Subtitle: arranged marriages are not human trafficking
Sub-subtitle: so-called "courtship" is to dating as trunk or treat is to trick or treat, a "Christian" whitewashing of darkness (aka syncretism)
This is an opinion piece [emphasis added] right now, but close to becoming a conviction. Before I settle my mind on it, I wanted to throw it to the group to let it get chewed up and see what comes out the other end.
My opinion is this: it is not only a father's right, but also his responsibility to arrange the marriage of his daughter. Indeed, it should have been on his mind since her birth. When a man's daughter plays the field, it is to his shame, whether it be by ignorance or not, and cultural norms be damned.
My reasoning for this is based on observation of history and the Word. I can expound somewhat, but one of the biggest reasons it's still only an opinion is that my reasoning hasn't fully come together. So, if you'll indulge me, I'd rather present the opinion and then question and object to everything you say. I have seen dating (courtship) argued for from the Word, but the attempts I have seen so far were all the same parroted blind misreadings and unsubstantiated stretching of the information provided. As a hint, please be extra creative if you are going to reference Ruth. I will say also that I believe God put all the clues in earth that we need in order to see the unseen, that is heavenly things, and so if the heavenly things have been revealed, then likewise we have a cheatsheet for understanding the things of earth.
I think anyone faced with the concept of arranged marriages easily dismisses them as impossible in this age and locality, and therefore not worth discussing, or even dangerous to talk about seriously (because of severe persecution). Seeing as this group is like a gym of Bible buffs, and being emboldened by the Word have already openly discussed socially dodgy ideas... Let's see you lift this one.
I was inspired by
@MemeFan to pay attention to this thread that I missed during the past year. I will eventually go through every bit of it, but here are my debatably-worthwhile two cents heading into it.
- I'm not opposed to arranged marriages and even see them as generally superior to infatuation-driven marriages. I also share @NVIII's reluctance to let either the overarching culture or the fact that something's never been done to prevent discourse toward creating solutions; however, coming anywhere close to being able to implement an arranged marriage in our culture or even our subcultures is downstream of first establishing legitimacy and dominance of patriarchy in our culture. I assert that men in our culture generally do not deserve to choose the husbands of their daughters, because men in our culture have not come close to demonstrating that they can establish headship over their wives, much less the breadth of headship over their daughters required to determine who their mates-for-a-lifetime are going to be.
- What I am a fan of is raising one's daughters from Day One to be respectfully cooperative, fully aware that they should be prepared to be led by a strong man, and fully prepared to fully function as wives, across the board. I failed in this as a father and now recognize how much there is to catch up on given that I didn't really get in gear until my daughters were 17 and 19.
- I now thoroughly believe that dating on the part of daughters who aren't prepared to go out in the world without being protected by their fathers is wholly inappropriate and likely destructive of those daughters' futures. Even in our devolved culture with its destructive-of-patriarchy legal system, fathers have the legal authority to prohibit their daughters from dating until they're ready to go out on their own. Having worked in student affairs for numerous universities, I can guarantee everyone that anyone who pays for their children to go to college is a fool, and anyone who pays for their daughters to go off to college to live on campus is an even bigger fool. Only 1 in 1000 girls fail to get sucked into the degenerative atmosphere, negating almost everything you've bothered to teach them; we all want to think our daughters will be the exceptions, but in my many years of observation all but the most tenaciously-devout Christians are the most likely to succumb to debauchery and whoredom. But if they want to pay themselves for 4 years of Hedonistic Summer Camp, then that will be on them, and we can't prevent them from doing so. Fathers can, though, prevent their daughters from dating before they're prepared to be wives, but in most cases it would require willingness on the part of those fathers to send their own wives packing, because the vast majority of Western wives -- and this is true even among Biblical Families wives -- will demand that their daughters be permitted to date (aka known as sampling d***s) while in high school or junior high.
Thanks, @Keith Martin, for resurrecting this one, and I'm looking forward to your insight.
I'm honored by that,
@NVIII, and I pray that I not only produce some insight but that you
agree that it's insightful after we sharpen our iron pegs by this exercise of dragging them through the brambly bushes.
To fully respond to your most recent message, I have to go back to this response to your OP by
@Bartato:
Does this indicate that you think you might be successful in arranging marriages for the younger two, but might have to accept defeat in the case of your eldest daughter?
It's fascinating that you picked that up. That was not what I was trying to say, but it is true. It is my struggle with her that forced my awakening on this particular topic and made me start searching for the truth. In discussions with her, she asked for a compromise: "arranged dating". That was when it dawned on me that courtship may be a compromise and not the truth.
The bottom line here is that, in the real world in which we live, fathers simply can't enforce who they want their daughters to marry, but they do damn sure have the spiritual authority and the legal power to prevent them from dating until they leave the house for good!
Before I wrote this reaction response, I required of myself that I re-read your entire OP.
I did not and have not read every post in this thread -- only everything on page one, and I've been responding as I've gone along, so perhaps you've since come to a greater degree of certainty about this topic, and, if so, I haven't encountered that, but as of your first post you were presenting yourself as having
opinions but not certainty -- and certainly no prescriptions or theological/moral battle lines drawn.
I found nothing in your OP that led me to believe either that what is contained in this paragraph you quoted disagrees with your OP or that it would indicate that I needed to approach what I was writing in a manner reflecting that I was confronting you -- because I
wasn't confronting or criticizing you there.
Because when I wrote it, my baseline intention was to agree with what you had written. I figured we might suss out some differing definitions of 'courtship,' but I can assure you of this: my intention for this paragraph was to support what you'd previously written. It wasn't a challenge. I see now that perhaps it could have been inadvertently, but not intentionally.
You seemed on the fence about whether we have the authority to arrange our daughters' marriages, but you were asserting that we
do have the authority to regulate whether or not our daughters date. My intention was to
bolster that. Nothing else. I agree that we have the authority to allow or entirely
prohibit dating, from both a spiritual and legal standpoint.
Nah, that's not the bottom line. Not to the question at the top of this thread.
Please double check. These were all the questions in your Original Post at the top of this thread:
Perhaps you're referring to a question you posed elsewhere. If so, just let me know, and I'll respond directly.
Stay focused, Keith. I get fully what both you and @MemeFan have been saying. I appreciate the words of caution, and recognize that it is true to the best of my knowledge in this corner of the world I live in. It's not true everywhere, but here it is for sure, and I will have to deal with that.
I would venture to guess that inescapable legal restrictions against forced arranged marriages are in place in the countries in which at least 95% of Biblical Families members and biblicalfamilies.org participants reside, so, yes, we'll
all have to deal with that unless we implement plans to move to countries where forced arranged marriages are permissible -- or decide that we're willing to risk incarceration because this is the hill we're willing to die on.
I also recognize that it is the same objection most people resort to in reference to patriarchal order and polygyny if you manage to break through their doctrinal walls with hard evidence from scripture and they don't want to talk about it anymore.
This
is a criticism: I believe this statement of yours is a non sequitur, primarily because I don't see that either
@MemeFan or I are exhibiting this kind of dodgy invalidation in response to not being able to make a refutation based on Scripture. Maybe someone else has in this thread (again, I haven't read everything), but, even if someone is, I wouldn't consider the analogy to be applicable --
because how legality relates to patriarchy or polygyny is quite distinct from how it relates to forced arranged marriage. I'll speak to U.S. law: there is simply no wiggle room about arranged marriages here (other than, as I mentioned elsewhere, in regard to insignificant subcultures like the Gypsies or non-mainstream cultures like Muslim enclaves of which mainstream culture is terrified enough to look the other way): no human being has any power to force marriage on any other human being -- even shotgun weddings have been legislated against, and quite a while ago.
The fact is, I couldn't even force my daughter to eat the food I give her if she really wanted to say no. Unless I actually physically forced her. This is in the same aforementioned real world. The question I'm asking about arranged marriage, rephrased for this imaginary scenario of picky eating, would be, "Do I have authority--and do I have a duty--to her to force her to eat the food I give her? And how can I draw that conclusion from the Word?"
Alright! Now we're getting somewhere. Had you just started from the beginning with the question, "Do I have the authority -- and do I have the duty -- to my daughter to force her to marry a man I believe is best for her? And, if so, how can I draw that conclusion from The Word," I would have answered thusly:
"You absolutely have the
spiritual authority to choose your daughter's husband and expect her to abide by your wishes, but -- and this matters in congruence with Scripture -- you absolutely do
not have the
legal authority to expect your daughter to abide by your choice of husband for her, and, unfortunately, outside of your powers of persuasion, the legal trumps the spiritual in this realm. You further have both the spiritual and legal authority to place whatever limits you deem appropriate on your daughters' dating practices. I'd go a step further to assert that you have
some degree of spiritual obligation to do so, but it's definitely gray area. Unfortunately, if you're looking for confirmation that you have a
duty to arrange your daughters' marriages and/or enforce your choices, you just don't, and this is especially where your last question comes in: you can draw all of these conclusions from The Word by noting (a) that Scripture is replete with ancient examples in which marriages
were arranged by fathers or their substitutes, (b) that, however, these arrangements weren't universally practiced, (c) that we are given no indication about whether such practices were initiated by the Israelites or just common practice in all surrounding cultures, and (d) that numerous scriptural examples exist that give fathers the
power to intervene, but never is the
intervention mandated. Therefore, even back when the legal prohibition against forcing arranged marriages didn't exist, it wasn't a
requirement to intervene even when a daughter entered into a sexual liaison inappropriately with her consort, so it simply can't be considered a
duty to arrange a marriage."
And the answer to the first part of that, I think you said it, is here:
Except, intentionally or not, you cut-and-pasted a lead-in word from one of my sentences that was in response to something else altogether that began with this:
Your daughter still has agency.
Does she? Through social or legal constructs she could grasp power and assume agency. But is that scriptural? Is that the order that God created? That's where I'm approaching this from, not looking at the distortion painted on top, but rather what is underneath and supposed to be. But, I'm glad you brought it up, because this is the opinion held by most, that it is her responsibility, her hunt, her choice, and her prize. I see that as being inconsistent and even antithetical to God's design, not to mention the implications that basis sets for a marriage.
Correct, but we don't live in Ancient Palestine. I applaud what you're teaching her, but it's inescapable that you're teaching her that in the Modern Western World.
Again, as the horse I beat far too often, every bit of this discussion is being held in the context that it's a matter of a mopping-up-the-floor symptom that exists in a situation in which we haven't even figured out where the open spigots or the drains are, much less turned them off or unclogged the drain. [emphasis added]
What I was labeling "Correct" was your last sentence before my comment (and I included the preceding sentences for context). I consider you to have been correct when you said that "the opinion held by most, that it is her responsibility, her hunt, her choice, and her prize" is "inconsistent and even antithetical to God's Design, not to mention the implications" that mindset has on a marriage.
In fact, I continue to
applaud what you're
teaching your daughter, as well as having no choice but to recognize that your power as a father is predominantly neutered in the Modern Western World.
Both can be true.
And it's not the same as the cop-out issues you referred to with patriarchy or polygyny, because I would agree with you on those two points -- especially regarding polygyny -- but both are tremendously distinct from arranged marriage for at least three reasons: (1) opposition to forced arranged marriage has far more legal support, (2) opposition to patriarchy and polygyny is far and away, in fact almost solely, a matter of avoiding social disapproval, and (3) some of the legal basis for criminalizing forced arranged marriage is in the realm of equating it with forced sexual assault: one wouldn't just be requiring one's child to eat her asparagus before getting another meal; one would be requiring one's daughter to have intimate vaginal sexual intercourse with a man whose penis she didn't want anywhere near her, and not just once but at least often enough to produce an heir (after all, that's what we're talking about here). Ultimately, western court systems have determined that forced arranged marriages are too close for comfort to both rape and incest.
The 'buts' are all answers to a different question, which would go something like, "How do I reconcile my responsibility in this matter with the tremendous obstacles faced by fathers in today's society?" That question doesn't need to be answered until the original one is. Until then it's only a distraction. Certainly the answer to the question of compromise shouldn't influence the answer to the question of principle.
I have two responses to this paragraph:
- The combination of that question, the other ones you've asked, and the necessity to reconcile them for yourself in order to eliminate cognitive dissonance . . . is inescapably something with which you're going to have to wrestle. The conclusions you come to and the paths you choose to take will be drawn from continua containing thousands of options, the oversimplification of which range from going postal against the system to knuckling under to it to the point of encouraging your daughters to have hoe phases. Only you can decide where you fit on each continuum.
- My other answer is the same one I gave you earlier . . .
Again, as the horse I beat far too often, every bit of this discussion is being held in the context that it's a matter of a mopping-up-the-floor symptom that exists in a situation in which we haven't even figured out where the open spigots or the drains are, much less turned them off or unclogged the drain.
. . . reflecting
my strongly-held belief that you've reversed the hierarchy between patriarchy and arranging daughter marriages. The latter is downstream of the former, substantial partial evidence of which is that men forcing their daughters to marry particular men would never establish the legitimacy of patriarchy in our culture, whereas establishing patriarchy would have some potential to move mountains about arranged marriages, not to mention straightening out a wide range of social ills, including the establishment of the legitimacy of polygyny.
That's why I equate perseverating on the arranged-marriage issue to be the equivalent of mopping up the floor, with the lack of male headship being the open spigot and condemnation of polygyny being the clogged drain in this metaphor.
not all my questions that you quoted were rhetorical
I guarantee you that I didn't assume that
any of them were.
I would like to know why you thought my position was correct
How am I doing
so far?
I look forward to seeing you on X.
