Why Marriage Requires Meaning

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath tells of the Joads, a family of tenant farmers who reside in an Oklahoma beset by drought and soil erosion in the midst of the Great Depression. Unable to manufacture a survivable crop yield (a common affliction in the dust bowl era), the Joad family is evicted from their home by the landowner. Homeless and poor, the family migrates to California in hopes of gainful employment and a brighter future.

In describing the desperation and collapsing agrarian economy, Steinbeck speaks of the conflicts between tenant farmers and landowners: the latter, interested in profits and burdened by the demands of the banks for whom they are financially obligated, notify families of eviction. The farmers and their families are told to abandon homes in which their families have resided for generations with little regard for the displacement that the families will endure in the aftermath. It is, after all, not the landowner’s problem. When eviction day comes, a “tractor man” arrives to raze the home and fields, though the “tractor man” is himself yet another cog in a vast capitalist, usurious, and exploitative economy within which he carries out his master’s bidding. The “tractor man” is ashamed of his occupation and experiences no joy in what he does. Should he quit or refuse, other “tractor men” will arise and come to finish what he failed to complete.

The various actors here bring to light not only misery but the loss of soul, purpose, and life where once community, labor, and meaning thrived. On this, Steinbeck writes:

“The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day and night for a tractor and the disks turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws clamp on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself.”

As a metaphor for what has befallen much of modern society, The Grapes of Wrath provides an instructive metaphor of our moment. Social, cultural, and economic changes continue apace, readily rationalized against newfangled cultural pieties, social movements, and intellectual currents. These developments disorient us, engrossing us in distraction that obscures the full amplitude of what has been lost while socializing us to the “new normal.” And it is in the reconstituting of human organization and severing of the interconnectedness of the human family that the older orthodoxies of society are most rapidly being abandoned in favor of the new. This “advancement” occurs by reducing us to our analysis, with our lives reduced to the legalese that can be marshaled to justify a dispassionate and increasingly lifeless society.

It is perhaps here that the most glaring lacuna comes into focus when we engage the ever-pressing question of marriage, its definition, and its sociological location in human society. Much public debate surrounding the definition of marriage rests on an altogether radical set of assumptions — about human anthropology, about the nature of moral duty, and above all, about the purposeful institution of the family and what makes it socially and politically relevant. Absent a robust and coherent conception of such a family, discussions of what stance Muslims ought to assume on the question of gay marriage, or the LGBT movement more broadly, are quickly reduced to tortured legal compromises while eliding the more fundamental question of whether or not such discussions bear any social and political merit, and if so, why.

In this, the debates of our moment largely exist at the surface. We are unable to raise metaphysical questions or to interrogate the unspoken moral assumptions implicit in claims of social progress that LGBT advocates promise because the surface cannot be scratched but so much. In describing this constraining of public discourse, Steven Smith observes in his Disenchantment of Secular Discourse that the secular discursive frame is one of an “iron cage” designed to filter out unacceptable views from public consideration. Within such a dialogical milieu, the success of one view or another occurs not by a forthright examination of the values, beliefs, and relative merit of the issue in question but through the clever “smuggling in” of (often highly) questionable assumptions in a manner that leaves them invisible to the average citizen. These beliefs’ invisibility to public debate permits the advancement of otherwise contentious items, ones frequently rife with belief-based considerations, in a manner that leaves them beyond critique. Consequently, those on the other end — the losing end — of public debate come to realize after a time that they possess little practical means of resistance, unless of course they can manage to “smuggle in” their own moral commitments through the fashionable pieties of the cultural moment.

Within such a setting, it is extremely difficult so much as to question the moral assumptions inherent in the question of marriage given how convincingly the dominant secular narrative has already proffered a comprehensive explanation of what marriage is (and thus how it must be understood). Marriage in the modern world is defined largely on the basis of shared sexual interest, the agreeability of personalities, and the initiation of a lifestyle centered on the mutual pursuit of erogenous and social ends that the two individuals entering into a marital relationship volitionally determine to be important. With such an understanding of marriage taken as gospel, the political recognition of one marital arrangement over another is nothing more than prejudice (how can it not be?), as many sexual relationships share in the characteristics and features seen as essential to the definition of marriage.

On this reading, the ostensible heteronormative preferencing of the state materializes in financial benefits enjoyed by the heterosexual majority over those marginalized LGBT minorities whose partnerships are irrationally stigmatized. Taken further, the open-air discrimination of a marginal minority becomes a cause of concern, and the moral might of equality advocates pronounces on those who struggle to articulate their deeply held objections in any terms that do not sound puerile, anachronistic, or plainly bigoted.

Here, the purposeful institutionality of marriage, from which marriage gains its definition, is entirely absent. And it is precisely because of this wide-scale misapprehension of marriage, an institution whose purpose has been radically reordered in recent years, that the traditionally maintained institutional purpose of marriage must be foregrounded in our conversations in hopes of its restoration politically (or, at a minimum, socially in our communal confines).

As far as institutions go, all exist with particular ends around which they are ordered. Masjids as institutions, for instance, are directed towards reducing the proximity between worshippers and God by providing a place of worship and offering ritual services through which religious obligations can be fulfilled. Though the individual worshipper attending the masjid may have his own ends in mind that depart from the telos of the institution (say, to meet friends, pass time, etc.), such disjunctions do not undermine the institutional integrity of the masjid or the reason why the masjid exists. If masjids were organized around the parochial ends of some worshippers and reconstituted as places exclusively or primarily to pass time or meet friends, we might well question whether we can still refer to them as masjids and not, say, community centers or recreational centers or by some other term altogether. Some Muslim organizations may institutionally intend to promote the cultivation of a strong Muslim community and thus amalgamate multiple sub-institutions within their teleological remit (i.e., mosque, daycare space, school, etc.). Many individuals attending these communities have their own personal ends that depart from the ends of such an organization, and although some of these interests may be accommodated, the institutional purpose looms and pronounces over those of the particular attendee.

Extending this thinking to other institutions like schools, hospitals, the military, and more helps elucidate this bifurcation of the particular verses the institutional yet further. The institutional purpose of the hospital exists above and beyond the purpose for which the individual doctor works: the two can, of course, be aligned, but they can also diverge quite dramatically. The military as an institution also operates with specific obligations related to its purpose, though the individual service member in the military can have his own ends and interests that exist independent of those of the institution he serves. Were the military, hospital, university, and other such institutions to reconstitute themselves according to the variegated ends of those who participate within them, they would likely suffer a lack of effectiveness and risk jeopardizing entirely the purpose around which they were formed.

The purpose of the institution must therefore transcend that of the particular individual who exists somewhere within it. And the purpose of marriage has always transcended the particular motivations of those entering into marriage itself. Put plainly, the purpose around which marriage finds social meaning is its ability to provide a context within which procreation can be secured and cultivated in a relationship of mutual commitment and from which new life, organically derived from the specific act of coitus between a male and a female, can be supported, nurtured, and raised into adulthood.

This institutional end can be a difficult one to comprehend for a number of reasons. Some might rightfully mention the many generally happy couples they know who have no reproductive goals in mind. Though such couples undoubtedly exist, the presence of marriages that have no procreative motivation here corresponds to the doctor who does not share the ends of the hospital for which he works. The personal motives and decisions of couples are not relevant to the institutional purpose for which marriage exists, just as the doctor’s motivation is irrelevant to the hospital he serves. So long as the doctor does not violate the obligations that govern his employment, he will remain employed even with divergent motivations, much like couples can very well exist without children and remain faithfully married with personal motivations that depart from that of the matrimonial institution that binds them. A similar objection appears when infertility is raised, with critics charging that the procreative purpose of the institution of marriage serves to undermine or devalue marriages in which procreation is not possible. It goes without saying that a number of marriages will take place between spouses incapable of conceiving through no fault of their own. The mere absence of offspring does not undermine the paradigmatically procreative importance of marriage as an institution and, far from undermining the matrimonial telos, honors it by upholding its form as holding special significance. By comparison, same-sex relationships explicitly dishonor this paradigm and violate the teleological ordering that grants natural intercourse.

Others might contend that this is a somewhat reductive view of marriage, as marriage carries connotations that should not so easily be set aside — connotations of intimacy, loving concern for the other, and lifelong companionship. Although these are undoubtedly essential features of a healthy marriage, the institutional purpose for which marriage attains social relevance is specifically procreative in content, not its loving character. Governments and societies as a whole have been largely indifferent to the character of specific relationships and whether they are functioning well or poorly. Securing stable marriages only becomes socially relevant if their derogation begins to impact the makeup of society, most notably by the proliferation of divorce and the attendant impact on children and others who are dependent on household stability.

The procreative potential exclusive to heterosexual relationships also explains why societies have been eager to promote the stable context of marriage for two persons interested in sexual activity while greatly stigmatizing sexual activity occuring outside of it. Children born out of wedlock face significant obstacles in life and report poorer outcomes than their counterparts born of marriage. A man or woman in such a reproductive predicament may elect to prevent the child from coming into the world through abortive means or alternatively desert the child altogether. The volatility of a relationship lacking in a discrete moral commitment bears social consequences that are undesirable to society at large and are morally catastrophic, and although two people engaged in casual sexual relations may elect to commit to a child conceived pre- or extramaritally, such exceptional situations do not vitiate the norm of marriage that society has always promoted and is wont to protect.

By this measure, homosexual relationships have little social consequence and no institutional overlap with that of marriage. The forms of erotic activity partaken of in homosexual encounters are not proper sex in the fullness of the term. Sodomy in particular has been criminalized at various times and places due to medical (and, importantly, moral) concerns, but beyond that, has been largely ignored by many societies uninterested in prying into private sexual encounters. As a matter of public policy, society has little to no vested interest in recognizing sexual affairs that occur in the privacy of one’s home, though it has many reasons to recognize and protect jealously the formation of families that take shape from the pairing of man and wife in matrimony.

One of the profoundly damaging consequences of the expansion of marriage to accommodate same-sex relationships is the reconstituting of its institutional teleology from one of protecting the organically procreative consequences of marriage to one of personal choice and the lifestyle that comes into being by two actors that find in one another agreeability, companionship, and some degree of erotic interest. This primacy given to the place of choice inverts the foundation of family from something providing interconnectedness through the specifically unchosen bonds of the womb to one of assenting actors who contingently assume the title of family but dispense with it when its inconvenience becomes unduly burdensome. The immutability of family bonds established through birth (i.e., parents, siblings, uncles and aunts, grandparents, etc.) is something that humanity has cherished irrespective of its specific character in a given context, some of which can be difficult to participate within. Here, the institutional purpose of maintaining the bonds of family is given rights that transcend the experiences of the particular individual. Even in exceptionally difficult family settings, people remain meaningfully obligated to bonds born of the womb.

This assumption of unelected moral duties grates against our social paradigm of consent, freedom, and personal agency as definitional to our sense of being. By abandoning the explicitly ineluctable nature of families (i.e., the children we bring into the world, our parents, our siblings, etc.) and reordering marriage and family to one laden with choice-based considerations alone, we profoundly weaken the ability of families to absorb with great difficulty the rather common burdens that they more often than not have to assume in a robust family setting. The abandoning of the elderly, for instance, and the offloading of them to retirement homes en masse becomes not only socially acceptable but a reasonable negotiation for those eager to pursue their volitional aspirations that would otherwise be impinged upon by the presence of elders whose care becomes increasingly taxing with time.

The consequences are likewise observed in the case of children whose maintenance, care, and individual characteristics render them undesirable. The proliferation of abortion is one domain of modern society in which this is regularly encountered, and abortion studies in the United States regularly report between 600,000 and a million abortions annually. The preemptive elimination of fetuses testing positive for down syndrome is as well in keeping with this socio-familial paradigm in which moral obligations related to pregnancy are entirely owned by actors whose subjective determinations of convenience reign over the ethical questions inherent in systematically eliminating those with disabilities from ever experiencing their first breath. Offloading children to institutions and regularizing the outsourcing of their care is yet another phenomenon whose growth is directly correlated to a prizing of personal fulfillment through entertainment, lustful experiences, and unrelenting money seeking alongside the consumerism that attends it.

Advocates of same-sex marriage occasionally object to this framing by flipping the script and raising the explicitly chosen nature of their relationships and the children that enter their households as superior to heterosexual marriages whose children are largely unchosen. But this reinstitutionalization of family, even if it may well function in cases of individual children who receive loving attention and care by a committed gay or lesbian couple, as a social reality undoubtedly places the welfare of children as a class at acute risk. Given the qualitative differences inherent in same-sex marriages, it should come as no surprise that the behavior of same-sex couples and the complexion of their marriages departs radically from that of heterosexual marriages. These differences include the fact that same-sex couples are more likely to cohabit than their heterosexual counterparts, are far more likely to divorce (which holds even in countries that have legalized same-sex marriage long ago and controls for various factors like income level, education, etc.), and are considerably more likely to have “open” marriages. This general volatility of same-sex relationships may be deemed largely irrelevant if materialized in a private capacity, but as a relationship bearing the institutional significance of marriage and the possible incorporation of a child, such outcomes are highly problematic and far less stable and secure for children as a class than the organic ties of biological parenthood occurring within marital commitments.

A popular program of gender constructionism further obscures the picture of family and its natural constitution as holding any special significance. Having “two fathers” or “two mothers” is seen as virtually interchangeable with having a mother and father. However persuasive the narrative of gender neutrality, the unique participation and complementarity of mother and father cannot be transposed, replaced, or assigned on gender neutral terms without significant costs to all parties. On this, Rutgers University sociologist David Popenoe observes, “We should disavow the notion that ‘mommies can make good daddies,’ just as we should disavow the popular notion…that ‘daddies can make good mommies.’… The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary — culturally and biologically — for the optimal development of a human being.”

Reconceptualizing marriage as a lifestyle choice also has the effect of magnifying the place of erogenous activity in marriage. It may come as a surprise to many that the sexual vitality of a given marriage is in fact not the primary value through which marriage gains meaning. Indeed, if recognizing marriage were a straightforward matter of demarcating active sexual relationships from inactive ones, then many sexually active relationships existing outside of marriage would have to be accommodated within the concept of marriage, just as many marriages may no longer qualify on account of their sexual inactivity. In fact, quite a bit outside of sex — including commitment, empathy, care, and upholding parental responsibilities — tends to be far more instrumental for the sustaining of a long-term marital relationship than the fulfillment of erotic desires alone. Moreover, much intimacy in marriage, particularly as couples age, occurs in platonic forms, ones appreciated and felt most keenly by the husband and wife themselves. This preoccupation with the explicitly erotic nature of marital relations has contributed to the burgeoning field of sex therapy as the locus of marital reconciliation while promoting the reconfiguring of traditional theological teachings about marriage to focus more on marital intimacy and the fault lines of permissible sexual acts than the rights of the individuals involved, the importance of commitment, and the family as an institution that naturally emerges after marriage.

The question of human dignity poses yet another complicating factor in our discussions of marriage. In an answer described by Business Insider journalist Grace Panetta as “bringing down the house,” Elizabeth Warren’s reply concerning gay marriage and faith in the recent Democratic LGBT Town Hall is worth noting to bring to light this confusion concerning the marital telos: “To me it’s about what I learned in the church I grew up in … it truly is about the preciousness of each and every life,” Warren said. “And the hatefulness frankly always really shocked me, especially for people of faith, because I think the whole foundation is the worth of every single human being.” Like Warren, many people subscribe to the idea that same-sex marriage is primarily about human dignity and worth and that the deliberate exclusion of same-sex partner arrangements is one of the worst types of bigotry, irrationally justified on the basis of ossified readings of scripture or faith traditions that simply need to get with the times. However, the institution of marriage has never been primarily about dignifying individuals or assigning to some people greater moral worth than others. Being single does not mean a person lacks individual meaning or moral value, just as other relationships like friendships and other solidarities are not devoid of important moral worth. Conceiving of marriage as an institution primarily concerned with providing human dignity is one of the many misunderstandings of marriage that abounds in an environment that has deinstitutionalized the traditional teleology of marriage and reinscribed it as a therapeutic venture ordered around the satisfaction of the individual members who participate in it.

To be clear, a number of the aforementioned changes clearly predate the emergence of same-sex marriage as a socially recognized phenomenon. Marriages in the West have long revolved primarily around the erotic desires and emotional needs of the spouses. In fact, same-sex marriage would never have been conceivable in the first place had not heterosexual marriage, over the past 200 years, evolved into a primarily love-based, romance-above-all institution. In a sense, same-sex marriages are piggybacking on this notion, though by extending the ethical logic already in place, the cementing of this new marital paradigm occurs by taking the natural reproductive aspect out of the essential definition of what marriage is altogether. The idea of this reconceptualized marriage also arose after sex had been decoupled from marriage in the West by the sexual revolution. The promotion of sexual autonomy and prizing of the sexual self in an unencumbered capacity (any and all sex legitimated exclusively through consent) allowed for the legitimization of gay sex and relationships, which could then take their place right next to heterosexual romantic relationships (catering to which marriage had already been reduced to). Such changes profoundly weakened the institution of marriage, leading to rising rates of divorce, out of wedlock births, mass abortion, and, eventually, the widening definition of marriage to include same-sex relationships.

Maintaining the purposeful institution of marriage as a procreative enterprise therefore serves many crucial functions that are eroded by its reconceptualization as primarily serving adult romantic commitment. It upholds a particular norm and organizes our conception of the family around the normative model of naturally conceived children residing with their biological parents. It maintains the specifically unchosen nature of the family structure which emerges through procreation and sacralizes the bonds that are forged within it. It protects children and the household in which they reside, securing for them a context which is catered specifically to their best interest and nurturing. It sees integrity of lineage and clarity on who one’s parents are as bearing meaning and provides a broader social context of protection, care, and community through interconnectedness and solidarities born of blood relations. All these things and more are of utmost concern to any society, and they are distinctive to marriage as an exclusively male-female endeavor.

Although I have, so far, primarily made my case through an appeal to the institutional importance of marriage without much reference to theology, all the reasons I have mentioned coincide directly with the socio-familial ethic of revelation as embodied in the Qur’an and Sunna. On more than one occasion, God mentions dutifulness to parents immediately following the imperative to submit to Him and uphold His absolute unicity (tawhid). He, ‘azza wa jall, also mentions repeatedly the act of procreation, and the various stages of fetal development in the womb, as a numinous act endowed with special significance and awe-inspiring power. Moreover, the Prophet’s (ﷺ) repeated instruction to maintain the ties of the womb (silat al-rahim), alongside warnings mentioning the gravity of severing blood relations, further elucidates the importance of family and its preservation as an essential part of a proper adherence to the faith.

The higher objectives of Islamic law (maqasid al-shari‘a), consisting of five principal interests that encapsulate the aims of Sacred Law, include as a distinctive category the preservation of nasab or nasl, both approximately translating into the importance of preserving genealogical integrity, offspring, and the family unit.

As a matter of Abrahamic solidarity, the two dispensations provided to Muslims with respect to the People of the Book (Jews and Christians) concern food consumption and marriage, and the notion of forming accord with the Kitabi traditions is something that has existed since the inception of Islam. The building of Abrahamic community is predicated on the ability of the three traditions to arrive at a negotiated settlement that will preserve their respective morals and values. Traditionally, this has not been too difficult (though other factors have undoubtedly fomented much religious strife), as the concept of family shares broad similarities across the Abrahamic traditions, including the honoring of one’s parents, maintaining familial bonds, and seeing the integrity of lineage as holding importance while disallowing sexually activity outside of specifically delineated parameters. A society that openly flouts such values and treats them with hostility weakens the moral multi-faith environment that Abrahamic traditions have seen as essential for their shared vitality. It should not be surprising that transmitting belief from generation to generation becomes all the more tenuous for Muslims, Christians, and Jews when these basic values are uprooted.

Left unabated, the uninhibited deterioration of the family may well be the last straw for Muslims and others who have already been forced to make many religious compromises in the modern West. Without robust families and communities, Muslims will not survive as committed Muslims, and the very creed of Islam hinges on the upholding of family as a handmaiden to the testimony of faith (shahada) itself.

If Muslims intend to reside in the West in communities that allow for a reasonably committed expression of Islam (itself admittedly compromised already by a usurious economic setting, military industrial complex, libertine sexual climate, etc.), then they will have to choose between abandoning public life and returning to reclusive enclaves or gaining the muster needed to be cultural heretics and assert their beliefs as publicly meaningful and beneficial for those around us.

Negotiations that require Muslims to affirm legal protections for LGBT groups extend far beyond the mere recognition of marriage (which has been law ever since the Supreme Court Obergefell decision of 2015) and depend on the ability of Muslims to live with a political dissonance that bifurcates their publicly held positions from their moral conscience. The demoralizing effect of affirmative advocacy for the expansion of immorality cannot be understated, and over time the implicit message comes to take on explicit conviction: what I can say in public is what really counts.

Understanding what is at stake is essential for any serious discussion of whether a particular political compromise is prudent. As it stands, the procreative significance of marriage remains elusive and largely ignored in public debate, even when broached in intra-Muslim settings. The institution of marriage as traditionally understood will fail to hold up against these pressures, and its demise will devastate in its wake the family and all that depends on it.

Other thoughts:

“Implicit bias” — a study entitled “Reactions to Male-Favoring vs. Female-Favoring Sex Differences: A Preregistered Experiment” finds that participants shown fake research on sex differences are more likely to believe said research if it states that women outperform men in something and condemn studies stating that men outperform women in something, even when the studies are identical with the exception of the conclusion. Another interesting tidbit from the study: female participants predicted that the average man would have a more positive reaction to male preferencing studies and generally negative reaction to female preferencing studies, though neither was true.

In a growing number of countries, nearly a third of all people live alone. An argument that Branko Milanovic makes in his work Capitalism, Alone is that greater commodification of many activities that were done within the family tends to result in more people living alone. Check out this tweet of Milanovic’s with the numbers.

So the Nats won the pennant and a lot of people can’t stop talking about Bryce Harper. The Ringer has an interesting piece on Harper and the “Ewing Theory” pantheon.

And Allah Knows Best.