The other day, someone in the Discord shared this link: 5 Things God is Telling You to Do If You Fear You Will Never Get Married. Of course, it’s more like the five things that a fairly young, self-professed happily-married evangelical guy, Mark Ballenger, is telling single evangelical women to do. And by that, of course, I mean that he’s mostly offering them the exact same regurgitated meaningless bad advice that evangelical leaders always offer in this situation. It’s almost all terrible, though some of it is more terrible than the rest. Let’s take a closer look at what Mark Ballenger thinks will totally make singleness okay for aging evangelical women.
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Everyone, meet Mark Ballenger, who is intensely concerned about evangelicals’ sex lives
According to Mark Ballenger’s website, this young-looking married guy holds a degree in Pastoral Counseling from none other than Liberty University. He apparently got it back when they still called themselves Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. Apparently, he also got it before they began putting all of their grad students’ theses and dissertations online. I wonder what his thesis covered?
His bio also says he’s worked as “a missionary, a pastor, and as a pastoral counselor.” However, what he really likes is writing Christian stuff. So here we are!
That’s interesting, considering how much more money and power he’d get as a pastor or Christian counselor. I’ve got to wonder what really happened there, to get him to vacate such gigs. The difference in income alone would be ginormous. His website can’t possibly be replacing what he used to earn, even as bad as pastors’ salaries have been tanking lately. Its content doesn’t even rise to the level of mediocrity.
Mostly, Mark Ballenger likes to write about relationships and sex. In particular, he likes to discuss their opposites: singleness and celibacy. He offers his readers a huge 70% off discount coupon for a $100 course about “sanctifying your sexuality.” By this phrase, he means living as a single evangelical without breaking evangelical leaders’ myriad sex rules. His course appears to include every single busy-work non-solution evangelical leaders have ever concocted on the topic, so at $30 it’s still overpriced by about $30.
Sex and the single evangelical
Let’s get one thing clear right out of the gate: Evangelicals do not differ much at all from non-evangelicals in terms of their sex lives. They have premarital and nonmarital sex at about the same rates and masturbate just as often.
Heck, the Institute for Family Studies even wrung their hands in 2019 over the news that evangelicals were coming around to the idea of nonmarital cohabitation “even if the couple had no express intention to marry.” (Their emphasis.)
For my own part, when I married my first husband Biff, we did not cohabit before marriage. But some couples in our fundamentalist church did cohabit in the time leading up to their unions. It doesn’t sound like much has changed since the early 1990s. There’s always been a huge divide between knowing the rules and following them.
Evangelicals simply lie about their private lives more often than heathens do.
And the evangelical cult of marriage
At the same time, though, evangelical culture has always venerated marriage as an ideal, especially in recent years. The further evangelicals drift from that ideal, the harder their leaders exhort them to join the cult of family.
For women in particular, the pressure to land a good husband must feel tremendous. Evangelical culture already doesn’t favor any woman who doesn’t fit the evangelical ideal: thin, young, pretty, demure, obedient, domesticated, and steadfastly nurturing.
Since evangelicals are aging more every year in their decline, any women who don’t find husbands early in life will find it harder and harder as the years pass. Some of those women become single mothers, and everything I’ve ever read on the topic hints that they do so at about the same rate as non-evangelical women—and face ostracism from their churches, as this thesis indicates, as well as even-more-diminished chances of marriage, since evangelical men always prefer never-married young women without kids.
And hey. We like what we like; we want what we want. I’m not here to tell anyone they’re less-than for having preferences in mates. What I describe here is just how evangelical culture operates, for good or ill. Both men and women in evangelicalism have their wish lists. Between evangelical men and women, the men are far more likely to get what they want, is all.
Other women hope against hope that Jesus will still drop the perfect man in their laps someday in his own time, as the Christianese goes, while dreading the impending arrival of their sunset years.
Mark Ballenger to the rescue!
The reason I think Mark Ballenger wrote his post with women in mind is that it doesn’t seem like it’d resonate much with evangelical men. Evangelical men get a whole other set of instructions that center on persuading them to marry the apparently limitless number of single moms in their churches, not on contenting themselves with a possible life of singleness forever.
When some guy wrote a post to that effect, the evangelical man-o-sphere exploded in outrage.
In short, the men in evangelicalism who want to get married usually can. The ones who aren’t married yet get pushed toward picking from available stock. Women, on the other hand, are viewed as lacking agency in marital matching. A man must select them from the herd.
The advice Mark Ballenger offers here isn’t about refining one’s expectations and demands. It’s about how to fill one’s years with activities besides those of marriage and childrearing and hopefully be happy at the end of it, despite one’s dreams of family never coming true.
Unfortunately, his roadmap will never get anyone to the promised land.
Mark Ballenger’s first step: Never stop Jesus-ing
The first item on Mark Ballenger’s listicle isn’t actually advice. It’s more of a warning:
If You Fear You Will Never Get Married, Decide in Your Heart that You Will Still Passionately Follow the Lord No Matter What
And once again, we just have to stop and marvel that a guy who professes himself happily married has the sheer gall to tell lonely singles this:
Ultimately, God did not make us just to get married, to have children, and to live happy lives. God does want us to do these things, but he calls us to marriage, to have children, and to live happy lives so that we bring glory to him. Marriage is a path, not an end destination. Marriage is meant to bring God glory.
And especially this:
Marriage is not meant to be the main focus of our lives.
In evangelical culture, only Jesus is officially allowed to be the official center of all Christians’ lives. So Mark Ballenger is not telling anybody anything new here. Instead, he’s issuing an implicit threat about what’ll happen if anyone fails to pay lip service to Jesus as the center of their lives.
Also, I wonder if Mark Ballenger is really trying to convince us that he didn’t passionately love his wife and desperately want to spend his life with her, rather than marrying her just to show us heathens what Team Jesus is all about.
Mark Ballenger’s second step: ego-search why you even want to get married
Now that he’s finished with that boilerplate blahblah, we can move on to his first piece of actual (bad) advice:
Spend Time Unpacking What Deeper Fears Are Fueling This Worry About Never Getting Married
He asks single evangelicals to examine just what marriage represents to them, emotionally. Why do they even want to marry? Are they sure it’s for a virtuous reason? Or do they just want to get laid and have someone around the house? He explains:
One of the reasons you fear not getting married is because marriage has come to mean something extra to you. The idea of getting married has attached itself to your identity. . . .
Or, and hear me out here, maybe evangelical singles know that evangelical culture looks down on the unmarried to a seriously awful degree.
Mark Ballenger promises that if readers will “give it [meaning this need for a spouse] to God,” then they will totally lose all fear of lifelong singleness. That’s just more boilerplate bad evangelical advice. Evangelicals imagine that “giving it to God” is like handing their imaginary friend a wrapped-up present, and then he takes whatever is in the box away from them forever. It does not work, mainly because there’s no actual god there standing by to receive anything, and also because that’s simply not how human minds work.
Sidebar: The god who wasn’t there
Item 2 also includes this absolutely gobsmackingly bad exhortation:
If you believe marriage is the only way to solve your loneliness, you have to take back this belief and choose to believe that God is actually the only one who can cure your loneliness with his presence.
Again, this advice only works if there’s an actual god in Christianity who does anything for his followers. In reality, he’s just an imaginary friend. That’s why “he” can’t cure anything, much less loneliness.
For that matter, he has no presence at all to give to anybody. Nobody has ever heard his voice, touched him, held his hand, looked him in the eye, or walked beside him. Millions upon billions of Christians imagine that they have. But that is cold consolation on lonely nights when the heart screams for the real thing, when pablum and aphorisms feel like mockery and the truth stares at us from the corner of the bedroom.
But just hint that any part of your deconversion involved never encountering a single sign of this god’s existence, even when you cried out for it repeatedly, and you will be blamed for taking the tribe’s claims seriously.
Also, people can’t “choose” to believe anything. If there’s no evidence for the claim, we won’t believe it regardless.
Step 3: Defanging the fear of the unknown
Next, having shamed his readers for not Jesus-ing enough to avoid loneliness, Mark Ballenger moves on to offer advice about defanging readers’ fear of the unknown:
Accept the Possibility that You May Indeed Never Get Married So You Don’t Fear the Unknown of What that Possible Future Looks Like
He states that he doesn’t want people to deny their desires for marriage. At the same time, he does think there’s a way to lessen the fear of a future without marriage:
We fear what we don’t know. Therefore, when you just can’t imagine a future that involves you not getting married, you will fear that future. But if you can imagine a future where you never got married but which you also continued to thrive in the Lord and lived a meaningful life, then the fear will lessen some.
Is he talking about visualization? If so, that’s dangerously close to real therapy stuff. Visualization can indeed help people get over anxiety. In books like Never Saw It Coming and Bright-Sided, scholars tell us that visualizing worst-case scenarios can take the fear out of failure and hardship.
This bit of his post represents the only really decent advice he offers. And it’s really based in secular psychology more than the tribe’s collective pseudo-wisdom. However, it fails to acknowledge that this fear is based in knowing how evangelical culture treats singles. This is not a fear of the unknown.
Now for some word salad from Mark Ballenger: Get out there and do stuff for Jesus!
It took me a few minutes to figure out just what this step actually means in lived reality:
Use Your Fear About Never Getting Married to Fuel You to Do the Things You Have Been Too Afraid to Do in Order to Pursue a Relationship
And I am dead serious: Mark Ballenger is chiding single evangelicals here and telling them that maybe Jesus is withholding their future spouse because they aren’t obedient enough yet. They’re not fulfilling the big ineffable master plan he’s got, which would actually end with them getting married. If they get off their tuckuses and obey his marching orders, maybe he’ll finally hook them up!
Mark Ballenger explains:
God wants us to feel negative feelings if we are doing negative things because these bad feelings motivate us to change.[citation needed] I say all that because it’s also possible you should fear never getting married if you are doing something that would prevent you from getting married that God is telling you not to do. Perhaps you know you are being so passive that it’s impossible for you to meet anyone.
So maybe Jesus wants singles to go join a dating site, or attend more singles’ get-togethers at church. And they’re afraid of doing that, so they never do.
It’s like that joke about the Christian who drowns in a flood after refusing three different rescues; each time, he waves the rescuers on, because he has faith that Jesus will rescue him, rather than other people. When the now-dead guy complains that Jesus didn’t rescue him, Jesus reminds him that he tried three times! But the rescues didn’t look like divine intervention, so the guy refused them.
Won’t all those lonely singles feel silly at the Pearly Gates when Jesus reveals how he’d planned to get them married, but they never obeyed?
Whooof.
And more boilerplate for the last item on the listicle
The last item, #5, represents more boilerplate blahblah that all evangelicals are required to put in all listicles:
If You Fear Never Getting Married, Pray
If demands for prayer do not appear first, then they must appear last. (Of course, I’ve seen listicles where evangelicals get carried away and put prayer in both positions, I guess just to be extra-sure they covered that base.) That’s where we are now.
Mark Ballenger cites a Bible verse, then repeats the usual stuff about prayer fixing everything:
Bring your fears to God in prayer. Spend time in his presence. Through prayer, God will take away your fears by telling you what to do to pursue marriage, what not to do as you pursue marriage, and he will comfort you with his loving presence.
That’s a great way to make a Christian finally realize that they’re not praying, but rather talking to their ceiling and misinterpreting their own feelings as the opinions of a god.
Mark Ballenger fails in almost every single direction here
With so many evangelical women single and wanting marriage, evangelical sites have abounded with advice for them. It all sounds about the same. Here’s a sampling:
- Cru offers a 10-point listicle that contains nearly all of the same advice that Mark Ballenger offers, with more practical tips like getting a roommate.
- Boundless, a production of Focus on the
BigotryFamily, offers much the same advice as well, along with some statistics about marriage that may or may not be outdated - And the official Focus on the
MisogynyFamily site blames single evangelicals for their lack of sufficient Jesus-ing - Billy Graham’s site admonishes single evangelicals to Jesus harder as well
- Perry Noble, a pastor, has all kinds of blame to hand out about evangelical singles not Jesus-ing hard enough
On those occasions when evangelicals offer advice that isn’t just Jesus-ing really hard, or blame for not Jesus-ing hard enough, it tends to all sound alike:
Pray. Keep busy. Go where single men might be in church functions. Don’t ever lose faith, period, or start doubting. (Or, Heaven forbid, think about getting with a non-Christian!)
Summing up the Mark Ballenger advice listicle
Now, I do like the visualization stuff Mark Ballenger suggests. But that halfway decent advice gets drowned out by the rest of his listicle, and he phrases it in the worst way possible.
As for me, I’ve got little standing to advise evangelicals who are single and want to be married or dating. I can comment on trends, and offer observations from the sidelines, but I’m not in their situation. Whatever I might suggest would fall on rocky ground indeed and never take root.
What they need are people who are also single and struggled with it before finding peace, not young married guys like Mark Ballenger chirping the same old non-solutions in their ears. It seems like the height of arrogance for such people to dare offering advice to those who are quite possibly agonizing over their singleness in a tribe that idolizes marriage and family above all other lifestyles.
That tribe cannot and will not change its collective opinions about marriage and family. That’s why it’s so much easier for its Mark Ballenger types to dump all this emotional ego-searching on the people who can’t fit into that life script. In a way, they’re maintaining important class divisions, sorta like poorhouses and lepers’ camps did in past years.
I guarantee you very few people are asking young, skinny, pretty evangelical lasses to do all of this stuff. Jesus totally made their paths much easier, and so they are spared all of that hard work.
Tough noogies, everyone else! That’s what you get for not Jesus-ing right!
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