The Commentariat Speaks (35)

The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a great little online tool for discovering when any word or phrase began to appear in the 22 million English books and manuscripts Google has digitized, and the years in which its popular usage peaked. Google’s library is a reasonable proxy for the frequency with which a term was and is used in Western cultures. The Ngram Viewer charts sets of search strings by year, in most cases from 1800 to 2022, and only charts words and phrases that appear in forty or more books.

The phrase I’m searching today is “sense [alternatively, ‘feeling’] of entitlement”.

No Date Stamp

Now, I’m well aware that feeling entitled to this or that doesn’t come with a date stamp. A sense of entitlement to certain things may, for all we know, have characterized Adam and Eve, along with many or most of us descended from them. It’s a human error not limited by time or culture, though it features in some cultures more than others.

Properly understood, Christian culture discourages the believer from feeling entitled to much of anything. We are, after all, “blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places”. Given that God has richly provided for all our genuine needs, and that all that really matters most in life is already accessible to us, contentment ought to be the normal state of being for the believer. Commands to Christians to “be content” and statements about the value of contentment are sufficiently common in the NT and familiar to believers that I don’t feel the need to quote them here at length. All to say, the times entitlement is an appropriate state of being for the believer are few and far between.

Of course, we are all human beings, and even Christians are bound to have felt needs from time to time beyond food, clothing and fellowship with Christ. I’m just saying we need to view such feelings with a bit of spiritual reserve and appropriate caution.

A Recent Problem

In any case, Google’s Ngram Viewer shows the phrase in question first appears in Google’s corpus in the late 1950s and its literary usage peaks in 2020. The upward curve on the graph is a good deal steeper than Michael Mann’s famous climate “hockey stick”, if that helps you to get the picture. No small number of English speakers are currently writing about entitlement, a fact that suggests even greater numbers in the West are feeling it. As I say, that fact alone doesn’t make a sense of entitlement a brand new thing, but it does indicate that articulating it in these words is relatively recent.

Today’s comment from a Christian man is all about female entitlement, a tendency he calls poisonous. That’s a reflection rich with irony, assuming we are able to read between the lines.

Lack of Contentment

So here we go. Daniel writes:

“Every professing Christian woman I have known who is still single into her thirties or even into her forties has rejected at least one biblically adequate candidate for the job of husband — and usually she has rejected two or three. Women generally have a serious problem with lack of contentment. That specific sin bedevils women much more than it does men — even many unbelievers can see it. One of the ways that unwillingness to be content manifests itself in single women is excessive pickiness when it comes to husband candidates — rejecting biblically adequate men who apply for the job because they’re not THIS enough, or THAT enough, or some other thing. I would also argue that it is not really a matter of standards. It is a feeling of entitlement to infinite optimization of prospects. I would further assert that this tendency in women is so poisonous that it impairs them from feeling animal attraction to men they would actually experience as attractive if they weren’t so picky.”

Daniel’s complaint that women feel entitled to “infinite optimization of [marriage] prospects” is increasingly common among young men today, including Christians. As a result, he says, Christian women are staying single into their thirties and forties. As most of us know, this happens to be well past their optimal fertility window and minimizes the prospect of godly offspring in the believing community, something we know is always in the Lord’s interests and one of the purposes for which the institution of Christian marriage exists. If true, this may be a problem.

However, our readers will surely point out that all Daniel’s evidence for his complaint is personal and anecdotal. That doesn’t make his observations incorrect, but it does make them difficult to verify. Let’s look at other data sources.

Other Data Sources

Brave’s AI says the marriage rate among Christians remains steady, adding a few flattering statements. For example, “Christians who are actively engaged in their faith remain more likely to marry than their non-religious peers.” Brave also says our marriages also tend to be more stable and to last longer than those in the general population.

The Institute of Family Studies says marrying around thirty is the new norm. However, their study also notes that in the case of marriages entered into without prior cohabitation (presumably what Christians are looking for), evangelical Protestant women are marrying at twice the rate of their non-religious counterparts. Their conclusion is that religious women marry earlier and marry more.

The Daily Citizen says a majority of American adults are not married, but also notes “Nearly 100 percent of highly religious men (97%) were likely to be married by their mid-40’s, while only 65% of non-religious men were likely to be hitched.”

All this runs counter to Daniel’s observations, although I don’t doubt he believes what he’s written. Hmm. Perhaps he’s not getting out and about enough in the Christian community.

“Biblically Adequate”

I’d also love to know what in Daniel’s mind constitutes a “biblically adequate candidate for the job of husband”. The word “biblically” certainly suggests a sound basis for a standard. Unfortunately, Daniel neglects to document his metrics, which makes his measure of Christian male “adequacy” impossible to assess objectively. I should probably point out that the apostle Paul, one of the few writers to deal with the issue of marrying or not marrying in scripture, does not remotely suggest that any believer, male or female, is obligated to marry. Quite the opposite. While clearly stating he has no command from the Lord with respect to the unmarried, he portrays marriage as an option, not an obligation. In Paul’s view, neither marrying nor declining to marry are sinful choices provided the believer is content to remain sexually continent.

To my mind, that makes the adequacy of any given suitor very much in the eye of the beholder. I would be extremely hesitant to characterize a sister in Christ as feeling entitled to infinite optimization of her prospects unless I had some serious inside knowledge about what she was thinking and why. I don’t doubt a feeling of entitlement characterizes some marriage choices, but few women spell these things out in so many words. Everybody likes to be liked.

More importantly, do any serious Christian men really want to be married to entitled women? I suspect most would take rejection from a woman with roving eyeballs as a grand opportunity to count their blessings.

Deciding to Marry

For many, marriage makes life better. For some, marriage makes life worse. In most cases, it makes some aspects of life better and some worse. At very least, as Paul mentions, marriage makes life more complicated and distracting. Marriage gives both men and women one more set of needs and desires to consider at every juncture. It’s a matter of stewardship of time, energy and resources. For that reason alone, I’d be inclined to leave the choice to marry or not to marry any particular Christian suitor to the judgment of the woman who stands to be most affected by the decision. If I were mulling over a lifetime of submission to anyone, I’d vet him pretty carefully too.

Despite having nothing more than his words by which to judge Daniel’s personal eligibility for marriage, I sympathize with his frustration. I have known several young (and a few aging) Christian men over the years who desperately wanted to marry but had great difficulty finding anyone interested in partnering with them. Sometimes, yes, female rejection or indifference to their desires may have been a product of overly fastidious choice making. At other times, the man in question vastly overestimated his own prospects of inspiring what Daniel calls “animal attraction”.

In such cases, I highly recommend looking for other ways to make your overall package more appealing. For men at an aesthetic, social or behavioral disadvantage, that may require a fair bit of work.