June, long the most popular month of weddings, is a good time to ask: How strong is marriage today? In the pop culture, marriage is weak. Songs often extol illicit sex or denigrate marriage.
There’s a song today, “Marry You,” popularized by singer Bruno Mars: “It’s a beautiful night, / We’re looking for something dumb to do / Hey baby / I think I want to marry you.” I didn’t realize marriage was dumb or to be taken so lightly, as if on a whim.
It’s not new that marriage is often a joke. Comedienne Mae West famously remarked in the 1930s or 40s: “Marriage is a wonderful institution. But who wants to live in an institution?” Henny Youngman made popular the phrase, “Take my wife—please!”
About 20 years ago, Don Wildmon, the founder of the American Family Association, reported that 88 percent of sexual activity in prime time television is between people who are not married, thus making “lust more attractive than love.” Things on TV seem to have only gotten worse.
Yet there’s nothing new under the sun. Adultery existed, of course, in Bible times, as it does now. Only then, it was shameful and recognized as being wrong. Now it is celebrated.
Proverbs 5 warns about the seductress: “Keep to a path far from her. Do not go near the door of her house, lest you give your best strength to others and your years to one who is cruel.”
For years we’ve heard that marriage in America is so bad off that one out of two marriages end up in divorce. We hear that if you get married today, you have a 50-50 chance (at best) of that marriage succeeding.
But the good news, according to a new book, is that the bad news is wrong. The new book is by Shaunti Feldhahn and Tally Whitehead: The Good News About Marriage: Debunking Discouraging Myths About Marriage and Divorce (Multnomah, 2014).
I interviewed Shaunti on my radio show recently. She said, “A lot of our conventional wisdom about the divorce rate, happiness in marriage, the rate of divorce in the church—all this discouraging stuff that actually kills marriages—is just not true.”
Source: Christian Post
Dr. Jerry Newcombe is a key archivist of the D. James Kennedy Legacy Library, a spokesman and cohost of Kennedy Classics.
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