honestly, infinite room for experimentation. Not every local Church will step up to the plate. But those that do will experience extraordinary things.

Because, Jesus.

I. Nuclear Households

Whenever I write about the Late Modern nuclear family I get prickly responses that say, essentially, that nuclear families are important. I agree, and I can tell you what the problem is: Our social language hasn’t kept up with our social configurations.

On the one hand, in most times and in most places close-knit biological relationships between mothers, fathers, and their children have grounded the social order. That’s the nuclear family: parents and kids. You can find evidence that nuclear families stabilize society in interesting places. Roman tombstones, for example, almost always bear memorials from spouses, children, or siblings, and almost never friends or extended family members—you can find the same thing with Vikings. Likewise, ancient marital law codes, like the Anglo-Saxons, focus on parents and children, suggesting that many ancient cultures understood the importance of supporting society’s base unit. Parents and children—that’s the nucleus of the family.

But parents and children are not the entire family and nuclear families have pretty much never been synonymous with the household. Instead, you’d have extended family members, business partners, clients, and slaves living in the same home.

But not us: In Late Modernity the nuclear family is also a nuclear household, and that’s the difference. It’s what most people have in mind when they talk about the Late Modern nuclear family: A social, and not a biological, arrangement, where the nuclear family is a household unto itself.

In an attempt to clear things up, I’m going to write about nuclear households.

Nuclear households are, virtually by definition, an experiment. Until fifty or so years ago, nuclear households had never been tried at scale. As such, they’re strange, and things do get stranger, because a nuclear household isn’t just a small family: It’s also an isolated family. As the cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins argued in her book Strangers & Intimates, in the West, a nuclear household means the family is separate from the marketplace. In other words, in a nuclear household, the children are not actively involved in the work of sustaining the family.

As such, nuclear households are essentially leisure units.

I mean, think of the things kids in nuclear households do: They go to schools that function alarmingly like daycares. They play soccer. They learn the violin. They go on vacation. And while those are good things, the separation of the family from the marketplace isn’t. It has many alarming consequences.

For one thing, kids don’t like it. To feel relationally secure kids need a meaningful role to play. And you don’t have to go back to hunter-gatherers to prove that, either. You can look at chores. An 86-year multigenerational study at Harvard found that kids with *certain chores did better in the long term. The word certain is significant here: Arbitrary chores have almost no benefit. But chores that directly contribute to the ecosystem of the family do. Psychologists who studied trauma recovery discovered that responsibility, meaningful work, and connection on the household level were all an essential part of the picture.

Another thing that happens is that kids aren’t prepared for life. Like, at all. A 2023 study conducted by Panorama Education found that “91% of adults across the U.S., both parents and non-parents alike, say that it is important for schools to focus on developing life skills.” It’s no wonder why: Parents don’t do that work. Sarah Clark—an associate research scientist with the University of Michigan and co-director of the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health—conducted a parenting poll and discovered an overwhelming lack of preparation. According to the poll, only “8% (of parents) were confident their teen could make an appointment with a doctor on their own, 25% thought their teen could dole out the correct dose of an over-the-counter medication, 41% expected their kid to eat healthy foods, and 46% percent think their teen will save money for the future.”

That’s not successful parenting, but it’s almost inevitable when families are cut off from the rest of life.

(Note: Have you heard the saying “Families that play together stay together?” It’s only true when you compare them to families that do nothing together, because the most close-knit, content, cooperative families work together. You can see that in obvious places, like in the intergenerational transmission of businesses, or the fact that the majority of young adults who stay home and contribute economically to their family say it had a positive impact on their relationship (74%!). But you can also see that fact in more subtle places, like the fact that surnames only come from one of three places—patronyms, toponyms, and job names (I don’t know the proper term for a job name—help me out, Latin nerds?). In other words, families are all but defined by three questions: Who’s your dad? Where are you from? What does your family do?)

And the other thing that happens when the family is cut off from the marketplace is it contracts.

We can intuit why: If I were to ask you “Can I come on your vacation?” the answer would probably be “No.” If I were to ask you “Can I help you chop wood?” the answer would probably be “Yes.” People are, in general and appropriately, less social when it comes to rest. Another way of putting that is people require a high level of social similarity when it comes to recreation, but not so much when it comes to work. That’s not, in and of itself, a problem. The problem is that when families are an exclusively recreational unit there’s no space for friends, church members, or the extended family to predictably participate. So single people are cut off still more.

Now, it may not be immediately clear why a Nuclear Household is a Liberal invention, so here ya go: a Nuclear Household is Liberal because it’s built to maintain the freedom of the individual (in this case two individuals—parents who live together). The domain of responsibility is restricted. It allows couples to have children while still mostly doing what they want.

(Note: That’s interesting, because Nuclear Households are overwhelmingly present in the Church. To see that you only have to look at household size. When I consulted the data I was disturbed to discover that, compared with Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, “Globally, Christians are the largest group in 12 of the 15 countries with the smallest households…Christians around the world live in somewhat smaller households, on average, than non-Christians (4.5 vs. 5.1 members). Christians have their smallest households in North America (3.4) and Europe (3.1).”)

Many maladies follow. Here’s one: When single people are left out of family life they don’t get to apprentice at running a household. How many people do you know who, upon getting married and having kids, both had no idea how to do the basics and had no model apart from their own parents? The answer is a lot of people. That, in turn, chips away at marriage because people only desire what they can imagine. If young men and young women don’t have concrete, appealing images when it comes to family life, they either won’t seek it, or if they do seek it, they won’t know what they’re looking for.

(Note: You see something related in childbearing. For a married woman, one of the greatest predictors of her having a baby is her friend having a baby. Basically, when you see it, you know what to desire. Renes Girard wants to be mentioned here. But not today, Renes. Not today.)

All that may help explain why the rise of the nuclear household has coincided with an experimental form of marriage, which has, like the snake devouring its tail, contributed to its own decline.

II. Nuclear Marriage

Around 18 BC Caesar Augustus faced a problem—it was, in fact, such a grave dilemma that he would soon order a census to get to the bottom of things.

The Roman population was shrinking.

To address the problem, Augustus issued a controversial bit of legislation: the Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibu. The Lex Iulia was designed to encourage marriage. It placed a tax on unmarried women, prohibited unmarried people from going to the theater, and all but mandated reproduction (for men by age 25, for women by age 20). There were other stipulations.

The Lex Iulia’s an interesting historical case for at least two reasons. First, it was vigorously resisted by young men, who preferred to remain unmarried in opulent, sex-saturated Rome. Second, and more significantly, with the Lex Iulia, Caesar Augustus gave marriage a telos: childbearing. He then set up the legal machinery of the state to support that purpose. And it worked: during the reign of Caesar Augustus, the Roman population grew, and the army was staffed.

Now, I don’t think old Octavian’s understanding of marriage is correct, and it doesn’t come close to Christianity’s extravagant vision. But it’s a relevant example because it contrasts sharply with Late Modernity’s vision, which is, in fact, an almost complete lack of vision. If you were to ask what Late Modern married couples do, you would have a hard time getting an answer.

First of all, Late Modern marriages are clearly not child-rearing units. In 2023, only 38% of opposite-sex couples had children and in 2024 only 5.4% of families included an unemployed person. In 2024, 92.4% of school age children went to a public institution, and as I mentioned before, 91% of adults think that schools should do more to prepare children for life, and they’re content to let government institutions do that work.

I’m not making an argument here, by the way. I’m trying to make observations. I’m also trying to ascertain what, exactly, these marriages are doing.

From the surveys, we can say that people get married for financial security, companionship, to start a family, and because—disturbingly—they felt “pressure.” From the data, we can also say that most divorces (73%) are initiated by one person and in most cases (59%) those people say they got a divorce because they weren’t compatible. Meaning: Even in cases where the original impetus for marriage was intact—such as financial security—it was trumped by a lack of compatibility.

This isn’t a post about divorce, by the way. There are, sadly, legitimate reasons to pursue a divorce or seek an annulment. This is a post about singleness, households, and marriages, and so the question remains: what were those couples incompatible for?

Lamentably, the plain answer here is that there is no concrete Late Modern vision for marriage because there’s no concrete Late Modern vision for anything. “At the heart of liberty,” says that famous 1992 Supreme Court opinion from Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Is that one of the lamest things ever said? Yes. But the worldview it proposes is overwhelmingly present in Late Modern marriage, because Late Modern nuclear marriage is a marriage that exists for its own benefit—however the couple in question happens to define that benefit. It is not, in other words, a generative or productive institution.

But it is a fragile institution. A leisure marriage is all but impossible to desire and definitely impossible to live. I’ll tell you why: No one’s preferences can support the heartache of life. Liking to cook or travel together isn’t going to cut it when tragedy inevitably comes. Also, when there’s no road map to marriage, there’s no way to improve at the skill of being married. No wonder so many people feel lost.

And here’s the thing for singles. When an isolated, un-productive, un-vocational vision of marriage is the predominant view of marriage, single people are going to be seen as a threat. That is, in fact, the exact claim several single friends made to me earlier this year. In our context, they explained, the Church sees single people as a threat to marriage.

I can see how that happens: when marriages are leisure institutions, single people draw on a limited pool of leisure. They’re going to take precious parenting time; they’re going to take attention; they’re going to start an affair. It just so happens that, when marriage is a matter of personal interest, well, sometimes single people are more interesting. This partially contributes to the Late Modern phenomenon in which people get married and disappear. They don’t become less available, which is appropriate. They become completely unavailable, which is disorienting at best and heartbreaking at worst.

Thankfully, that is not the case in Christian marriage. Single people are not a threat to the Christian marriage, because single people are an essential part of the household within which the Christian marriage operates.

But honestly, in many places, that hasn’t been described for a while.

III: Recreational Marriage for Christians

It’s easy to critique that situation above .

But we do have to ask: Has the Church, in general, done better? The Church is not exempt from the sweeping changes of late modernity; Christians largely live in homes with parents and a child or two. Especially in the West, Christians have, more than any other faith, separated the family from the rest of life (remember those tiny Christian households from the PEW data?). Sadly, our view of marriage has been diminished by Late Modernity’s lack of vision.

Have you ever heard the phrase “Marriage isn’t to make you happy, it’s to make you holy”? You must have; it is the thesis of a bestselling Christian marriage book and the title of innumerable YouTube videos. The phrase is, while not incorrect, still alarmingly close to Liberal self-actualization expressed in Christian terms.

Marriage isn’t just to make you holy because following Jesus isn’t just about becoming holy. Following Jesus is also about preaching the gospel, serving the poor, and transforming the world; it’s about loving God and loving your neighbor. Just so, marriage is also about raising children, discipling Christians, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the immigrant, worshiping God, and preaching the Gospel as well as transforming the human heart, curing the soul, and becoming like Christ. It is a sacramental and economic relationship right at the center of the domestic Church.

I’ve spent hours perusing the bestselling Christian books and podcasts on marriage trying to determine how it’s defined on the popular level and I can tell you, the picture’s not encouraging.

The Number 1 bestselling book on Christian relationships on Amazon isn’t really about marriage—it’s about identifying abuse. Honestly, that’s an important skill. But it doesn’t speak well of the Christian imagination when it comes to living, and in that book, marriage is defined this way: “…companionship was integral to God’s design for marriage from the start. He created marriage to be a means for a husband and wife to help each other become the people God designed them to be. And what’s more, our covenants with our spouses are intended to be a glorious reflection of Christ’s covenant with his bride.”

Not bad. Honestly, that’s true: Companionship. Becoming. Reflecting. But the question remains: What are you supposed to do?

Here’s another thesis from one of those bestsellers: “(God) also created marriage with a very specific purpose.” That’s great! What purpose? “God gave us the covenant of marriage as an awesome symbol of the relationship He desires to have with mankind. He has given you an opportunity, unlike any other, to experience deep love…Marriage is an opportunity to bring glory to God as you share with the world His testimony by loving your wife the way Christ loves the Church.”

Hmm. That’s not wrong either. But it’s just so ephemeral. Experience God’s love and love your wife? What if, as is increasingly the case in Late Modernity, someone doesn’t know how to love? I can’t tell you how many young, single people I talk to who genuinely ask “So…what exactly is marriage for?”

To me, this looks like Western Christianity’s long-term crisis applied to marriage: There’s no alternative metaphysics, no sacramental tapestry, no realistic means of transformation, no compelling public theology, basically, no sacred canopy within which marriage makes sense. It’s moral therapeutic deism applied to marriage.

Fortunately, as I’ve written other places, there are signs that a great action of God may take place in our time. In every room of the Church, Christians are recovering their enchanted worldview, effective discipleship, and history. That’s beyond good, because one of the best things the Church can do for both married couples and singles is recover a robust faith. When Jesus’s household is aligned with Jesus’s mission there are more than enough places for otherwise estranged people to meaningfully participate and there are cosmic resources available to support the sacramental reality that is marriage.

In the remainder of this post, I want to discuss just two facets of marriage local churches have to recover if they’re going to meet the unique social needs of our time. The first is a vocational vision of marriage; the second is a sacramental vision of marriage in which marriages actively participate in the reality to which they point.

Let’s get after it.

IV: Recovering Vocation

Any book on marriage will tell you that marriage was established in the Garden of Eden, in Genesis 2. And any book on Genesis will tell you that humanity was made in the image of God—hopefully, those books on Genesis will also acknowledge that imaging God includes continuing God’s work, which is ordering chaos and filling the void.

But here’s the thing: Popular works rarely—and I mean almost never—link the two. Popular works almost never attach an active vision of imaging God to marriage as an essential institution to get that done. And that’s a huge problem because historic and authoritative works—including, you know, Scripure—almost always do link the two. Remember Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 19? Jesus uses celibate court officials aka Hebrew eunuchs (see part one) to clarify his teaching on marriage, grounding both in a fundamentally vocational frame. Likewise, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has this to say:

“God who created man out of love also calls him to love— the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is Himself Love. Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator’s eyes. And this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation: ‘And God blessed them, and God said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.’’ Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another.”

You see that? Marriage is for something: the Creation mandate. It’s also for the Great Commission, something that becomes clear when you consult the tradition. Here’s the Book of Common Prayer:

“The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. It signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church, and Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people. The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord.”

I admit, Cranmer isn’t as compelling as other voices. But he’s still wonderfully concrete: joy, help, having kids, raising them in the faith. Marriage is about making disciples, both internally and externally. On this point John Chrysostom is also excellent: “For just as with a general, when his soldiery also is well organized, the enemy has no quarter to attack; so, I say, is it also here: when husband and wife and children and servants are all interested in the same things, great is the harmony of the house…how, it may be said, can these things be? They will be so, if we will despise money, if we will look but to one thing only, excellence of soul, if we will keep the fear of God before our eyes.” Later on he adds: “For indeed a house is a little Church.”

John’s point is revelatory: marriages function properly when they are vocationally aligned to the mission of Jesus.

And if that’s so the question naturally arises: “How are we, in our community, defining the mission of the Church?” Your answer will, inexorably, shape what married couples try to accomplish. If the mission of the Church is exclusively about the formation of Christlikeness in individuals, and if the means of that formation is private practice, couples will ignore the outside world.

For that reason the modern discipleship renaissance is almost guaranteed to have good results for both married couples and single people simply because it offers a road map to following Jesus that balances an internal and external orientation. Take an amplified view of Comer’s formulation: Be with Jesus—through deliberate practice with your spouse. Become like Jesus—through deliberate practice with your spouse. Do what Jesus did—through deliberate practice with your spouse. Do that in community for the sake of the world. Good stuff.

Wonderfully, a vocational vision of marriage reopens places for singles to meaningfully participate. It’s not just that there’ll be the occasional invitation. It’s that single people can bear responsibility in the household, and that is an irreplaceable part of belonging.

Here’s what I mean: Em and I do go on dates. We take walks. We stay up late talking. We spend a ton of time caring for our kids.

But we also worship together, often in the company of single friends. We also host conversations and workshops in our home and elsewhere on core dimensions of the Christian faith—our single friends co-host those, and without their load-sharing contributions those events would not be possible. Or take feasting: It’s an essential Christian discipline: you need other members of the Household of Jesus around to feast fully. I could say more, and I will in the third installment, but that’s probably enough to see the point: a vocational marriage is a marriage in relationship, and that draws people from all walks of life into household rhythms.

V. Gettin’ (Meta)Physical

Enough of that point.

It’s time to discuss the second facet the Church needs to recover, which is a participatory vision of marriage grounded in God’s power.

If you’re at all familiar with the Reformation you know that during that time marriage finally and formally lost its sacramental status: “Those five commonly called Sacraments,” says the 39 Articles, “that is to say, Confirmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and Extreme Unction, are not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel, being such as have grown partly of the corrupt following of the Apostles, partly are states of life allowed in the Scriptures, but yet have not like nature of Sacraments with Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, for that they have not any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God.”

But, if you’re at all familiar with Church history you know that the loss of what Hans Boersma calls the sacramental tapestry began centuries earlier with people like Willliam of Occam and Duns Scotus and their ilk. You can’t lay the blame at the feet of the Reformers, is the point (ask Bishop Barron if you’d like further clarification as to how that happened).

What the West in particular lost is what the pros call a participatory metaphysics, a situation in which sacraments—and indeed, the entire created order—participate in the reality to which they point.

In that view, Jesus’s death and resurrection really are present in baptism. As Saint Ambrose asked, “What did you see? Water, certainly, but not water alone…the presence of the Godhead is there.”

Likewise, God’s sustaining power really is present in the Eucharist. “The cup of blessing that we bless,” says Saint Paul, “is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”

And likewise, Jesus’s spousal love for the Church really is present in marriage, so that both being in a Christian marriage and being near a Christian marriage are a legitimate way to experience Divine love.

Now, it may not be immediately clear that a loss of a participatory metaphysics contributed to marriage’s catastrophic decline, but boy howdy did it.

First, as soon as something is a mere notion or image, and not a real means of God’s grace, people stop doing it. You can look at communion in mainstream Protestant churches, which for a long time kept communion for extreme special occasions. But you can also look at confession: if it’s not sacramental, if it has no intrinsic potency, people will say they value it but they won’t ever do it. And it’s not just Protestants. In 2022, a RealClear Opinion Research survey found that only 37% of Catholics said they went to confession once a year (down from 43% in 2015); many don’t go at all. The reason? They don’t think it does anything. The same thing applies to marriage: If all marriage does is make you think of Jesus’s love for his Church, well, you don’t have to be married to think those thoughts.

Second, when churches lose a participatory vision, people don’t know how to live marriage. If marriage participates in the reality of Jesus’s love for his Church, and Jesus’s love for his Church is avowedly cruciform, well then, folks can expect marriage to be a means of life in the form of death and resurrection. Read the Fathers and you will find this pattern universally assumed. Here’s Chrysostom again: “Wouldest thou have thy wife obedient unto thee, as the Church is to Christ? Take then thyself the same provident care for her, as Christ takes for the Church. Yea, even if it shall be needful for thee to give thy life for her, yea, and to be cut into pieces ten thousand times, yea, and to endure and undergo any suffering whatever,—refuse it not…Supply her with everything. Do everything and endure trouble for her sake. Necessity is laid upon thee.”

Third, when churches lose the sacramental tapestry, there’s no wonder. That is catastrophic. As humans made in God’s image, our greatest desire is to be near and experience God. I remember the excitement I felt in my teens going to well-shepherded charismatic worship gatherings. It was very similar to the excitement I’ve felt going to services at great cathedrals. The desire to be near the Living God was like electricity, and I mention it because we’re supposed to feel that way about marriage and about community. We’re meant to be in awe. But if the heart’s elemental pull towards God doesn’t move you both towards intimate relationship and out into the world, well, you’re going to have a hard time moving towards either.

And by the way, you can’t die to yourself if you can’t sense the resurrection calling to you on the far side. Without wonder, there’s no sustainable way to pick up your Cross.

Of course, a participatory vision of marriage is good for single people, and not only because it draws people towards marriage. Allow me to briefly name three benefits.

First, if marriage is sacramental then it’s going to be sustained by the ordinary life of the Church: By the rhythms of worship, preaching the gospel, and serving the poor we talked about above. A participatory vision of marriage pulls marriage towards the communal and liturgical life of the body.

Second, if marriage is sacramental, then it’s going to be sustained by God’s power held in the body. Remember Ephesians 3:14-21? All the saints, baby! A participatory vision of marriage means Come pray for us, Come work with us, Come convey to us the measure of God’s grace you carry, and by the way, let us give to you the gifts we have been given. A participatory vision of marriage is a relational vision of marriage.

Third, if marriage is sacramental, then we can expect the sheer “Come and see!” wonder of the faith to animate the institution. Instead of “Leave us alone,” it’s “Come and see how we’re experiencing God’s grace for our need!” “Come and see how God blesses ordinary, in-process people who are hurting each other yet even so being transformed!” “Let us come and see how God is blessing you because we need to be near His life!” A participatory vision of marriage isn’t a siloed marriage because it’s in motion; it’s drawn towards something, and that something happens to be the scintillating life of the Triune God.

VI: And Now: Miracles

All this has been groundwork. I’ve taken two long posts to explain what’s happening, and I’ve done that because I think we need a good diagnosis if we’re going to search for a cure.

In the next installment, I’m going to talk about how the Church has traditionally embraced radically alternative households in hard times.

But let me say a quick word now.

First of all, a revival would fix all of this in about five minutes. Revivals have a way of sweeping people into God’s wake, and if we were to examine the social consequences of historic revivals, we would find strange, large, Spirit-empowered alternative households. You know that two elderly single women formed the prayerful nucleus of the revival in the Hebrides, right?

But absent a revival, an all-in Church would also do the trick. Was Hernhutt a revival? Kind of—a slow, patient, water the ground with tears and return with sheaves to show revival. Likewise, were the Evangelical Sisters of Mary an outpouring? Yes: a slow, in it for the long haul, brick-by-brick outpouring.

As a history nerd, I can say that it takes a crisis to transform the social order. On the one hand, various forms of decline in the West may provide that crisis—things like economic contraction, the long term effects of multipolarity, etc.

But on the other and better hand encountering Jesus is its own kind of crisis.

Encountering Jesus gives life radically new meaning and direction. Jesus gives his people supernatural power and stamina to live differently. He brings the outcast into the family and the social casualty to the table, and the result is not just a better form of communal life: It is communal life as it was meant to be lived.

That’s where my chips are, and that’s what we’ll discuss next time.

Warrior On!

MW Editor’s Note. Thanks to Blaine for linking his Substack post to Mentoring Warriors. If you want to read his article on Substack or contact Blaine, follow the link below.

Substack link for Blaine Eldredge’s Part 2 on Singleness; Going Nuclear